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Remembering the genocide
OPINION
It's time the Canadian government joined other nations in formally recognizing the 1915 genocide of 1.5 million Armenians
Montreal's 35,000-strong Armenian community today joined about 8 million Armenians around the world in commemorating the 86th anniversary of the 1915 Armenian genocide.
In Armenia and more than 80 other countries, people are laying wreaths and lighting candles in memory of an estimated 1.5-million Armenians who were massacred, tortured, raped and starved to death.
Armenian communities in Canada will receive letters of condolence from different levels of government but the word genocide will be replaced by the euphemistic "tragic events of 1915" in the letter from the federal government.
While Quebec and Ontario legislatures recognized the Armenian genocide in 1980 and have voted every year to confirm the motions, the federal government, under the pressure from Turkey, the country where these 1.5 million Armenians perished, refuses to do so.
Canadian Armenians say it's time for the government to take a moral stance commensurate with its world status as a human-rights leader and formally recognize the genocide.
In Turkey itself, there will be no commemoration. That's not because there is nobody left to remember - there are thousands of Armenians in Istanbul, remnants - but because the words "Armenian genocide" can land you in jail.
Turkish historian and human-rights activist Ragip Zarakolu has suffered threats, attacks and imprisonment because he dared to challenge the Turkish government to acknowledge the Armenian genocide.
Zarakolu believes that if Turkey is ever to become a true democracy it has to face its past. "It is a burden for our society because it is a problem of conscience and acceptance of reality and denial of repressive regimes and systems," Zarakolu said last year in a CBC interview. "We must do this as a society, as a Turkish society. It is a responsibility of conscience."
Turkey, however, has steadfastly refused to acknowledge the genocide that has been recognized by most genocide scholars and historians, including a small but growing number of Turkish historians.
The Turkish government argues there was no premeditated plan to exterminate Armenians, that Armenians are exaggerating the number of casualties, that Turkish authorities were forced to deport Armenians fearing they would collaborate with the advancing Russian army and that those dead Armenians were killed in intercommunal violence that claimed as many Turks as Armenians.
Prominent Turkish historian Halil Berktay begs to differ. He described what happened to Armenians in an interview with the Turkish Radikal newspaper in October 2000: "In that period (1915), 1.75 million Armenians lived in eastern Anatolia. The official decision to expel the Armenians made by the military regime was organized in a way to include without exception the entire Armenian population of the region. This is what the written documents reveal.
"It was understood that, together with these official commands, separate, unwritten special orders were given at the same time to the men of the Special Organization (a state-sponsored paramilitary group). They worshiped violence and had no social morals."
These special orders were to kill Armenians, Berktay said.
Berktay estimates that at least 600,000 Armenians were killed by the Special Organization, which organized death squads and volunteers in the region. Some of these volunteers were criminals let out of prison and spared the noose, Berktay said. They also made Turkish and Kurdish Muslim tribes attack the migrating convoys of Armenians.
"To these massacres may also be added the horrifying casualties created by the miserable conditions of the forced migration," Berktay said. "Everywhere in the West there are photographs that you cannot bear to see. The first time I came across this visual material I stood there breathless and cried for minutes. These pictures are no different than those of concentration camps and massacres in Africa since there are great numbers of people in the photos."
Interestingly, there was a time when Turkey not only did not deny the crime but court-martialed the perpetrators of these atrocities. In 1919, a special tribunal convicted and sentenced to death the interior minister, war minister and commander-in-chief of the 4th Ottoman army.
They escaped but were later hunted down and killed by Armenian avengers. Two provincial governors were hanged by the Turks after separate trials. The tribunals cited "massacres against the Armenians," which "were organized and executed by the young Turk leaders."
In a 1926 interview with the Los Angeles Examiner, Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Republic of Turkey, admitted to the mass murder and promised to deal with the other participants: "These left-overs from the former Young Turkey Party, who should have been made to account for the lives of millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse from their homes and massacred, have been restive under Republican rule."
That was a promise Ataturk didn't keep. Genocide became a taboo subject in Turkey and successive Turkish governments have gone to great lengths to purge the collective memory of its people and the world.
This has led the Armenian communities to seek legislative recognition of the genocide similar to the one given to the Holocaust.
The tide has been slowly turning against Turkey. Argentina, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Russia and Uruguay have all recognized the genocide. And on Jan. 18, in a landmark victory for the Armenian diaspora, France passed a law recognizing the genocide. Canadian Armenians say it's now Canada's turn.
"Canada has a moral obligation to recognize the genocide," said Mher Karakashian, a teacher and Montreal film-maker. "It has to reinstate the truth, because until it does so, it is a co-conspirator in the denial, and denial is another form of genocide."
- Levon Sevunts, an Armenian, is a reporter for The Gazette.
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