The STAR-LEDGER

Tuesday, April 29, 1997

Kean leads call to recognize Turkish slaughter of Armenians

By Bill Swayze
STAR-LEDGER STAFF

Former Gov. Tom Kean hopes his alma mater, Princeton University, finally gets the point: The massacre of more than 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turks during World War I was genocide.

The president of Drew University assembled a throng of noted historians on the Madison campus yesterday to reiterate that message, combating efforts by some scholars -- including a Princeton professor -- and Turkish officials to deny the government-sponsored extermination that began in 1915.

"It was upsetting to me as an alumnus that Princeton would basically employ a professor who denies a historical fact," Kean said, referring to Heath Lowry, a professor who chairs the university's Near Eastern studies department.

"I know no real historian who would deny the facts of the Armenian genocide. Princeton has been in the forefront of human rights, but on this issue they are not. This is one area they ought to clean up. We are an institution that stands for the truth," Kean said.

Controversy involving Lowry erupted in 1995, when scholars and writers attacked Princeton over his 1993 appointment to the university's Ataturk Chair of Turkish Studies. The position was partially funded by a $750,000 matching grant from a Washington lobbying group funded by the Turkish government, which rejects the notion that Ottoman Turks marched more than 1.5 million Armenians into the deserts and murdered them. The Turks, backed by scholars like Lowry, contend that Armenians were relocated and were simply victims of a bloody civil war.

Lowry, who headed the lobbying group for nearly a decade, has referred to the massacre as the "so-called Armenian genocide," his critics said.

Outraged scholars said Lowry's appointment allowed revisionist history to reach the classroom. But at the time, Princeton contended the university's curriculum was not for sale and donors of chairs had no influence on appointment.

Yesterday, Lowry and Princeton President Harold Shapiro did not return phone calls. But the university issued the same prepared statement provided in 1995. In it, Lowry does not deny that a large portion of Armenians died during World War I.

But, he contends, "I and many other scholars in the field cannot accept the characterization of this human tragedy as a pre-planned, state-perpetrated genocide."

To dispute that assertion, about 150 students and scholars joined Kean yesterday to discuss the genocide during an all-day event, which Kean said was triggered by the Princeton controversy. Talk revolved around Lowry's position and that of the Turkish government and comparisons with other genocides, including the Nazi Holocaust.

Genocide expert Robert Jay Lifton, 70-year-old author of "The Nazi Doctors" among many other books and professor of psychiatry and psychology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said: "Until very recently, the commemoration of the Armenian genocide has been left to the Armenian communities, as though the rest of the world has no need to take note of it, had no stake in it.

"But if we are to take the smallest step toward living in truth, we need to recognize that everybody has a stake in genocide," Lifton said. "The ultimate menace to us all is that of genocide.

"We owe it to ourselves and our communities to expose untruths -- such factual, psychological and, above all, ethical falsehoods," he said. "The obligation to live in truth has particular significant for scholars.

"Where scholars deny genocide in the face of the decisive evidence that it has occurred, they contribute to a false consciousness that can have very extreme reverberations because their message, in effect, is: Murderers do not really murder; victims are not really killed. Mass murder requires no confrontation, no reflection, but should be ignored," Lifton said.

Richard G. Hovannisian, 64, author and professor of Armenian and Near Eastern history at the University of California at Los Angeles, presented a historical survey of the Armenian people -- from Biblical times through the 4th century, when Armenia adopted Christianity, through the days under the oppressive, murderous rule of the Ottoman Empire.

"It was the first major genocide of this century... and it set the pattern for the major genocides of this century," he said. "The world did not deal with the genocide adequately at the time, and that left a strong message to future perpetrators that they could do it and get away with it."