Frankfurt Remembrance: Reflections on the Lausanne Treaty

Characterizing true democracy as the willingness to defend democracy, Kieser began in medias res, addressing the war in Ukraine. The Ukrainian people have been denied their dignity, rights and identity by Vladimir Putin, he stated, and drew a comparison to 1915, when denial of dignity and identity led to denial of the very right to life.

Quotes from Young Turk officials, including War Minister Enver Pasha, documented their genocidal intentions. Comparing the ideological Pan-Turanism then to current imperial ambitions, Kieser issued harsh criticism of those nations — then and now — that sacrifice democratic movements and oppressed minorities on the altar of economic and financial interests with authoritarian regimes. “Up until the Ukraine war,” he said, “the European Union and Germany have hardly ever wielded the powerful economic and financial instruments they possess in the defense of justice,” and pointed to the horrendous human rights violations of both Russia and Turkey, exemplified by the latter’s persecution of Osman Kavala and Selahattin Demirtas. Thus, it was no surprise that “it took more than a century” for Germany to acknowledge the genocide, despite its involvement as the Ottomans’ wartime ally.

Kieser cited President Biden’s recognition of the Armenian Genocide last year as an example of courage and lauded his assumption of leadership in the Ukraine crisis. In contrast, he recalled the Trump era when, in response to Azerbaijan’s 2020 aggression in Artsakh, there was “no pressure for sanctions or oil boycotts to force a ceasefire, and revive the [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] Minsk [Group] process” to seek a viable solution. The West’s inaction in the face of that aggression, according to Freedom House’s latest report, served as an incentive for Putin’s recent aggression.

The Armenian Experience

“To suffer under passive impotence of Western democracies one orients to: that has been the Armenian experience since 1895 and World War I. No other people has had to go through such disappointments, repeatedly and archetypally, and yet has not given up,” Kieser stated. In 1921, when Turkey and Russia divided the South Caucasus, they “made a mockery of Armenia as a miserable creature of the Paris peace treaties and the League of Nations.” The League of Nations failed to protect Armenia and in the same year, Stalin annexed Karabakh to Azerbaijan. Nor would Kurds, or Armenian genocide survivors in Dersim, be defended in 1937-8.

For Kieser it is unthinkable to commemorate the genocide without dealing with the Lausanne Conference and Treaty. This, the “sole remaining post World War I treaty still in force sealed an interest pact among powers” and “could never become the basis for peace among and for peoples.” In an effort to keep Turkey away from the USSR, the West at Lausanne “made the numerically small Armenian people into a victim par excellence of the 20^th century.” Having lost everything, homeland, possessions, over a million lives in the genocide, they were denied their identity, an articulated history, for decades; they became a half-lame, wandering, closed circle of exiles, as in Tatul Sonentz-Papazian’s poem.