Memories must live on for Armenian genocide victims
by ART TONOYAN, guest columnist

Baylor University The Lariat Online, Texas
April 20 2006

April 24 marks the 91st anniversary of the Armenian genocide in the
Ottoman Empire — the first genocide of the 20th century, which has
come to be described as the “century of genocide.”

Some 90 years ago, the ruling elites of the Ottoman Empire put into
motion a plan to homogenize their empire and thus save it from imminent
collapse due to a number of internal as well as external factors like
economic mismanagement and resurgent nationalisms among the empire’s
subject ethnic minorities.

A nationalist and a racialist ideology known as Turkism was adopted,
which while elevating the Turkish ethnos, defined the subject
nationalities as malicious and cancerous entities actively contributing
to the demise of the empire.

This ideology subsequently provided grounds for the establishment
of a distinctively Turkish national economy, effectively putting an
end to the traditional multiethnic mercantile strata of the empire
composed mainly of Armenians, Jews and Greeks.

One of the folk sayings circulating around at the time went something
like “Trust a snake before a Jew; trust a Jew before a Greek; but
never trust an Armenian.” Their stories were boycotted in a load of
cases, and in many other cases their businesses were increasingly
becoming subject to frenzied mob attacks and looting. Yet this was
only the beginning.

Armenians, who had gained prominence in the empire over the centuries,
not the least because of their fiscal competence, became increasingly
vulnerable to this kind of harassment.

It did not help them that they were religiously and geographically
in close proximity to their Russian neighbors to the north with whom
the Ottoman Empire was in a state of war.

In response to the increasing discrimination and violence against them,
the Armenian minority began agitating for the betterment of their
condition. The response from the government was swift, calculated
and cruel.

Rendering the Armenians economically defenseless was only part of
the plan.

Now they were defenseless existentially.

The European powers as well as the U.S. did not intervene on their
behalf in any significant fashion that went beyond condemnatory,
if symbolic, enjoinments.

And on April 24, 1915, nearly all Armenian intellectuals in the empire
were arrested and executed without a trial.

After the bulk of the Armenian leadership was put to death and the
viability of resistance was reduced to nil, the Ottoman government
under the guise of World War I began systematic deportations and
massacres of the Christian Armenians en masse.

Armenian villages and churches were burned down, and a large number
of women and children were killed with indescribable cruelty. Over
the course of three years, an estimated 1.5 million Armenians became
victims of indiscriminate massacres.

Their crime? Their distinct national and religious identity.

Despite the enormity of the atrocities and the cruelty wrought upon
the victims, virtually all of the perpetrators were spared punishment.

As time went on, political expediency coupled with business interests
in the newly formed Turkish Republic would make sure that the victims
and their plight would be remembered no more. But as it turned out,
not everybody was as forgetful.

In 1939, having the benefit of historical hindsight, Adolph Hitler —
while planning genocide of his own against the Jews and the Poles —
urged on his generals, who may have displayed reservation at this
plans, to carry them out nonetheless by saying: “What the weak western
European civilization thinks about me does not matter. Thus for the
time being I have sent to the East only my ‘Death Head Units’ with
the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children
of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the
living space we need. Who still talks nowadays of the annihilation
of the Armenians?”

Czech novelist Milan Kundera had once remarked that “the struggle
against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

It has become human, all too human, to hit the imaginary delete button
and send tragic events like the Armenian genocide, the Jewish Holocaust
and countless others into the Orwellian “memory hole.”

In the case of the victimized Armenians, Jews, Rwandans and others,
it may be too late to be our brothers’ keepers.

Yet in keeping their memories alive we may very well keep ourselves
alive in an age of insanity and endless amusement.

And let us never forget that genocide is ours to commit and ours
to prevent.

Art Tonoyan is a doctoral candidate in the J. M. Dawson Institute
for Church-State Studies.

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress