By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 2, 2005

April 24, 2005 marked the 90th “anniversary” of the Armenian genocide. With the purpose of decapitating the Armenian community, on April 24, 1915, Turkish Interior Minister Mehmed Talaat ordered the arrest of all Armenian political and community leaders suspected of opposing the Ittihad (“Young Turk”) government, or favoring Armenian nationalism. In Istanbul alone, 2,345 seized leaders were incarcerated, and most were subsequently executed. None were nationalists, political or charged with sabotage, espionage, or any other crime. None were even tried.1 According to Turkish author Taner Akcam, systematic plunder, raids, and murders of Armenians were already occurring daily, under the pretexts of “searching for arms, of collecting war levies, or tracking down deserters…” 2 Within a month, the final, definitive mass deportations of the Armenian genocide would begin.3

In recognition of that anniversary, I interviewed Vahakn Dadrian, the world’s preeminent scholar of the Armenian genocide. The author of Warrant for Genocide and The History of the Armenian Genocide in March and April alone received two lifetime achievement awards—from the Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, and from the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

Dadrian studied mathematics, history and international law at the Universities of Berlin, Vienna and Zurich before earning his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. He has been a Research Fellow at Harvard University, a guest professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a visiting professor at Duke University, received two large National Science Foundation grants and for years headed a genocide study project for the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation. From 1970 to 1991, he taught sociology at the State University of New York. In 1998, he received the Khorenatsi Medal, Armenia’s highest cultural award. He currently heads Genocide Research at the Zoryan Institute. Continue reading “Armenia’s Tears” →

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