Memory As Witness, Unity as Strength

But I cannot stand before you in a posture of pure retrospection. Because history is not finished with us.

In September 2023, the world watched — largely in silence — as the Armenian population of Artsakh, Nagorno-Karabakh, the ancient Armenian heartland, was forced from their homes in a matter of days. Over 100,000 people — an entire indigenous population — fled in a mass exodus that can be called nothing other than ethnic cleansing. Families who had lived on that land for generations left with whatever they could carry. Churches that had stood for centuries were left behind.

And this week — just days before we gather here — Azerbaijan’s occupation administration destroyed the Holy Mother of God Armenian Church in Stepanakert, the capital of Artsakh. A church built between 2000 and 2019. A living symbol of Armenian faith and revival on that ancient land. They did not wait for the anniversary to pass. They did not pretend. The demolition happened in plain sight, days before April 24, as if to punctuate what we already know: this is not the end of a process. It is the continuation of one. Not only are buildings being destroyed — but memory, identity, and the right of a people to return to their homeland.

This is not ancient history. This is happening in our lifetime. And the echoes of 1915 are not faint — they are deafening.

We must also speak the names of those still imprisoned. Among the political prisoners held in Baku today is my friend Ruben Vardanyan — a visionary philanthropist who gave up extraordinary personal privilege to serve the people of Artsakh, only to be seized and imprisoned. He is not alone. Other Armenian leaders, officials, and citizens remain in Azerbaijani detention, their continued imprisonment a deliberate act of erasure — a tactic with deep roots in our history. On April 24, 1915, it was the Armenian intellectuals and community leaders of Constantinople who were rounded up first. We know what that pattern means. We must demand, loudly and without equivocation, the immediate release of all Armenian political prisoners.

These patterns do not belong only to our history. The novelist Chris Bohjalian — himself of Armenian descent — wrote this week that the language of genocide is growing in America. He reminds us that ethnic cleansing always begins with language: slurs become policy, and policy becomes murder. He draws the line connecting the Armenians, the Jews, the Cambodians, the Bosnians, the Rwandans — and asks how much genocide one sentence can hold. We Armenians know that line intimately. We were called microbes and subversives before we were marched into the desert. The word “genocide” itself was coined, in part, because of what was done to us — Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin saw in the Armenian annihilation a crime so total it demanded its own name. When dehumanizing language rises again — anywhere, directed at any people — we must be among the first to name it. We know what it sounds like. And we know where it leads.

I also must acknowledge what happened just yesterday, when the White House released its annual statement on Armenian Remembrance Day. President Trump invoked the Meds Yeghern. He pledged that “the United States and Armenia will continue our work toward building a more secure and prosperous world.” He acknowledged the Armenian spirit. He spoke of “the hope at the center of Christianity” — a recognition, at least, of who we are. These words are not nothing.

And yet — as in his first administration — the statement did not use the word “genocide.” Not once. The administration reached, as presidents before Biden did, for softer language: “exiled and brutally massacred,” “devastating events,” the Meds Yeghern. These phrases orbit the truth. None of them land on it.

I say this not to make tonight partisan — this gathering has never been partisan and never will be. President Biden used the word genocide every year of his presidency. President Reagan used it in 1981. Congress voted for it by near-unanimous margins in 2019. All fifty states have recognized it. The historical record is not contested among serious scholars anywhere in the world.

The word matters. It was coined, in part, for us — because Raphael Lemkin saw what happened to the Armenians and understood that the crime demanded a name that law could hold. It matters because without the word, the world can always look away. It matters because our dead deserve more than euphemism. And so we note the omission — plainly, without rancor — and we recommit to the work that has always been ours: ensuring that one day, no American president will reach for a softer word when the right one is already there, already earned, already true.

This brings me to something I want to speak about with care, because it requires of us both honesty and love.

The Armenian world — diaspora and homeland — does not always agree. We disagree about strategy, about politics, about the role of the church, about the relationship between recognition and normalization, about the terms of peace with neighbors who have not yet acknowledged their culpability. These are real disagreements. They deserve serious debate. I do not ask that we suppress them.

But I do ask — I implore — that we hold fast to the one thing that cannot be negotiable: the full recognition of the Armenian Genocide as the foundation of any path forward. Recognition is not a bargaining chip. It is not a starting position from which we make concessions. It is the minimum threshold of historical truth, of human dignity, of justice for 1.5 million souls who were canonized by our Church in 2015 as Holy Martyrs.

When I stood at Times Square, what moved me most was not the size of the crowd but its composition — Armenians of every political persuasion, every generation, every denomination, every opinion about every other question — standing together because on this, on this, there is no division. That unity is not weakness. It is our greatest strength. It is what our grandparents passed down to us in lieu of the homeland they lost.

The Republic of Armenia today faces extraordinary pressures — geopolitical, economic, demographic. Armenia is navigating a precarious path surrounded by powers with interests that do not always align with ours. The diaspora has a role to play: not to dictate, not to demand, but to stand alongside — resourcefully, vocally, and in solidarity. Alignment does not require agreement on every question. It requires a shared commitment to Armenia’s survival, security, and sovereignty.

I want to say something about memory itself — about why we do this, year after year, generation after generation. There is a term in psychology: intergenerational trauma. The idea that catastrophic loss does not end with those who survived it, but travels forward — carried in the stories told and untold, in the silences around certain subjects, in the way a grandmother’s hands tightened when she spoke of home, in the hunger for a homeland that most of us have never seen. Many of us grew up in its presence before we had a name for it. I know I did. That weight is real. And it is part of what we carry into this church tonight.

But memory is not only a wound. It is — and this is the harder, more necessary truth — a form of forward motion. Mark Twain is said to have observed that history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. For Armenians, that is not a metaphor. It is a diagnostic tool. When we recognize the rhythms of 1915 in the present — the language of dehumanization, the targeting of community leaders, the demolition of sacred places, the practiced silence of the world — we are not catastrophizing. We are pattern-recognizing. We are doing what our grandparents did not have the luxury of doing: seeing it early enough to name it. Memory, held rightly, is not a prison. It is a compass. And the direction it points is always toward the living.

We are here today because someone before us refused to be silent. A grandmother who told her story. A priest who kept the liturgy alive. A scholar who built an archive. A child who carried a candle at a groundbreaking. A community that, year after year, in cities around the world, said: We remember. We bear witness. We will not let this be forgotten.

And we remember them not only as victims of history, but as something more. In 2015, on the centennial of the Armenian Genocide, the Armenian Apostolic Church canonized the 1.5 million martyrs as saints. This was not a ceremonial gesture. It was a theological declaration: that those who died did not die as mere casualties of political violence, but as witnesses — to faith, to identity, to the indelible claim of a people upon the earth. We stand in a church tonight. We know what it means to call someone a saint. When we say their memory is eternal, we mean it in the fullest sense that word can carry.

Before I close, I want to speak directly to those of you who belong to the generation that came after the last survivor. You did not sit across a kitchen table from someone who had walked the desert roads of 1915. You did not see the scar on a wrist, or hear the silence that fell when certain towns were named, or feel the particular weight of a grandparent’s hand on your shoulder when the subject turned to home. The last survivors of the Armenian Genocide have passed from this world. That direct, living thread has been cut.

I want to tell you: that does not diminish your claim to this memory. It changes your relationship to it.

What your great-grandparents carried in their bodies, you carry in your will. The knowledge of what happened, the insistence that it be named, the refusal to let it fade into abstraction — these are not inherited. They are learned. And then they are chosen. Every year that you walk into a gathering like this one, every time you say the word “genocide” in a conversation where someone would prefer you didn’t, every time you stand at a memorial or teach a friend or a child what April 24 means — you are not performing inherited grief. You are making a decision. You are saying: I know what happened, I know what it means, and I choose to carry it forward.

That is, I would argue, a more demanding form of memory than inheritance. Your great-grandparents could not have forgotten if they tried. You can choose to forget — and you are choosing not to. That choice is a form of love for people you never met. It is the only way the living can still do something for the dead.

You are not the end of the chain. You are what happens when a people decides to remember not by blood alone, but by conviction.

That is what we do today. That is what we will do next year, and the year after that, until recognition is universal and justice is complete — or until we have passed this obligation, as it was passed to us, to those who come after.

Baruyr Sevak wrote that even when you silence the bell, its metal heart still finds ways to ring. We are that bell. This gathering, this community, this people — we are that bell.

May the memory of our martyrs be eternal. May Armenia be strong. And may we be worthy of what they gave us.

Կեցցէ Հայաստան — Long live Armenia.

Յիշատակն  արդարոց  օրհնութեամբ  եղիցի — May the memory of the righteous be blessed.