By David D'Arcy

It's hard to believe that in 2007 there is a debate over whether the Armenian Genocide that began in 1915 actually took place, or whether the campaign to exterminate Armenians in Anatolia "qualifies" as a genocide.

The mass murder of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks is as well-documented as any events of that time. You can read the orders from Ottoman officials that mandated central planning of much of the killing, although there was plenty of freelancing that is documented by photographs and the accounts of eyewitnesses.

There are vivid survivors' stories of seeing huge numbers of innocent women and children slaughtered, after which those who were not killed were sent on long marches in the desert, during which thousands more perished without food or water. There are extensive newspaper accounts of the massacres, and correspondence from diplomats who saw it. There is also much eyewitness testimony and correspondence from the religious and non-governmental organizations that tried to intervene to minimize the carnage or care for its victims. There are photographs of piles of bodies and of heads lined up like trophies, often taken by triumphant Turks. There is systematic evidence compiled by the Turks themselves, which was used in trials that were held after the killings, although those trials were abandoned when the rest of the world shifted its attention to other matters.

More troubling is that there won't be a debate, or a vote on whether to commemorate the mass murder. The US Congress was mulling a vote marking the Genocide, and it seemed likely that the measure would not pass. The measure's supporters asked for any vote to be postponed [1], sensing that a vote would be viewed as undermining the US war effort in Iraq by endangering US relations with Turkey. Previous efforts in Congress to pass such a resolution never made it to a full vote.

Pressure, as usual, comes from Turkey, which is now paying ex-Congressmen to lobby their colleagues, and paying those colleagues to ensure the right outcome. Turkey's official position is that the Genocide never took place. Pressure is also coming from US businesses and from the White House, which sees Turkey as an essential ally and enabler in the war in Iraq, and fears Turkish incursions, now underway, to punish supporters in Iraq of Turkey's large and persecuted Kurdish minority. Let's also not forget the fear that Turkey might abandon the US camp and seek a new alliance with Russia and Iran.

Before the vote was postponed, we were looking at the prospect of elected officials rejecting a measure based on truth, and reacting with the fear that the Turks might enact reprisals against the US. Think of it this way: even though Congress marks the suffering of all sorts of groups, it hesitated to recognize one of the worst human tragedies of the 20th century out of fear that the heirs to the people who carried out the Genocide might do something similar. Thank you, Dr. Strangelove. All this came during the week that the US (and President Bush personally) honored the Dalai Lama, a gesture that they knew would anger China.

For statements of positions opposing the resolution, you can read editorials in the Wall Street Journal [2] and the Seattle Times [3]. You can also read Charles Krauthammer [4]'s opposition to the resolution, which he expresses while stressing that the Genocide did indeed happen.

What does all of this have to do with cinema? Last week, members of Congress in Washington DC were given a chance to see Screamers [5], a survey of the Armenian Genocide and other genocides, directed by Carla Garapedian [6], a filmmaker who has worked mostly with the BBC. The story of the 1915 massacres, their aftermath and denial is woven through a tour of System of a Down [7], the well-known Armenian-American band that has made the story of the Genocide part of its explosive act.

The narrative stresses the undeniability of the events of the Genocide, as viewed by historians and survivors - thanks to the legendary longevity of Armenians, there are still survivors of the massacres. You'll also learn more about the Turkish extermination campaign than you'll get in the New York Times these days (although the Times covered the atrocities extensively back then), or on network television.

Bear in mind that a documentary on PBS about the Genocide last year (The Armenian Genocide [8], directed by Andrew Goldberg [9]) came under such attack from Turkish-funded lobbying that the network did what institutions tend to do when they can't quash controversial material. They panel-ized it, with a "fair and balanced" discussion of whether the Genocide happened, led by an NPR personality. You can get a sense of the hand-wringing involved from the column of PBS's ombudsman [10], who, to be fair, seems to have to looked into the factual background more than most members of Congress have over the last few weeks.

Screamers takes its improbable title from the observation, made by Samantha Power [11] (author of A Problem from Hell [12]: America and the Age of Genocide), that every genocide in recent history has had "Screamers," voices who raised "red flags" when the atrocities occurred. The term means anything from whistleblowers to prophets. The assumption is that people knew, and that the the killings in each genocide could have been stopped or limited.

It's troubling that there need to be Screamers to call our minds to mass killings that happened almost a century ago, but the story has been suppressed almost since it happened. In the 1930s, when MGM sought to make a movie adaptation of the bestselling novel about the Genocide, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh [13], by Franz Werfel [14], a Jew who left Austria after Hitler came to power in Germany, the Turkish government leaned on the studio and kept the movie from being produced. Several years later, when MGM exhumed the project that had seemed dead - and we're talking about a novel which reached an international audience comparable to the readership for Gone with the Wind [15] - the Turks were there again to strong-arm the studio from following through. (You can read about the case in Peter Balakian [16]'s Black Dog of Fate [17] or listen to an NPR report [18] that I did on the controversy surrounding the 2002 film Ararat [18], by Atom Egoyan [18], who also considered adopting the Werfel novel. The rights are still held by MGM, and there's been talk of eventually making an epic with Sylvester Stallone [18] in the lead.)

As we await that apocalypse, Screamers gives you a sampling of the visual record of the Genocide, which calls to mind other images of mass murder, some of them all to familiar. Armenian men stand in chains before Turks on horseback, who look like the Janjiweed hordes that the Sudanese government says are operating "independently" as they mutilate and murder civilians in Darfur [18]. Other images show heads of executed Armenian men lined up by smiling Turks, presumably the men who killed them. Those pictures of killers mocking their victims and photographs of piles of dead bodies look a lot like images of Nazi soldiers in Poland and Russia.

There's a light moment in Screamers (and something of an homage to docu-guru Michael Moore [18]) when band members dress up (sort of) and head to Washington a few years ago to urge members of Congress to allow the Genocide resolution to come to a full House vote. Then-Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert [19], who seems to be twice the size of Michael Moore here, is a hard man to hide, but he manages to elude the four young musicians until they cross his path by accident. Ever the politician, the bearish Hastert ducks friendly entreaties about the Genocide vote and about a letter sent six months earlier from System of a Down's singer Serj Tankian [20], asking Hastert to bring the measure to a vote. With true Washington sincerity, Hastert hurries away, promising to take a look at the letter that he ignored it for months. The vote never happened.

Other inconvenient truths emerge as Screamers surveys the US government's attitude toward more recent crimes of genocide. In 1988, Saddam Hussein was shown to have been using chemical weapons against Kurds in northern Iraq. This was, after all, part of the reason why we eventually went to war with Iraq. Yet back in 1988, the US government (in which Colin Powell served as National Security adviser) decided not to punish Iraq for using poison gas on thousands of its own people. Saddam was at the bloody end of a long war against Iran, our enemy at the time, and he was seen as serving US interests, even as he slaughtered Iraqi citizens. Once again, "mistakes were made."

Yet it's wrong just to point fingers at George W. Bush [20], and Screamers finds plenty of blame to go around. Bill Clinton [20] made his own excuses when innocents were slaughtered in Bosnia and Rwanda and the US stood by.

Excuses were hard to find when the executive director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'Nai Brith, Abraham Foxman, fired the head of the ADL in Boston this summer for daring to state that there was an Armenian Genocide. When the story hit the Boston Globe, resulting in a week of front-page coverage [21], and bloggers on Armenian and Jewish sites responded with incredulity, a chastised Foxman finally conceded that the slaughter of Armenians was "tantamount to genocide," and, under pressure, rehired [22] the regional ADL director, Andrew Tarzy. Foxman subsequently apologized to the Turkish Prime Minster, as he explained, so the Jewish minority in Turkey would not be harmed by his mealy-mouthed recognition of the Genocide.

Let's see if I have this right. A Jewish leader who has made a career fighting discrimination resists acknowledging the Armenian Genocide in order to ensure that Jews won't be persecuted by Turks who are angered by the historical truth. In order to avoid the risk of a genocidal backlash, we insist that a prior genocide never happened. And this is a man who exposes Holocaust deniers?

I spoke to Carla Garapedian about her film before she took off to show Screamers at the Rio de Janeiro Film Festival. The DVD will soon be released by SONY-BMG.

How did this film get made?

I grew up in the Los Angeles Armenian community. Everyone in the Armenian community is aware of this issue, and has someone who is connected to it, either directly or indirectly. Both sides of my family had come to the United States because of the Genocide, so it's very much in my background. To make a film about it is something else. In 2004, I was home visiting family, and Michael Hagopian [23] of the Armenian Film Foundation [24] said, "System of a Down had asked me if they could show excerpts of my documentary [Germany and the Secret Genocide [25], 2003] at their concert." It was at the Greek Theater, and it was marking the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, which every year is April 24th. The band was having its second commemorative concert, and they asked various human rights organizations to sit outside on the concourse. There was Human Rights Watch [26], there was the organization that is now called Save Darfur [27]. There was a table on the Cambodian Genocide [28]. There was a group called Facing History [29], which deals with the Holocaust. It was a wide range of
organizations, but specifically about genocide.

I was sitting there, not really thinking too much about the band. Two things happened. One - the fans walked over to the table where I was sitting, and there I was with my hands outstretched waiting to give them a pamphlet, and they would say, "Oh, we already know about the Armenian Genocide." That was a surprise, until they said, "Not only that, but we already know about the genocide going on right now in Sudan. And we know about the other genocides." That was really a shock to me, because I've spent most of my adult life meeting people who've never heard of the Armenian Genocide. And here were kids. Almost every ethnic group n Los Angeles was represented by those fans. And that impressed me.

Carla Garapedian with Serj Tankian on location in London

That was one thing. But before I knew it, there was a gaggle of people chanting, "Serj, Serj." Then I saw this figure walking through the crowd, waving his hands a little bit like the Queen - he wouldn't want me to say that. I wondered, "Who is this person?" He had a mane of hair. He had a way of walking that was almost gliding along. He somehow apologizes for his height by the way he walks. He just sort of glides along. This was Serj Tankian, the lead vocalist of System of a Down, who had written a lot and tried to raise awareness about the Genocide. He was a poet as well as a lyricist. And there he was.

Those two things made me think when I knew a little more about Serj and learned more about the band, that here perhaps was a vehicle for at least raising not just the issue of the Armenian Genocide, but other genocides. A colleague said, "Let's send your tape to his producer, Rick Rubin [29], as the way to get through to him." And they were being approached by prominent filmmakers. Michael Moore has made a music video for them called "Boom [30]," so who was I?

I met him in August 2004, and we talked about the film. At that stage I had a much more narrow focus, and he said, "Look, I'm interested in cooperating with you, but if you widen the film to talk about all genocides, not just the Armenian one."

That was the beginning, but between August and April of 2005, I made another film, because I was offered the chance to go to Africa to make a film about a mercenary coup which was attempted in a very small West African state, Equatorial Guinea, which was oil-rich, and it turns out was the real-life example for The Dogs of War [31], the Frederick Forsyth [31] book.

I hadn't raised any of the money for the Armenian film. I didn't know how I was going to raise the money. It wasn't an obvious fit, working with a rock band and doing a film about genocide.

Quite apart from anything else that happened on the shoot of that African film, I found myself in what was a very small Mafioso country, completely ruled by a very corrupt elite, and the courtroom was this kangaroo court where these mercenaries were being tried. Among the people who were being tried for the coup were six Armenians who had flown a cargo plane - unwittingly, I think - out of a number of post-Soviet and eastern Europeans who were flying cargo planes in Africa, trying to make a buck. They came into the courtroom, shackled by their wrists and ankles, which was a travesty of justice, and when it came time to say a few words, one of them said, "Why would I, as an Armenian, who has suffered injustice - my country has suffered injustice - why would I visit injustice on another country?"

I honestly think that nobody in that courtroom knew what he was talking about except me. It was a funny way of reminding me about this other idea that I had sort left on the back burner.

I went to London, to Nick Fraser [32], the commissioning editor at the BBC, and one of his assistants was a System of a Down fan, so that helped. Nick said, "I think that it is very interesting that the story is told from the point of view of these young men, these four angry young men." There were two other things that he thought were interesting. In Europe, Turkey was trrying to join the European Union, and a whole debate had come about in which the Armenian Genocide was essentially a political football, because Europeans were trying to judge whether Turkey was reformed enough in its political and human rights to be allowed into the European club. The Armenian Genocide issue was involved because Turkey was prosecuting people for talking about the Genocide. Orhan Pamuk [33] was in the news then, but there were lesser-known people, like Ragip Zarakolu [34], the Turkish publisher. He and his wife published two books on the Armenian Genocide and his wife got a two-year prison sentence for that.

Armenian genocide victims

So Europeans were asking themselves, "Do we want to have a country in the European Union that is throwing people in prison for matters of free speech and freedom of expression. This is the behavior of the old Soviet Union. It's not the behavior of a country that is part of the European Union." There were other immigration issues that were probably the subtext of that debate, but that's another story. Certainly, the question of Turkey's human rights record was coming in because of the Armenian Genocide. A historical event that had happened almost a hundred years before had entered into the current political debate, and Nick Fraser knew that.

Another thing that had happened was that Samantha Power had won a Pulitzer Prize for her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the End of Genocide. Her thesis is basically that America has stood idly by and watched genocides unfold, and that the foreign policy has been one of non-intervention and neutrality. While the public relations has been that you pay lip service to the idea of "never again, never again will we allow something like the Holocaust to happen," the reality is that almost every president has had a genocide on his watch.

What she does in that book is to chronicle that in each genocide, there have been what she calls Screamers, who try to raise a red flag and stop what's going on. So it's not as if our politicians didn't know what was going on, or that their own diplomats weren't reporting what was gong on. They knew that, but the calculation of national interest was such that American wouldn't intervene. She starts with the Armenian Genocide because she argues that it created a template for the century. You have a very prominent diplomat, Henry Morgenthau [35], who is copiously reporting on what's going on. You have consuls in the interior of Turkey, who are copiously reporting what's going on, eyewitness testimony from missionaries, diplomats from other countries, so America knew, so much so that it actually intervened unofficially with humanitarian relief, but officially did nothing.

Why is there a willingness to acknowledge the current atrocities in Darfur as a genocide? The killings there have been shown to be well-documented, and have been shown to have begun with government aerial bombings and government funding, even though the Sudanese government denies this. Yet it's been shown that in Darfur, in absolute terms, there have been fewer killings over a longer period of time than happened during the Armenian Genocide. Why are the killings in Darfur being called a genocide by major political leaders, while the Armenian Genocide is not being called by that name by the same people?

The short answer is that this is the politics of appeasement and denial. By the politics of appeasement, I mean that Turkey is our ally, and America has danced around the word with various presidents. Reagan called it a genocide in 1981, but that was before America signed up to the Genocide Convention. President George W. Bush called it "genocidal" in Detroit when he was campaigning in Detroit to raise money from rich Armenians, but when he got into power he called it "annihilation." America signed on to the Genocide Convention in 1998. Various presidents would not sign that convention because they feared the concept of a world court where America could be prosecuted by other countries for crimes that were not genocide. So 1988 comes along, Reagan decides to sing onto it, but only with some amendments that essentially absolve America from really doing anything. That's why the Bush administration can call Darfur genocide, but essentially not be obliged to prosecute the perpetrators. They have actually called Darfur genocide but they're not doing anything about it.

Darfur victim. Photo: Carr Center for Human Rights

The United Nations answer is that there has to be intent to destroy or eliminate a population on the basis of race or religion or ethnicity. The determination by the United Nations is that the intent to destroy is there. The fact that they haven't achieved it by wiping everybody out is not a prerequisite. Rafael Lemkin [36], who created this idea, was very concerned that you don't have to have everybody killed off. Otherwise, the Holocaust wouldn't be considered genocide, because Hitler didn't kill all the Jews.

The official Turkish position doesn't acknowledge intent. It says that there was a war going on, and that a million and a half Armenians just happened to get in the way.

All perpetrators basically say the same thing. If you had a conversation with Hitler right now, I'm sure he would say that the Jews were a threat and they had to be done away with, in addition to all the other people that he killed off. The Hutus would say the same thing about the Tutsis. Of course, perpetrators believe in their myth, as if it were true.

What does the participation of a rock band contribute to what you're trying to do? How does this differentiate the film and make it a different kind of film than other films about other genocides?

It's the first thing that links them all together, starting with the Armenian Genocide and moving to the Holocaust and bringing it up to date. There's a universality in this film that doesn't exist in other films. The Jewish community, for the first time, is supporting a film like this. Each community had talked about its genocide in exclusivity. It's the first time that we've had the Jewish community come on board. The director of the Holocaust Museum [37] in Washington told me that every year he's petitioned by the Turks to remove the Armenian Genocide exhibition and to remove the Hitler quote on the wall, which says, "Who remembers the Armenians?"

Have you had any reaction from Turks in the United States to the film?

We had a screening at the Library of Congress two days before Hrant Dink [38] was murdered. [Dink, who was interviewed in the film, was an Armenian journalist in Istanbul who drew attention in Turkey to the genocide. He was murdered by a Turkish nationalist on January 19, 2007.] We knew that there was going to be a representative from the American Turkish Association. And this lady came, and stood up at the end, and said, "This is a very powerful film, but you are only showing one side of Ottoman history. Don't you know that there are 70,000 Armenians who are living and working in Turkey? Why are you only looking at the dark side?"

Well, there was one less with the murder of Hrant Dink.

I told her that the film was being viewed in the Library of Congress, where the wartime tribunals of the Turkish perpetrators were for everybody to see, and if you go across the street, there are 50,000 records from our own diplomats, and if you go across to the Holocaust Museum, there's the Hitler quote on the wall. I told her that there were not two sides to genocide. There's genocide, and there's the denial of genocide. I told her that the real question was for her government to open up its archives to scholars from all over the world. They open it up selectively.

There were also some Azeri people at the screening who were upset. People feel strongly. We learned that when Hrant Dink was killed. I remember he said that you can't blame the ordinary Turkish person for feeling the way they do, because they've been fed this propaganda by the state for so long that they don't know anything else. And people will defend what they know. The answer to that is not to try to change the minds of people at the government level, because governments are going to do what governments are going to do. You've got to get to the hearts and minds of ordinary people and change their minds that way. That's what he believed.

Hrant Dink was prosecuted under Article 301, a Turkish law that provides for imprisonment of someone who insults Turkishness. People need to feel that they have the freedom to be who they are, and that's the problem. Acknowledging the Armenian Genocide actually creates a problem for this government, because it basically opens up the door to a discussion about Turkey's national identity, and the formation of the Turkish. It's always about something like that. You have to say, "What's the fear?" And that's the fear.

Property is the other fear that Turkey has, because so much property was expropriated from Armenians, including my own family. When we filmed, we went back to Serj's grandfather's village and half of it was lying in ruins. Then there's the question, doesn't this property belong to us?

Serj Tankian with his grandfather Stepan Haytayan, survivor of the Armenian genocide.

Have you reached the youth music audience with Screamers, and what do you achieve by reaching it?

There's a lot going on on the Internet, which is kind of scary. We're on YouTube [39] and MySpace [40]. There's a fan website [41], and the kids are talking about this. We had a thing that said, "When you go to Screamers, you become a Screamer," because you're showing with your ticket purchase a certain commitment to this issue. It's exceeded my expectations that the kids are responding.

The kids that I met at some of these events when we've shown the film are very affected by what they've seen. That makes me think that maybe I've made the right choice, because I've put a lot of music in this
film, for the young people, and not for the older people. I've got four angry men screaming and raging, and that is calculated to reach the younger people through what they know and what they listen to.

People to whom I've showed the film were struck by the guys in the band and by the music, but also by the tenderness that an "angry" musician like Serj Tankian showed to his grandfather, who survived the genocide.

Our grandparents are just that. You can't think of anyone more precious than a survivor.