OLGOTHA_07-19-09_P0F0TNU_v12.f7980f.html

Books: `Armenian Golgotha’ describes the Turkish massacre of Armenians

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, July 19, 2009

By Phyllis Meras

Special to The Journal

In April, President Obama was asked to recognize the 1915-1918 Turkish
massacre of the Armenians as genocide. For political reasons, he
declined to do so. Turkey is an American ally that borders Iraq and
Iran. The United States has good commercial opportunities there as
well as access to an air base. These might have been in jeopardy if
the president had agreed to use the word `genocide’ to describe the
horrific killing of Armenians living in Turkey by the Turks in World
War. I.

Perhaps if he had read this book beforehand he might have acted
differently.

According to the Armenians, 1.5 million of their countrymen were
systematically massacred by the Turks at that time. The Turkish
government insists that only 300,000 were killed and that it was not a
`systematic’ killing of a whole country or an ethnic, religious or
racial group – the UN definition of genocide. But any reader of this
Armenian memoir, written by a priest who later became a bishop in the
Armenian Apostolic Church, and who managed to survive a nearly
year-long death march and finally escape his Turkish captors, would be
hard-pressed not to describe as exactly that.

In 1913, Grigoris Balakian was a young student of theology at the
University of Berlin. When World War I began, he returned to Turkey,
despite periodic massacres of Christian Armenians since the 1890s.

The outbreak of war led to heightened tensions in Turkey, which
entered into a secret military alliance with Germany. Armenian
Christians were suspected of being in league with the Allies, perhaps
spies for Russia. So it was that, in April of 1915, 259 Armenian
intellectuals, including Grigoris Balakian, were arrested and
imprisoned. The `genocide’ was under way.

It seems impossible that during the arduous events that followed –
being driven from village to village with no food except what he and
his fellow refugees could beg or occasionally buy from friendly Turks
– Balakian could have remembered his ordeal in such detail. But he
did, and recorded them in this book when he returned to Constantinople
at war’s end.

His account is alternately horrifying and inspiring. At one moment, he
is describing a landscape littered with bones of massacred
Armenians. A few paragraphs later, deeply moved by the beauty of the
countryside across which he and his companions are being driven, he is
describing the spring `when nature had begun to revive the trees and
flowers, wearing green and many other colors’

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