Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News

Armenian Holocaust
by Charles Glass (London Desk) - The New York Press - December 13, 2000
Posted: Thursday, December 14, 2000 07:28 pm CST

Back from Jerusalem, I read that the British government has remained true to form and caved into Turkish demands that it exclude all mention of the Armenian genocide from Holocaust Memorial Day on Jan. 27. On that day, Britain is to honor the victims of the 20th century's acts of genocide, mainly of the Jews in Europe during World War II and the Tutsis of Rwanda in 1994. Tony Blair's right-on regime understandably excluded the 19th century, which might have meant bringing up the Tasmanians. Though thanks to British efficiency, there is no Tasmanian lobby to bring up that old peccadillo. And if the Nazis and Turks had achieved their goals, there would be no troublesome Jews and Armenians around to remind us what happened to them.

It fell to a civil servant in the Home Office Race Equality Unit, whatever Orwellian arm of bureaucracy that may be, to explain to American Armenians the government's oversight. Writing to the Armenian Assembly of America, the unit's unlucky Neil Frater disclosed that the only people to be remembered in January will be those killed in "the Nazi Holocaust and more recent atrocities." How convenient that Britain has chosen to draw the line at the 1940s, excluding its own genocides and those of its Turkish NATO allies who consume vast quantities of British weapons, riot control equipment and, worst of all, television programs. How lucky that the Armenians just didn't quite fit the profile and, thus, jeopardize Britain's relations with Ankara.

In Jerusalem the other day, I visited the Armenian Museum in Armenian Patriarchate Road between the Jaffa Gate and the Western Wall of the Old City. Its dusty shelves and overgrown garden testify to the fact that it receives few tourists or scholars, but it is worth seeing. It is not a holocaust museum, but a collection of artifacts from the first Christian kingdom in history: Armenia's icons, altar pieces, embroidered clerical robes, paintings, swords, armor and chalices. Midway through the many vaulted rooms of the stone palace housing the treasures, the genocide takes over. "On 24 April 1915," a card announces next to photographs of murdered Armenians, "prominent Armenian intellectuals of Constantinople were rounded up and massacred."

In fact, the Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1918 began much like the Russian and German destruction of Polish society, with the killing of officers. The Ottomans were fighting a war for the survival of their empire, because the Young Turks had foolishly entered the Great War on the German side. Armenians in the Ottoman army were taken out of their units in Feb. 1915, their hands bound, and slaughtered. Next came the intellectuals, clergy, teachers, rich traders and politicians in the prosperous Armenian colony that had thrived, like the Jews of Vienna until the Anschluss, in Constantinople. They were massacred on April 24, 1915, the date that Armenians have commemorated ever since as the beginning of their annihilation. Loyal subjects of the Sultan, Constantinople's Armenians were shocked to be singled out for murder. Due to Ottoman fear of Armenian demands for Allied assistance in establishing their own state in Turkish territory-the same demand made by Zionists and Arab nationalists-the Sublime Porte accused all Armenians of treason. Hitler later made a similar accusation of disloyalty against Jews in the Reich, calling them Bolsheviks, with about as much justification.

With 300 of the Armenian elite out of the way, the Ottomans turned on the rest of the population. The first to go were about 5000 poorer Armenians in the imperial capital. Other Armenians in the big towns were deported, again like the Jews in Germany, to the provinces-in this case to the deserts of Mesopotamia. Some of those who did not die of exhaustion or hunger were burned alive. In one incident at Deir ez-Zour on the Euphrates, the Turkish Governor tied up 2000 Armenian children, all of whose parents had already died, and set them alight on gasoline-soaked pyres. The American Military Mission estimated that the Turks killed between 500,000 and one million Armenians in 1916, a year after the massacres began and two years before they came to an end.

A month after the Constantinople killings of 1915, the Allied Powers, admittedly engaged in a war with Turkey, declared the genocide "crimes against humanity and civilization," the former a term they would use against another defeated power at the end of the next world war. Winston Churchill and other British leaders wanted the Turkish officials responsible put on trial for war crimes. Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador, wrote to Washington, "Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports of eyewitnesses it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion." At the end of the war, Morgenthau and Herbert Hoover prepared a memorandum that said 750,000 Armenians had taken refuge in Russia and were in desperate need of humanitarian care. Little was forthcoming, because newly Sovietized Russia was under an Allied embargo.

Most American presidents have recognized that the Armenians suffered what Morgenthau called "race extermination." The most recent was Bill Clinton, who on Armenia's memorial day every year lamented "the deportations and massacres of roughly one and a half million Armenians..." His concern, however, in a way that can only be described as Clintonesque, allowed him to persuade Congress to drop its resolution condemning the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. Clinton put the truth, that unwelcome visitor to the Lincoln bedroom during his tenure, underneath a big bucket whose contents included American arms sales to Turkey, Turkey's permission for American planes to fly bombing runs over the Iraqi plains where so many Armenians died in 1916 from Incirlik Air Base, and Turkey's "strategic alliance" with Israel.

By refusing even to include the murders of Armenians among the official genocides, Tony Blair is imitating once again his mentor in Washington. Alas, poor Tony. Upon whose lack of integrity will he model his own when Bill departs? I suppose either Al or GWB is up to the job.

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