Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News

A genocide the world forgot
by Michael Coren, Toronto Sun - April 7 2001
Posted: Wednesday, April 11, 2001 03:32 am CST

"Who remembers the Armenians now?" asked the leader of one of the most civilized nations on the face of the Earth. He then set about the attempted genocide of an entire people.

The man's name was Adolf Hitler, his victims were the Jews and in just a few weeks time the Armenian people will recall their suffering and the campaign to remove them from existence.

Hitler was right, of course, when he suggested that even though more than 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered by the Turks, the world did hardly anything and promptly forgot or denied. Even now many, if not most, Turkish politicians claim the genocide somehow did not happen and that the Armenians are making it all up.

It did happen. And it was brutal, grotesque and organized. Men, women and children were killed without mercy. Women were often raped first, men tortured and humiliated. Children who escaped death were sold as slaves, their mothers taken into the harems of Turkish officers or state officials.

"The Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war," said U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, "and the failure to act against Turkey is to condone it."

A hardened British infantryman, seeing a photograph of some Turkish soldiers standing by a pile of decapitated heads of Armenian men, said simply, "This cannot be happening. My God, this cannot be happening."

Armenians had long lived within Turkish territory, because as the Ottoman Empire expanded it overran Christian lands and foreign peoples. Some of the conquered converted to Islam, easing their relationship with their masters. Not so the Armenians, who had embraced Christianity earlier than most. Because of this, they were not trusted and were frequently persecuted.

By 1915 Turkey was at war, allied to the Germans and Austrians against Russia, Britain and France. As the Russians advanced further toward Turkish territory, the Turks decided to disarm all Armenians in the Turkish Army and then to put them into labour battalions. They were then killed.

ARRESTED AND MURDERED

The next group to be targeted were the political, intellectual and religious leaders of the Armenian community. By 1916, they had been arrested and murdered. Then came the systematic rounding up of entire families, often involving house-to-house searches, much in the manner of Nazi atrocities 25 years later.

Demoralized and frightened, the Armenians were told they were to be relocated, but instead were force-marched, without food or water or sometimes even clothing, to concentration camps in the desert. There they were starved to death or shot. There were suddenly no Armenians left.

The Turks have either denied that any of this happened or have explained any violence by claiming Armenians took up arms for the Russians against Turkey. Ottoman soldiers were merely fighting an enemy, they say. Untrue. Those Armenians who did fight for Russia lived outside the Turkish Empire.

Another excuse claims the Armenians had rebelled within Turkey against the government and the Turks were merely putting down a revolt. If so, why the mass deaths of women and children? But there was no revolt, only isolated incidents of Armenians trying to defend themselves.

Today the Armenian Diaspora, just like the Jewish one, is large and is strengthened by its collective memory of so much suffering. The Armenians, however, have an added dimension to their tragedy. While only lunatics question the Jewish genocide, an entire government denies the Armenian experience.

There are many Turks, however, who know and admit the truth. They have read it, or heard it from their grandparents who saw and heard and screamed. Individual Turks tried to help their neighbours, and there are wonderful stories of the hiding of entire families. Those people, as well as the victims of state terror, need to be remembered and commemorated.

In 1916 and after World War I it was not only Turkey's enemies but allies, Germany and Austria, who were aware of and condemned what had happened. Today, generations later, it is time not for hatred and revenge but for admissions of guilt and a peaceful settling of grievances. The souls of a million and a half people demand it. Their cries are as eloquent as the purest of sonnets.

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