Municipal group breaks with ADL over Armenian genocide issue

April 8, 2008 07:01 PM Email| Comments (0)| Text size – +

By Keith O'Brien, Globe Staff

The Massachusetts Municipal Association severed ties today with the Anti-Defamation League’s embattled No Place For Hate program, reigniting a debate that had gone quiet recently over the ADL’s position on the World War I-era Armenian genocide.

In a unanimous vote, the board of directors at the association, a nonprofit advocacy group for Massachusetts cities and towns, expressed “strong disapproval” of the ADL for failing to unequivocally acknowledge the Armenian genocide at a national meeting last November, according to a statement released yesterday.

"Unequivocal recognition," the association’s board of directors said, “is both a matter of basic justice to its victims as well as essential to the efforts to prevent future genocides.”

“We think this is an issue on which there can be no equivocation,” said Jonathan Hecht, a Watertown town councilor and member of the Massachusetts Municipal Association’s board of directors. “My personal view,” he added, “is that No Place For Hate is not credible as long as the ADL is unable to unequivocally recognize the genocide.”

At least 12 Massachusetts communities have pulled out of the program since last summer, beginning with Watertown, when it became known that the ADL did not support legislation in Washington officially recognizing the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turks between 1915-1918 as genocide. As towns began to sever ties, and even the ADL’s regional leaders called for unequivocal recognition, the national ADL issued a carefully worded statement calling the deaths of Armenians at the hands of Turks “tantamount to genocide.”

But critics quickly called for a stronger, clearer statement. And when it did not come, local Armenian-Americans began lobbying others communities, as well as the Massachusetts Municipal Association, to stop participating in No Place For Hate.

The association's decision to do so today will send a "clear message" to communities that still welcome the program, said Sharistan Melkonian, chairperson of the Armenian National Committee of Eastern Massachusetts. And the regional ADL conceded in a statement yesterday that the vote was a disappointment. But Robert Trestan, the ADL’s northeastern region civil rights counsel, did not believe the vote would lead to still more communities pulling out of the program.

“I think that towns that have stuck with the program have realized that the ADL has a tremendous amount to offer them,” Trestan said. “We’re in towns all over the state, and that’s what we want to continue to do.”