Kerkonian and Koumjian Speak about Civil and Criminal Legal Perspectives on the Destruction of Culture and Genocide at the Armenian Museum of America

Manushasge Puto v. Albania allowed lumping 20 cases of Albanian lands confiscated under the communist regime the compensation for which was not enforced. The same procedure was used to get payment for old monies and bank deposits, as in Suliagic v. Bosnia and Herzegovina (2009), with 1,350 similar cases before the court, or for cases of restitution or compensation of nationalized properties, as in Atanasiu v. Romania (2010). The court dealt with enforcement delays in Burdov v. Russia (2009), in which the Russian state failed to execute judgment debts.

Kerkonian found that one of the most interesting cases the Court accepted in this realm with Rule 61 is Kuric v. Slovenia (2012), in which a group of nationals of the former Yugoslavia lost their status as permanent residents following Slovenia’s declaration of independence in 1991. They became “erased” people with no status of citizenship in any country.

All of the above cases deal with elements of the indignities faced by Armenians, “erased” in citizenship status, deprived of titles and deeds to their lands, monies and bank deposits, with nationalized properties, and facing delayed enforcement.

Armenians, as descendants of survivors of the Armenian Genocide, should therefore, Kerkonian said, start looking at their identity based on their cultural markers because there is significant value both in the historical and the legal sense therein. He concluded that “There are real avenues that I think a creative approach would allow us to build on in order to

reclaim, in order to create and in order to protect the dignity of not only of our ancestors, but as importantly, our self-worth, our dignity as Armenians and for our progeny. I think that there is a bold vision that we need to be reconsidering, in terms of not looking at it from the standpoint of victimization but from the standpoint of mitigation, as in the standpoint of looking for opportunities to make sure that what those eyes [of the Armenian survivors] have seen, are things that our children and our progeny will be able to see too.”

Koumjian then began his talk and explained that it would concentrate on the criminal aspects of the destruction of culture, which can be crimes against humanity. There is international recognition through various legal categories that such acts can be criminalized. For example, in a recent case from Mali at the International Criminal Court, Koumjian said, the accused pled guilty to the destruction of a series of mausoleums and a mosque, which was deemed as important parts of the local culture, and was sentenced to nine years in prison on a plea bargain.

Genocide is the more complicated of these legal categories. The term, invented by Raphael Lemkin, started to be used around World War II, and was further defined as part of international law in the Genocide Convention of 1948. It combines five different kinds of acts, with a mental element.

Koumjian examined a number of aspects of that definition and provided illustrations. For example, to qualify as genocide, the intent to destroy a permanent racial, ethnic or national group must exist. In the case of the Muslim Rohingya of Myanmar, there is debate over whether they form a religious, ethnic, or national group, but under the accepted UN definition it does not matter, since they do form a permanent group and are identified as such by other Burmese.

Furthermore, the intent does not have to be to kill every member of the group in the world, but to destroy the group in whole or in part. In Srebenica, eight to nine thousand men and boys, 13 to 65 years old, were killed during three days in the summer of 1995 but the elderly men and very young children and women were put on buses and transported out of the area. Both the Yugoslav tribunal and the International Court of Justice ruled it as genocide because of the intent to destroy the Bosnian Muslims within that municipality, which was deemed a substantial part of the total Bosnian Muslim population. Similarly, Koumjian pointed out, the fact that less substantial killings of Armenians took place in places like Istanbul in 1915 did not mean that what took place was not genocide.

Koumjian spoke about the situation in Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge targeted ethnic Khmer as a political and economic group, which does not fit the UN definition of genocide. However, Koumjian said, they also did target two other smaller groups, the Vietnamese, who were the “hereditary enemy” there, and the Cham Muslims, who resisted the Khmer Rouge attempt to prohibit the practice of religion.

The number of Vietnamese killed was quite small, Koumjian said, because at the beginning of the regime they forced most to leave the country. The Khmer Rouge said then that they gave the Vietnamese the opportunity to leave, and anyone who did not leave after two years would be killed, even those only half-blooded Vietnamese. Oddly, if a Vietnamese woman was married to Khmer man, they would kill their children, but not vice versa, because they believed nationality was obtained through the mother.

The situation of the Muslim Cham is relevant to the Armenian case, where many Armenians converted to save their lives, and children were taken from the group to be raised as Muslims in Kurdish or Turkish homes. After a short period of time the children began to lose their identity.

The prosecution argued to the judge in the Cambodian case that if you tell someone that they only will live if they convert, and a religious group only exists if you practice this religion, then you are destroying the group through such actions and committing genocide. Cham Muslim leaders and those who refused to convert were targeted, though some Cham were allowed to survive and scatter into other areas.

In other words, a group can be destroyed in ways other than physical killing. Another example is when ISIS tells Christians in Syria or Yazidis that they must convert or die, this shows the intent to destroy a group. The use of rape as a weapon of war by states or organizations like ISIS is also recognized in criminal tribunals as a genocidal tool intending to prevent the cohesion of a group.

Koumjian noted that the examples he was discussing are very relevant for the prosecution of current genocidal processes, not only with ISIS, but also for Myanmar’s Rohingya.

He cited the William Saroyan line, “Whatever happens anywhere in the world to anyone in the world is everybody’s business,” to indicate that there are crimes in the world of such significance that they are everybody’s business. It is everyone’s business to prevent them from happening. Koumjian declared, “I think that Armenians as a victim group, a group that has experienced genocide, have a particular obligation and responsibility to speak out against genocide and other crimes against humanity occurring anywhere in the world.”

After a question-and-answer session, Kerkonian donated to the Armenian Museum of America the transcript of the first and only commemoration of the Armenian Genocide held in Chicago in the courtroom of Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan, the first foreign-born Armenian judge on the US judiciary, in 2015. Born in Aleppo, he just retired several weeks ago, and Kerkonian knew him well.