Balakian's "Burning Tigris" wins 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize!

[Hovik]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: New York, Peter Balakian’s The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response Wins 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize





Peter Balakian’s The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response has been awarded the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize for the best scholarly book in the preceding two years on the subject of genocide, mass killings, gross human rights violations, and the prevention of such crimes. The award is given by the Institute for the Study of Genocide at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. The prize comes with a cash award and commemorates Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar who pioneered the international legal concept of genocide. Helen Fein, Chair of the prize committee called The Burning Tigris “a book of enduring scholarly value and of important contemporary meaning.” Previous winners include Samantha Power’s A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and Alison Des Forges Leave None To Tell The Story: Genocide In Rwanda.

The Burning Tigris was a New York Times bestseller and a national bestseller, and a New York Times Notable Book of 2003. Balakian is the author of seven other books, including Black Dog of Fate, which won the 1998 PEN/Albrand Prize for memoir, and June-tree: New and Selected Poems. He is the recipient of honors and awards including a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Anahit Literary Prize, and an Ellis Island Medal of Honor. He has appeared widely on national television and radio. Translations of his work have been published throughout Europe. He is the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Colgate University, where he was the first director of Colgate’s Center For Ethics and World Societies.

The award ceremony and talk by the author will be held on Friday, November 11 at 2:15 pm in 1311 North Hall (445 W. 59th St) at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Contact Helen Fein, Director, the Institute for the Study of Genocide, [email protected].

For review copies of THE BURNING TIGRIS or to set up interviews with Peter Balakian please contact: Tim Brazier, [email protected]

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Balakian Shares Lemkin Prize With Turkish Publisher

ANN/Groong
Genocide News
November 23, 2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

by Doris V. Cross

On November 11th the Institute for the Study of Genocide in New York
City awarded Peter Balakian the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize for his book
The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America~Rs Response. The
prize is awarded for the best scholarly book in the English language in
the preceding two years ~Son the subject of genocide, mass killing, gross
human rights violations, and the prevention of such crimes.~T

Present at the ceremony, held at the City University of New York~Rs John
Jay College of Criminal Justice, was Ragig Zarakolu, director of Belge
International Publishers, in Istanbul, which has just published in
Turkish Balakian~Rs critically-acclaimed 1997 memoir, Black Dog of Fate:
An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past.

At the podium to accept the Lemkin Prize from Helen Fein, Director of
the Institute for the Study of Genocide, Balakian welcomed Mr. Zarakolu,
who, he said, ~Sfor almost 30 years has exhibited extraordinary courage
by publishing books in Turkey that are about taboo subjects--many of
them on the histories of the minority peoples of Turkey--the Armenians,
Kurds, Greeks.~T

Balakian then surprised the audience by asking Mr. Zarakolu to ~Scome to
the podium to share this prize with me. I can~Rt imagine anyone more
deserving of a prized named after Raphael Lemkin.~T Mr. Zarakolu
responded, ~SI thank you and am most honored to be here with you at this
joyous occasion. You honor me greatly.~T

~SIt was a spontaneous gesture~T Balakian said, after the ceremony. ~SWhen
I saw Zarakolu here all these miles from Istanbul, and after all he~Rs
done, nothing could make more sense than to share it with him. I hope it
created another small bridge between Armenian and Turkish culture.~T

After reflections on The Burning Tigris by Professor Roger Smith, of the
College of William &Mary and a past President and the presentation of
the award by Professor Orlanda Brugnola, President of the IGS and
professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Balakian thanked the
Institute and noted that ~SScholars of genocide have created an
interdisciplinary discourse that has changed the curriculum in ways that
might have been unthinkable two decades ago. They have affirmed that
scholarship can be meticulous and yet incorporate an ethical
perspective. Had there been genocide scholarship in the 1920s and ~Q30s,
it might have been more difficult for Adolph Hitler to say, as he did,
eight days before invading Poland in 1939, ~Qwho today, after all, speaks
of the annihilation of the Armenians?~R

~xxxxler~Rs statement,~T Balakian said, ~Sreminds us why scholarly memory is
also a moral issue. As scholars of genocide have brought their own
disciplines into this interdisciplinary one, they have affirmed the
notion that scholarly work can have a role in the world in an active
way; in a way that might affect moral values and even public policy~Win
order to detect early warning signals and implement prevention of the
ultimate crime.~T

Balakian had much to say about the character and commitment of Raphael
Lemkin: ~SIt~Rs of special importance to underscore that the man who
coined the very word ~Qgenocide~R and invented the concept of genocide did
so in part on the basis of what had happened to the Armenians in 1915
and what was happening to the Jews of Europe before his very eyes in the
1940s. A statement Lemkin made in 1954 underscores how deeply he felt
about the relationship between the two genocides; writing to a young
woman urging her to keep working for the passage of the UN Genocide
Convention in the Senate in August 1954, Lemkin wrote: ~Qlet us not
forget that the heat of this month is less unbearable to us than the
heat in the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau and more lenient than the
murderous heat in the desert of Aleppo which burned to death the bodies
of hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenian victims of genocide in
1915.~R~T

~SNo figure more fully embodies the fusion of intellectual passion with
ethical commitment than Raphael Lemkin, the brilliant legal scholar
whose writings brought forth the concept of genocide and in doing so
started a modern paradigm for international human rights,~T Balakian
concluded.

In concluding, Balakian reflected on how he as a poet and scholar
trained in American studies came to write about the Armenian Genocide
from the American perspective: ~SIt was exciting to discover that the
first time Americans left their own country to engage in human rights
relief work was for the Armenia people in the 1890s; that no American
history is now complete without understanding that the movement for
Armenia was America~Rs first international human rights movement. . . I
wanted to recover that lost history, because no one had written about
it, no one had conceptualized the human rights movement for Armenia that
had evolved in the 1890s and would continue for several decades into the
1920s.~T

Balakian also noted that his book demonstrates, no matter how much
philanthropic and popular energy and money there was for the Armenian
rescue and intervention for the Armenian Genocide, ~Sin the end there was
nothing but gridlock--gridlock between the popular will of the nation,
and the State Department and White House. The Armenian case is the
beginning of what has become a familiar story. The U. S. government has
no priority for dealing with international human rights catastrophes to
this day.~T In closing, Balakian said that the Turkish government~Rs
denial of its crimes against humanity in 1915 is an international
scandal and has made the history of the Armenian Genocide a current
topic in international politics, especially as Turkey aspires to the EU.~T

The ceremony ended with prize-winning documentary filmmaker Andrew
Goldberg showing ten minutes of rare footage of Raphael Lemkin speaking
about the Armenian Genocide on CBS televsion from 1949.


For further information contact:
Doris V. Cross, [email protected]
or
Tim Brazier, HarperCollins, [email protected]

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Helen Fein:Memory.Denial and Accountability

http://www.csuchico.edu/mjs/center/teaching_resources/general/articles/Helen_Fein/Helen%20Fein%20Lecture%20UC%20Berkeley%202000%20ver%202.pdf