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The Denial of the Armenian Genocide in Political Context (Updated) |
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by David Green
Email: davegreen84 (nospam) yahoo.com (unverified!)
Phone: 217-840-3979 |
11 May 2005
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The Daily Illini has in the past two weeks published four letters from individuals denying the Armenian genocide during World War I, which were in response to a news story covering the 90th anniversary of the genocide. They have also published three letters in protest of this denial. Below are the news story and letters, as well as updated supporting documents, including articles by Howard Zinn and Robert Fisk, and excerpts from Ward Churchill and Norman Finkelstein. |
The Daily Illini has in the past two weeks published four letters from Turkish students denying the Armenian genocide, which were in response to a news story covering the 90th anniversary of the genocide. They have also published three letters in protest of this denial. Below are the news story and subsequent letters, as well as updated supporting documents.
Turkey's denial of the Armenian genocide by has been supported by the U.S. and Israeli governments. Elie Wiesel, after following the Turkish/Israeli/U.S. party line in the 1980s, has recently signed a letter in support of recognition of the genocide. But as one DI letter in response to the deniers asserts, one can only imagine the response if one letter denying the Nazi holocaust were printed by the DI--no less four. Instead, there has been silence from the leaders of the local Jewish community. This silence is consistent, however, with the calculated manner in which the Nazi holocaust has been manipulated in the service of American and Israeli ambitions.
The manner in which the denial of the Armenian genocide is treated in the student newspaper of a world class university raises several immediate issues: the truth about the genocide itself, its treatment in our schools, and its relation to the current plight of Armenia and the Armenian Diaspora.
This treatment also leads inevitably to U.S. foreign policy, Israel, the Arab world, and the Holocaust Industry. The denial of the Armenian genocide—officially legitimized by the U.S. government and Israel—are met without a hysterical response from those who know the facts and have worked assiduously to disseminate the historical record. In contrast, the denial of the Nazi holocaust, while a fringe and ineffectual phenomenon, has been met with utter hysteria by Jewish organizations and leaders, and is related to what many claim is an increase in anti-Semitism that threatens all Jews (while, of course, being unrelated in their eyes to Israel's behavior).
But these contradictions are of a piece in the cynical coinage of the current realm of Middle Eastern politics. On one side of the coin, the Nazi holocaust is sanctified as unique, incomparable, and beyond historical understanding—a consequence of eternal Jew hatred which is used to justify Israel’s actions, since that hatred (however unique to Germans) has now been adopted by Arabs and Muslims.
On the other side of the coin, the denial of the Armenian genocide is maintained as policy by the governments of the U.S. and Israel for reasons baldly related to their relations with Turkey in the current power game. This apparent (but not real) contradiction is not only symptomatic of distorted political perceptions, but prevents a serious consideration of the comparative historical contexts of genocide—including those perpetrated in this hemisphere. As Howard Zinn argues, this bodes poorly for the prevention of future genocides around the world.
DG
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Oct 10, 1999
A Larger Consciousness
By Howard Zinn
Some years ago, when I was teaching at Boston University, I was asked by a Jewish group to give a talk on the Holocaust. I spoke that evening, but not about the Holocaust of World War II, not about the genocide of six million Jews. It was the mid-Eighties, and the United States government was supporting death squad governments in Central America, so I spoke of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of peasants in Guatemala and El Salvador, victims of American policy. My point was that the memory of the Jewish Holocaust should not be encircled by barbed wire, morally ghettoized, kept isolated from other genocides in history. It seemed to me that to remember what happened to Jews served no important purpose unless it aroused indignation, anger, action against all atrocities, anywhere in the world.
A few days later, in the campus newspaper, there was a letter from a faculty member who had heard me speak - a Jewish refugee who had left Europe for Argentina, and then the United States. He objected strenuously to my extending the moral issue from Jews in Europe in the 1940s to people in other parts of the world, in our time. The Holocaust was a sacred memory. It was a unique event, not to be compared to other events. He was outraged that, invited to speak on the Jewish Holocaust, I had chosen to speak about other matters.
I was reminded of this experience when I recently read a book by Peter Novick, THE HOLOCAUST IN AMERICAN LIFE. Novick's starting point is the question: why, fifty years after the event, does the Holocaust play a more prominent role in this country -- the Holocaust Museum in Washington, hundreds of Holocaust programs in schools -- than it did in the first decades after the Second World War? Surely at the core of the memory is a horror that should not be forgotten. But around that core, whose integrity needs no enhancement, there has grown up an industry of memorialists who have labored to keep that memory alive for purposes of their own.
Some Jews have used the Holocaust as a way of preserving a unique identity, which they see threatened by intermarriage and assimilation. Zionists have used the Holocaust, since the 1967 war, to justify further Israeli expansion into Palestinian land, and to build support for a beleaguered Israel (more beleaguered, as David Ben-Gurion had predicted, once it occupied the West Bank and Gaza). And non-Jewish politicians have used the Holocaust to build political support among the numerically small but influential Jewish voters - note the solemn pronouncements of Presidents wearing yarmulkes to underline their anguished sympathy.
I would never have become a historian if I thought that it would become my professional duty to go into the past and never emerge, to study long-gone events and remember them only for their uniqueness, not connecting them to events going on in my time. If the Holocaust was to have any meaning, I thought, we must transfer our anger to the brutalities of our time. We must atone for our allowing the Jewish Holocaust to happen by refusing to allow similar atrocities to take place now - yes, to use the Day of Atonement not to pray for the dead but to act for the living, to rescue those about to die.
When Jews turn inward to concentrate on their own history, and look away from the ordeal of others, they are, with terrible irony, doing exactly what the rest of the world did in allowing the genocide to happen. There were shameful moments, travesties of Jewish humanism, as when Jewish organizations lobbied against a Congressional recognition of the Armenian Holocaust of 1915 on the ground that it diluted the memory of the Jewish Holocaust. Or when the designers of the Holocaust Museum dropped the idea of mentioning the Armenian genocide after lobbying by the Israeli government. (Turkey was the only Moslem government with which Israel had diplomatic relations.) Another such moment came when Elie Wiesel, chair of President Carter's Commission on the Holocaust, refused to include in a description of the Holocaust Hitler's killing of millions of non-Jews. That would be, he said, to "falsify" the reality "in the name of misguided universalism." Novick quotes Wiesel as saying "They are stealing the Holocaust from us." As a result the Holocaust Museum gave only passing attention to the five million or more non-Jews who died in the Nazi camps. To build a wall around the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust is to abandon the idea that humankind is all one, that we are all, of whatever color, nationality, religion, deserving of equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What happened to the Jews under Hitler is unique in its details but it shares universal characteristics with many other events in human history: the Atlantic slave trade, the genocide against Native Americans, the injuries and deaths to millions of working people, victims of the capitalist ethos that put profit before human life.
In recent years, while paying more and more homage to the Holocaust as a central symbol of man's cruelty to man, we have, by silence and inaction, collaborated in an endless chain of cruelties. Hiroshima and My Lai are the most dramatic symbols - and did we hear from Wiesel and other keepers of the Holocaust flame outrage against those atrocities? Countee Cullen once wrote, in his poem "Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song" (after the sentencing to death of the Scottsboro Boys): "Surely, I said/ Now will the poets sing/ But they have raised no cry/I wonder why."
There have been the massacres of Rwanda, and the starvation in Somalia, with our government watching and doing nothing. There were the death squads in Latin America, and the decimation of the population of East Timor, with our government actively collaborating. Our church-going Christian presidents, so pious in their references to the genocide against the Jews, kept supplying the instruments of death to the perpetrators of other genocides.
True there are some horrors which seem beyond our powers. But there is an ongoing atrocity which is within our power to bring to an end. Novick points to it, and physician-anthropologist Paul Farmer describes it in detail in his remarkable new book INFECTIONS AND INEQUALITIES. That is: the deaths of ten million children all over the world who die every year of malnutrition and preventable diseases. The World Health Organization estimates three million people died last year of tuberculosis, which is preventable and curable, as Farmer has proved in his medical work in Haiti. With a small portion of our military budget we could wipe out tuberculosis.
The point of all this is not to diminish the experience of the Jewish Holocaust, but to enlarge it. For Jews it means to reclaim the tradition of Jewish universal humanism against an Israel-centered nationalism. Or, as Novick puts it, to go back to "that larger social consciousness that was the hallmark of the American Jewry of my youth". That larger consciousness was displayed in recent years by those Israelis who protested the beating of Palestinians in the Intifada, who demonstrated against the invasion of Lebanon.
For others -- whether Armenians or Native Americans or Africans or Bosnians or whatever -- it means to use their own bloody histories, not to set themselves against others, but to create a larger solidarity against the holders of wealth and power, the perpetrators and collaborators of the ongoing horrors of our time.
The Holocaust might serve a powerful purpose if it led us to think of the world today as wartime Germany - where millions die while the rest of the population obediently goes about its business. It is a frightening thought that the Nazis, in defeat, were victorious: today Germany, tomorrow the world. That is, until we withdraw our obedience.
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Assaults on Truth and Memory:
Holocaust Denial in Context (a critique of Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust)
http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/dec96churchill.htm
By Ward Churchill
(Conclusion)
Degeneration
Had Denying the Holocaust ended there, or, more accurately, had it been constrained to encompass only the material summarized above, it would be an altogether good and useful book, one which might be recommended to the broadest possible readership. Unfortunately, Lipstadt incorporates a subtext into her final chapter which undoes quite a lot of the good she might otherwise have accomplished. Moreover, she does so with a heavy overload of precisely the distortions, polemicism and emotion-laden prose she herself condemns.
The problem emerges most clearly when, in conjunction with her rebuttal of German conservatives historians, she takes up the work of Ernst Nolte, a neoliberal known mainly for his masterly historical/philosophical analysis of fascism, published during the early 1960s. At issue is the evolution of Nolte's handling of the Holocaust in and since the 1976 publication of his Deutschland und der kalte Krieg (Germany and the Cold War), in which he has shown himself to be increasingly prone to an "historicization" of Nazi genocide by way of contrasting and comparing it to other phenomena, including the Turkish extermination of Armenians in 1918, the Stalinist program against Ukrainians during the 1930s, the American performance in Vietnam during the 1960s and early 1970s, and the Khmer Rouge "autogenocide" of the mid- 1970s.
Although there is much that is problematic in what appears to have motivated Nolte to bring his usual methodology to bear with respect to the Holocaust-as well as in his attribution of motivations to some of the historical figures he treats (e.g., Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot)-this has been critiqued rather severely by the prominent left social philosopher Jurgen Habermas, in a series of essays which ushered in the so-called Historikerstreit ("Historians’ controversy") of 1986 in Germany. It is telling that Lipstadt offers not so much as an oblique reference to Habermas or his arguments. This is because she not especially concerned in Nolte's case with debunking a minimization or denial of the Holocaust at all. Indeed, she acknowledges that he not only affirms its occurrence, but that it occurred in its full dimensions what she has in mind instead is to use Nolte as a vehicle upon which to attack comparative methods per se.
This is accomplished via an uninterrupted transition from Lipstadt's solid denunciations of Diwald's, Hillgruber's and Sturmer's spurious attempts to equate German suffering under the Soviets with that of the Jews under, to her purported rebuttal of Nolte's much broader sets of comparisons, all four of which are thereby lumped together as a unified whole. As the first three men's comparisons are not only inaccurate but immoral, so too are Nolte's and, by extension, comparison by anyone of any phenomenon to the Holocaust. All efforts to contextualize the latter--"relativizing" it--are by definition at least as reprehensible as denial itself in Lipstadt's scheme of things.
These historians are not crypto-deniers, but the results of the work are the same: the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction... Ultimately the relativists contribute to the fostering of what I call the "Yes, but" syndrome... Yes, there was a Holocaust, but it was essentially no different than an array of other conflagrations in which innocents were massacred. The question that logically follows from this is, Why, then, do we "only" hear about the Holocaust? For the deniers and many others who are "not yet" deniers, the answer to this final question is obvious: because of the power of the Jews. "Yes, but" is a response that falls into the gray area between outright denial and relativism. In certain respects it is more insidious than outright denial because it nurtures a form of pseudo-history whose motives are difficult to identify. It is the equivalent of David Duke without his robes (emphasis added).
This, from a woman who claims to reject "immoral equivalencies." The wild sweep of her brush not only smears Nolte with the same tar as Hillgruber and Diwald--or Paul Rassinier and David Irving, for that matter--but also such decisively anti-Nazi historians as Joachim Fest, who have defended Nolte's comparativist methods while disagreeing with many of his conclusions. By the same token, the splatters extend without nuance or distinction to a host of emphatically progressive scholars like David Stannard, Ian Hancock and Vahakn Dadrian, each of whom has argued the case that one or more other peoples has suffered a genocide comparable to that experienced by the Jews without attempting to diminish the gravity and significance of the Holocaust in the least (if anything, they endeavor to reinforce its importance as an historical benchmark). Even Jewish scholars like Israel Chamey and Richard Rubinstein, and Nazi-hunter Simon Weisenthal, who acknowledge similarities between the Nazi genocide and those undergone by Armenians, Poles, Gypsies, American Indians and others, are necessarily encompassed within Lipstadt's astonishing definition of neo-Nazi scholarships.
What has happened is that, in her project's final pages, the author has subtly-one might say deceptively--substituted one agenda for another. Without pause or notification, she shifts from the entirely worthy objective of systematically exposing, confronting and repudiating those who deny the existence of the Holocaust as an historical reality to a far more dubious attempt to confirm the Nazi genocide of European Jewry as something absolutely singular, a process without parallel in all of human history.69 There is a tremendous difference between the two propositions, yet Lipstadt bends every effort to make them appear synonymous. In effect, any and all "failures" to concede the intrinsic "phenomenological uniqueness" of the Holocaust is to be guilty of denying it altogether.
Hence, a Joachim Fest is to be seen as the "moral equivalent" of a Paul Rassinier, an Ian Hancock as equaling a Richard Verrall, an Israel Chamey equating to an Arthur Butz. All of them being "cut of the same moral cloth," all are to be equally vilified and discredited. Ultimately, only the Truth of the exclusivity of the Holocaust remains unscathed. The fundamental and deliberate distortions of Lipstadt's formulation speaks for itself. It is a lie, or complex of lies, consciously and maliciously uttered, lies of a type which readily conform in their magnitude and intent to those of the very deniers Lipstadt has devoted the bulk of her text to combating. In the end, Denying the Holocaust is thereby reduced by its author to an exercise in holocaust denial.
Uniqueness as Denial
Nowhere is Lipstadt's allegiance to the kind of duplicitous argumentation deployed by deniers more obvious than when, during her polemic against Ernst Nolte, she "explains" why the mass internment of Japanese-Americans by the United States in 1942 is different in kind, not just from outright extermination programs, but from Nazism's policy as a whole: "In [an] attempt at immoral equivalence, Nolte contends that just as the American internment of Japanese Americans was justified by the attack on Pearl Harbor, so too was the Nazi "internment" European Jews. In making this comparison Nolte ignores the fact that, however wrong, racist, and unconstitutional the U.S. internment of the Japanese (emphasis added), the Jews had not bombed Nazi cities or attacked German forces in 1939. Even his use of the term internment to describe what the Germans did to the Jews whitewashes historical reality."
Actually, what Nolte argues is that neither example is more justified than the other, a very different position from that of which he is accused. Secondly, Lipstadt's conversion of Japanese-Americans into 'Japanese" within the space of a single sentence is illuminating. Plainly, the misrepresentation-magically transforming a racially-defined group of American citizens into subjects of a hostile foreign power-is vital to her position. Equally plainly, an identical notion-that the Jews comprised a foreign and racially-hostile element within German society-was a crux of Hitlerian ideology. The Nazis held, falsely, that Jews thus comprised an inherent "Fifth Column" within German-held territory, a myth duly adopted by David Irving and other deniers to justify Jewish internment (but not extermination, since they claim it did not occur). The U.S., for exactly similar reasons, contended that Americans of Japanese extent constituted a comparably subversive element, a glaring untruth Lipstadt seconds without hesitancy or equivocation.76 In any event, "internment" is a word which sanitizes the experiences of both the Japanese-Americans and the Jews.
Whatever Nolte's shortcomings, and they are many, it is Lipstadt, not him, who is ignoring facts here, forming a methodological symmetry with the deniers. The same may be said with respect to her cavalier dismissals of any possibility for legitimate comparison between the Jewish experience under the Nazis and that of other peoples slaughtered as a matter of state policy during the twentieth century. Take "the brutal Armenian tragedy" of 1918, in which well upwards of a million people were killed and millions more subjected to a "ruthless Turkish policy of expulsion and resettlement." This was "horrendous," Lipstadt informs us, "but it was not part of a process of total annihilation of an entire people," so it is not comparable to the Holocaust.
This "yes, but" conclusion is immediately followed by others. The "barbaric" Khmer Rouge extermination campaign in Cambodia? It was "conducted as part of a brutalizing war" in which "imagined collaborators"-a million of them?-were "subdued and eliminated. "What the Nazis did to the Jews, unlike what the Khmer Rouge did to the Cambodians, was "gratuitous." Besides, Cambodia is a backwards kind of place, not "a prosperous, advanced, industrial nation at the height of its power" like Germany, so the fate of its population apparently doesn't count as much as the fate of more advanced mortals." Hence, it is obviously "immoral" to compare the Khmer Rouge genocide to that perpetrated by Nazism.
The Soviet "collectivization" of the 1930s, in which millions of people were deliberately starved to death as a matter of developmental economic policy, is depicted as being "arbitrary" rather than "targeted [on] a particular group...... This will undoubtedly come as a great surprise and comfort to the Ukrainians who have seen themselves as having been very much targeted by the Soviets, about five of the seven million estimated deaths by starvation during the winter of 1931-32 alone having accrued from their ranks." It will likely prove even more startling to the Kazakhs, who were totally obliterated. 1 13 And, since "no citizen of the Soviet Union assumed that deportation and death were inevitable consequences of his or her ethnic origins," no legitimate comparison of Stalinist "terror" to the Holocaust is possible. To suggest otherwise, much less to argue the point, is to become 'David Duke without his robes" or, at best, guilty of "an unconscious reflection of anti-Semitic attitudes."
Such historical misrepresentations of other peoples' suffering aside, the essential claim to uniqueness for the Holocaust put forth by Lipstadt and those sharing her view, is lodged in a double fallacy concerning the experience of their own. The first half of this duality is the assertion that, under the Nazis, "every single one of millions of targeted Jews was to be murdered. Eradication was to be total (emphasis in the original) ." This was true, according to senior Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, not just with respect to German or even European Jewry, but worldwide, because Nazism set out in a "pseudo-religious" and "pseudo-messianic" fashion to extirpate Jews an a "global, universal, even cosmic" scale (emphasis in the original). As Cornell University professor Steven T. Katz frames things, "the Nazi racial imperative [was] that all Jews must die, and that they must die here and now." And, Bauer concludes elsewhere, "total physical annihilation ... is what happened to the Jews (emphasis added)."
These characterizations of Nazi intent and its impact upon its victims couples readily to the second part of the dualism: nothing meeting this description of the Holocaust has ever happened to anyone else, anywhere, at any time. "To date," says Bauer, "this has happened once, to the Jews under Nazism."90 "The fate of the Jews under National Socialism was [therefore] unique," historian Lucy Dawidowicz continues. This is because, as Michael Man-us puts it his book, The Holocaust in History, in cases like that of the Armenians, the "killing was far from universal. Or, as Yehuda Bauer is wont to wrap things up, in every other recorded instance of wholesale and systematic population eradication, "the destruction was not complete.
The problem is that neither half of this tidy whole is true. Rhetoric notwithstanding, there is no evidence at all that any Nazi leader, Hitler included, ever manifested a serious belief that it would actually be possible to liquidate every Jew on the planet. Indeed, there is considerable ambiguity in the record as to whether the total physical annihilation of European Jewry itself was actually a fixed policy objectives What is revealed instead is a rather erratic and contradictory hodgepodge of anti-Jewish policies which, as late as mid- 1944, included an apparently genuine offer by the SS to trade a million Jews to the Western allies in exchange for 10,000 trucks to be used Germany's war against the Soviets. Contrary to Bauer's irrational contention of a "cosmic" and unparalleled total extermination, approximately two-thirds of the global Jewish population survived the Holocaust, as did about a third of the Jews of Europe.
This in no way diminishes Nazi culpability. There can be no question but that Nazism's program for creating a judenrein lebensraum (Jew-free living space) for "Aryans" entailed a substantial reduction in the size of the European Jewish population, thoroughgoing dislocation/expulsion of survivors, and a virtually total elimination of Jewish cultural existence within the German sphere of influence . Nor can there be any serious question as to whether the Nazis were willing in the end to kill every Jew who came within their grasp, if that's what was required to achieve the goal. All of this, beyond doubt, qualifies as genocide," but it is a far cry from the uniquely totalizing and obsessive drive to achieve a complete biological liquidation of Jewry attributed to the Holocaust by "scholars" like Yehuda Bauer, Steven Katz and Deborah Lipstadt.
Stripped of the veneer of falsehood and invention with which such propagandists have larded it, the experience of the Jewish people under Nazism is revealed as being unique only in the sense that all such phenomena exhibit unique characteristics. Genocide, as the Nazis practiced it, was never something suffered exclusively by Jews, nor were the Nazis singularly guilty of its practice." In attempting to make it appear otherwise--and thus to claim the privileged status attending and "unparalleled" victimization peddled as being transcendently their own ("accumulating moral capital," as exclusivist Edward Alexander has unabashedly put it) proponents of uniqueness have engaged in holocaust denial on the grand scale, not only with respect to the Armenians, Ukrainians and Cambodians, but as regards scores of other instances of genocide, both historical and contemporary.
By doing so, they have contributed, heavily and often with an altogether squalid enthusiasm, to the invisibility of the victims of this hideous multiplicity of processes in exactly the same way the Jewish victims of Nazism have often been rendered invisible even by those whose work falls well short of outright Holocaust denial."' To this extent, Lipstadt and her colleagues have greatly surpassed anything attempted by Rassinier and his ilk. Those who would deny the Holocaust, after all, focus their distortions upon one target. Those who deny all holocausts other than that of the Jews have the same effect upon many. Certainly, the latter is not an ethical or moral posture superior to the former.
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The Daily Illini - News
Issue: 4/25/05
Campus remembers Armenian genocide
By Gina Siemplenski
The Armenian Association (ArmA) held a candlelight vigil on the Quad Sunday night to remember the 90th anniversary of the Armenian genocide by the Turkish military.
About 20 attendants remembered the annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey and the deportation of almost the entire Armenian population from its ancestral lands in the Asia Minor that began on April 24, 1915.
Selected readings, poetry and prayers were read in addition to a 90-second moment of silence. A song called "Krunk" was also played on a violin by ArmA treasurer and business major Lauren Buchakjian. The song was composed by a victim of the genocide.
Zaruhi Sahakyan, president of ArmA, said there were two purposes for the ceremony.
"First, we want to remember those innocent victims in 1915 and the years after. Second, if we do not learn from the past then we are doomed to repeat it," Sahakyan said.
Controversy continues to surround the mass killings. While virtually everyone acknowledges that the massacre happened, Turkey disputes that it was planned and carried out by the state - thus the label "genocide" does not apply, it says.
"The evidence is absolutely overwhelming and not just in the American archives," said Robert Krikorian, professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
However, more and more countries, regions and cities recognize the Armenian genocide, Sahakyan said.
"This is an important development since a greater acknowledgement of genocide by the community of nations will serve the purpose of preventing and condemning a genocide in the future and will ultimately promote the understanding of the issue in Turkey itself," Sahakyan said.
Sahakyan asked that the world community heed the lessons of the Armenian Genocide.
"First to recognize the early 'seeds' of genocide and act speedily to prevent a full-blown genocide and secondly, to resist and rebuke the deniers of genocide because denial will only encourage rogue states to attempt genocide in the future," Sahakyan said.
Many people believe that because the international community did nothing to punish Turkey for its crimes in Armenia, Hitler became more confident that he could successfully carry out the massacre of six million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, Sahakyan said.
"Hopefully one day humankind will be freed of the scourge of genocide once and for all," he said.
The vigil drew many people of Armenian heritage, including Jacob Portukalian, freshman at Vincennes University in Vincennes, Ind., to attend the ceremony.
"I would like to think of this as an opportunity to remember what happened to my people and reflect on their tragedies," Portukalian said.
The vigil's goal was to offer prayers for the soul, but today a more academic approach will be taken to understanding the historic event, Sahakyan said.
Students who want to know more about the Armenian killings are encouraged to attend the seminar "American Genocide and Historical Memory," delivered by Krikorian. It is at 2:00 p.m. at the Illini Union, room 210.
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The Daily Illini - Opinions
Issue: 5/2/05
Letter: One-sided
It is disappointing and very much frustrating to see that the Daily Illini puts a propaganda article on a controversial subject on its front page. In the article "Campus remembers Armenian Genocide," (4/25) the very grave accusation of "genocide" is made without bothering to present all the historical facts.
The news was only one-sided and was lacking the arguments of the Turkish side. This is unacceptable for me.
In fact, during the same war time period (1915-18) more than 500,000 Turks and Muslims were killed in the same area by armed Armenian militia, which was the very reason why the Ottoman State decided to relocate the Armenian population in eastern Anatolia.
Many people suffered during World War I, including Turks and Armenians. However, when we talk about human suffering, we should not categorize people according to their ethnic origin and ignore one group as was done in the article.
I believe that we should look at the past objectively in order to build a peaceful future, not with the goal of perpetuating hatred for whatever reason.
Alaattin Ozyurek
graduate student
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The Daily Illini - Opinions
Issue: 5/3/05
Letter: Unmentioned history
It is disappointing to see that the DI puts a propaganda article on a controversial subject on its front page. In the article "Campus remembers Armenian Genocide" (4/25) the grave accusation of "genocide" is made without mentioning the fact that during the same period (1915-18) hundreds of thousands of Turks and others were killed or relocated in the same area by the armed Armenian militia, the very reason why the Ottoman State decided to relocate the Armenian population in eastern Anatolia. This fact alone is sufficient to dismiss the "genocide" label from this tragic relocation event.
The Wikipedia article cited has an official warning stating, "the neutrality and factual accuracy of this article are disputed." Most of the claims by Armenians are already shown to be either simply wrong or extremely exaggerated Turkey has opened the Ottoman archives to scholars years ago. Obviously, this would not be the attitude of Turkey if there were really a "genocide." Yet in the article these "genocide" claims are presented as indisputable facts and anybody who is looking for the truth is condemned with "the denial of genocide."
Moreover, the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923 by fighting against the Ottoman government. Therefore, calls to "punish" the current Turkish Republic and blaming it for events predating its existence are difficult to understand.
As members of the Turkish student community at UIUC, we are sorry for the tragedy of Armenians and extend our sympathies to their descendants. When we talk about human suffering we should not categorize people according to their ethnic origin. It was a period of suffering for everyone. Unfortunately, these tragedies are often used for political gain and, in the process, to incite hatred against people of Turkish origin. Few people know that dozens of Turkish diplomats were killed by the Armenian terrorist organization ASALA during 1970s and 80s because of this unfounded hatred.
We believe as students of UIUC that we should look at the past objectively in order to build a peaceful future for our children, not with the goal of perpetuating hatred for whatever reason.
Burak Guneralp
graduate student
Turkish Student Association of UIUC
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The Daily Illini - Opinions
Issue: 5/4/05
Letter: Denial & revisionism
In his letter Alaattin Ozyurek argues that high mortality rate among Turkey's Muslim population somehow implies that the extermination of Turkey's Armenians was not genocide. Using the same "logic" one could "argue" that the death of estimated five million Germans during WWII means that the extermination of European Jews was not genocide either.
Also, Ozyurek implies that the extermination of the Armenians was the result of their rebellion. I will answer to this only by quoting Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, the German vice-consul in Turkey at the time, who in 1915 sent the following telegram to his superiors in Berlin:
"I have conducted a series of conversations with competent and influential Turkish personages, and these are my impressions: A large segment of the Ittihadist (Young Turk) party maintains the viewpoint that the Turkish empire should be based only on the principle of Islam and Pan-Turkism. Its non-Muslim and non-Turkish inhabitants should either be forcibly Islamized, or otherwise they ought to be destroyed. These gentlemen believe that the time is propitious for the realization of this plan. The first item on this agenda concerns the liquidation of the Armenians. Ittihad will dangle before the eyes of the allies the specter of an alleged revolution ... Moreover, local incidents of social unrest and acts of Armenian self-defense will deliberately be provoked and inflated and will be used as pretexts to effect the deportations. Once en route however, the convoys will be attacked and exterminated by Kurdish and Turkish brigands, and in part by gendarmes, who will be instigated for that purpose by Ittihad."
Areg Danagoulian
graduate student
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The Daily Illini - Opinions
Issue: 5/5/05
Letter: An understatement
Professor Israel Charny once said that genocide denial is "killing the victim twice - once with genocide and then again with denial." To label what Burak Guneralp expressed as offensive is an understatement; it merits the same outcome as a hate crime. The denials that the Turkish students have been spewing in the Daily Illini transpire with the same ignorance and aspirations as Nazi sympathizers who vulgarly deny the Holocaust of the Jews. Such idiocy necessitates permanent banishment from any media outlet as their only deserving places are on those of hate and propaganda Web sites. Even Turkey doesn't go at great lengths to deny the genocide anymore. They do the other honorable deed - ignoring it.
Searching "Assyrian Genocide" on Wikipedia results in no reliability warning as the massacres of approximately 750,000 Assyrians unfolded with credible foreign eyewitnesses. There are also no red herrings that the Turkish can strategically sidetrack on like the justified and consequent Armenian defense. The Assyrians' only crimes were being Christian and law-abiding citizens of Turkey. When the Turks issued a jihad against the Christian populous in 1914, the Assyrians, instead of arming up, turned in their weapons and even culinary knives to the Turkish envoys. This exploit rendered them easy prey for slaughter. While WWI was being fought in the trenches of Europe, the Turks were silently and covertly exterminating the entire unarmed Christian populous of Asia Minor parish-by-parish. Ask my grandparents how remarkable it was to watch family members beheaded and raped by Turkish militia.
Analyzing reports from groups assembled by official French, Swiss and Dutch governments, the systematic torture, massacre and ethnic cleansing of several million Christian citizens of the Turkish Empire is not only an investigated reality, but a horrific reminder of the appalling acts that hatred can induce following remarks such as Burak's.
If any writer or reporter inferred that the Jewish Holocaust was a false allegation against the Nazi government, there would be serious consequences that would comprise of apologies, firings and resignations of those outfits involved. Precisely why is the Assyrian/Hellenic/Armenian Genocide treated any differently?
Joseph Vartan Danavi
junior in LAS
Assyrian Student Union
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The Daily Illini - Opinions
Issue: 5/6/05
Letter: Distorting history
Burak Guneralp in his letter to the DI yesterday claims that he wishes to "look at the past objectively in order to build a peaceful future for our children," but at the same time he denies the history of the Armenian genocide, putting himself on the same level as a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier.
Burak's claims of "relocation" by the Ottoman Empire are ridiculous. The U.N. War Crimes commission declared Turkey's actions a genocide, in which 1.5 million Armenians were butchered. Official orders from a Turkish general, Nur ed-Din Pasha, called for genocide, asking every Turk to "kill four or five Armenians or Greeks." The Armenian genocide, like the Holocaust, is an indisputable fact of history. Turks must accept and apologize for their past, as Germans have done.
Burak speaks of "building a peaceful future," but he fails to mention that while Turkish people are kind and crave nothing but peace, the Turkish government is the main obstacle to peace in the Near East. Turkey has closed borders and placed an economic embargo on Armenia, which has shattered the tiny country's economy. Turkey also is an aggressive state, having invaded her neighbor, Cyprus, and ethnically cleansing much of the Greek population. Turkey also has territorial claims on another neighbor, Greece, and Turkish military aircraft repeatedly violate Greek airspace. Turkey also brutally represses her Kurdish minority, and some estimates put the number of ethnically cleansed Turkish Kurds at two million.
It is easy for Burak to speak of "peace," but he would do better to recognize that the policies of his own country are the obstacle to this peace. The first step towards Turkey's rehabilitation is for Turkey to admit and apologize for the genocide.
Constantine Yannelis
junior in LAS
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The Daily Illini - Opinions
Issue: 5/9/05
Letter: False information
Constantine Yannelis' May 6 letter, "Distorting History," presents such false information and aggressive accusations that, in hindsight, the title of the letter was well chosen.
Yannelis, associates the alleged Armenian genocide with the Holocaust. A trial was administered after WWI for the Ottoman officials, in similar fashion to the Nuremberg Trials following WWII. At the end of WWI, the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, was under Allied occupation and all state archives were under the control of the British. As a result of constant propaganda and accusations by Armenians, the British finally decided to transport more than 140 Ottoman high officials, officers and cabinet members to Malta for a trial. After 30 months of imprisonment, while the British, French and the Americans searched for evidence, the accused Ottomans were released due to lack of evidence of war crimes including genocide.
Now after almost 90 years, the Armenian nationalists together with the nationalists of other countries who have something against Turkey are continuing the same drumbeat to force Turkey to accept genocide claims, based on unfounded evidence and mere propaganda.
Yannelis' letter further accuses Turkey to be an aggressive country for closing the Armenian border. The Armenian border is closed because Armenia does not recognize the Turkish-Armenian border set by international agreements. Armenia invaded parts of Azerbaijan including Nagorno-Karabakh and massacred hundreds of fleeing families beginning in 1992, making it more than wise for Turkey to close that border for security reasons.
Turkey did not invade Cyprus, but used its right from the Treaty of Guarantee to secure the lives of Turkish Cypriots on the island that were being attacked by the nationalist Greek Cypriots who advocated union with Greece (Enosis). The phrase in Yannelis' letter "ethnically cleansing much of the Greek population" is simply not true, given the current Greek population on the island is 78 percent. Carrying the motto "Peace in the nation, peace in the world" since her establishment, Turkey has no territorial claims against Greece or any of her neighbors.
Turkey does not repress the Kurdish population, but has been combating the terrorist organization PKK for years to keep her unity. When Saddam used WMD's against Kurds in Northern Iraq, Turkey was the country that opened her borders to accept thousands of refugees.
Deniz Ă–zhan
University employee
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The Daily Illini - Opinions
Issue: 5/10/05
Letter: Don't forget the tragedies
This letter is in response to the ongoing debate on the alleged genocide claims against "Turkey." I honestly have to say that I have been somewhat startled by the enthusiasm with which "Turkey" is depicted as the mother of all ills by certain individuals. Perhaps a tad naively, I urge these people to keep up their enthusiastic lifestyle in other pursuits like introducing their respective cultures to the UIUC community. Having seen their enthusiasm, I seriously doubt that any obstacle can stand in their way to success.
The reason I have put the name of Turkey in quotation marks above is simple: it's been twisted and turned to fit whatever claim the authors have tried to make. For instance, one letter that appeared on 5/4 had come up with the amusing statement of "parent government to modern Turkey." Since the author of this letter seems to be an avid historian, shouldn't s/he have known that what s/he refers to as "modern Turkey" was born precisely due to the destruction of the "parent government" in question?
Fact of the matter is, the modern Turkish Republic was officially formed in 1923, after the date of the alleged genocide. To this day, the modern republic contains people of many different ethnic origins living together one way or another. Yes, tragic events did occur to different ethnic communities during the hell of WWI and I honestly feel for them. However, I also find twisting and turning the truth to fuel political benefits by the past extremely shameful (i.e. quoting some German consul whom I doubt left his chair in the consulate before writing his telegram).
Therefore, I urge anyone and everyone to not forget the tragedies suffered by their loved ones, but at the same time to not use these tragedies to seek future political benefits either.
Cem Erkul
freshman in engineering
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The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (book review)
October 19, 2003
By Belinda Cooper
THE BURNING TIGRIS
The Armenian Genocide
and America's Response.
By Peter Balakian.
Illustrated. 475 pp. New York:
HarperCollins Publishers. $26.95.
THE 20th century opened with an event that has been considered the template for the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews: the deportation and murder of as many as 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during World War I. Yet while the Holocaust conjures up a host of images in our minds, we have no similar familiarity with the Armenian murders (which most serious observers agree fit the definition of genocide) nor the even less-known massacres of Armenians in the 1890's and in 1909. As Peter Balakian puts it in ''The Burning Tigris,'' they form a ''narrative lost to the public.''
Balakian, an Armenian-American poet who in 1997 published the acclaimed memoir ''Black Dog of Fate,'' a moving portrayal of growing up in the United States with the legacy of the Armenian genocide, seeks in ''The Burning Tigris'' to remind us that this neglect was not always the case. As he shows, the killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire generated an enormous humanitarian response. Beginning with the 1894-96 massacres under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, in which 200,000 died, they galvanized American public opinion and sparked a countrywide campaign that would continue through World War I to aid the ''starving Armenians.'' It was spearheaded by prominent suffragists, industrialists and former abolitionists and was aided by a developing sensationalist press that found the massacres ''a compelling story.'' Americans received much of their information from Protestant missionaries who had been active among Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire for years, as well as from diplomats, doctors and relief workers like the Red Cross head Clara Barton.
Balakian sees the aid campaign as setting the stage for the 20th-century development of American human rights relief work, and he spends several chapters portraying its leading participants. Yet the book's real power derives from the eyewitness accounts of the genocide itself. The sheer volume of outsiders' testimony that Balakian compiles, and the horrifying similarity of their observations of men, women and children beaten, tortured, burned to death in churches or sent out into the desert to starve, is an overwhelmingly convincing retort to genocide deniers. Balakian also cites the evidence and confessions gathered in the promising, though quickly abandoned, postwar trials of Turkish officials.
Nevertheless, the Turkish government argues to this day that the deaths resulted not from a systematic campaign of extermination but from civil conflict instigated by rebellious Armenians. And it has used its importance as a strategic ally to make Western leaders complicit in this burial of history. As late as 2000, a resolution by the United States House of Representatives that would have officially labeled the killings ''genocide'' was tabled in the face of Turkish threats to cut access to military bases. Only recently, as Turkey moves to join the European Union, have some Turkish historians begun to question the official story.
The relative dearth of accessible literature on the Armenian genocide, and the growing interest today in questions of international justice and humanitarian intervention, make this book timely and welcome. Disappointingly, however, Balakian fails to weave the various strands of his account -- the genocide, the relief efforts and the wider issue of why the great powers failed to intervene -- into a consistent historical or analytical framework. Instead, he presents a disorganized, largely descriptive narrative that ultimately raises more questions than it answers. His main story, the genocide itself, is an unremitting depiction of irrational barbarism by sociopathic Turkish leaders and a fanatical population against a generally unresisting minority. Yet even the most terrible historical events are rarely this simple, as the countless volumes devoted to every aspect of the Nazi Holocaust attest. Attention to the complexities of causation and context in no way reduces the evil of the genocide or the culpability of the perpetrators.
Balakian agrees with the social psychologist Irwin Staub that ''a progression of changes in a culture and individuals'' is a prerequisite for genocide, but he provides only a superficial sense of the changes in the centuries-old relationship between Turks and Armenians that could unleash such violence. He offers a fascinating but typically all-too-fleeting glimpse of American Protestant missionaries' influence on the Christian Armenians and the tensions it created with the Muslim Turkish community.
As more immediate motives for the violence, Balakian mentions budding nationalism on both sides, Armenian demands for rights, the Ottoman empire's panic at its progressive loss of territory, jealousy of the Armenians' financial success and profits from confiscation of their property, Islamic fundamentalism and the great powers' reluctance to intervene. But he never pulls these factors together into a coherent backdrop. Nor does he provide much insight into the Armenian community in Turkey, leaving the reader to wonder why, as he describes it, Armenians continued to assert their loyalty to the Ottoman Empire even after it became clear that the Turkish aim was annihilation. Why -- as has been asked, and answered, about the European Jews -- was there not more resistance? His sources speak of Turks who opposed what was happening -- who were they, and how numerous were they? As the narration unfolds, such questions inevitably arise, but remain unaddressed.
Despite these weaknesses, ''The Burning Tigris'' does succeed in resurrecting a little-known chapter of American as well as Armenian history. It also underscores a crucial point about humanitarian responses to violations of human rights: outrage and outpourings of sympathy and aid may save some lives, but -- as the 20th century would show time and again -- they have little real impact in the face of state interests that militate against intervention. With ''The Burning Tigris'' Peter Balakian forcefully reminds us that almost a century after the Armenian genocide, the international community has yet to find a means of implementing Charlotte Perkins Gilman's vision, as pertinent today as it was in 1903: ''National crimes demand international law, to restrain, prohibit, punish, best of all, prevent.''
Belinda Cooper is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute.
Published: 10 - 19 - 2003 , Late Edition - Final , Section 7 , Column 1 , Page 35 , New York Times Book Review
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Nothing Personal / Among the deniers
Ha'aretz
May 9 2003
By Thomas O'Dwyer
If the victims of genocides cannot depend on the support of the descendants of the Holocaust - where on earth will anyone ever find truth and justice?
When this column started around three years ago, one of the first people I went to meet and write about was Prof. Deborah Lipstadt. She's the historian who had just won a place for herself in Jewish legend by demolishing once and for all - with the aid of the splendid British justice Charles Gray - the lies of Holocaust denier David Irving, who had sued her for libel and lost.
Lipstadt was full of praise for the way she had been sustained during the long court ordeal by a staunchly supportive media - after all, fighting neo-Nazi lies is for all human dignity and safety as well as for Jewish justice. How sickening therefore is it to watch the disgusting machinations of the Jewish state when it comes to its cowardly refusal to speak out stridently against the deniers of the Armenian genocide. If the victims of genocides cannot depend on the support of the descendants of the Holocaust - when on earth will anyone ever find truth and justice anywhere?
After a newspaper item appeared on Sunday saying that a government brochure mentioned that a "third generation survivor of the Armenian holocaust in 1915" would light a torch at the Independence Day ceremony, Turkish embassy hysteria went into its customary overdrive in protest.
In a remarkable act of craven capitulation to denial, the Knesset and government caved in and actually printed 2,000 new brochures for the ceremony. The revisionist version of history expunged the truth and replaced it with a description of the torch-lighter Naomi Nalbandian as a "daughter of the long-suffering Armenian people" and her grandparents as "survivors of historical Armenia, 1915."
The Ottoman Empire ethnically cleansed and murdered 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1918. The Turkish army drove hundreds of thousands of Armenians through the Der Zor desert where they died from hunger and thirst. What is more, the government sanctioned raids by Turkish soldiers, who destroyed whole Armenian villages, not sparing even the women or the children. The Armenian population was completely wiped out in Western Armenia. About 600,000 survived and now live in various countries of the world (including modern Armenia).
Modern Turkey continues to vehemently deny these crimes against humanity and fights ferociously around the globe to bury the historical facts. And again this week - and not for the first time - we have witnessed the State of Israel's complicity in the lie, because it is scared of upsetting its only friend in the Muslim states. This is political expediency at its most morally bankrupt. Tripping over itself in its stupid defense of the untenable Turkish position, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has again and again played an active role in suppressing even discussion of the issue.
"Outrageous," is how Deborah Lipstadt, the defeater of deniers, has described the Turkish denial. "The Turks have managed to structure this debate so that people question whether this really happened." Now shouldn't that sound familiar to any Jewish ear? A few months before she smashed Irving, Lipstadt was one of 150 scholars and writers who signed a Washington Post ad condemning Turkey's persistent denial of the Armenian genocide. Among the others signing was no less a person than Prof. Yehuda Bauer, the academic director of Yad Vashem. "We and many others have accepted the United Nations definition of genocide and there can be no argument about [the Armenian case] being genocide," he said at the time.
"I am an Armenian and I have no right to say what is my identity," said Nalbandian after the government and the Turks told her what she had really meant to say - and would say. She added: "They don't say to second and third generations of Holocaust survivors `don't say that,' do they?" What if the rest of the world behaved as cravenly in the face of Holocaust deniers as Israeli officials do in the face of the Turks? During a similar row several years ago the then Armenian foreign minister said in an interview: "There is some discrepancy between Israel's words and their deeds on genocide. Israel has to show a moral authority since we have gone through a similar history and experience. What is shocking is that there should be any question whatsoever of Israel denying the murder of a nation. The sooner the Turks come clean, admit the crimes of their great-grandparents, and get it over with, the better for all humanity.
The British for many decades denied responsibility for the Irish potato famine that killed an estimated two million people and sent another two million into exile - because it was a natural disaster - although history recorded full well that the British were taking convoys of food out of Ireland under armed guard. It took Tony Blair to admit responsibility 150 years later, and apologize, to lay the shame to rest.
Turkey's denials of the Armenian massacre will not endure - but the memory of Israel's refusal to speak out against the denial just might. "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" asked Adolf Hitler when persuading his fellow thugs that a Jewish extermination would be tolerated by the West. Of course there is one Turk you can quote who still commands almost reverential respect from his fellow countryman - Kemal Ataturk, the legendary founder of the modern nation. In an interview published on August 1, 1926 in The Los Angeles Examiner, Ataturk talked about the former Young Turks in his country: "These left-overs from the former Young Turk Party, who should have been made to account for the millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse from their homes and massacred, have been restive under the Republican rule." When we have the word of Ataturk himself, we don't need to be accused of "pandering to the views of the enemies and haters of Turks" as one Turkish diplomat once wrote to me for daring to question the lie. I assume he meant the Kurds - who for decades "didn't exist" either in Turkish myth except as "mountain Turks."
The three rulers of Turkey as a triumvirate during the time of the genocide were Cemal Pasha, Enver Pasha and Talat Pasha. Of them, British Viscount James Bryce said in a speech on October 6, 1915: "The massacres are the result of a policy which, as far as can be ascertained, has been entertained for some considerable time by the gang of unscrupulous adventurers who are now in possession of the government of the Turkish Empire."
After the German ambassador persistently brought up the Armenian question in 1918, Talat Pasha said "with a smile": "What on earth do you want? The question is settled. There are no more Armenians."
Later, Prince Abdul Mecid, the heir apparent to the Ottoman Throne, said during an interview: "I refer to those awful massacres. They are the greatest stain that has ever disgraced our nation and race. They were entirely the work of Talat and Enver. I heard some days before they began that they were intended. I went to Istanbul and insisted on seeing Enver. I asked him if it was true that they intended to recommence the massacres that had been our shame and disgrace under Abdul Hamid. The only reply I could get from him was: `It is decided. It is the program.'"
Keep on denying, folks. But remember, the dead won't let you forget.
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From Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry:
The one truly mainstream holocaust denier is Bernard Lewis. A French court even convicted Lewis of denying genocide. But this was the Armenian genocide and Lewis is pro-Israel. Accordingly, this holocaust denial raises no hackles in the US; the fact that Turkey is an Israeli ally was a further extenuating circumstance. Mention of the Armenian genocide is, therefore, taboo. Wiesel, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz and Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg withdrew from an international conference on genocide in Tel Aviv because the sponsors, against government urging, included sessions on the Armenian case. Acting at Israel's behest, the US Holocaust Council 'virtually effaced' mention of the Armenians in the Washington Holocaust Museum; and Jewish lobbyists in Congress blocked a day of remembrance for the Armenian genocide.
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Holocaust and Genocide
INDEPENDENT (London) 5 August 2000
Robert Fisk
(Why is it that only one of the great holocausts of the last century merits a capital 'H'? Here, Robert Fisk, who has spent many years researching the massacre of one and a half million Armenian Christians, argues that all acts of genocide deserve equal recognition.)
In the spring of 1993, with my car keys, I slowly unearthed a set of skulls from the clay wall of a hill in northern Syria. I had been looking for the evidence of a mass murder -- the world's first genocide P for the previous two days but it took a 101-year-old Armenian woman to locate the river bed where her family was murdered in the First World War. The more I dug into the hillside next to the Habur river, the more skulls slid from the earth, bright white at first then, gradually, collapsing into paste as the cold, wet air reached the calcium for the first time since their mass murder. The teeth were unblemished -- these were mostly young people -- and the bones I later found stretched behind them were strong. Backbones, femurs, joints, a few of them laced with the remains of some kind of cord. There were dozens of skeletons here. The more I dug away with my car keys, the more eye sockets peered at me out of the clay. It was a place of horror.
In 1915, the world reacted with equal horror as news emerged from the dying Ottoman Empire of the deliberate destruction of at least a million and a half Christian Armenians. Their fate -- the ethnic cleansing of this ancient race from the lands of Turkey, the razing of their towns and churches, the mass slaughter of their men folk, the massacre of their women and children -- was denounced in Paris, London and Washington as a war crime. Tens of thousands of Armenian women -- often after mass rape by their Turkish guards -- were left to die of starvation with their children along the banks of the Habur River near Dear ten-Hour, in what is today northern Syria. The few men who survived were tied together and thrown into the river. Turkish gendarmes would fire a bullet into one of them and his body would drag the rest to their deaths. Their skulls -- a few of them -- were among the bones I unearthed on that terrible afternoon seven years ago.
The deliberate nature of this slaughter was admitted by the then Turkish leader, Enver Pasha, in a conversation with Henry Morgenthau, the US ambassador in Constantinople, a Jewish-American diplomat whose vivid reports to Washington in 1915 form an indictment of the greatest war crime the modern world had ever known. Enver denounced the Armenians for siding with Russia in its war with the Turks. But even the Germans, Ottoman Turkey's ally in the First World War, condemned the atrocities; for it was the Armenian civilian population which was cut down by the Turks. The historian Arnold Toynbee, who worked for the Foreign Office during the war, was to record the "atmosphere of horror" which lay over the abandoned Armenian lands in the aftermath of the savagery. Men had been lined up on bridges to have their throats cut and be thrown into rivers; in orchards and fields, women and children had been knifed. Armenians had been shot by the thousand, sometimes beaten to death with clubs. Earlier Turkish pogroms against the Armenians of Asia Minor had been denounced by Lord Gladstone. In the aftermath of the 1914-18 war, Winston Churchill was the most eloquent in reminding the world of the Armenian Holocaust.
"In 1915 the Turkish Government began and ruthlessly carried out the infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor," Churchill wrote in his magisterial volume four of The Great War. "... the clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act, on a scale so great, could well be ... There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons." Churchill referred to the Turks as "war criminals" and wrote of their "massacring uncounted thousands of helpless Armenians -- men, women and children together; whole districts blotted out in one administrative holocaust -- these were beyond human redress."
So Churchill himself, writing 80 years ago, used the word "holocaust" about the Armenian massacres. I am not surprised. A few miles north of the site where I had dug up those skulls, I found a complex of underground caves beneath the Syrian desert. Thousands of Armenians had been driven into this subterranean world in 1915 and Turkish gendarmes lit bonfires at the mouths of the caves. The smoke was blown into the caves and the men were asphyxiated. The caves were the world's first gas chambers. No wonder, then, that Hitler is recorded as asking his generals -- as he planned his own numerically far more terrible holocaust -- "Who does now remember the Armenians?"
Could such a crime be denied? Could such an act of mass wic |
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