Armenians seek place in museum

[Azat]

Wiesenthal center's lack of an exhibition on the 1915 genocide is criticized. Museum says a display is in the works.

 

By Christopher Reynolds, Times Staff Writer

 

Since the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance opened its doors in 1993, its founders have aimed to commemorate the Holocaust and to explore prejudice and persecution worldwide -- a daunting dual mission that has won admirers from Jordan's King Hussein to Hollywood's Arnold Schwarzenegger.

 

But as the institution's 10th anniversary approaches, a widening circle of critics has gathered to press museum officials with a single question: Where are the Armenians?

 

The museum, those critics assert, has backed away from its own pledges to include the first genocide of the 20th century -- the Armenian genocide of 1915 -- as a part of its permanent exhibition. That genocide is effectively absent, some of those critics suggest, because of a 21st century political alliance between Jewish leaders and the Turkish government whose predecessors carried out that genocide.

 

"It's kind of ludicrous, if you're going to talk about the 20th century, not to mention it. It's like teaching U.S. history and beginning with the Civil War," said Ardashes Kassakhian, director of governmental relations for the western region of the Armenian National Committee of America.

 

Museum director Liebe Geft acknowledged that the Armenian genocide, once featured in an introductory film, hasn't been part of the museum's permanent display or introductory film presentation for five years. But she dismissed the criticism as "unrealistic and erroneous."

 

Geft noted that the museum does recognize the Armenian deaths as an act of genocide -- a view still contested by the Turkish government -- and has taken many steps to acknowledge that. From 1993 until an update at the end of 1997, she said, the museum's introductory film included the genocide. Temporary exhibitions have touched on the topic, she said, and upon request, visitors will find that the museum's library and learning center have at least 70 books and two videos about the Armenians. Geft also said a display including the Armenian genocide will be added to the institution's permanent exhibitions "very soon."

 

Most historians agree that the genocide of 1915 brought the deaths of up to 1.5 million Armenians, through executions, starvation and forced marches that occurred until the Ottoman Empire fell in World War I and was replaced by a Turkish republic in the early 1920s.

 

The Armenian deaths have received renewed attention in recent months, following the release of the Atom Egoyan film "Ararat" and publication of the book "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" by Samantha Power. Seizing the moment, Armenian American activists have accelerated their campaigning.

 

The result is a thorny three-way negotiation over history, memory and tragedy that touches an estimated 500,000 or more Jews, 150,000 Armenians and 5,000 Turks in Los Angeles County -- and puts museum leaders under a microscope.

 

"There's a struggle that is going on in the United States today about how to appropriately recognize the Armenian genocide, and it's all tied up in politics with Turkey and NATO and the Middle East," said John K. Roth, a professor of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College and veteran of about 30 years studying the Holocaust and genocide.

 

"This is the politics of memory," said Elazar Barkan, professor of cultural studies and history at Claremont Graduate University. Whether or not the Armenian genocide is present in the museum, he said, "it's a political statement. Either way."

 

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a member-supported nonprofit organization founded in the late 1970s by Rabbi Marvin Hier, spends about $28 million yearly on a mission of "education and social action related to racism and prejudice within the context of the Holocaust." The center's ventures include the museum in Los Angeles, plans for a New York Tolerance Center (to open in mid-2003) and a Jerusalem Center for Human Dignity and Museum of Tolerance (to open in 2006-07).

 

As a museum director, Geft said, she hews to no political agenda, just a mandate to reach visitors, in part by remaining topical. In recent years, she said, that has meant less attention not only for the Armenians but also for issues such as the Cambodian genocide of the late 1970s.

 

For evidence of the museum's strategy, Geft said, visitors need only look to its displays on civil rights in the U.S., its references to Rwanda and the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, or its entire third floor, where the museum on Feb. 11 will unveil a celebration of American diversity that traces family histories of poet Maya Angelou, comedian Billy Crystal, musician Carlos Santana and baseball player and manager Joe Torre.

 

However, Wiesenthal Center officials do acknowledge that because of Turkey's historically benign treatment of its Jewish population, and because of Turkey's status as an ally of U.S. and Israeli interests in the Middle East, many U.S. Jewish leaders are alert to Turkish sentiments. As recently as Nov. 10, the Wiesenthal Center issued a release urging the European Union to admit Turkey as a member.

 

"When you have a society that didn't throw you into ghettos, there is a reservoir of goodwill toward Turkey among many Jews, including myself," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, who serves as the Wiesenthal Center's associate dean and has worked on museum projects since before its opening. In the last five centuries of Jewish history, Cooper said, "interaction with Turkey is one of the bright spots in an otherwise horrible, miserable period of exile."

 

When the Museum of Tolerance opened in 1993, Cooper asked, "Were the Turks happy that we put in a segment on the Armenian genocide in the Museum of Tolerance? Absolutely not. We had letters and we had visits." But none of those efforts played any role in any museum decisions, Cooper said.

 

Meanwhile, in the Los Angeles Turkish Consulate office, Acting Consul General Ozgur Kivanc Altan said that, in recent years, "obviously, there has been contact between the consulate and the museum, but not in the dimension you are mentioning."

 

Altan said the consulate has not contributed to the Wiesenthal Center or the museum and has made no efforts to influence museum exhibitions. However, he noted, he has visited the museum, and "our position is well-known by the Armenians and also by the museum itself."

 

That position, in a nutshell, is that the crisis that began in 1915 "would not merit inclusion in the museum if it would be presented as Armenian genocide," Altan said. "What we are saying is, yes, a terrible tragedy took place, and yes, many Armenians lost their lives terribly. But also in that war, more than 2.5 million Turks and Muslims lost their lives."

 

The conflict between Armenians and Turkish leaders has persisted through nine decades and has spilled into Southern California. Armenian militants assassinated two Turkish diplomats in Los Angeles in 1973, and another in 1982.

 

Meanwhile, at colleges nationwide, Turkish officials have pledged funding for professorships, drawing charges from Armenians that the gift conditions will taint scholarship. UCLA's history department, offered $1 million by Turkey in 1997, declined it on an 18-17 vote.

 

And at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which opened two months after the Museum of Tolerance in 1993, lobbying by Armenian, Turkish and Jewish groups was in full cry before visitors ever stepped in.

 

In their book "The Holocaust Museum in Washington," that institution's founding director, Jeshajahu Weinberg, and co-author Rina Elieli recall intense lobbying by Armenian Americans seeking inclusion of the 1915 genocide, a counter-campaign by Turkish officials opposed to any mention of Armenians, and further lobbying from the Israeli embassy, weighing in on Turkey's behalf.

 

Ultimately, the Holocaust Museum's leaders included three mentions of the massacre in permanent exhibits, including the display of a quote attributed to Hitler on the eve of invading Poland in 1939: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of Armenians?"

 

From its first days as a proposed offshoot of the Wiesenthal Center, the Museum of Tolerance has stood out as a likely new ideological territory for the Turkish-Armenian struggle.

 

At first, the Armenians seemed to have the upper hand. In 1985, when then-Gov. George Deukmejian, an Armenian American, granted $5 million for the museum start-up, the legislation noted that Californians should be informed about the hatred and prejudice "which have so adversely affected the lives and well-being of so many human beings, through such mass murder as the Armenian genocide and the Nazi Holocaust and other genocides."Also, in interviews before the eight-level, $55-million museum opened in February 1993, Hier was quoted repeatedly as saying that the Armenian genocide would be included. And so it was, for the next four years. Though no permanent exhibit at the museum has focused specifically on the Armenian experience, the events of 1915 were included prominently in an 11-minute introductory film at the museum: "It's Called Genocide." But at the end of 1997, museum officials made several changes, including the replacement of that film with a new 8 1/2-minute documentary "In Our Time," which omits Armenians and focuses more on horrors in the 1990s.

 

Former Gov. Deukmejian, now retired, said he had not visited the museum recently, but the omission of the Armenian genocide would be "very disappointing. It was my understanding that [the museum] would provide information regarding not only the Armenian genocide but all genocides through the world" in modern times. State Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles) made similar points in a June 2001 letter seeking a permanent exhibit recognizing the Armenian genocide "in keeping with the promises extended to the Armenian community at the museum's inception."

 

In fact, said museum director Geft, the museum has been planning such an exhibit for more than two years, a "genocide wall," with information on many horrors through history, including the Armenian deaths. That project had been delayed by financial concerns and the press of other projects, Geft said, but should be completed "very soon." She said she couldn't specify a timetable.

 

The museum's critics, however, are unpersuaded.

 

"I have two reasons to suspect foul play here," said Harut Sassounian, publisher of the Glendale-based California Courier, an Armenian newspaper. "If it was an innocent rearrangement of exhibits, and the leadership believed that the Armenian genocide was an issue, they would have some kind of reference.... But it's totally eliminated," said Sassounian. "And the second reason is knowing the degree of cooperation between the Turkish government and various Jewish-American organizations."

 

Samantha Power, executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, is more measured in her view, but said she, too, is perplexed by the museum's choices.

 

"It's a mistake" to leave the Armenian deaths out of any serious look at 20th century genocide, she said. Because of Turkey's campaigning, the Armenian genocide is "the only hard one [for curators] that's out there, and it's conspicuous that the hard one is missing."

 

http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmu...e-more-channels

[khodja]

This is good news, that these issues are being aired. Jewish amnesia toward Turkish atrocities goes beyond amnesia about the treatment of Armenians, Assyrians and Anatolian Greeks, but to their own treatment, both the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey. The history of the treatment of Turkish Jews by the Turkish authorities has some seriously negative instances. The Israeli government has chosen to include the poor treatment of their own people with amnesia as well. It all gets back to geo-politics, but there are subtle shifts already in what may become an earthquake of change in Armenian-Israeli relations.

[MosJan]

Museum of Tolerance Fails in Its Promise, Once Again

By Gohar Galyan

 

LOS ANGELES—On Tuesday afternoon, over thirty youth from the Armenian Revolutionary Federation's Shant Student Association and Armenian Youth Federation (AYF), as well as representatives from the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), and Armenian Relief Society, visited the Museum of Tolerance to confirm whether the museum fulfilled its promise to unveil, by June 30, an exhibit that included the Armenian Genocide. To the visitors' disappointment, the new exhibit did not mention the Armenian Genocide.

 

"I felt cheated and lied to and felt very disappointed that a museum would lie to not only me but also to the kids, to the Armenian community and to all Californians," said ANCA Western Region Government Relations Director Ardashes Kassakhian, one of the visitors.

 

The promise was made at an April 21 meeting during which members of AYF were on the sixth, and what was to be the final day of a hunger strike in front of the Museum protesting its failure to properly address the Armenian Genocide and its refusal to speak with the AYF and ANC about the issue. The protest drew local and national media attention.

 

Kassakhian, AYF Central Executive member Vicken Sosikian and two of the hunger strikers met with the director of the Museum Liebe Geft, the director of public relations Eva Shapiro, and an assistant. During the meeting, Armenian community representatives "were given an assurance that by June 30, there would be an exhibit that referenced and included the Armenian Genocide," said Kassakhian. After that meeting, Armenian community representatives were escorted to the ground floor of the Museum where Geft pointed out the wall where the promised exhibit would be mounted.

 

"At that point, we did not think that the Museum would be so insincere as to lie," said Kassakhian. In mid June, Sosikian spoke with Geft who assured him that the exhibit would open by June 30. "She said that it was still in progress, that they were putting the final touches on it, and it would be ready at the end of June," said Sossikian.

 

It was this promise that led the various representatives of the Armenian community to meet in front of the Museum at noon on Tuesday; once gathered, everyone entered the Museum. "The ANC and the AYF organized today's visit. We basically went there to view the exhibit we were told was going to be done by today," said Sosikian.

 

Sosikian said that he was hopeful entering the Museum. "When a director of a Museum of that magnitude makes a statement, I believe it," he said.

 

The Armenian group immediately visited the wall on which the exhibit was promised. Though a new exhibit was in place, it omitted the Armenian Genocide. When Kassakhian asked a Museum representative (who did not want to be identified) why the exhibit excluded any mention of the Armenian Genocide, the representative replied that the Museum was still researching "the numbers."

 

Kassakhian asked what "the numbers" referred to, but received no answer from the representative, who said she was not involved in the project and directed the group to speak with Geft. When Sosikian asked to meet with Geft and Shapiro, he was told, by the same representative, that they were both unavailable.

 

"What is even more upsetting is that the representatives of so many well-respected and active organizations in the community went there to see the so- called exhibit, but they did not even bother to exhibit their public relations director to make a statement," said Sosikian.

 

The Museum representative also said that the Museum was working on another exhibit that would mention the Armenian Genocide, but that she did not know when that exhibit would open. In February, however, Geft told the Los Angeles Times that a permanent exhibit that mentioned the Armenian Genocide would open "very soon."

 

On June 20, after Sosikian spoke with Geft, the AYF and ANCA issued a joint press release about the unveiling of the new exhibit at the Museum by July 1, and encouraged Armenian Americans to visit the Museum to view it.

 

On Wednesday, however, Shapiro said that the "information in the press release was erroneous." When pressed about the sincerity of the promise Geft made at the April 21 meeting, Shapiro repeated that the information was erroneous and that the Museum had no further comment. Calls from Asbarez to Geft and Rabbi Abraham Cooper were not returned.

 

The unidentified representative mentioned that when the Museum initially opened, it included an exhibit on the Armenian Genocide, but the Museum, reserving the right to move around and remove exhibits in order to keep the exhibits relevant, removed that exhibit. She said, however, that the Museum library included over seventy books and films on the Armenian Genocide.

 

She stressed that the Museum makes available a film that mentions the Armenian Genocide to those Museum goers who request it. On Monday, an ANCA member visited the Museum; the tour guide did not tell him about the availability of the film.

 

On Tuesday, the visitors were escorted to the theater only after one of the visitors asked the Museum whether it had anything on the Armenian Genocide. Thus, it appears, in order to view the film, the visitor must know about its availability, and request to view it.

 

But many of those who viewed the six minute film on Tuesday were bitterly disappointed.

 

"The length of the film is really disappointing. They have one minute on the Armenians," said Hrag Saatjian, one of the four AYF hunger strikers who visited the Museum on Tuesday. "You can't just talk about the extermination of 1.5 million people in vague terms and make it an option. That is not showing the proper respect that they deserve."

 

"Although the Museum claims that the film is 'powerful,' I found it to be simplistic, incongruous, and empty of any substance that explains what leads to genocide, and how to stop it," revealed Kassakhian. "What makes it worse is that not everyone who visits the Museum on a given day even sees this film."

 

Furthermore, the film claims that 500,000 to 1,000,000 Armenians died during the Genocide. In reality, 1.5 million Armenians were massacred.

 

Protesting the Museum's failure to fulfill its promise, the Armenian representatives walked out of the Museum on Tuesday and demanded a refund for their tickets. The Museum complied.

 

The Museum's actions led many to believe that the Museum was disingenuous when it made the promise in April. "I don't think they were sincere. If they were, they would have called us and told us that the exhibit was going to be delayed. I think this was a blatant lie and it makes one question the motives for the omission of the Armenian Genocide," said Kassakhian.

 

Despite the disappointment, Saatjian does not think his efforts in the hunger strike were in vain. He views the hunger strike as a progressive step towards getting the Museum to host a permanent exhibit on the genocide. "It got the Museum's attention and the Armenian community's attention," he said. "It was one step towards our goal."

 

Sosikian said that ANCA and AYF leaders are now going to sit down to formulate a game plan for dealing with the Museum.

 

Saatijian remained hopeful about the placement of a permanent exhibit. "We are going to continue our efforts to see to it that there is an exhibit," he said.

[DominO123]

This Museum has no credibility whate so ever, and need to be exposed as a Museum of denial desined under the banner of tolerance.

 

I would have written those people, but since I have not seen that tape, I can't comment on anything.