On April 16 at 1:00 PM, Ara A. Jeknavorian, Ph.D., of the Merrimack Valley Armenian Genocide Education Committee, will present “Consequences of Genocide Denial” at the Fort Devens Museum.

At the risk of infuriating Turkey, President Biden formally announced in 2021 that the United States regards the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by Turks more than a century ago to be a genocide — the most monstrous of crimes. Mr. Biden was the first American president to make such an announcement, breaking with predecessors who did not wish to antagonize Turkey, a NATO ally and a strategically pivotal country straddling Europe and the Middle East.

While this announcement carries enormous symbolic weight-equating the premeditated mass murder of 1.5 million Armenian men, women, and children from 1915-23 to the atrocities committed in Nazi-occupied Europe, Cambodia and Rwanda-its incomprehensible continued denial and the lack of accountability by the Turkish Government can be linked to enabling subsequent cases of man’s inhumanity to man.

The presentation on Consequences of Genocide Denial provides a discussion on the causes and impact of the Armenian Genocide on 3000 years of Armenian Civilization in eastern Turkey, and how its denial by its perpetrators has led to subsequent genocides.