Our Windsor, Canada
April 19 2015
Armenian Genocide: 100th anniversary of a ‘great catastrophe’
Up to 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in
1915. One hundred years later, the wounds have not healed
OurWindsor.Ca
By Olivia Ward
In 1915, the Ottoman Empire’s Armenians were declared enemies of the
state by the ruling junta of ultranationalists, who denounced them as
supporters of their wartime foe, Russia.
Even in the dark depths of the First World War, what followed was
unique in its calculating brutality.
Fiercely denied by the Turkish government, it would be denounced as
the 20th century’s first genocide: an organized attempt to ethnically
cleanse the Armenians from their homeland. By the time the massacres
and deportations were done, as many as 1.5 million men, women and
children had perished.
On April 24, Armenians throughout the world will commemorate the 100th
anniversary of the event that destroyed their families, pillaged their
patrimony and set them adrift with few, if any, mementos of their
past.
A century later, the world is closer to understanding the facts of the
“great catastrophe” that befell the Armenians, as histories of the
massive killings have swelled.
In Turkey, the history is hazier.
“What happened in 1915 is the collective secret of Turkish society,
and the genocide has been relegated to the black hole of our
collective memory,” says Turkish writer Taner Akcam in a foreword to
Turkey and the Armenian Ghost.
“Confronting our history means questioning everything — our social
institutions, mindset, beliefs, culture, even the language we speak.
Our society will have to closely re-examine its own self-image.”
As recently as this week, Turkey sharply criticized the Vatican after
the Pope denounced the massacres as genocide, calling on all heads of
state to recognize it and oppose such crimes “without ceding to
ambiguity or compromise.”
More than 20 countries, including Canada, have passed bills
recognizing the killings as genocide. The U.S. does not officially
recognize the term, although President Barack Obama had used it before
his election.
Mapping the atrocities
For decades, Turkey has insisted that the killings were part of civil
war and unrest rather than organized genocide, that the Armenians had
revolted against the Ottoman Empire by siding with the invading
Russians in the First World War, and that although Armenians
experienced a “tragedy,” they were only one of many groups that
suffered heavy losses during the war.
However, “back in 1915, there was nothing controversial about the
catastrophe,” Thomas de Waal writes in Foreign Affairs. The Young
Turkish government, headed by Mehmed Talat Pasha and two others, had
joined with Germany against its longtime foe, Russia. And two million
Christian Armenians, who lived in what is now eastern Turkey, were
targeted as internal enemies.
“Talat ordered the deportation of almost the entire people to the arid
deserts of Syria. In the process, at least half of the men were killed
by Turkish security forces or marauding Kurdish tribesmen,” said de
Waal, author of the book Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the
Shadow of Genocide. “Women and children survived in greater numbers
but endured appalling depredation, abductions and rape on the long
marches.”
Diplomats in the region were shocked by the carnage, including U.S.
ambassador Henry Morgenthau, who accused Turkey of “a systematic plan
to crush the Armenian race.”
Their reports cited torture, rape, pillage and massacres. Some
Armenians were thrown into the Black Sea and drowned. One spoke of
mass graves with bodies piled up “as far as the eye can see.”
But in a part of the world riven by ethnic fault lines, no historical
landscape is smooth.
“Armenians were divided in the Ottoman Empire,” says Ronald Suny of
the University of Michigan, author of “They Can Live in the Desert and
Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide. “In cities of
Western Turkey like Izmir and Constantinople they were relatively
successful, and there were Muslim resentments toward them.”
But those in eastern Anatolia, their historical homeland, were “mostly
peasants, craftsmen and workers,” who often felt themselves victims of
well-armed nomadic Kurds. “Armenians only got permission (to carry
arms) in 1908, but they didn’t have many weapons. It was a dangerous
and insecure region.”
Consequently, their leaders demanded government reforms that would
give them more rights and protection. “When that failed some joined
revolutionary movements, but they were in small numbers. There were
small bands that tried to defend the Armenians. Some tried to get
Western powers interested in promoting and protecting their
interests.”
But Suny says the great majority of Armenians were seeking improved
rights and reforms within the Ottoman Empire — not to subvert the
government. Nor were they “dreaming of a separate state.”
So why would the Ottoman leaders launch such sweeping attacks?
Some historians dwell on the war, territorial conflicts between
Armenians and Kurds, political ambitions of the Young Turks, religious
motivations and Armenian appeals to foreign countries for aid. But
Suny dug for deeper philosophical and psychological causes.
“All of those background events, and the experience of Armenians,
Turks and Kurds roughly from the 1870s to the genocide itself,
constituted a moment I call ‘affective disposition,’ ” he said. “A
mental and emotional universe formed in which the Young Turks imagined
the Armenians as an existential threat so profound in their
imagination that they had to be destroyed.”
>From the time of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, he says, Armenians were seen
as treacherous, agents of the West, and a minority that upset the
natural balance of the mainly Muslim country.
The incipient Armenian revolutionary movement fuelled the flames, and
grudgingly-accepted reforms urged by Europe backfired on the
Armenians. Attitudes hardened as ordinary Turks were freer to go out
on the streets, start boycott campaigns and make anti-Christian views
public.
When the First World War broke out, some Armenians looked to the
Russians as protectors against the Turks. The majority sided with the
Ottomans, but efforts to prove their loyalty by joining the Turkish
army and supporting the war effort failed and they were attacked and
demonized as enemies within. Fear and resentment turned to hatred of
Armenians.
“The organizers of the killings were the Young Turks, who ordered mass
deportations and in some cases massacres,” says de Waal. “But a lot of
the killing was done in a freelance, opportunistic way, often by
Kurds.” Other Caucasus minorities joined in.
The Kurds, who have their own experience of repression, have
apologized for their part in the killings, which they recognize as
genocide. They have opened churches and spoken of reconciliation.
The Turkish government has maintained its hard line, although
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did take an unexpected step forward
last year with a message of condolence to Armenians. But many were
disappointed that the government scheduled a ceremony to commemorate
the First World War battle of Gallipoli on the same day as their 100th
anniversary.
On the ground, however, things are beginning to change, and resolution
may eventually come by evolution. The path to the past may be through
the future.
Descendents of Armenians who survived by converting to Islam and
intermarrying with Turks and Kurds are “coming out of the shadows,”
says de Waal. “They’re acknowledging they had Armenian grandparents.
Now there are people who aren’t exactly Turks, and aren’t Armenians
either. They are a bit of both.”
Toronto Star
From: A. Papazian
http://www.ourwindsor.ca/news-story/5565476-armenian-genocide-100th-anniversary-of-a-great-catastrophe-/