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Opinion Columnist
In her 2019 memoir, “The Education of an Idealist,” Samantha Power, who emigrated from Ireland as a child, described how she knew, even before being naturalized, that she had become an American. “I now thought like an American, reacting to problems in the world like the Bosnia war by asking myself, ‘What, if anything, can we, America, do about it?’”
That question has animated Power’s epic career, which has stretched from war correspondent to United Nations ambassador to, now, head of the United States Agency for International Development, the government agency devoted to foreign aid. It was a question that a lot of liberal-minded people asked themselves in the 1990s. Back then, elite conventional wisdom held that America’s failure to try to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was a moral catastrophe; it was partly the shame of that episode that led Bill Clinton to eventually intervene in Kosovo.
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(Jacana 2013) and Darwin’s Hunch (Jacana 2016). She is a Research Associate at WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research).
US President Joe Biden made a statement on 24 April that officially recognised the Armenian Genocide. Between 1915 and 1917, over a million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks and another million were forced into exile.
“Of those who survived,” Biden said, “most were forced to find new homes and new lives around the world, including in the United States. With strength and resilience, the Armenian people survived and rebuilt their community.”
Biden’s statement on the 106th anniversary of the start of the genocide had great meaning for me personally. I grew up in Watertown, Massachusetts, which is a major centre of the Armenian diaspora in the United States. Watertown is home to the Armenian Library and Museum of America, as well as Armenian churches, grocery stores and bakeries and several Armenian newspapers.