EDITOR's DESK

Over the past few years, the Armenian Weekly, with both its regular and special issues, has become a forum where already prominent as well as up-and-coming scholars, journalists, and activists from around the globe share their insight, research, and analyses on issues related to history, human rights, and current affairs.

Keeping true to this “young” tradition, this special issue of the Weekly, titled “Commemorating Genocide: Images, Perspectives, Research” deals with genocide, memory, and denial. It brings together archival historians, political analysts, commentators, and photographers who embark on a journey to shed light on the scourge of genocide, the scars of denial, and the spirit of memory.

In papers especially written for this publication, Kaiser, Aghjayan, and Bjornlund look at some archival documents from the Ottoman Empire and Scandinavia; Ungor, Hur, and Gunaysu address the issue of the destruction (and construction) of memory; Sanjian studies the Azerbaijani dimension of genocide denial; Weitz looks at the shared histories of the Holocaust and the Medz Yeghern; while Theriault, Bayrakdar, Ayata, Papazian, and Kotchikian discuss Turkish-Armenian and Kurdish-Armenian relations and dynamics.

This publication also features photo-graphs by Dermansky, of genocide memorials worldwide, and by Rivest, of post-genocide Rwanda. We thank photographers Oshagan and Parian for the cover photo and Koundakjian for the photo of the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Dzidzernagapert in Yerevan.

Most pages of this publication feature victims and survivors of the Armenian Genocide. We found it appropriate to remember them, to associate faces and names with a crime that is so often reduced to just contested numbers of its victims and dispossessed. We thank their families for supporting this publication.

We also thank the churches, organizations, and individuals that made the publication of this issue possible.