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The Forgotten Holocaust
The killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War remains one of the bloodiest and most contentious episodes of the 20th century. Robert Fisk visits Yerevan, and unearths hitherto unpublished images of the first modern genocide.
The photographs, never before published, capture the horrors of the first Holocaust of the 20th century. They show a frightened people on the move - men, women and children, some with animals, others on foot, walking over open ground outside the city of Erzerum in 1915, at the beginning of their death march. We know that none of the Armenians sent from Erzerum - in what is today north-eastern Turkey - survived. Most of the men were shot, the children - including, no doubt, the young boy or girl with a headscarf in the close-up photograph - died of starvation or disease. The young women were almost all raped, the older women beaten to death, the sick and babies left by the road to die.
The unique photographs are a stunning witness to one of the most terrible events of our times. Their poor quality - the failure of the camera to cope with the swirl and movement of the Armenian deportees in the close-up picture, the fingerprint on the top of the second - lend them an undeniable authenticity. They come from the archives of the German Deutsche Bank, which was in 1915 providing finance for the maintenance and extension of the Turkish railway system. One incredible photograph - so far published in only two specialist magazines, in Germany and in modern-day Armenia - actually shows dozens of doomed Armenians, including children, crammed into cattle trucks for their deportation. The Turks stuffed 90 Armenians into each of these wagons - the same average the Nazis achieved in their transports to the death camps of Eastern Europe during the Jewish Holocaust.
Hayk Demoyan, director of the grey-stone Museum of the Armenian Genocide in the foothills just outside Yerevan, the capital of present-day Armenia, stares at the photographs on his computer screen in bleak silence. A university lecturer in modern Turkish history, he is one of the most dynamic Armenian genocide researchers inside the remains of Armenia, which is all that was left after the Turkish slaughter; it suffered a further 70 years of terror as part of the Soviet Union. "Yes, you can have these pictures, he says. "We are still discovering more. The Germans took photographs and these pictures even survived the Second World War. Today, we want our museum to be a place of collective memory, a memorisation of trauma. Our museum is for Turks as well as Armenians. This is also [the Turks'] history."
The story of the last century's first Holocaust - Winston Churchill used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of six million Jews - is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews idle ones. Turkey's reign of terror against the Armenian people was an attempt to destroy the Armenian race. While the Turks spoke publicly of the need to "resettle" their Armenian population - as the Germans were to speak later of the Jews of Europe - the true intentions of Enver Pasha's Committee of Union and Progress in Constantinople were quite
clear. On 15 September 1915, for example (and a carbon of this document exists) Talaat Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an instruction to his prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the tens of thousands of Armenians in his city. "You have already been informed that the government... has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey... Their existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience." These words are almost identical to those used by Himmler to his SS killers in 1941.
Taner Akcam, a prominent - and extremely brave - Turkish scholar who has visited the Yerevan museum, has used original Ottoman Turkish documents to authenticate the act of genocide. Now under fierce attack for doing so from his own government, he discovered in Turkish archives that individual Turkish officers often wrote "doubles" of their mass death-sentence orders, telegrams sent at precisely the same time that asked their subordinates to ensure there was sufficient protection and food for the Armenians during their "resettlement". This weirdly parallels the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, where officials were dispatching hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers while assuring International Red Cross officials in Geneva that they were being well cared for and well fed.
Ottoman Turkey's attempt to exterminate an entire Christian race in the Middle East - the Armenians, descended from the residents of ancient Urartu, became the first Christian nation when their king Drtad converted from paganism in AD301 - is a history of almost unrelieved horror at the hands of Turkish policemen and soldiers, and Kurdish tribesmen.
In 1915, Turkey claimed that its Armenian population was supporting Turkey's Christian enemies in Britain, France and Russia. Several historians - including Churchill, who was responsible for the doomed venture at Gallipoli - have asked whether the Turkish victory there did not give them the excuse to turn against the Christian Armenians of Asia Minor, a people of mixed Persian, Roman and Byzantine blood, with what Churchill called "merciless fury". Armenian scholars have compiled a map of their people's persecution and deportation, a document that is as detailed as the maps of Europe that show the railway lines to Auschwitz and Treblinka; the Armenians of Erzerum, for example, were sent on their death march to Terjan and then to Erzinjan and on to Sivas province. The men would be executed by firing squad or hacked to death with axes outside villages, the women and children then driven on into the desert to die of thirst or disease or exhaustion or gang-rape. In one mass grave I myself discovered on a hillside at Hurgada in present-day Syria, there were thousands of skeletons, mostly of young people - their teeth were perfect. I even found a 100-year-old Armenian woman who had escaped the slaughter there and identified the hillside for me.
Hayk Demoyan sits in his air-conditioned museum office, his computer purring softly on the desk, and talks of the need to memorialise this huge suffering. "You can see it in the writing of each survivor," he says. "When visitors come here from the diaspora - from America and Europe, Lebanon and Syria, people whose parents or grandparents died in our genocide - our staff feel with these people. They see these people become very upset, there are tears and some get a bit crazy after seeing the exhibition. This can be very difficult for us, psychologically. The stance of the current Turkish government [in denying the genocide] is proving they are proud of what their ancestors did. They are saying they are pleased with what the Ottomans did. Yet today, we are hearing that a lot of places in the world are like goldmines of archive materials to continue our work - even here in Yerevan. Every day, we are coming across new photographs or documents."
The pictures Demoyan gives to The Independent were taken by employees of Deutsche Bank in 1915 to send to their head office in Berlin as proof of their claims that the Turks were massacring their Armenian population. They can be found in the Deutsche Bank Historical Institute - Oriental Section (the photograph of the Armenian deportees across the desert published in The Independent today, for example, is registered photo number 1704 and the 1915 caption reads: "Deportation Camp near Erzerum.")
A German engineer in Kharput sent back a now-famous photogaph of Armenian men being led to their execution by armed Turkish police officers. The banking officials were appalled that the Ottoman Turks were using - in effect - German money to send Armenians to their death by rail. The new transportation system was supposed to be used for military purposes, not for genocide.
German soldiers sent to Turkey to reorganise the Ottoman army also witnessed these atrocities. Armin Wegner, an especially courageous German second lieutenant in the retinue of Field Marshal von der Goltz, took a series of photographs of dead and dying Armenian women and children. Other German officers regarded the genocide with more sinister interest. Some of these men, as Armenian scholar Vahakn Dadrian discovered, turn up 26 years later as more senior officers conducting the mass killing of Jews in German-occupied Russia.
Computers have transformed the research of institutions like the Yerevan museum. Poorly funded scholarship has been replaced by a treasure-house of information that Demoyan is going to publish in scholarly magazines. "We have information that some Germans who were in Armenia in 1915 started selling genocide pictures for personal collections when they returned home... In Russia, a man from St Petersburg also informed us that he had seen handwritten memoirs from 1940 in which the writer spoke of Russian photographs of Armenian bodies in Van and Marash in 1915 and 1916." Russian Tsarist troops marched into the eastern Turkish city of Van and briefly liberated its doomed Armenian inhabitants. Then the Russians retreated after apparently taking these pictures of dead Armenians in outlying villages.
Stalin also did his bit to erase the memory of the massacres. The Armenian Tashnag party, so prominent in Armenian politics in the Ottoman empire, was banned by the Soviets. "In the 1930s," Demoyan says, "everyone destroyed handwritten memoirs of the genocide, photographs, land deeds - otherwise they could have been associated by the Soviet secret police with Tashnag material." He shakes his head at this immeasurable loss. "But now we are finding new material in France and new pictures taken by humanitarian workers of the time. We know there were two or three documentary films from 1915, one shot approvingly by a Kurdish leader to show how the Turks "dealt" with Armenians. There is huge new material in Norway of the deportations in Mush from a Norwegian missionary who was there in 1915."
There is, too, a need to archive memoirs and books that were published in the aftermath of the genocide but discarded or forgotten in the decades that followed. In 1929, for example, a small-circulation book was published in Boston entitled From Dardanelles to Palestine by Captain Sarkis Torossian. The author was a highly decorated officer in the Turkish army who fought with distinction and was wounded at Gallipoli. He went on to fight the Allies in Palestine but was appalled to find thousands of dying Armenian refugees in the deserts of northern Syria. In passages of great pain, he discovers his sister living in rags and tells how his fiancée Jemileh died in his arms. "I raised Jemileh in my arms, the pain and terror in her eyes melted until they were bright as stars again, stars in an oriental night... and so she died, as a dream passing." Torossian changed sides, fought with the Arabs, and even briefly met Lawrence of Arabia - who did not impress him.
"The day following my entry into Damascus, the remainder of the Arab army entered along with their loads and behind them on a camel came one they called... the paymaster. This camel rider I learned was Captain Lawrence... Captain Lawrence to my knowledge did nothing to foment the Arab revolution, nor did he play any part in the Arab military tactics. When first I heard of him he was a paymaster, nothing more. And so he was to Prince Emir Abdulah (sic), brother of King Feisal, whom I knew. I do not write in disparagement. I write as a fighting man. Some must fight and others pay." Bitterness, it seems, runs deep. Torossian eventually re-entered Ottoman Turkey as an Armenian officer with the French army of occupation in the Cilicia region. But Kemalist guerrillas attacked the French, who then, Torossian suspects, gave weapons and ammunition to the Turks to allow the French army safe passage out of Cilicia. Betrayed, Torossian fled to relatives in America.
There is debate in Yerevan today as to why the diaspora Armenians appea r to care more about the genocide than the citizens of modern-day Armenia. Indeed, the Foreign minister of Armenia, Vardan Oskanian, actually told me that "days, weeks, even months go by" when he does not think of the genocide. One powerful argument put to me by an Armenian friend is that 70 years of Stalinism and official Soviet silence on the genocide deleted the historical memory in eastern Armenia - the present-day state of Armenia. Another argument suggests that the survivors of western Armenia - in what is now Turkey - lost their families and lands and still seek acknowledgement and maybe even restitution, while eastern Armenians did not lose their lands. Demoyan disputes all this.
"The fundamental problem, I think, is that in the diaspora many don't want to recognise our statehood," he says. "We are surrounded by two countries - Turkey and Azerbaijan - and we have to take our security into account; but not to the extent of damaging memory. Here we must be accurate. I have changed things in this museum. There were inappropriate things, comments about 'hot-bloodied'people, all the old clichés about Turks - they have now gone. The diaspora want to be the holders of our memories - but 60 per cent of the citizens of the Armenian state are "repatriates" - Armenians originally from the diaspora, people whose grandparents originally came from western Armenia. And remember that Turkish forces swept though part of Armenia after the 1915 genocide - right through Yerevan on their way to Baku. According to Soviet documentation in 1920, 200,000 Armenians died in this part of Armenia, 180,000 of them between 1918 and 1920." Indeed, there were further mass executions by the Turks in what is now the Armenian state. At Ghumri - near the centre of the devastating earthquake that preceded final liberation from the Soviet Union - there is a place known as the "Gorge of Slaughter", where in 1918 a whole village was massacred.
But I sensed some political problems up at the Yerevan museum - international as well as internal. While many Armenians acknowledge that their countrymen did commit individual revenge atrocities - around Van, for example - at the time of the genocide, a heavy burden of more modern responsibility lies with those who fought for Armenia against the Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s. This mountainous region east of the Armenian state saw fierce and sometimes cruel fighting in which Armenians massacred Turkish Azeri villagers. The Independent was one of the newspapers that exposed this.
Yet when I arrive at the massive genocide memorial next to the museum, I find the graves of five "heroes" of the Karabakh war. Here lies, for instance, Musher "Vosht" Mikhoyan, who was killed in 1991, and the remains of Samuel "Samo" Kevorkian, who died in action in 1992. However upright these warriors may have been, should those involved in the ghastly war in Kharabakh be associated with the integrity and truth of 1915? Do they not demean the history of Armenia's greatest suffering? Or were they - as I suspect - intended to suggest that the Karabakh war, which Armenia won, was revenge for the 1915 genocide? It's as if the Israelis placed the graves of the 1948 Irgun fighters - responsible for the massacres of Palestinians at Deir Yassin and other Arab villages - outside the Jewish Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem near Jerusalem.
Officials later explain to me that these Kharabakh grave-sites were established at a moment of great emotion after the war and that today - while they might be inappropriate - it is difficult to ask the families of "Vosht" and "Samo" and the others to remove them to a more suitable location. Once buried, it is difficult to dig up the dead. Similarly, among the memorials left in a small park by visiting statesmen and politicians, there is a distinct difference in tone. Arab leaders have placed plaques in memory of the "genocide". Less courageous American congressman - who do not want to offend their Turkish allies - have placed plaques stating merely that they "planted this tree". The pro-American Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri left his own memorial less than a year before he was assassinated in 2005. "Tree of Peace," it says. Which rather misses the point.
And yet it is the work of archivists that will continue to establish the truth. In Yerevan you can now buy excellent witness testimonies of the genocide by Westerners who were present during the Armenian Holocaust. One of them is by Tacy Atkinson, an American missionary who witnessed the deportation of her Armenian friends from the town of Kharput. On 16 July 1915, she recorded in her secret diary how "a boy has arrived in Mezreh in a bad state nervously. As I understand it he was with a crowd of women and children from some village... who joined our prisoners who went out June 23... The boy says that in the gorge this side of Bakir Maden the men and women were all shot and the leading men had their heads cut off afterwards... He escaped... and came here. His own mother was stripped and robbed and then shot... He says the valley smells so awful that one can hardly pass by now."
For fear the Turkish authorities might discover her diaries, Atkinson sometimes omitted events. In 1924 - when her diary, enclosed in a sealed trunk, at last returned to the United States, she wrote about a trip made to Kharput by her fellow missionaries. "The story of this trip I did not dare write," she scribbled in the margin. "They saw about 10,000 bodies."
Anatomy of a massacre: How the genocide unfolded
By Simon Usborne
An estimated 1.5 million Armenians died between 1915 and 1917, either at the hands of Turkish forces or of starvation. Exact figures are unknown, but each larger blob - at the site of a concentration camp or massacre - potentially represents the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
The trail of extermination, and dispute about exactly what happened, stretches back more than 90 years to the opening months of the First World War, when some of the Armenian minority in the east of the beleaguered Ottoman Empire enraged the ruling Young Turks coalition by siding with Russia.
On 24 April 1915, Turkish troops rounded up and killed hundreds of Armenian intellectuals. Weeks later, three million Armenians were marched from their homes - the majority towards Syria and modern-day Iraq - via an estimated 25 concentration camps.
In 1915, The New York Times reported that "the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles... It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people." Winston Churchill would later call the forced exodus an "administrative holocaust".
Yet Turkey, while acknowledging that many Armenians died, disputes the 1.5 million toll and insists that the acts of 1915-17 did not constitute what is now termed genocide - defined by the UN as a state-sponsored attempt to "destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group". Instead, Ankara claims the deaths were part of the wider war, and that massacres were committed by both sides.
Several countries have formally recognised genocide against the Armenians (and, in the case of France, outlawed its denial), but it remains illegal in Turkey to call for recognition. As recently as last year, the Turkish foreign ministry dismissed genocide allegations as "unfounded".
One authority on extermination who did recognise the Armenian genocide was Adolf Hitler. In a 1939 speech, in which he ordered the killing, "mercilessly and without compassion", of Polish men, women and children, he concluded: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
© 2007 The Independent
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45 Comments so far
Show AllLet's not forget the inncent Iraqis and innocent Vietnamese slaughtered by a certain wester country!
We should be remembering all peoples in many times killed for being different whether they be native populations in the new world, Armenians, Jews, Palestinians, Ukrainians...whatever.
It was not aliens that done it.
As a religious teacher once said:
"Look what we are doing to us."
Never forget the Armenian Holocaust!
P.S.
We should be remembering all peoples in many times killed for being different whether they be native populations in the new world, Armenians, Jews, Palestinians, Ukrainians...whatever.
It was not aliens that done it.
As a religious teacher once said:
"Look what we are doing to us."
On Counterpunch, John Walsh has a wonderful two-part article "Abe Foxman's Genocide Denial Roadshow".
The words "relocation" or "resettlement" are dead giveaways -- the same excuse for the Native American genocide which the majority of white Americans still refuse to refer to as genocide -- "Hey, they have casinos, they're doing better than we are!"
We shouldn't forget Djugashvili's Ukrainian famine either, his preface to the purges & show trials.
to paraphrase stalin, one death is murder, thousands is a statistic. 1+1+1+=genocide
Misleading title for an important article. It is fair to say that the Armenian genocide gets much less press than the Jewish half of the Holocaust of WW2. But, thanks to international squabbling, including US participation, the existence of the Armenian tragedy is brought up far more often than others.
A prime example is the Holocaust itself. The number of non-Jewish victims, chosen because they were Slavs, Roms, homosexuals, or whatever, may very well equal or even exceed the number of Jewish victims. But we almost never hear about them except, occasionally, as a brief aside in an article about the Jewish suffering.
Ukraine, China, WW2 itself all dwarf the Armenian tragedy, yet the first 2 are rarely mentioned.
Armenians Rock.
Just listen to SOAD!!!
There are many others in the previous century we should talk about as well?
How about some ongoing ones?
No- the Armenian holocaust is very alive for those in the world who choose it to be.
These are things in history that should never be forgotten.
But what is an apology from the Turkish going to do?
What is their admittance going to do?
The most important thing for those who care, is to walk with the knowledge that it happened. And to remember that mankind is capable of it again.
Those who should have been held accountable for it are long gone. Can then nation that inherited this atrocity be held accountable for it?
Remember what happened, without the thought of revenge.
As a child, if I didn't like the food I was given, my mother exhorted me to "think of the starving Armenians" and be grateful for my food. Only as an adult did I realize she was parroting what *her* mother must have told her (my mother was born in 1913). But I've never forgotten the starving Armenians, and I'm glad that they are remembered today. I hope one day Turkey provides restitution, or at least, an apology.
It's all so very, very, sad.
For more on the history of recent genocides read Samantha Power's, "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide".
Artsakh (Karabagh) was an Armenian area with a small minority of Azeris when Azerbaidjan seized control of it in the 20s. From then on, the Azeris treated it like the Ottomans had treated western Armenia prior to 1915: slow motion ethnic cleansing (similar to the current treatment of Palestinians by Israel). The minute the Armenians of Artsakh began agitating for self-determination, the Azeris massacred Aremenians at Sumgait (in Azerbaidjan proper) and in Baku. In Artsakh itself, Azeri military attacked Armenian civilians.
The Karabagh war was not revenge, it was an attempt to not be exterminated. The Armenians of Artsakh had recent and vivid reminders of what their fate would be if the Azeris won. I recommend a fascinating book called My Brother's Road by Markar Melkonian. It's about his brother Monte who was one of those Karabagh heroes who grew up in California and died in Karabagh. It discusses revenge and terrorism but is primarily an amazing story.
Let's remember that the Turkish genocide was an attempt to exterminate a people. The Karabagh war was an attempt to survive. Azerbaidjan continues to deny the Armenian genocide and many in Azerbaidjan thought the Turks of 1915 a model to emulate. They, like the Turks, seem to be saying "We didn't kill you and if you don't shut up, we'll kill you again".
Why are both Israel and Turkey denying the holocaust?
Knesset opts not to discuss Armenian genocide at PM's request
By Gideon Alon, Haaretz Correspondent
The Knesset decided Wednesday to shelve a proposal for a parliamentary discussion on the Armenian genocide, in compliance with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's request.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni had also asked for a removal of MK Haim Oron's (Meretz) proposal from the agenda of the Knesset Education, Culture, and Sports Committee. She said the discussion might destabilize diplomatic relations with Turkey, which denies responsibility for the death of nearly 1 million Armenians during World War I.
MK Oron said that before the vote, Livni called him twice to ask him to withdraw the proposal. "This inquiry is something we owe the Armenians, primarily at a time when we are struggling to preserve the memory of our own people," said Oron.
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He added that he had intended the discussion to lead to a resolution by the Knesset acknowledging the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians by the Turkish security forces.
Prominent members of the Armenian community in Israel observed the vote from the Knesset visitors' balcony and expressed their disappointment with the decision.
Health Minister Yacov Ben-Yizri, speaking for Livni, said that "as Jews and Israelis we are especially sensitive to the issue, but over the years the subject has been transformed into a heated discussion that the two parties must resolve in order to truly heal the wounds of the past."
In his address, Ben Yizri did mention that the Armenians were "killed en-masse during the last days of the Ottoman rule."
Robert Fisk is a talented and courageous writer. His work provides the most penetrating insights into the life and history of Middle Eastern people that I've read.
And he always gives emphasis to the people, rather than governments, of these nations. That's why his essays are so moving.
There's a lesson in his approach for the rest of us who work for peace.
There's a lesson in his approach for the rest of us who work for peace...
Well, having newspapers here in the US that would be willing to employ reporters like Fisk would certainly be a start.
It once was asked... "Who will remember the Armenians?"
'We do'
That is humanity's and history's answer.
There was also the genocide at Nanjing during WWII by the Japanese. This is often forgotten by history too.
We could make a very long list in these comments of the various 'genocides' humans have perpetrated. A very long list indeed. It doesn't seem to be limited to western europeans. For instance I see China and Japan both mentioned above, and Cambodia and Rwanda are far too recent to forget.
One thing I think everyone should realize is that it could happen anywhere. Its important that we understand how something like this develops. Then we can start to truly understand the dangers of some of the hate speech we see often.
One example in America today would be the hate speech against immigrants. That doesn't mean that we are going to have a pogrom against immigrants. But if one did develop, one could look back at the hate speech we see in American politics today and see how that was an early step towards it.
The peoples who suffered in the last century, and in this, are legion...Guatemalans, Chinese, Asians of nearly every description, Bosnians, Armenians, Jews, Africans...the list is nearly without end.
Genocide is specific. It is the attempt to totally wipe out a particular people, a gene pool, call them a race, an ethnic group, a nationality, what you will.
Let's not forget the slaughter of native people in western hemisphere countries, including the USA.
I can think of a MUCH more forgotten Holocaust. The CIA backed and organized Indonesian Holocaust of 1965. You hear way way less about this than the Armenian Holocaust. So there! Of course the NY times applauded the McGenocide at the time.
Lets first stop the ongoing holocaust before we start remembering the past.
The scandal of the Armenian holocaust is the deniers of it.
Elie Wiesel, most prominently, has fought long and consistently against having the Armenian holocaust mentioned in the same context as the German holocaust that the Jews underwent. If denial of the German holocaust is a crime, as it is in Austria, for example, which jailed the British historian David Irving on that charge, then so should denial of the Armenian holocaust.
For how Israel's supporters have perverted the German holocaust and used it to shut off debate about Israel, read Norman Finkelstein, "The Holocaust Industry."
Dear dichterfreund;
Thank you for mentioning the famine created by Stalin's collectivization drive. I got so wrapped up in the Armenian issue that I forgot to mention it. About 20M were starved, shot, or transported to slave labor camps where very few survived.
If Armenians were exceedingly wealthy, powerful, and politically involved in the U.S. then we (Americans) would hear about the Armenian Holocaust regularly. We might even throw untold billions of dollars and our political weight behind Armenia, no matter what crimes its government committed.
The powerful decide what we hear and what our government does.
to Suhail_Shafi
Must get your facts right.
1- The Armenian massacres were the direct result of anti-Armenian Turkish policy, in order to "solve" the Armenian Question, which rose in 1878, after the treties of San Stefano and the Conference of Berlin.
2.- Nobody is talking about Sultan Abdulhamid's organized massacres of 1895-96, when 300,000 Armenians perished.
3.- You consider the Russian Bolsheviks as allies of Armenians, hence the Turkish anger. Well, buddy, the Bolshevik revolution was in October 1917, when the Armenians were already exterminated!!
4.- The reason behind the Turkish motivation regarding the Armenian Genocide, was their Panturanist ideology. They tended to create a vast empire from Istanbul to the mountains of Altai, in Central Asia. Armenia and the Armenians were an obstacle on their way East. Hence the joining of the Ottoman Empire in the First WW.
Sometimes a little history helps, right?
My grandfather was drafted in the Ottoman army in 1914. He fled the army and reached his village (Haboosi, in Kharput/Elazig) the very day when the whole village was being deported, with it his wife Soghome, and three kids, Raffi, Vartkes and Khatoon.
He not only lost his family, but also his home and pottery workshop. And here is the main point of the Genocide.- Kill them and usurp their lands.
We as Armenians not only mourn our dead, but above all, the loss of our fatherland.
A turkish so called "apology" will never heal our wounds. We want what was taken from us, our homeland.
A respected journalist like Robert Fisk has to stress this point.
Mr. Hussey,
Note that Finkelstein was denied tenure and prevented from teaching due to his stance on the holocaust. Jewish control of the universities in America seems to prevent history from being rationally discussed.
If Turkey conceded this happened, what would happen next? What exactly do the Armenians want?
Payments to survivors?
I don't mean to dismiss the pain and horror these people may have experienced during these relocations. I do think, however, that it is far more urgent to prevent similar tragedies from occuring / continuing in the present than it is to try --futilely-- to seek diplomatic / financial closure for something that is well behind us.
When, after all, do you expect Germany's holocaust survivors to collectively nod their heads, slap the German goverment on the back and say, "We're even. Thanks for your good faith effort to make up for the past. Let's just put it all behind us now" ?
I think the world's greatest victims ought to show some good faith themselves by being at the forefront of battles to protest and prevent like tragedies from occuring in our times versus simply looking after their own.
CoMARC: Good analysis. While every slain victim's families have the right to grieve, the issue that would better the world is resolving to never let these types of masked slaughters happen again. The same recipes and psychological formulae are utilized to gather a force that aims at the outsider who has "the goods." Sadly, predicted wars over water, climate change, and/or oil challenge human beings NOT to fall back to these time-tested population reduction experiments in obscenity.
"Look what we are doing to us." "Look what we do to each other."
Think about it.
As we remember and mourn the victims, we must also mourn the perpetrators.
"There but for the grace of God, go I." - could be applied to both parties.
It seems that everyone that obsesses on being wronged wants vengeance of some kind. Maybe they should focus on themselves and be sure that they have not nor have any of the wronged peoples ever done harm to any one else and they are not harming anyone now and will not harm anyone in the future.
The more strident the "outrage", the more capacity for escalating violence to others.
I could be wrong.
The big difference today is that not only are the living killed in the needless war in Iraq, and elsewhere around the world as I write, but the killing will continue long after troops are withdrawn - if they ever are. At least in these genocides of the past things such as depleated uranium weren't around.
That's not the case in today's world. The needless dying and suffering will continue for generations after the last shot is fired - if that even happens. We will have left behind a poisoned land that will continue to kill, and landmines or cluster bombs are accidentally come across. I think of Lebanon and the Southern portion of that country. How long will it be before anyone can walk carelessly through that land?
I know we don't talk about the war in Iraq as genocide but to me, that's what it is. No matter the clan or militia or whatever, they are all breathing the same air and walking the same land that is now deadly to live in. We are doing the same to our own brave fighters there as well. It will be denied for as long as possible, I'm sure, but the strange illnesses and cancers don't lie.
I've visited the Killing Fields in Cambodia and have walked through the schools used for torture and, ultimately, killing. I took no photographs. When I left there, I left with a deep feeling of sadness. And on the streets of the city, there are walking reminders of that time. It's all around you. Unless you close your eyes you can't avoid seeing scores of people still suffering.
What is it that can turn a person into such a horrible creature? The song "Imagine" by John Lennon comes to mind as the song mentions so many of the reasons we kill each other.
Turks and Armenians massacred each other during the First World War, but I am unsure whether this article is relevant on a progressive website. From what I know and can tell, Common Dreams has not had the habit of delving into brutal and bloody periods of the past of other nations unless it was of relevance to the causes of the US progressive/liberal/antiwar movement.
Also, from what I understand there is at least one important difference between the fate of Armenians and Jews. The Jews were overwhelmingly loyal to the German state and were not fighting against the Germans while the Armenians during the first world war were actively revolting against the Ottomans and were trying, with the help of their Bolshevik allies, to invade large swathes of Northeastern Turkey. An important difference.
"For more on the history of recent genocides read Samantha Power's, "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide"."
rebelnow,
how can you read that propagandist? She conveniently only mention genocides that fit her definition of enemy. Genocides committed against foes of US are conveniently left out, so are the ones committed by the US.
For a review of her book by Ed Herman,
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12404
"All these posts and no one has yet blamed Bush/Cheney for the Armenian holocaust? Come on folks, you're "progressives" remember? Get with the program!"
mjolnir,
you have this site mixed up with RAT sites like KOS, who blames everything on Bush/Cheney. Sites like CD points the finger at the establishment.
The elimination of 200 million Indigenous Americans has to be the greatest genocide in human history. A stupendous crime in which the only retribution is for the Western Civilization to cease to exist.
As someone actively engaged in the struggle for recognition of the Armenian Genocide - against the aggression of Turkish denial and revision - I am proud of CommonDreams for giving attention to such an article (and thankful to Robert Fisk for his intellectual dedication to history and her innumerable victims).
As to why this article belongs on a progressive site: denial (what genocide scholar Gregory Stanton categorizes as the 8th / final step of genocide) is an enormous part of the progressive community's struggle for justice - be it American denial of the horrors in Iraq (or annihilation of the Native Americans); the Government of Sudan's denial of genocide in Darfur; Israel's denial of injustice against Palestinians; or, of course, the Republic of Turkey's 92-year-long campaign of systematic denial of the Armenian Genocide (and massacre of other minorities within the Empire [i.e. Greeks and Assyrians]). In actuality, Turkey is a leading example of denial (as many publications and current events show). To understand denial is to understand the psychology of perpetrators, once crimes have been perpetrated. Additionally, to uncover the denial of traumatized decedents - who, through denial, pack soil onto the graves of the dead - is to illuminate denial as it occurs during crimes themselves (Sudan, today, clearly denies that they are acting with the Janjaweed militia, as the Ottoman Turks denied that the deportation marches were not intended to kill the Armenians who were walked or bludgeoned to death). In 92 years, without healing and (nearly unimaginable) reconciliation, decedents of today's perpetrators will deny the acts we witness against today's innocents. Denial is the last wave of genocide (crime), with us from the start.
Up until the present, official denial of the Armenian Genocide leaves many aging Armenians feeling betrayed by history, just as much as it still kills outspoken intellectuals (like Hrant Dink who was assassinated this year (01.19.07) for speaking out, and calling for peace between Turks and Armenians). Why would someone speaking for peace be assassinated in Turkey? He spoke about the Armenian Genocide. What was happening to him before his assassination? He was on trial, in Turkey, for "insulting Turkishness" (Article 301 in the Turkish penal code). Ninety-two years later, denial fuels killing.
(Re: suhail_shafi) . . .
When questioning the relevance of such issues in progressive forums, I ask that we also ask why Turkish Nobel Prize Laureate Orhan Pamuk (at Columbia University) fears visiting Turkey; why the outspoken Turkish scholar Taner Akcam now fears for his life (see www.akcam.info), or why so many in Turkey have been brought to court for speaking critically about this "time in the past." For Armenians and Turks to heal, these issues "of the past" must be reconciled, and denial does not allow that. Because Turkey continues to lobby and outright buy weak American officials (search Gephardt on www.tnr.com) so that recognition is not gained in America, this is an American issue. Because "Young Turks" bring their hate speech and "counter-commemorations" of the Armenian Genocide into the streets of New York City, this is an American issue. Because relief to victims of the Armenian Genocide was America's first international human rights outreach project, this is an American issue (see Peter Balakian's The Burning Tigris). With regret, I conclude that to question the legitimacy of such dialogue is itself subtle denial, unwisely attempting to obscure a desperate need for truth.
As for Armenian's revolting against the Ottoman Empire, let us note that this is a common Turkish stance (taught in schools and society by the Republic of Turkey). While there were Russian Armenians who, as part of Russian military, were fighting the Ottomans, the Armenians subject to genocide (Ottoman Armenians) were innocent mothers, fathers, elders and children – killed in cold blood. Until the time surrounding atrocities, the Armenians within the Empire were known as the Milleti Sadaka (or sadik). That is, within the Ottoman Empire's millet system (a result of the Tanzimat reforms), the Armenians were considered "the loyal millet" (see Taner Akcam's A Shameful Act). It is my hope that those who know not about this issue will be prompted by authors such as Fisk to dig deeper, and help contemporary Armenians and Turks to finally heal, cultivating a love that only grows through recognition.
This was Hrant Dink's call to us all. It is left up to us to keep him alive.
The dilemma that exists between Turks and Armenians today is a microcosm of many post-genocide situations, and a microcosm of problems within humanity at large.
Onward.
E.S.M.,
ArmenianNonviolence
Correction: Hrant Dink was assassinated on January 19, 2007, not 2005 as accidentally typed above.
Robert Fisk is worthy of praise, yet again, for the depth and accuracy of his article. If only our mainstream news in the U.S. was just as informative.
A few points are apt regarding some of the comments posted above:
A) Re: How is this relevant to America and our peace communities?
As may be known, the US and Turkey (and Isreal) share a close alliance, not least because the latter two help bolster the lucrative arms industry in the U.S. In an article, which appeared on Common Dreams on May 21, 2007, Frida Berrigan wrote: "…Turkey and the U.S. signed a $1.78 billion deal for Lockheed Martin's F-16 fighter planes. TAI — Turkey's aerospace corporation — will receive a boost with this sale, because Lockheed Martin is handing over responsibility for parts of production, assembly, and testing to Turkish workers. The Turkish Air Force already has 215 F-16 fighter planes and plans to buy 100 of Lockheed Martin's new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter as well, in a deal estimated at $10.7 billion over the next 15 years." Despite the fact that the countries' relationship experienced a slight hurdle over the Iraq war, Turkey still wields great influence over the U.S. State Department, threatening that their intimate relations will be hurt if any legislation affirming the Armenian Genocide is passed.
… Now, why is Turkey's denial such a huge deal, and unlike many other cases of denial? This brings us to the second point:
B) I use the word "cases" specifically because Turkey can, and has been, used as serious case-study of genocide denial, both similar and different to the denial of other atrocities, like the Rape of Nanking and the genocide of millions of Native Americans, to name just two examples. Denial takes place during and after all cases of genocide. However, the extent to which the Turkish Republic has gone, the amount of money it has channeled into, and the human resources it has used to deny the Armenian Genocide are extraordinary. Several examples:
a. Turkey has funded Chairs in university departments, hiring professors who will purport the Republic's narrative of 1915. These professors' personal relationships with Turkey are well documented.
b. Turkey tried to persuade Encarta to delete the word "genocide" as it relates to the treatment of the Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during WWI. Encarta refused.
c. Turkey banned Schwarzenegger films since the Governor of California passed state legislation commemorating the genocide.
d. Turkey can imprison its intellectuals for speaking about the genocide, according to Article 301 of its Penal Code.
e. In 2005, Turkey's Ministry of Education, issued a statement to 5th and 7th grade teachers urging them to get students to write about why "the Armenian allegations are baseless." This included Armenian students.
f. Textbooks in Turkey teach that the Armenians massacred the Turks.
g. Turkey attempts to "buy" American legislators, as has been described in the post above.
The list is long, but the critical point is that Turkey's denial of the Armenian Genocide is not characterized by simply "not talking about the issue," but it's a well-funded, systematic, thorough campaign – an extension of genocide itself. It denigrates the memory of the victims and continues to traumatize the survivors. Hence, it necessitates counter-action, lest all perpetrators of atrocities realize how easy it is to deny one's crimes.
In light of the state of denial, the article by Fisk is not just timely and appropriate to Common Dreams, but necessary. For the sake of historical accuracy, it and others like it must be written, though the task of the writers of this history is not easy. Evidently, many are harassed, imprisoned, and even killed. With this said, the most courageous among them are Turkish intellectuals who risk their lives for the sake of a truly democratic Turkey that will confront its past honestly. And for the sake of an overdue peace between peoples who have for too long seen their differences instead of their common humanity.
Peace,
HT
ArmenianNonviolence
liberty wrote: "... Why are both Israel and Turkey denying the holocaust?
Knesset opts not to discuss Armenian genocide at PM's request ..."
Answer seems like it should be that if Israel recognizes the Turkish holocausting of 1.5mn Armenians in 1915, then Israel could not possibly deny that it has, and for several decades now, been holocausting the Palestinians, as well as stealing their land and destroying their homes and economy; committing genocide in all ways that genocide is defined in international law. That is something Israel refuses to admit; it hellbent refuses to ack. what it's been long doing to the Palestinians, and has no intention of stopping.
Israel strategically needs to keep its mouth shut with regards to other cases of holocausts, except for the one against Jews during WWII; the latter being a holocaust the Israeli state is and always has been very much premised or based on. Israel won't recognize any other holocausts, not publicly and officially anyway; doing so would be like Israel attacking its own plan or project to eliminate Palestinians and eventually steal what remains of Palestine today.
Maybe, for the sake of argument anyway, the above is not why Israeli leadership is shelving the Turkish holocaust of the Armenians. Perhaps it's instead due to Turkey being an ally of the U.S., which Israel definitely needs to remain strongly allied with for protection.
Or maybe, and likely enough, both reasons apply.
jjohnjj wrote: "... Robert Fisk is a talented and courageous writer. His work provides the most penetrating insights into the life and history of Middle Eastern people that I've read. ..."
I'd refrain from such idolatrous perspectives; I would and do. Fisk is [only] human, and while he has provided some qualitative articles, there are plenty that aren't worth five minutes of my time. And he certainly did not write well with regards to Hizbollah last summer, in the context of the US-Israel war of aggression on them and Lebanon. Fisk came through quite bigotted, and maybe he does okay with respect to Iraq because it's not where he's spent much of his life living; while he has been resident of Lebanon for a very LONG time and being with the Lebanese "Christians", siding with them, he has developed a bigotry torwards Hizbollah.
He sure wrote that way, and Jonathan Cook produced a very good article that included an excellent argument and a call for Fisk to clarify what his position precisely was. I've never seen Fisk respond with clarification, but maybe he has. Anyway, I could not disagree with Cook, and if Fisk has not provided the clarification, then I will remain with what he made evident, and which is that in Lebanon, there he allows himself to be self-righteously bigotted against Muslims opposing Western corruption of a foreign state.
What has he written about the (Lebanese "Christian") Pierre Gemayel family; has it been wholly positive, praising, etc., or was it like what Robert Dreyfuss provides for?
"The 'kiss of death'", by Robert Dreyfuss, Aug. 10, 2007,
http://robertdreyfuss.com/blog/2007/08/the_kiss_of_death.html
The Wikipedia pages on the Gemayels supports what Dreyfuss says in the closing part of his article; about the family being or having been pro-European fascism, -Nazi, -Israel and -West, while not always but eventually and evidently or clearly for invalid reasons anti-Palestinian and -Muslim(s).
Wikipedia is not the best source, but what it does provide can at least be used for leads on topics to search the Internet for.
EDIT: Actually, read vprood's post, and in reading what he or she says Armenians want today, after what was done to them, remember that the same is very much the picture of or for Palestinians; therefore, Israel surely would not want to acknowledge the holocaust of the Armenians.
gde wrote: "Misleading title for an important article. ...
A prime example is the Holocaust itself. The number of non-Jewish victims, .... ..."
Yes, and the 20mn or more Rusisans killed by the Nazi forces, EH!
And I don't think we can really fault the Jewish survivors of the holocaust for pushing to make the holocaust of the Jews predominant topic, while the MANY and, in total, many MORE others killed by the Nazi forces is all very ignored, underreported, treated basically as if it did not happen. It's not the survivors who are in the positions to be able to do this with human history; it's the elites who are akin to the "hidden hand" that operates in and controls govts, say.
Those are people who play very DIRTY politics.
twistoflex wrote: "Mr. Hussey,
Note that Finkelstein was denied tenure and prevented from teaching due to his stance on the holocaust. Jewish control of the universities in America seems to prevent history from being rationally discussed".
There we go again with people claiming that the Jews [control] the nearly whole of the U.S.A.'s institutions, including govt. It's false, for those people are NOT true Jews; they're Zionists and very anti-Torah. Otoh, if we employ the term 'Jew' non-religiously, using it only ethnically, then we may have a seriously different conclusion; yet not all who call themselves Jews are of the same ethnicity, so ....
But I think there's also falseness in the sense that what [appears] to be control may very well be just that, only a matter of appearance, as opposed to thoroughly understood reality. It's very possible that the question is not about the Zionists controlling DePaul University (in this case of Norman G. Finkelstein), but that the appearance is nonetheless strategically useful to the real controllers.
Too many people judge based on only appearances and it's done so commonly that it's as if people who do this are UNABLE to recognise the difference between what is appearance, vs what is really verified and proven or disproven reality.
The "art of deception" has a number of tactics that can be used to deceive, and one is distraction; draw onlookers' attention away from self and therefore toward another subject, ..., etc.
People on the anti-Zionism track of fanatical, single-minded kind cause me to wonder if they're just too narrowly focused and letting apearances be interpreted as if definitely indicative of the whole truth, or if they aren't wittingly working to aid and abet the most powerful elite controllers. I'm anti-Zionism while NOT anti-Jewish or anti-anyone who's innocent; but I won't treat the Israeli govt and the lobby in the USA, as well as Americans supporting the former entities, as if they're the real or top controllers in the USA. I recognize that they publicly play an apparently influential role, but that's not the same thing as being the real controllers, who may very well welcome all of the obvious nature of the Israeli govt leadership and the lobby in the USA, as well as the "Christian" Zionists of the USA.
That can be used for distraction. Whether or not it is being used for this purpose is something to determine, but that it can be used for this objective is without question 'YES', definitely.
Let not thyself be fooled or mistaken because of only appearances; instead, DIG to uncover the whole truth.
yungturk39 wrote: "If Turkey conceded this happened, what would happen next? What exactly do the Armenians want?
Payments to survivors?".
WEIRD and pointless question.
"I don't mean to dismiss the pain and horror these people may have experienced during these relocations. I do think, however, that it is far more urgent to prevent similar tragedies from occuring / continuing in the present .... ..."
That sounds noble, etc., but it's also deceptive; because there is NOTHING we can do to "prevent similar tragedies from occuring" and "continuing".
I sympathise with the fact that the reader posts in this page calling for paying first and foremost attention to the genocides presently happening or being perpetrated are definitely right; and I feel the same way as these people express in this page, well, with respect to needing to try to stop presently perpetrated genocides, as well as preventing potential future ones. BUT that remains matter of [wish] kind, for we do NOT have any way of stopping the present genocides and preventing future ones.
Those who think that we and au contraire have such means that we can employ or apply should state what these are, for I certainly do NOT know of any such methods or means.
We first of all need SOLIDARITY, and we can evidently forget about achieving this in the USA, as well as also in Canada. We need mass solidarity in order to have strength in numbers; but even that likely would not be enough. It's needed, but it would be virtually impossible to achieve in the West, and then we still need means, tactics that the mass in solidarity can apply. One tactic that has been occasionally used is called CIVIL WAR.
NOT ready to do that? Then I figure that we're also not ready to really do anything serious to stop present and prevent future genocides.
Those who disagree should present not mere blanket opposition without any real argumentation, but the latter, real argumentation and therefore serious explanation. I doubt that the above is off-base, but maybe there are a factor or two or ... that I'm not thinking of and which would cause me to have a different perspective.
I really don't perceive, yet, how we can stop and prevent genocides; however, one serious contribution would be for the troops to REFUSE to continue following orders, and for law enforcement forces to finally start working according to law, instead of doing the opposite. Then we'd have these forces on our side and REAL and strong chance of stopping and preventing genocides. We majorly lack that though, and we are therefore in a position of inability to strongly oppose.
Etc.
The various Native American genocides killed about 15 Million. All other "holocausts" pale by comparison. Yet, the conquest of the Americas is still considered to be a form of progress and the expansion of civilization.
ArmenianNonviolence and nvprood - assuming you are Armenians, I hope you do not misunderstand my statements - I was not trying to play down the suffering of Armenians, just ask questions, that is all. No offence intend
ed, none taken I hope.
suhail_shafi,
Not at all. Questions are the key to answers. Your comments, however, did not include question marks and seemed to carry deep implications. I hope my response was productive to the clarification of your inquiry. Offence and resentment are not nonviolent. Dialogue is.
Feel free to e-mail if you follow up on any of the references above.
Peace,
E.S.M.,
ArmenianNonviolence (@gmail.com)
All of these comments about acknowledging other genocides ignore one key fact - this article is about the Armenian genocide - a horrible event that is well documented, yet to this day, denied by Turkey. Denial is one of the key factors of genocide, and as long as we allow denial to be linked to genocide, we set the stage for the next one. If Turkey is pressured to acknowledge this genocide, others like Darfur become less likely, because there are consequences. As long as the US allows Turkey to deny the genocide because we need them as an ally in Iraq, other governments around the world, get the message - 'befriend the US - kill whoever you want'.