ARMENIANS STILL REMEMBER APRIL 24, 1915
Jirair Hovsepian

Watertown TAB & Press
April 8 2010

WATERTOWN — This April will be the 95th anniversary of the Armenian
Genocide. Almost a century has gone by with eyewitnesses and survivors
dwindling to a handful.

For thousands of years, Armenians lived in Anatolia and Cilicia,
now Turkey, without Turks, creating a unique alphabet, architecture,
art, music, and in 301 AD accepted Christianity as the first nation
to adopt it.

In 1639, the Ottoman Empire occupied Western Armenia. Through the
centuries, they harassed, overtaxed and committed localized massacres.

Between 1894 and 1896, Sultan Abdul-Hamid organized massacres killing
over 200,000 Armenians. In 1909, the Young Turk party massacred
35,000 Armenians.

Lord Byron wrote: "… an oppressed and noble nation … It would be
difficult perhaps to find the annals of a nation less stained with
crimes than the Armenians, whose virtues have been those of peace,
and their vices those of compulsion."

In 1915, Talaat Pasha, the Interior Minister, resolved to solve the
"Armenian Question." Along with Djemal Pasha, head of the police,
and Enver Pasha, the Minister of War, masterminded the deliberate
annihilation of the Armenian nation.

Beginning April 24, 1915, until 1923, the Ottoman Empire killed
1,500,000 Armenians, men, women and children, two-thirds of the
population. There are countless studies written by historians and
genocide scholars regarding this inhumanity to man.

Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire
from 1913 to 1916, reported: "…Deportation of and excesses against
peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports of eye
witnesses [sic] it appears that a campaign of race extermination
[genocide] is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against
rebellion."

Today’s Turkey as the beneficiary of the loss of the Armenians’
lives, property, lands and irreplaceable antiquities from millennia,
still denies that their ancestors committed the most horrific crime
in human history.

They spend millions trying to hide the truth by intimidating their
population with Article 301 (insulting Turkishness), the U.S.

government’s security by threatening to close the U.S. airbase
in Incirlik, hiring former U.S. officials as lobbyists to prevent
Congress from officially recognizing fact of The Genocide.

Senator Barack Obama while campaigning for the U.S. Presidency
promised: "… as President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide." On
Jan. 19, 2008, he said "… that the Armenian Genocide is not an
allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a
widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical
evidence."

Unfortunately, he has succumbed to the Turkish tactics and reneged
on his honorable pledge.

On March 4, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed (H.Res.252)
officially recognizing that the 1.5 million Armenian deaths was a
genocide. Immediately, the Turkish Government recalled its ambassador
to the U.S. as a protest.

Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, in 1944, coined the term
"genocide" for the Nuremberg trials, citing as example the experience
of the Armenians in 1915.

Under pressure from Turkey, the Obama administration is being duped
and actively involving itself to ensure that the resolution is not
brought before the full House, thereby being complicit in denial.

On April 23, 2008, Dr. Gregory Stanton, president of International
Association of Genocide Scholars, said: "…there is an eighth
stage in every genocide: Denial. It is actually a continuation of
the genocide….Denial harms the victims and their survivors….Elie
Wiesel has repeatedly called Turkey’s denial a double killing, as it
strives to kill the memory of the event. We believe the US government
should not be party to efforts to kill the memory of a historical
fact as profound and important as the genocide of the Armenians,
which Hitler used as an example in his plan for the Holocaust."

The following quote by William Saroyan, one of America’s well-known
writers, describes the Armenians and their resolve to survive against
all odds in freedom:

"I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race; this
small tribe of unimportant people, whose history is ended, whose
wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled,
whose literature is unread, whose music is unheard, whose prayers
are no longer uttered.

Go ahead, destroy this race. Let us say that it is again 1915 there
is war in the world. Destroy Armenia.

See if you can do it. Send them from their homes into the desert. Let
them have neither bread nor water.

Burn their houses and their churches. See if they will not live again.

See if they will not laugh again. See if you can stop them from
mocking the big ideas of the world.

You sons of bitches. Go ahead, try to destroy them."

As long as one Armenian lives, the Armenian Genocide will always be
remembered. As long as one honest and honorable man remembers it,
there is hope for preventing future genocides.