Avenge the Armenians: Steal From the Turks?

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In the blog "Keghart.com", we find a strange compilation of two letters the Boston Globe declined to print in reply to the article by Geoff Edgers about Boston Museum of Fine Arts and a statue: “MFA sends ‘Weary Herakles’ statue back to Turkey,” (Sept. 24, 2011). They were written by two US Armenians Berge Tatian and David Boyajian both of Massachusetts. Tatian (from Newton MA) objects to the return:

[...] It's as if I find a work of art on my property and then go around claiming it as part of my patrimony. The Turk's complaint over looting is pathetic if not laughable when they themselves are guilty of the most egregious crime of looting, that of the properties of the Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians of Asia Minor, after destroying their heritage.

Boyajian of Stoneham MA also objects for much the same reasons:

[...] Turkey has exterminated the indigenous peoples of Asia Minor – Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians – and tried to erase all traces of their existence, while harassing the few who are left. Turkey has destroyed, deliberately misidentified, or grossly neglected most of the churches, cultural landmarks, and villages of these ancient peoples, whom Turks conquered after arriving from Central Asia. Hundreds of such villages have also been assigned Turkish names to erase the fact that these were the lands and homes of people whom Turkey annihilated. [...] Rather than returning the Herakles statue, the MFA should be shedding light on Turkey’s acts of cultural destruction and genocide.

Well, of course this is all about the Armenian genocide of 1915-23, and these two are just trying to entangle the Greek statue in their own quarrel about their own history and identity. We note again the use - so unusually prevalent when reading cultural property arguments written by Americans - the "two wrongs make a right" ("it's OK to steal from the citizens of Turkey because they are all descendants of slanty-eyed culture-damaging monsters from central Asia"). This is the rhetoric of the playground rather than an adult argument.

First of all of course Berge finding an ancient object on his own property in Massachusetts is free to do with it, and call it, what he wants. That is what US law states. That's what US property owners do to native American artefacts found by the thousand on eBay. In the same way Turkish law states certain things about antiquities. The upper half of the Herakles statue was removed in a clandestine fashion, and not reported or subject to the export licencing procedures. it was illegally removed from the site and the country. Those, and no other, are grounds enough for it to go back. In the same way as if Mr Berge had had his car stolen from his driveway, or a Chinese vase from his living room. Its not anything to do with "culture" or "looting", it is theft.

Tatian and Boyajian write as though the establishment of a Turkish nation was the only case ever in world history of population displacement with all that goes with it. Far from it. The process affected my country several times since the end of the eighteenth century. Despite all the historical grievances, the Poles don't go running round advocating stealing from the Russians, Germans, Austrians and Hungarians because of what they were doing to Poland at the time of the Armenian 'holocaust'. It is perfectly natural that villages in the Ukraine which were once Polish now have Ukrainian names, and villages in what was once Germany in the west of Poland have names that can be inflected in Polish and not their original German names which often cannot.

Likewise maybe Tatian and Boyajian would like to give us a list of the preserved places of worship, burial grounds, cultural landmarks, and villages of the ancient peoples who the colonists found here (the Wampanoag tribes) which are the traces of the existence of these peoples and their cultures in Massachusetts (which of course has territorial boundaries entirely coterminous with those of the native groups living there before the colonisation). And where are the thousands of Wampanoag tribesmen? The ones that survived the so-called King Phillip's War? The Narragansett, Wampanoag, Podunk, Nipmuck ? And of course "Newton" and "Stoneham" have well-obvious Wampanoag etymology, don't they?

What, given their own history of cultural replacement, do Tatian and Boyajian imagine gives the people of Boston, MA any right to keep foreign stolen artefacts on the grounds which they cite?

Vignette: The Wampanoag, cultures and communities gone before the Trail of Tears.