New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ indictment last month on charges he sold his office for favors, including silence about the Armenian genocide, is hardly the first time Turkish interests have been accused of going to great lengths to shape New Yorkers’ views on that blood-drenched chapter of history, which occurred more than a century ago.
Just ask Hrag Vartanian, co-founder and editor of the online arts magazine Hyperallergic and a prominent member of the city’s Armenian community. He recalls the time eight years ago when he stepped onto the balcony of his Williamsburg home and saw the writing in the sky: “101 years of Geno-lie,” read one message from a “sky typing” plane. It continued: “Turkey=Truth.”
Vartanian revisited the aerial erasure of history amid allegations that Adams had acceded to pressure from a Turkish official in 2022 and agreed not to acknowledge Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, which marks the extermination of more than 1 million Armenians. Prosecutors say this was one of several favors Adams did in exchange for illegal campaign donations and free or discounted travel.
“The day that news (of Adams’ indictment) came out it really did feel like somebody had just deflated everything around me,” Vartanian said. “To think that this is what we have to deal with, and there’s this huge machine backed by a government that is ensuring that we’re silenced and that the history isn’t known.”
Adams has denied any wrongdoing, attributing the 57-page indictment to “lies,” and officials with the Turkish consulate in New York have not responded to requests for comment. But experts on the genocide say the allegations of Turkish meddling fit a decades-old pattern of attempts at influencing New York officials’ views on the tragedy — as well as those of schoolchildren. The Turkish leaders have long denied the killings constituted “genocide,” but President Joe Biden in 2021 officially adopted the term in describing the carnage.
“Any interaction that involves the Turkish government will inevitably lead to requests similar to what we read in the case of Mayor Adams,” said Khatchig Mouradian, a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University, and the co-principal investigator of NYU’s Armenian Genocide Denial Project.
Mouradian said Armenian genocide denial “has been a priority for Turkish foreign policy for decades,” and involves pressuring legislative bodies at the city, state and congressional levels “to not pass any resolutions commemorating the Armenian Genocide.” In other instances, he said, pressure has involved litigation by Turkish American groups against universities.
“What happened in New York is actually not an aberration,” he said. “In this particular case, it happened to be a high-profile case.”
For more than a century, historians and members of the Armenian diaspora say they have fought to bring attention to the events that began in 1915.
According to the International Association of Genocide Scholars, that’s when “more than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture and forced death marches,” at the hands of the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire. Some estimates put the number of deaths at more than 1.5 million.
Although the organization states “the historical record on the Armenian Genocide is unambiguous” and Biden affirmed the genocide claims with his statement in 2021, scholars say they have long had to fight a disinformation campaign mounted by Turkish leaders.
Shaping public opinion
Efforts to change public opinion on the genocide have taken on different forms over the years.
In 2004, Peter Balakian, an English professor at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, and an expert on the Armenian genocide, pushed the New York Times to use the word “genocide” to describe what had happened.
And in 1982, Balakian served as an adviser to the state Department of Education, when officials were in the process of developing a textbook on genocide.
Balakian, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for a collection of poems, “Ozone Journal,” told Gothamist the textbook included a “significant portion on the Armenian genocide,” but that education officials soon encountered pressure from the Turkish government, who argued that the claims were untrue and would hurt Turkish-U.S. relations.
“The Department of Education caved and made alterations on the chapter, which were unconscionable and reflected Turkish censoring of the basic dimensions of this genocidal history,” said Balakian. He also organized protests at Princeton University in 1996 amid accusations that the university operated as a center of Turkish propaganda in return for a $750,000 donation from that country’s government.
Paul Boghossian, a professor of philosophy at NYU and co-principal investigator of its Armenian Genocide Denial Project, said the Armenian genocide is “probably the greatest crime against humanity that has never been actually acknowledged by its perpetrators and about which much of the world remains ignorant, partly because that campaign of denial has been so effective.”
Boghossian said that even though more than a century has passed since the genocide, the Turkish government continues to deny it out of fear of reparations.
“They’re worried that if they actually acknowledge it, they’ll have a huge price to pay,” he said.
For decades, Boghossian said, Turkish pressure against the U.S. government prevented U.S. presidents from officially recognizing the Armenian genocide. That changed in 2021 under Biden.
“Biden was the only one courageous enough,” Boghossian said.
In his statement, Biden invoked the Armenian term for the genocide, Meds Yeghern, and paid tribute to “all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide.”
Although many experts see the issue as settled history, some said they weren’t entirely surprised by the allegations against Adams.
“I’d heard many, many rumors that Adams had a special relationship with Turkey,” Boghossian said. “But of course, until we saw the indictment, we didn’t know the full extent of what was going on.”
Adams faces a five-count indictment for allegedly doing the Turkish government’s bidding in return for free or discounted international flights, lavish hotel accommodations and illegal campaign contributions.
According to the indictment, a Turkish official messaged an Adams aide on April 21, 2022, “noting that Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day was approaching, and repeatedly asked the Adams staffer for assurances that Adams would not make any statement about the Armenian Genocide.”
The indictment continued, “the Adams staffer confirmed that Adams would not make a statement about the Armenian Genocide. Adams did not make such a statement.”
Aides to Adams did not respond to questions regarding the allegation. Nor did his defense attorney, Alex Spiro.
But on Monday, Spiro filed a motion to dismiss the charge that Adams had accepted bribes from Turkish officials, writing that the allegation encompasses “a wide array of normal and perfectly lawful acts” that many city officials would undertake on behalf of a consulate.
Bringing stories to light
Vartanian, who was born in Aleppo, Syria, and grew up in Toronto, said all four of his grandparents survived the genocide. His husband, an Armenian American who grew up in New Jersey, also had four grandparents who’d survived the genocide. Three of them were orphaned by it.
Vartanian’s grandmother Zarouhi Vartanian lost her spouse during the genocide, as well as a child, then was “forced to march through the desert” and attempted suicide on multiple occasions before beginning a new life in Aleppo.
“There were silences in our families around this because there was so much pain,” he said, “and that pain was palpable.”
Vartanian said those stories eventually emerged through the efforts of younger generations, which made the revelations that Adams was allegedly “negotiating something as historically factual as the Armenian genocide” especially upsetting. He said recounting his grandparents’ stories made him emotional.
“I’m on the verge of tears because they still do hurt,” said Vartanian, “and to have someone trying to deny what you know your families went through just adds to the pain.”