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Armenian genocide: a history of denial
by The Daily Star (Lebanon) - April 24 2001
Posted: Thursday, April 26, 2001 at 10:14 PM CT
Tragedy of some 1.5 million deaths began in 1890s: Warren
Singh-Bartlett explains
Who today remembers what happened to the Armenians? Eight days before
his forces invaded Poland in 1939, Hitler is said to have encouraged
his High Command to `send to death mercilessly and without compassion
men, women, and children.' After all, remarked the Fuhrer, `who today
remembers the extermination of the Armenians?'
And until the 1960s, the answer appeared to have been almost nobody.
Even today, only 16 countries and international bodies recognize that
as many as 1.5 million Armenians were victims of genocide. Five of
those, including Lebanon, did not officially acknowledge the
massacres until just last year.
The genocide, based on accounts detailed by Armenian groups,
historical references, and agencies in various governments, occurred
as follows:
In 1914, there were just over 2 million Armenians living in the
Ottoman Empire, the majority in the Armenian `homelands' of what is
now eastern Anatolia. By 1918, no more than 100,000 were left in
Turkey proper, and over half a million refugees were scattered across
the Middle East, South America, Europe and the Soviet Union.
As Anatolia was emptied of its Armenians, their villages and churches
were razed, graveyards dug up, property confiscated and place names
were `Turkified,' or completely changed. In just four years, 3,000
years of Armenian history had come to an end, and between 1 million
to 1.5 million Armenians were dead.
The genocide begins
The roots of the genocide lie in the 1890s, when, under the orders of
Sultan Abdul-Hamid II, anywhere up to 200,000 Armenians were killed
in pogroms aimed to scare a population believed to be on the verge of
seeking independence, back into submission.
In 1909, a further 20,000 Armenians were killed in Cilicia, and once
again provoked widespread condemnation in Europe. The Young Turks, a
group that included future Turkish leaders Enver Pasha and Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk, used the massacres to depose the sultan. But soon, the
Young Turks began to flirt with Turkism, hoping to create a `Turkey
of Turks.'
Creating a `Turkey of Turks'
On April 23 and 24, 1915, up to 600 Armenian leaders and community
heads were deported from Constantinople to Anatolia and murdered, and
on the same day several thousand Armenian residents were also
murdered.
At the same time, the Ottoman Army began the massacre of its Armenian
troops. Entire divisions were executed.
In May, by which time mass deportations had already begun, Minister
of Internal Affairs Talaat Pasha, claiming that the Armenians were
untrustworthy and on the verge of rebellion, ordered their
deportation to `relocation centers' in Syria and Mesopotamia.
Between April and October 1915, around 1.2 million Armenian
inhabitants of Anatolia were deported from their homes, and the state
embarked on a plan of confiscation, ensuring they would have nowhere
left to return to even if they survived.
Those that were not killed (the men were often executed immediately)
were driven into the Syrian desert by Ottoman troops or packed into
trains and deported to camps in Raqqa, Aleppo, Ras al-Ain, and Deir
ez-Zor.
Forced to march without food or water, many of those on the `death
marches' - mostly women, children, and the elderly - died of
exhaustion, starvation, or exposure.
Those that survived faced starvation in the camps, or worse, further
massacres. Up to 100,000 may have been murdered in Deir ez-Zor alone,
some forced into caves and then choked to death by the smoke from
fires lit at the entrances.
Turkey's new order
In her 1979 book Accounting for Genocide, historical sociologist
Helen Fein, who is executive director of the Institute for the Study
of Genocide in New York, states that `the victims of 20th century
premeditated genocide - the Jews, the Gypsies, the Armenians - were
murdered in order to fulfill the state's design for a new order.'
The Armenians stood in the way of Turkey's plans to create a
homogenous Turkish republic, envisaged one day as stretching from
Istanbul far into Turkish-speaking Central Asia, as did Turkey's
Greeks, Assyrians, Arabs, and Kurds.
Of the five groups, only the Kurds remain in significant numbers in
Turkey and they, too, have since suffered at the hands of the Turks.
The Greeks were expelled from Turkey, as were ethnic Turks from
Greece, while the Assyrians and Arabs were forced into Syria or Iraq.
When it began, the genocide provoked condemnation and promises of
intervention - in their Joint Declaration of May 24, 1915, the Allied
Powers accused the Young Turk regime of crimes against humanity and
civilization.
But by 1923, once the former Ottoman Empire was divided up between
the European Powers, the Treaty of Lausanne absolved Turkey of any
further responsibility. From then on, the genocide became a
non-issue.
For the next few decades, the Armenians were still trying to come to
terms with their losses. For their part, the Turks were eager to
make sure the massacres were forgotten, arguing that any deaths were
the result of the war raging at the time between the Turks and the
Russians.
Then, in the 1950s, the world's attention became focused on the Jews,
the century's second victims of genocide, who after years of
perseverance were finally bringing some of those responsible for
their own tragedy to justice. Taking their success as a cue, the
Armenians began to campaign for recognition of their own suffering.
In recent years, the campaign has begun to bear fruit, and several
countries now have commemoration days specifically for the Armenian
genocide, including Australia, Cyprus, and Lebanon, where April 24
was designated Armenian Genocide Day in 1997.
But official government recognition of the massacres as `genocide'
has been slower.
The denial continues
As defined in Webster's dictionary, genocide is `the deliberate and
systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.'
The Turkish government freely admits that many Armenians were killed
during the period (although is states that figures of 1.5 million
dead are grossly exaggerated), but it denies charges of genocide.
It states that the expulsions, deportations, and killings were
neither `systematic' nor `deliberate,' blaming Armenian `terrorists'
and the war raging between Russia and Turkey for the death and
destruction.
Enver Pasha, the first leader of modern Turkey after the fall of the
Sultanate, certainly saw it that way. Although he admitted to Henry
Morgenthau, the then-US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, that the
massacres had happened, he claimed the Armenians got what they
deserved for siding with the Russians.
Subsequent governments have agreed with Pasha, writing school
textbooks to fit this view, whilst simultaneously trying to discredit
the idea of an organized campaign against the Armenians.
Few countries today deny that the massacres took place, but most
still do not accord the events of 1915 official recognition. The most
common reason many governments give is deference to Turkish
sensitivities - the `strategic' partner of both NATO and the European
states.
Gradually, the silence is being broken as more and more countries
recognize the massacres as genocide. However, most world powers are
still lagging behind.
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