The 1915 Armenian genocide: Finding a fit testament to a timeless crime
Images of a genocide: Victims of the ‘Great Slaughter’
As the last survivors die out, academics must consider how best to
create a lasting memorial to the 1.5 million who were murdered
Robert Fisk
Sunday 06 April 2014
The very last Armenian survivors of the 1915 genocide – in which a
million and a half Christians were slaughtered by the Ottoman Turks –
are dying, and Armenians are now facing the same fearful dilemma that
Jews around the world will confront in scarcely three decades’ time:
how to keep the memory of their holocausts alive when the last living
witnesses of Ottoman and Nazi evil are dead?
At a recent conference in California, Armenians have been discussing
how to maintain the integrity of their historical tragedy in hundreds
of years to come – when even the grandchildren of the survivors and
victims have gone. Like Jews in Israel, Europe and America, the
Armenians have amassed tens of thousands of documents, photographs,
digital recordings of survivors’ testimony and files from Ottoman
archives showing the orders for the destruction of Turkey’s Ottoman
Christians. But will that be enough, in 500 years’ time, say, to
separate the unique wickedness of the Armenian genocide – and, by
extension, the Nazi destruction of the Jews – from all the other mass
crimes against humanity in history?
Israelis use the same Hebrew word, shoah (holocaust), for the
liquidation of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, as they do for Hitler’s
killing of six million Jews in Europe. The two events, despite the
numerical difference in the total dead, have much in common. The
Armenians were told they would be “resettled” in other lands of the
Ottoman empire, before being deliberately sent on death marches of
rape, pillage and mass slaughter across the deserts during the First
World War. Their homes and property were confiscated, hundreds of
thousands of Armenian men were separated and slaughtered with knives
and axes in ravines by “special units” of the Ottoman government – the
equivalent of Hitler’s Einsatzkommandos in the occupied Soviet Union –
while their women and children were robbed, violated, starved to death
and butchered by the roadside.
Ottoman soldiers posing in front of Armenians they have hanged The
Turks used railway wagons to transport Armenian men, women and
children to their deaths, while in the northern Syrian desert – the
scene of further killing in the present civil war – the Ottomans
engineered the first primitive gas chambers by driving thousands of
Armenians into rock caves and asphyxiating them by lighting bonfires
at the entrances.
I have personally interviewed dozens of Armenian survivors – all now
dead – who described the rape and murder in front of them of their
sisters and mothers. One elderly Armenian lady told me of how Turkish
gendarmes piled up babies and set them on fire; her mother tried to
console her child by explaining that the cries were “the sound of the
babies’ souls going up to heaven”. The Armenian conference in
California watched graphic evidence of how the Turks “Islamised”
Christian Armenian children in an orphanage north of Beirut; some of
the small, starving inmates stayed alive only by grinding up and
eating the bones of other children who had died.
The principal focus of the international conference at the
Ararat-Eskijian Museum in California last month, in which I also
participated, was to honour “those who helped rescue a generation of
Armenians between 1915 and 1930” and included graphic footage of the
largest home for child survivors after the genocide: a converted
Tsarist barracks at Alexandrapole in which 22,000 children who had
lost their parents were cared for by foreign NGOs, including the
American Near East Relief fund.
Thousands of children emerged from their unspeakable ordeal blinded by
trachoma after drinking contaminated water. “The sand would get into
their eyes and doctors would have to open their eyelids and scrape the
sand from their pupils,” researcher Missak Keleshian said.
There are direct links between the Armenian and Jewish holocausts.
Several junior German officers training Ottoman forces in Turkey
witnessed the death marches and – in some cases – the results of mass
killings. Some of these Germans later turned up as senior Wehrmacht
officers in the Jewish killing fields of Belarussia and Ukraine after
the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union in 1941. Hitler himself asked
“who now remembers the Armenians?” – before urging his generals to
unleash their soldiers’ brutality against the Jews of Poland.
But how to extend the “life” of these memories beyond the still
just-living world of the survivors?
Because of the quarter-century gap between the two holocausts, the
Armenians have far less movie footage and far fewer photographs and
documents than, for example, the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial outside
Jerusalem.
Armenian and Jewish scholars have long collaborated and advised each
other on the collection of witness testimonies and documentation of
their suffering. Although the Israeli government, to its shame, still
does not recognise the Armenian suffering as a genocide, Israel’s top
genocide researcher thinks otherwise, recognising that the Ottoman
Turks were deliberately attempting to destroy an entire race of their
people.
Armenians have for some years debated whether to open their own “book
of the righteous”, to honour those brave Turks who tried to save
Armenian lives – at mortal danger to themselves and their families –
in just the same way as the Israelis acknowledge those gentiles who
risked their lives to save Jewish victims of Hitler during the Second
World War. There are two advantages to this: the first, and most
important, would be a truthful declaration that not all Turks
supported the genocide, and that there were men – soldiers, gendarmes
and, in at least one case, a Turkish provincial governor – who
redeemed their country’s honour by refusing to participate in this
monstrous war crime of 1915.
Secondly, the Turkish government still today, shamefully, refuses to
acknowledge the Armenian genocide – the Armenians were “victims of the
chaos of war” is their fearful excuse. But an Armenian “role of
honour” would place Turkey’s holocaust “deniers” in a difficult
position: could they refuse to honour those of their own people who
behaved with courage and integrity in the face of such barbarity,
especially when the Armenians wish to acknowledge them?
Turkish academics are now themselves acknowledging the truth. Inside
Turkey, many men and women are discovering that they have Armenian
grandmothers – the very same women and young girls who were taken, or
kidnapped, by Muslim men and shipped to their homes during the
genocide.
But how to perpetuate for ever the uniqueness of these holocausts of
the 20th century? I recall how, at a Muslim conference in Chicago, a
Turkish man approached a stand where an Armenian was selling books on
Middle East history, one of them a book of mine, which includes a
substantial chapter on the Armenian genocide. He didn’t believe that
the Armenians lost so many men and women, he told the bookseller and
added: “Well, if it’s true, the Armenians must have done something
wrong!”
This is the archetypal argument of the anti-Semite who denies the
Jewish Holocaust. Blame the victim, not just as the cause of his own
suffering, but as the perpetrator. Yet the vital element that was
missing in this atrocious argument was not the identity of the
victims, but the comprehension that the victims were human beings like
you and me.
Surely that was why my own mother insisted that the first book I
should read on my own – at the age of eight, I think – was the diary
of Anne Frank, the German Jewish girl who was betrayed to the Nazis,
along with her family, in her hiding-place in Amsterdam, and sent to
Belsen where she died of typhus. Anne’s story was profoundly moving
for millions around the world, not because she was Jewish but because
she reminded every reader, Jewish or otherwise, of their own sisters
and cousins and daughters. Indeed, Anne reminded them of themselves.
I am not suggesting that the Armenian and Jewish identities of the
victims of two great holocausts of the last century – with their total
dead of 7,500,000, perhaps more -should be diminished. The Jews were
murdered because they were Jews and thus doomed under Hitler’s racist
regime. The Armenian Christians were killed by the Turks because they
were Armenians. Had they been Muslim Ottoman citizens – which a few
were forced to become – they would have survived. But the common bond
that we today share with the dead is our common humanity. The final
horror of these genocides does not lie in the racial origins of the
victims – that, in a sense, is to play Hitler’s game and that of the
Young Turk pashas who massacred the Armenians.
The absolute and total historical memory of these appalling historical
facts can, I suspect, only be perpetuated for hundreds of years by
more closely associating the victims with ourselves. I have argued
with Jewish readers over this. Some have insisted that by identifying
the Jewish victims of the Holocaust as identical to Europe’s
present-day non-Jewish peoples, the world would be denying the very
Jewish identity of the six million dead. The Armenians, for various
cultural, historical – and perhaps religious – reasons, have not taken
this view. They are more inclined to accept that their victimhood
should be shared.
After years interviewing Armenian survivors – and Jewish Holocaust
survivors – I am not certain how the continuum of memory can be
protected into coming centuries. The suffering of the Armenians and
Jews is surely something beyond tears, a tragedy that should remain
engraved in history forever – despite our disposition to lose interest
in the crimes of ancient history. Who now mourns for the Huguenots or
the dead of the Hundred Years War or the mass victims of Ghengis Khan?
The Armenians and Jews of the 20th century, however, were the first
victims of industrial genocide, a crime fuelled by nationalism.
If there is a message that will last for hundreds of years, perhaps it
has to be focused on the absolute conviction that these people were
our people. Their fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters were
our fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-1915-armenian-genocide-finding-a-fit-testament-to-a-timeless-crime-9241154.html