Associated Press Worldstream
April 14, 2005 Thursday 8:35 PM Eastern Time
90 years after start of ‘Great Slaughter,’ Armenians still seek
recognition of genocide
MIKE ECKEL; Associated Press Writer
YEREVAN, Armenia
At 102, Gulinia Musoyan is still horrified when she thinks of what
happened to her as a child in Ottoman Turkey – rousted from her home
in the middle of the night, forced to trudge shoeless for days
through the desert alongside thousands of others, with the weak
killed or left to die in the blazing, rocky wastelands.
Ninety years later, the suffering endured by Musoyan and hundreds of
thousands of other Armenians is gaining sympathy worldwide, but not
the judgment sought by the victims and their descendants: that the
mass slayings of up to 1.5 million Armenians be declared a genocide
carried out by Turkey, which the Turks vehemently deny.
For Armenia and its diaspora, there is only one way to describe what
happened – “Mets Eghern,” the Great Slaughter.
Armenians demand that Turkey take responsibility for a
state-sponsored, premeditated attempt to liquidate this minority
people in the Ottoman Empire over four years starting in 1915.
Despite the passing of decades, Armenians say the issue must be
resolved, and they’re pressing the European Union to make Turkey’s
acknowledgment of genocide a condition for EU membership.
“The first tragedy is when you cause this atrocity. Second is when,
after 90 years, you don’t accept this tragedy,” said Nikolai
Hovhanisian, a scholar at the Armenian Academy of Sciences. “The
Armenians want their own Nuremberg.”
While some Turks have wavered in their views, officialdom has not.
Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul has called the genocide charge
slanderous. And Deniz Baykal, a leading opposition politician, said:
“We cannot accept these allegations Turkey won’t be held responsible
for something we never did.”
—
Armenia once was a vast kingdom, extending from the Black Sea to the
Caspian, but by 1915 it had been subjugated and divided – parts of it
absorbed into Russia and others into Ottoman Turkey. As the Ottoman
Empire disintegrated among the blood and smoke of World War I,
Turkish nationalism soared and Armenians were regarded as potential
subversives. The Muslim Ottoman rulers feared the Christian Armenians
were siding with the Christian Russia of Czar Nicholas II, the enemy
of German-allied Turkey in the war.
On April 24, 1915, the Young Turks regime that was in power in
Ottoman Turkey ordered hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and
cultural leaders arrested in Constantinople, now Istanbul. Many
eventually were killed, and Armenians mark the date as Genocide
Remembrance Day.
Violence spread through Armenian regions in eastern and southern
Turkey.
Musoyan, 12 at the time, recalled that fearful rumors of attack –
“Those who will cut you will come” – circulated for months in her
village of Kessab along the Mediterranean coast north of Latakia in
present-day Syria.
Finally, soldiers came in the middle of the night, Musoyan said. By
daybreak, they had gathered some 6,000 Armenian women, children and
weak or older men and started driving them out of town, “like
beasts.”
“It was hot, the sun beat down on us, we were thirsty and they gave
us nothing to drink, we had only the bread we took from home,” she
said.
“The Turkish soldiers used whips and sabers to beat us. Those who
were too weak to keep up were killed or left for the dead,” she said.
Musoyan said it took days – maybe a week – for her, her older sister,
her younger brother and her mother to arrive at the town of Hamah,
Syria, some 160 kilometers (100 miles) southeast of Kessab.
Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were driven across the Syrian
desert to Deir ez-Zor, near the present-day border with Iraq, where
Armenian activists say many were slain or died of hunger and disease
in concentration camps.
Others managed to flee eastward, across the Araxas River into
Russian-held Armenia.
Varazdat Harutyunian, 95, says he and his family fled to Echmiadzin,
the town that is the seat of the Armenian Apostolic Church. He
remembers an endless procession of burials as thousands of people
died of cholera and hunger; in a cool basement near the cathedral
“bodies were stacked like firewood,” he said.
Turkey acknowledges many Armenians were killed, but says the numbers
are exaggerated and the victims died in civil unrest, not as a result
of genocide.
—
Huge numbers of Armenians fled to other countries, notably the United
States, France and Lebanon. But the tragedy of 1915-19 links the
far-flung diaspora communities and the Armenians still in their
historic homeland; it is a grim counterpart to the bright pride that
Armenians take in their unique alphabet, love of literature and
traditions of hospitality.
“The memory sits in every Armenian’s subconscious,” said Sonia
Mirzonian, vice director of the Armenian National Archives. “If
you’re Armenian, you can immediately see the fear and understanding
in any other (Armenian) you meet.”
Historian Ashot Melkonian, with the Armenian Academy of Sciences,
said the genocide is a prism through which the Armenians perceive
many events. For instance, the devastating 1988 earthquake that
killed 25,000 Armenians is often described as a genocidal cataclysm,
he said.
Armenians largely see the six-year war over the Armenian enclave of
Nagorno-Karbakh in Azerbaijan as a conceptual extension of Turkish
genocide, and broadly refer to the Muslim Azeris as “Turks.”
But although the deaths loom large for Armenians, they’ve received
comparatively little attention elsewhere. Historical evidence was
scattered and political considerations may have dampened
investigative energy.
The Armenians’ tragedy garnered wide attention in Europe and the
United States in the early 1920s. But it fell from notice as the
Great Powers redrew the postwar borders of the collapsed Ottoman
Empire and Russia convulsed in revolution and civil war.
Following World War II, as Turkey allied itself with the West against
the Soviet Union, Ankara was able to keep the issue dormant.
Armenians under Soviet rule could not openly discuss the events until
1965 when Moscow allowed the construction of a massive granite
memorial in Yerevan.
Richard Hovannisian, an Armenian historian at the University of
California, Los Angeles, called the lack of full understanding of the
Armenians’ plight “amnesia” or the “subversion of memory” – owing to
the complex politics following World War I and Turkey’s keystone
position in Cold War politics.
Armenia gained independence in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet
Union, but the country has long languished due to the loss of
subsidies from Moscow, the war over Nagorno-Karbakh and the border
blockade by Turkey – Azerbaijan’s ally. Much of Armenia’s wealth now
comes from the support of the diaspora.
Now, Genocide Remembrance Day is observed annually on April 24 with
processions and speeches in Armenia and diaspora communities. A
growing number of countries – including France, Russia and Greece –
have officially acknowledged the killings as genocide. The United
States, which has one of the largest populations of expatriate
Armenians, has not – in large part, Armenians say, because Turkey is
a vital NATO ally it cannot afford to offend.
However, some scholars in Turkey and elsewhere say evidence is
accumulating that supports Armenians’ contentions.
Roger Smith, a genocide scholar and professor emeritus at the College
of William and Mary in Virginia, said a “convergence of evidence” now
supports a planned genocide.
“There is ample documentation of the genocidal intent of the Ottoman
authorities,” agreed Taner Akcam, a Turkish-born history scholar who
teaches at the University of Minnesota.
Akcam also said more Turks are coming to re-examine the events 90
years ago because they’ve become more interested in their own history
as a result of growing democratization and freedom of speech.
“Every day more intellectuals … publicly deplore the mass killing
of the Armenians,” Akcam said. “People want to know what really
happened. You cannot suppress this in a continuous way. The Turkish
people want to know.”