Armenian Anguish

A Times editorial, “Anguish and Policy,” published April 30, drew a sharp response from Armenian-Americans, and from others. The letters on this page reflected the range of that response. We wish to make two points.

First, we did not intend our words to imply that we do not believe the well-established fact that hundreds of thousands of Armenians, perhaps as many as a million and a half, perished at the time of the First World War. The Armenians call this genocide. It is the somber privilege of the victims to name it what they will.

Second, we have come to believe, after looking more closely, that we were wrong to oppose, as an unfair insult to Turkey, an ally in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a Congressional Resolution that proclaims April 24 as a “National Day of Remembrance of Man’s Inhumanity to Man” in honor of the victims of the Armenian genocide. The amended resolution makes it clear it was the old Ottoman Turkey, not modern Turkey, that bore responsibility. To put the Congress of the United States on record as deploring a human calamity still remembered with anguish is to strengthen the hand of that great majority in the Armenian community who seek redress through the legal process, not terror. To deny a cry for recognition that something dreadful happened in Armenia during a dreadful war is to embitter the agony of its memory.