The Contribution of the Armenian Community of Argentina to the Recognition of the Armenian Genocide

From the beginning, the Turkish State hidden the genocidal policy of 1915, showing no interest in the historical truth and building the collective memory in mirror of the official denialist historiography, installed by those directly responsible, the Young Turks, and deepened by the successor, the Kemalist government In this way, the historical denial was presented in the form of a national history; while the memories of the affected minorities were relegated to the private sphere or directly reduced to silence. To promote this policy, several publications emerged early in Turkey that supported the official version, justifying the violence against the Armenian minority, such as the posthumous memoirs of the Talaat Pasha Interior, where their vision of the events was disseminated, denying premeditation and blaming the victims for their destiny.
In Argentina, a country with an important Armenian community made up mostly of survivors of the Genocide and therefore deeply marked by the trauma of the loss of their ancestors, they became involved early with the issue, remembering their dead every April 24 in some Armenian institutions. Notwithstanding the conceptualization of the crime of genocide after the Jewish Holocaust and the 1948 Declaration, and above all, the remembrance of the fiftieth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in 1965 that began in Yerevan and expanded in cities inhabited by the diaspora was decisive in its rescue from forgot. It was perceived that this was not a crime against Armenians in particular but against humanity.
The objective of this paper is to analyze the process of recognizing the Armenian Genocide in Argentina and the task carried out by the Armenian community taking into account two dimensions: the academic and the political dimensions. With respect to the first, the contribution of academics and cultural promoters will be highlighted, like the organization of conferences as well as the publication of books by prominent foreign specialists (including translations) and local ones. With respect to the second, we will question the role of Armenian institutions as well as public ones such as the three Executive, Legislative and Judicial powers in the recognition of the Genocide.
For this purpose we will rely on the community press (Armenia and Sardarabad newspapers), statements of the different state entities: provincial, municipal and national as well as secondary sources.