Daily Record, UK
April 18 2015

Kim Kardashian turns spotlight on a forgotten holocaust that inspired
Hitler’s Jewish death camps

09:44, 18 April 2015
By Record Reporter

KIM KARDASHIAN has used her global superstar status to shine light on
a dark, forgotten part of history: the Armenian genocide.

As she stepped forward to lay flowers at a memorial to her murdered
Armenian ancestors, Kim Kardashian walked into an unholy international
row.

With deliberately controversial timing, the reality TV star was using
her fame to nudge one of the darkest chapters in history back into the
limelight.

Her trip coincided with this month’s 100th anniversary of the start of
a massacre of 1.5million Armenians by the Turks. By tweeting her
31million followers about her “emotional day at the genocide museum”,
Kim, 34, whose great-great grandparents fled the bloodshed, helped
remind the world of a forgotten holocaust.

Her high-profile visit to the Armenian capital of Yerevan with sister
Khloe came as Pope Francis also entered the controversy.

At a special Sunday mass at St Peter’s Basilica, he met the head of
the Armenian Apostolic church, Karekin II, and branded the massacres
“the first genocide of the 20th century.” The Pope’s words have
enraged Turkey, who (along with their Nato allies Britain and America)
still refuse to acknowledge the mass hangings, death marches and
starvation as a genocide.

But many see it as Adolf Hitler’s blueprint for the extermination of
six million Jews in World War II.

“It was the lesson from history that wasn’t learned,” said Armenian
Assadour Guzelian, 85, who lost many relatives to the atrocities.

“In 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, he said he’d order his units to
‘exterminate without mercy.’ And when one of his generals questioned
this, he replied, ‘Who remembers today the extermination of the
Armenians?’

“If the Allied powers had brought Turkey to a Nuremberg-style trial,
he would not have dared to say that, and millions of Jews would not
have been subjected to the Holocaust.

“There is no way you cannot refer to this as genocide. Before World
War I, two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. After the
war, there were a few hundred thousand.

“So what happened to the rest?”

Attacks on Armenian “vermin” began in the 1890s under despotic Sultan
Abdul Hamid II. Like the Jews in 1930s Germany, this largely Christian
minority was seen as richer and better educated than Turkish Muslims
and a potentially disloyal element.

The violence meted out was branded as “The Armenian Solution” – an
eerie pre-echo of Hitler’s Final
Solution of 1942-1945. And when Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin first
coined the word “genocide” during the later war, it was after studying
the Armenian massacres.

Kardashian’s great-great grandparents, Sam and Harom Kardaschoff, were
among those who abandoned their homes and escaped to the US in the
early 20th century, avoiding the full-scale massacres which began on
April 24, 1915.

The family of Guzelian, a retired lecturer now living in London, were
not so lucky. His parents Garabed and Rahel survived the genocide but
his sister Varthoui was bayonetted to death when she was four by a
soldier.

“They didn’t want to waste bullets so they just drove them into the
desert and nobody heard from them any more,” said Guzelian. “My
uncles, aunts, great uncles all disappeared.

“There was almost no chance of surviving the death marches. Hunger
came, then diseases like typhoid and cholera. Some killed themselves,
others were killed by the soldiers.”

He added: “My sister was killed after my mother, her feet swollen and
bleeding, begged the soldiers for just five minutes’ rest. They were
being delayed and my mother said, ‘I am just trying to hold my child
up’ and one of the soldiers got mad and just put his bayonet into my
sister.

“But my mother was happy. She told me the child would no longer suffer.”

Guzelian’s parents escaped death only because the Turks brought them
back from the desert to build roads. They went on to have four more
sons and he is the youngest.

These death marches turned desert plains into killing fields littered
with corpses and skulls. There are stories that children were thrown
to their deaths from mountains or had their knee tendons slashed to
amuse sadistic soldiers. Young women were raped or forced into
prostitution, older women were beaten to death and babies left by
roadsides to starve.

Chillingly, the mass-murder was observed by army officers from
Germany, an ally of Turkey in World War I. Konstantin Freiherr von
Neurath, sent to “monitor operations” against the Armenians, later
became Hitler’s foreign minister, working alongside Holocaust
architect Reinhard Heydrich.

Other German officers are believed to have witnessed the scale and
methods of the killing, and aspects of both campaigns are disturbingly
similar. Both nations set up concentration camps and Armenians were
crammed 90 at a time into
railway wagons, just as the Nazis did when sending Jews to their deaths.

Igor Dorffman-Lazarev, a specialist in Armenian history at the School
of Oriental and African Studies in London, said: “In some cases,
German generals and officers even participated in the organisation of
the deporting of Armenians.

“In 1931, Hitler presented the Armenian genocide as a model. He said,
‘We intend to introduce vast
politics of transfer of populations… recall the extermination of the
Armenians’.”

But the Turkish government, still insist the conflict was a civil war
in which atrocities were com–mitted by both sides.

Dorffman-Lazarev explained: “They have always claimed the Armenians
had revolted against the state. There were several local revolts but
they started after the beginning of the killings and deportations, as
a reaction to the state’s violence.”

In Turkey, many Armenians still feel persecuted and they keep a low
profile to this day. And it is illegal to call the Armenian conflict
an act of genocide.

Newspaper editor Hrant Dink was prosecuted for doing that and, in
2007, a Turkish nationalist murdered him.

The government even helped defend a man who was prosecuted for calling
the genocide claim “an
international lie”.

In 2008, Dogu Perincek was convicted of racism in Switzerland, where
denying the genocide is illegal.

But with Turkish backing he
successfully appealed at the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. This
was challenged earlier this year by human rights barrister Amal
Clooney, wife of movie star George.

She said the decision “cast doubt of the reality of genocide that
Armenian people suffered a century ago…the stakes could not be
higher for the Armenian people”.

A century may have passed since the atrocities but international
fallout looks set to continue for many years more. Controversially,
Turkey, now plans to stage a commemoration of the World War I
Gallipoli campaign on the anniversary of the genocide.

Armenians see this as a blatant attempt to overshadow the centenary –
and quash any discussion of a shameful episode in history.

From: Baghdasarian