The Armenian Genocide Is Undeniable
NOTE: This piece was originally published on the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, though edits have been made for clarity.
“I said loud and clear that one million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in Turkey, and I stand by that. For me, these are scholarly issues. I am a novelist. I address human suffering and pain and it is obvious, even in Turkey, that there was an immense hidden pain which we now have to face.”
- Orhan Pamuk, Turkish Nobel Prize winning novelist.
Many of us were raised to believe that genocide denial was a serious crime. The deliberate mass extermination of a people is the furthest extreme of savagery that the human animal can commit itself to. We are rightfully appalled by the likes of David Irving, who deny the Holocaust, but do we apply this measuring stick to those who deny other genocides? I must say no. Genocide deniers are in our midst, and they can act freely with little scrutiny and total legitimacy. Those who deny genocides should lose all scholarly credibility because they reveal a willingness to put ideological interests over truth. Unfortunately, it appears that our intolerance for genocide denial has long been on the wane. Genocide denial can be ignored if the narrative suits a particular political purpose.
The Armenian Genocide occurred in the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) in 1915. It is considered by many to be the first genocide of the modern era. It is estimated that between 1 million and 1.5 million Armenians were killed. For an explanation of how this came about, I turn to historian Eugene Rogan, an associate professor at Oxford, spoke with NPR about on the centennial of the genocide about his book, The Fall of the Ottomans.
He said that the genocide took place during the background of World War I, in which the Ottoman Empire was engaged. The Armenians were a Christian minority who were very much integrated into the nation’s political system. This minority, for their part, were defenders of the Empire they called home. These loyalties were put into doubt once the Ottomans lost a battle against the Russians. The Ottomans feared that the Armenians would change sides. Indeed, there were some Armenians who joined Russia and encouraged others to join, but most didn’t, being that they didn’t want to further endanger an already sensitive position within the Empire.
For evidence of this, Rogan refers to the memoirs of Turkish soldiers who boasted about randomly killing Armenian soldiers and calling them “accidents.” The Young Turk government, which ruled the Ottoman Empire, decided to have the Armenians dealt with, fearing their betrayal. Publicly, the orders were to move the Armenians to areas where they would no longer be a “threat” to the Ottomans. However, private orders were given for their destruction. Men were separated from women. The men were massacred while the women went on death marches in the deserts. The Ottoman’s plan was to reduce the Armenians to five or ten percent in any province they may thrive. Rogan says that, “I think the evidence presented by scholars leaves very little doubt that there was a predetermined plan to reduce the demographic profile of the Armenian community through means of mass killing. And in that sense, we have I think incontrovertible evidence that the Armenian massacres of the First World War constitute the first modern genocide.”
Though he’s hardly the only historian, as most historians and scholars now recognize the Armenian slaughter as a genocide. Historian Ronald Suny, who lost his great-grandparents to the tragedy, expounded that the genocide was a result of extreme fear and resentment for the Armenians. To these Turks, the massacre was a purely rational decision to defend the Empire. He noted that they chose the most violent solution possible, adding that, “when political actors could have acted differently, but decided instead to embark on a course that led to devastation and destruction.” Celebrated historian, Arnold J Toynbee, has said, “In one way or another, the Central Government enforced and controlled the execution of the scheme, as it alone had originated the conception of it; and the Young Turkish Ministers and their associates at Constantinople are directly and personally responsible, from beginning to end, for the gigantic crime that devastated the Near East in 1915.” I could list more, but then we’d be here all day. French philosopher, Bernard-Henri Levy, summarized the matter best when he said:
“This we have always known: that, beginning in 1915, the Armenians were the victims of a methodic attempt at annihilation. A wealth of literature has been devoted to the subject, based in particular upon the confessions offered by the Turkish criminals themselves, starting with Hoca Ilyas Sami, almost immediately after the fact. From Yehuda Bauer to Raul Hilberg, from researchers at Yad Vashem to Yves Ternon and others, no serious historian casts doubt upon this reality or denies it.”
Though I’d be remiss not to mention another historian: Bernard Lewis. Lewis is one of the most respected scholars on the Middle East and Islamic history. He has an immense bibliography of detailed books on the region and was even sought by the Bush administration for his expertise. After 9/11 he wrote “The Roots Of Muslim Rage” for The Atlantic, which I felt was rather eloquently written. Lewis is also known for his disagreements with another scholar of the Middle East, Edward Said, for his arguments laid out in the book Orientalism. Lewis is a denier of the Armenian Genocide, though no one I can name in the popular press seems very interested in holding him accountable for it. The apologist distortions of Lewis began with his book The Emergence of Modern Turkey. As David B. Green of Haaretz records the scholar’s rather depressing surrender to Turkish propaganda,
“Although early editions (in 1961 and 1968) of one of Lewis’ groundbreaking books, “The Emergence of Modern Turkey,” spoke about “the terrible holocaust of 1915, when a million and a half Armenians perished,” in later editions, the wording was changed to refer to “the terrible slaughter of 1915,” and lowered the estimate to one million Armenians, as well as mentioning “an unknown number of Turks, killed by Armenians. Lewis explicitly argued that, although the Turks massacred countless Armenians, there is no evidence that they operated according to a centralized policy of genocide, and that calling the killings that had the effect of diminishing the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust.”
Green also adds that for his part, Lewis was fined one franc for his denial in France. Is that all? Being a supporter of free speech, I don’t believe that genocide denial should be criminalized, though I’m angered by the sheer indifference people have made to Lewis’s whitewashing of history. Why has he not yet been branded an academic pariah and his books removed from the classrooms? Why is it still acceptable to give this man a platform to speak? Should genocide deniers be advising our governmental leaders on foreign affairs? When Lewis was awarded a National Humanities Medal by George W. Bush in 2006, it was protested by the Armenian National Committee of America. This was met, on the whole, with further indifference.
This state of denial has even seeped into the workings of our news networks. One such network is called “The Young Turks.” That would be the equivalent of naming your news network “The Khmer Rouge”. The name is also problematic because it obscures history. When the word “Young Turks” comes up in the minds of people these days, they’ll think not of the perpetrators of genocide, but of a progressive news show. The head on this news network is Cenk Uygur, a former anchor for MSNBC. Uygur is Turkish and unfortunately swallows his nation’s propaganda. In a piece for The Daily Pennsylvanian, he stated, “If the history of the period is examined it becomes evident that in fact no such genocide took place.” By the way, he cites Bernard Lewis in the article. In a letter to the editor of Salon, Uygur shamelessly pleaded, “Why is it assumed that the “Turkish studies side” has the burden of proof in overturning the verdict of Turkish guilt?” It isn’t enough for Uygur to trivialize the holocaust of nearly 1.5 million Armenians, but he must also run over the corpses by proudly bearing the name of those who brought out the extermination.
One of Uygur’s defenses against this disgusting name is the claim that in the dictionary “Young Turk” means “young progressives looking to overthrow an established system.” This atrocious explanation shows that either Uygur knew little about the context behind that word (which is unlikely) or the fact that since he uses the word differently, that it suddenly erases its hurtful history. You know, if you look up “Nazi” in the dictionary, you’ll find that it means “National Socialist.” Should socialists then start calling themselves “Nazis”? I rest my case.
The real paradox here is Ana Kasparian, co-host of The Young Turks and a good friend of Uygur. Not only is Kasparian an Armenian, but she also accepts that truth of the genocide. She made a video called “Remembering The Armenian Genocide”, in which she explicitly says, “And for anyone who denies this occurred, I would please beg them to put their own biases aside, research this, look into the nuances, and understand what happened to my community over a hundred years ago.” I don’t know how Kasparian came onto a show called “The Young Turks”, knowing all of this, or why she refuses to publicly raise the issue on the program. There are probably many personal disagreements between Uygur and Kasparian behind the scenes, but it’s clear that Uygur is winning. The Young Turks did virtually no coverage of the genocide’s 100th anniversary. The only thing Armenian-related they covered was Kim Kardashian, who, ironically enough, has asked Obama to recognize the genocide. Though of course, that part the story wasn’t covered.
Though this small news network is hardly the most egregious offender here. Take the top brass of the United States. As a Senator, Barack Obama made it a campaign promise to recognize the Armenian Genocide, insisting that it was his “firmly held conviction that the Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence.” Though now as President, Obama gave the Armenians this revisionist statement, “Beginning in 1915, the Armenian people of the Ottoman Empire were deported, massacred, and marched to their deaths. Their culture and heritage in their ancient homeland were erased. Amid horrific violence that saw suffering on all sides, one and a half million Armenians perished.” The word genocide is clearly avoided.
Obama’s failure to recognize the Armenian Genocide is a national embarrassment. It sends a message that he’s more interested in appeasing Turkey’s despot, Tayyip Edrogan, than in bringing comfort to a people whose suffering has long been ignored. The Los Angeles Times has explained that recognizing the genocide would threaten America’s military hegemony in that area, “Turkey has threatened several times, most recently in 2007, to close Turkish missile bases to U.S. airplanes if Congress passes a simple non-binding statement acknowledging the events of 1915 as genocide. And its tactics work; the resolution, which had the votes to pass, was killed at the State Department’s behest.”
Even so, Obama’s timidity in challenging the status quo reveals him to be a moral coward. America’s current foreign policy is not one that respects the ideals of its founding documents, but one that put politics over people. What’s access to Turkish missile bases compared to fixing the historical record? Churchill famously chided that, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.” If America believes that they can bring change to nations like Turkey by being passive and compliant actors, they’re being delusional beyond belief.
Now Obama is hardly the first president to deny the Armenian Genocide, and I doubt he’ll be the last. Though this wasn’t always the state of affairs in the United States. In fact, while the genocide was happening, Henry Morgenthau, an Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, said, “I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such episode as this.” Morgenthau regularly sent eye witness telegrams to the White House about the genocide, and was utterly convinced that, “a campaign of race extermination is in progress.” Morgenthau later wrote extensively about the genocide in his memoirs and raised funds for the survivors. Though it seems that now on Capitol Hill, Morgenthau’s cries are long forgotten.
You would think that Israel, of all nations, would show solidarity with a people suffering from a genocide. After all, many argue that the state of Israel itself stands as a reminder of the Holocaust. The city of Jerusalem even has an Armenian quarter. Despite all of this, the State of Israel refuses to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide, although many surely know the reality of it. Much like the United States, the answer lies with geopolitics. Ishaan Tharoor of The Washington Post writes that Israel, like the United States, has close military ties to Turkey as well as Azerbaijan. A nation that usually feuds with Armenia over the disputed lands of Nagorno-Karabakh. Israel gets 40% of its oil from Azerbaijan and sees the nation as a useful ally against Iran.
In a documentary by Journeyman Pictures entitled “Genocide Denied”, we are spectators to the type of treatment that Armenians have received from Israel. For instance, a church that was to be built as a memorial to the Armenian Genocide, had its construction halted by the Israelis in 1975. Israel claimed that they had no permission to do so. The church has yet to be completed. The film also interviewed Yair Auron, an Israeli historian who wrote the book The Banality of Indifference, which is about Israel’s continual denials of the Armenian Genocide. He speaks of Israel’s then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who on a trip to Turkey, said, “We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to a Holocaust occurred. It was a tragedy what the Armenians went through, but it was not a genocide.” Auron says that when he published his book, Peres sent him a letter congratulating him for his research. So he knows the truth, but even so, Peres and Turkey lobbied hard to prevent the United States from recognizing the genocide.
Though this position is now changing in the Jewish State. Algemeiner reports that on the 100th anniversary of the Armenian tragedy, some members of the Israeli Knesset went to Armenia to commemorate the genocide. One of them, Nachman Shai, said, “Israel must reconsider its position on whether the time has come to recognize the fact that an Armenian genocide occurred. As Jews we must recognize it. This is especially true during these days, when we mark Holocaust Remembrance Day.” It’s also ironic that Israel should take a markedly different stance on the Armenian Genocide than the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. They made their position quite clear,
“On the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum remembers the suffering of the Armenian people. The Ottoman government, controlled by the Committee of Union and Progress (İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti), systematically eliminated the Armenian ethnic presence in the Anatolia region of its empire. Between the spring of 1915 and the end of autumn 1916, Ottoman authorities arrested, deported, conducted mass killings, and created conditions intended to cause widespread death among Armenian Christians.”
Pope Francis showed far more courage than either Obama or Peres, when he stated that the Armenian Genocide was “widely considered the first genocide of the twentieth century.” Francis also stressed the importance of remembrance when he said, “We recall the centenary of that tragic event, that immense and senseless slaughter whose cruelty your forebears had to endure. It is necessary, and indeed a duty, to honour their memory, for whenever memory fades, it means that evil allows wounds to fester.” The name of Pope Francis is one which the Armenians shall always hold in high respect.
It’s well worth saying that Raphael Lemkin, the man who coined the term “genocide”, first became interested in humanity’s mass exterminations after reading about the Armenian Genocide in the news. CNN says that he was shocked that few Turks ever faced justice for the murders, “Why is a man punished when he kills another man? Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of a single individual?” He would later create the term after the tragedy of the Holocaust. In addition, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says that Jews under Nazi occupation could relate to the Armenian plight, “a novel about Armenian self-defense ( Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh) was secretly passed from hand-to-hand among Jews imprisoned in ghettos during the Holocaust, who saw in it an inspirational analogy to their plight and a call to resistance.” Tragically, the connection goes further.
Adolf Hitler, the man who would perpetrate the Holocaust and plunge Europe into World War II, said this before his invasion of Poland,
“I have issued the command — and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad — that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness — for the present only in the East — with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
It is Armenians themselves who must do the remembering, so that the world does not forget. They have built the memorial museum Tsitsernakaberd in their native country. The building has a unique and powerful design. In the center of the roofless, circular Memorial Sanctuary is an eternal flame for the victims. Not far from the sanctuary is an obelisk-like spire which the museum’s official website describes as, “symbolizing the survival and spiritual rebirth of the Armenian people.” Very poetic.
It’d be difficult to finish discussing a genocide without sharing stories from the survivors. Living witnesses to the tragedy have become a rarity and are further dwindling in number. Soon, there will be no witnesses to this barbarity left. So I’ll share some of what they have said, if only in fragments.
Moses Haneshyan, 105 year old survivor, as recorded by The Guardian:
“Soldiers came and gathered us in the village, pushing their rifles against us,” he said. “My mother was visiting a neighbouring town — we never found out what happened to her.
“I was with my father, holding his hand. Half the road was covered with dead people.
“Up to a million and a half Armenians died during the mass deportations into the Syrian desert. Haneshyan and his father, Ibrahim, might have shared that fate had their march not passed through the town of a wealthy Arab man his father had once worked for.
“He saw us and he bribed the soldiers to free my father and me. He put us on his horse and took us to his house, a big house with a garden full of animals,” Haneshyan said.
“The pair hid in the house for three years, terrified of being discovered. His father worked as a servant for the family while Haneshyan spent his time playing with the rabbits and chickens. Only when France occupied Hatay in 1918 were they able to return to their village.”
Beso Gasparian, as recorded by The Guardian.
“It was night-time in Dalvor when 12-year-old Beso Gasparian’sfamily were warned of the proximity of Ottoman soldiers. She fled with her mother and her eight-year-old brother, Manuk, to a hill above the village to hide their valuables and wait for the rest of their family to join them.
“But as dawn came a massacre erupted. They watched as the soldiers beheaded her father and stabbed her two-year-old nephew before turning on the boy’s mother, Kveh. She was seven months’ pregnant.
“The three of them returned to the village the following night to bury the dead. “The scene was hellish. We put the killed baby on my sister’s chest and covered them with stones. But we couldn’t find my father’s corpse,” wrote Lusya Araqelyan, recounting the story told to her by her grandmother.”
Edward Racoubian, as recorded by The Huffington Post:
“We walked for many days, occasionally running across small lakes and rivers. After a while we saw corpses on the shores of the these lakes. Then we began seeing them along the path: twisted corpses, blackened by the sun and bloated. Their stench was horrible. Meanwhile, vultures circled the skies above us, waiting for their evening meal.
“At this point, we came upon a small hole in the ground. A little deeper than average height, the hole was large, and 25 to 30 people could easily fit in it. The women lowered each other down into it. There was no water in it but the bottom was muddy. We were about 20 people and we began sucking on the mud. Some of the women made teats with their shirts filled with mud and suckled on them like children. We rested there for about a half hour. If we hadn’t been forced out a little later, that would have been our best grave.
“Many days later we reached the Euphrates River, and despite the hundreds of bodies floating in it, we drank from it like there was no tomorrow. We quenched our thirst for the first time since our departure from Sivas. Then they put us on small boasts and we crossed to the other side. From there we walked all the way all the way to Rasul-Ain.
“Of a caravan of nearly 10,000 people, they were now only some 300 of the us left. My aunt, my sisters, my brothers had all died or disappeared. Only my mother and I were left. We decided to hide and escape and finally took refuge with some Arab nomads. My mother died there under their tents. With tattoos on my hands and body, they branded me as their own.
“The nomads did not treat me well — they kept me hungry and beat me often. I spent most of my days in the desert, shepherding. When I became 18 years old, I met some Christian Arabs who told me to go to Aleppo, where I could find some Armenians. In January 1933, I arrived in Aleppo.
Kristine Hagopian, as recorded by The Huffington Post
“We had already been deported once, in 1915–16, sent toward Dier-ez-Zor. But my uncle’s friend had connections in the government and he had us ordered back to Izmir.
“Orders came again that everyone must gather in front of the Armenian church to be deported. My father refused to go and told us not to worry. He didn’t think the Turkish government would do anything to him, since he was a government employee himself. Twelve Turkish soliders and an official came very early the next morning. We were still asleep. They dragged us out in our nightgowns and lined us up against the living room wall. Then the official ordered my father to lie down on the ground. They raped him. Raped! Just like that. Right in front of us. And that official made us watch. He whipped us if we turned away. My mother lost consciousness and fell to the floor.
“Afterward, we couldn’t find our father. My mother looked for him frantically. He was in the attic, trying to hang himself. Fortunately, my mother found him before it was too late. My father did kill himself later, after we escaped.”
Peter Balakian, an Armenian-American poet, shared a moving poem about the atrocity on Democracy Now called “After The Survivors Are Gone.” Through his words, he is able to illustrate the suffering of Armenia. Suffering which has gone on for a hundred years, and without recognition.
“ “I tried to imagine the Vilna ghetto,
to see a persimmon tree after the flash at Nagasaki.
Because my own tree had been hacked,
I tried to kiss the lips of Armenia.
At the table and the altar
we said some words written ages ago.
Have we settled for just the wine and bread,
for candles lit and snuffed?
Let us remember how the law has failed us.
Let us remember the child naked,
waiting to be shot on a bright day
with tulips blooming around the ditch.
We shall not forget the earth,
the artifact, the particular song,
the dirt of an idiom —
things that stick in the ear.”
Further Reading
Armenian Genocide Testimonies from the Shoah Foundation
https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/armenian
Originally published at http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com on June 13, 2013.
