Author: Badalian Vardan

ERDOGAN VOWS NEVER TO RECOGNISE 1915 KILLINGS AS ‘GENOCIDE’

Gulf Times, Qatar
April 15 2015

Ankara

Turkey has warned the European Parliament that it would ignore any
resolution calling on Ankara to recognise the 1915 killings of
Armenians in World War I as genocide.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said any such statement would go “in
one ear and out from the other”.

The European Parliament is voted later in the day on a “motion for
resolution on the commemoration of the centennial of the Armenian
genocide”.

The vote took place against the backdrop of growing tensions over the
characterisation of the tragedy ahead of the 100th anniversary of the
Ottoman-era massacres this month.

“Whatever decision the European Union Parliament makes today would go
in one ear and out from the other because it is not possible for
Turkey to accept such a sin or crime,” Erdogan told reporters at an
Ankara airport before leaving for Kazakhstan.

The EU parliament had itself recognised the killings as genocide in 1987.

Furious with Pope Francis’s use of the word “genocide” at the weekend
to describe the killings, Turkey responded by summoning the Vatican’s
ambassador in Ankara and recalling the Turkish envoy to the Holy See
in a show of protest.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, whose country is a Nato member and
long-time European Union hopeful, warned the Pope not to use
“blackmail against Turkey”.

“We will not let our nation be insulted over history,” Davutoglu said
in an address to his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in
Ankara.

“The Pope has also joined those traps set against the AK Party and
Turkey,” he said, railing at the “unfair accusations” made ahead of
Turkey’s June 7 elections.

The United States on Tuesday called for a “full, frank”
acknowledgement of the mass killings while shying away from calling
the massacres “genocide”.

“I don’t know right now what sort of decision they will make … but I
barely understand why we, as the nation, as well as print and visual
media, stand in defence,” Erdogan said, referring to the European
parliament, before the vote. “I personally don’t bother about a
defence because we don’t carry a stain or a shadow like genocide.”

Armenia and Armenians in the diaspora say that some 1.5mn of their
forefathers were killed by Ottoman forces in a targeted campaign to
eradicate the Armenian people from Anatolia, in what is now eastern
Turkey.

Turkey takes a sharply different view, saying that hundreds of
thousands of both Turks and Armenians lost their lives as Ottoman
forces battled the Russian Empire for control of eastern Anatolia
during World War I.

Erdogan said yesterday that Turkey was home to some 100,000 Armenian
citizens, who were working in the country, some illegally.

“We could have deported them but we did not. We’re still hosting them
in our country. It is not possible to understand such a stance against
a country which displays” hospitality, he said.

Turkey is also still home to a small Turkish-Armenian community,
mostly based in Istanbul, who number around 60,000.

Armenians around the world will commemorate the 100th anniversary of
the tragedy on April 24, the same day as Turkey is planning major
commemorations of the World War I battle of Gallipoli.

ARMENIANS PRAISE POPE’S COMMENTS

Glendale News Press, CA
April 14 2015

Catholic leader’s acknowledgment of genocide beginning in 1915 called
influential.

By Arin Mikailian, [email protected] and Alene Tchekmedyian,
[email protected]

April 14, 2015 | 6:14 p.m.

Local leaders and community members are praising Pope Francis for
his remarks from the Vatican this past weekend that categorized the
deaths of 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire
in 1915 as the first genocide of the 20th century.

The pope’s comments echoed sentiments made by Pope John Paul II in
2001 and quickly generated a wave of positive response from Armenians
worldwide, including those living in Glendale who hope the remarks
will push top government officials here for recognition in the U.S.

A century after the genocide and the fall of the empire, the modern
Turkish government continues to hold its ground by claiming the
killings didn’t amount to a genocide.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) has introduced legislation pushing for
genocide recognition and called Pope Francis an extraordinary spiritual
leader, adding his words were moving to the tens of thousands of his
Armenian constituents.

“I think he’s certainly won a place of affection in every Armenian
household,” Schiff said.

The congressman added that the pope’s address went beyond the Catholic
church and was geared toward all humanity. He said he also hopes
President Obama will make good on his campaign promise to officially
recognize the genocide.

“I’m hoping the next on through the door will be our president,”
Schiff said.

Mayor Zareh Sinanyan said he’s optimistic that the pope’s remarks
could influence more recognition around the world.

“Unfortunately, we Armenians have been in a position for the last
100 years in even getting simply acknowledged of a historical fact,”
he said. “It takes a lot of energy and resources, which is very sad.

Humanity doesn’t seem to be ready to embrace, to do the right thing
for the right reasons.”

Pope Francis’ speech drew speedy criticism from the government of
Turkey, which withdrew its ambassador to the Vatican.

“The reason [Turkey is] acting like this is because of the
international community’s failure for the past 100 years to properly
address the issue of the Armenian Genocide,” the mayor said. “This
is what happens when there’s murder and then you get away with it.”

An official with the Armenian National Committee of America-Glendale
said the group also hopes Obama takes note of the pope’s comments
and said continued denial goes beyond the Armenian Genocide.

“We applaud the conviction of Pope Francis in bringing the Armenian
Genocide into a global context and shedding light on this horrific
crime against humanity that continues to be denied by its perpetrator,
and as a result of this denial, has set the stage for similar acts of
genocide to continue occurring in our modern-day chain of events,” said
Tigranna Zakaryan, community relations director for the organization.

Local Armenians also shared their appreciation for Pope Francis and
his remarks.

Aram Kavoukjian, whose family’s pharmacy has been in Glendale for two
decades, said he was pleased and relieved that the Armenian Genocide
was getting international attention.

“It was great to see that the pope wasn’t worried about politics and
was just interested in talking about the truth of what happened,”
Kavoukjian said.

Glendale resident Ani Chalabyan, who moved to the city from Armenia
six months ago, said she hoped the pope’s comments would put pressure
on President Obama to recognize the genocide.

While Kavoukjian doesn’t think the Vatican has enough political power
to push the U.S. or Turkey into recognition, he said the pope’s global
reach helps increase awareness about the massacres.

“This is getting our cause out there,” he said.

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READING GERMANS REGARDING THE ARMENIAN ISSUE

Today’s Zaman, Turkey
April 15 2015

ALÄ° YURTTAGUL
April 15, 2015, Wednesday

The 100th anniversary of the Armenian “Meds Yeghern,” or genocide,
has finally arrived.

The Vatican’s characterization of the 1915 incidents as the “first
genocide” of the 20th century as well as the European Parliament’s
postponement of its Turkey report from April to May and the inclusion
of the Armenian issue on its April agenda are not coincidental. It is
no surprise that there are currently numerous conferences, exhibitions
and publications about the tragic history of Armenians in France,
Russia and the US, countries with sizable Armenian populations.

Interestingly enough, Germany is conducting in-depth discussions into
the matter even though it does not have a sizable Armenian population.

Berlin seeks to look into this sorrow in depth. I have a book that
focuses on the role of Germans in the Armenian genocide written by
Jurgen Gottschlich, a journalist living in Ä°stanbul and Berlin. It
is titled “Beihilfe zum Völkermord” (Complicity in Genocide). As you
know, in criminal law, not only is “intention” or “deliberation” to
kill someone a crime, but so is “assistance” or “complicity.” Before
moving to a discussion of whether Gottschlich sees Germans’ role in
the Armenian genocide as “assistance” or “complicity,” I would like to
touch on why a reading of Germans regarding this matter is imperative.

A cursory look at Germany’s recent past reveals that the country is
still suffering from the effects of two profound traumas. The world
sees Adolf Hitler as the German fascism that cast a shadow on the fate
of Jews. This reading is not necessarily wrong. While the number of
Russians or Germans who died is way above the 6 million Jews who died,
the Jewish suffering stands apart. The Nazis targeted Jews because
they are different and they systematically annihilated them.

The shadow of history’s greatest genocide, which Jews refer to as
“Shoah” or “Holocaust,” can still be felt in Germany. The Holocaust
Memorial, which spans a 4.7-acre space in downtown Berlin, was built
a few years ago. There is also a more recent “stolperstein” (stumbling
block) movement in which “stolpersteine” (the plural of stolperstein)
— small, cobblestone-size memorials for individual victims of Nazism
— are laid in the sidewalks.

Actually, “stolperstein” represents the second trauma. Germany
experienced the 1968 movement differently from France. In Germany,
revolutionary youth started to question their parents and their recent
past. They realized that when Jews were taken from their homes to
gas chambers, their parents weren’t ignorant of the process. They
further understood that some of their neighbors, uncles, writers,
journalists and politicians were loyal supporters of the Hitler regime,
were “murderers” or were “complicit” in the genocide. Being “children
of murderers” is a current trauma that many Germans feel deeply. In
this context, the “stolpersteine” represent a “refusal to forget,”
a “renunciation of the past” or a “determination to refrain from
complicity in crimes.”

Gottschlich’s book is a good example of this generation’s perspective
on their country and the world. As it examines the Armenian issue in
our recent past, the book is interesting. The book is an interesting
read not only for the Armenian issue, but also for its foray into
Germany’s role in it.

As you can guess from its title, the book puts Germans in the spotlight
instead of Turks, the Committee of Union and Progress (Ä°TC) or the
Ottomans. More precisely, it focuses on the role of Germans in the
Armenian genocide. The writer not only examines Anatolia and the
places where the incidents occurred, but also looks at the German
army’s archives that survived World War II. He also tried to study
a number of private archives as well as the archives of the General
Staff in Ankara.

The book contains the biographies of German officers who worked closely
with Enver PaÃ…~_a, Talat PaÃ…~_a and Cemal PaÃ…~_a, the leading figures
of the Ä°TC, as well as letters these German officers sent to their
relatives, which betray their perspective on the Armenian genocide
as no different from that of Enver PaÃ…~_a and Talat PaÃ…~_a. The book
also describes how certain Germans raised objections to the injustices
done to Armenians and tried to warn Berlin about them.

Gottschlich examines the biographies and documents like a meticulous
historian, but he also doesn’t renounce his identity as a journalist
as he takes into consideration the time and circumstances of the
incidents. “Beihilfe zum Völkermord” is an interesting report in
terms of the German Reich’s responsibility. When you read the book,
you can decide if Germans’ role in the genocide was “assistance”
or “complicity.” I hope the book is translated into Turkish soon so
that the grandchildren of the Ottomans have a chance to look at their
parents and grandparents from a different perspective.

EUROPA NOSTRA AWARD FOR RENOVATION OF ARMENIAN CHURCH AND MONASTERY

APRIL 14TH, 2015 CYPRUS2 COMMENTS

The Armenian Church and Monastery in the northern part of Nicosia
has won a Europa Nostra award, the European Commission said on Tuesday.

The Commission and Europa Nostra on Tuesday revealed the winners of the
2015 European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Awards,
considered Europe’s most prestigious prize in the heritage field.

The 28 award winners, selected from 263 applications submitted by
organisations and individuals from 29 countries, are honoured for
outstanding achievements in four categories: 1) conservation, 2)
research and digitisation, 3) dedicated service to heritage, and 4)
education, training and awareness-raising.

The European Heritage Awards Ceremony will take place on June 11 at
the Oslo City Hall and will be co-hosted by Fabian Stang, Mayor of
Oslo, Tibor Navracsics, European Commissioner for Education, Culture,
Youth and Sport, and Plácido Domingo, the renowned opera singer and
President of Europa Nostra.

At the ceremony, seven of the selected winners will be named as Grand
Prix laureates, receiving â~B¬10,000 each, and one will receive the
Public Choice Award, chosen in an online poll conducted by Europa
Nostra.

“Cultural heritage is one of Europe’s biggest assets. It brings
countless cultural, economic, social and environmental benefits to
all of us. I would like to congratulate the winners of the 2015 EU
Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Awards, who are the
perfect example of what dedicated and competent Europeans can do
for heritage – but also for our European identity, contributing to
a sense of belonging. We all need to keep working together to help
communities and citizens take ownership of our heritage, make it
part of our daily lives and preserve it for the generations to come,”
said Commissioner Navracsics.

“This year’s winners are powerful examples of creativity and innovation
at work for Europe’s cultural heritage. They also demonstrate that
heritage matters to Europe and its citizens. We trust that, under
the leadership of President Juncker and Commissioner Navracsics,
the European Union’s strategy for an integrated approach to cultural
heritage will be further developed and implemented,” added Plácido
Domingo.

The Armenian monastery and church are located in the Arab Ahmet area
of northern Nicosia.

The architectural compound comprises three Armenian school buildings,
the premises of the Armenian Prelacy, an important historical mansion,
courtyards and openâ~@~Pair areas, all fenced by a boundary wall. The
restoration of the Church aimed to preserve a masterpiece of gothic
architecture that, since 1963, has suffered from misuse and neglect.

Despite several imperfect interventions over the years and its
desperate condition at the onset of the project, the Church
contained significant architectural and decorative elements
from the original 14th century construction, including frescoes,
carved bosses and capitals, tracery and metal elements belonging
to the stained-glass–some of which were only discovered during
the restoration. Using traditional materials and techniques and
appropriate landscaping methods, the ancillary buildings and courtyard
area have also been rebuilt and refurbished for appropriate use,
Europa Nostra said.

The project was begun in 2007 as part of a larger peace-building
effort in Cyprus. It was designed both to restore one of the most
noteworthy parts of the island’s cultural heritage and to provide
Armenian, Greek and Turkish Cypriots with the opportunity to work
together with international experts to preserve their common heritage.

Europa Nostra said the jury saw the project as a definite success
story, partly of conservation, with high quality research and
meticulous conservation techniques, but also as an exercise in the
even more challenging process of rebuilding a community.

The US embassy in an announcement welcomed the news.

It said that through its partnership with the United Nations
Development Program (UNDP), the United States Agency for International
Development had funded the multi-year, multi-million dollar renovation,
which Armenian Cypriots, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots worked
together with international experts to accomplish.

Between 2006 and 2013, architects, engineers, planners and crafts
people restored the site to international standards, ensuring that
it is preserved for future generations, the announcement said.

“Fundamentally, there is no greater reflection of respect than
assisting others to preserve their heritage. That respect is manifest
in the work that was done at this site,” said US ambassador John
Koenig in his remarks at a March 2014 event at the site, which included
representatives of all of the island’s religious communities.

“The United States is a longstanding supporter of initiatives like
this that demonstrate in the most tangible way how conservation and
heritage can build bridges between fractured communities. Sharing the
responsibility for preserving such incredible places builds trust
and, through projects like this, Cypriots are building a better,
more peaceful, future.”

“ARMENIAN WOMEN’S FRONT” CALLS FOR THE RELEASE OF POLITICAL PRISONERS (VIDEO)

04.16.2015 12:55 epress.am

“Armenian Women’s Front” civil initiative organized a protest action in
front of the RA Presidential Palace on Wednesday, April 15, demanding
the release of theconvicted members of “Founding Parliament” opposition
movement, “Noyan Tapan” news agency reported.

The women in front of the Presidential Palace held posters with the
pictures of the arrested oppositionists. One of the placards read:
“Women Against Dictatorship: Release the political prisoners,
Dictator! We will not back down, we will attack!”

At the start of the action the protesting women stood in front of
the gates of the President’s office, while police officers tried to
remove them by force. The demonstrators, however, managed to stand
their ground remaining in front of the residence with placards in
hands. The entire time law enforcement officers urged the women not
to approach the gates of the Presidential office, cross the street
and continue their protest action on the Ïpposite sidewalk.

The protesters eventually gave in, crossed the Baghramyam Avenue,
stood on the carriageway for a while with posters in hands, before
going down the gates of the National Assembly building and continuing
their protest action there.

The representatives of “Armenian Women’s Front” said that the protest
actions would be ongoing, that they would “appear everywhere” and
inform everyone of the arrests taking place in Armenia for as long
as the government does not meet their demands.

Recall, members of “Founding Parliament” opposition movement were
detained on April 7, and charged with organization of mass disorder
(RA Criminal Code Article 225 Section 1) on April 9. They were
sentenced to a two-month imprisonment.

Video source – Noyan Tapan

HAYKAKAN ZHAMANAK: TURKEY IS NERVOUS AFTER EP ADOPTED RESOLUTION ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

11:07 16/04/2015 >> DAILY PRESS

Armenia welcomes the European Parliament Resolution on the Centenary of
the Armenian Genocide. As Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian
stated on Wednesday, “the Resolution contains an important message
to Turkey to use the commemoration of the Centenary of the Armenian
Genocide to come to terms with its past, to recognize the Armenian
Genocide and thus pave the way for a genuine reconciliation between
Turkish and Armenian peoples.”

Turkey’s Foreign Ministry also reacted to the European Parliament’s
Resolution. In a statement, it said that the European Parliament
aspired once again to rewrite history. The Turkish MFA urged the
Members of the European Parliament to “encounter their own past
and remember especially their roles and responsibilities in the most
abhorrent calamities of humanity such as World War I and World War II,”
Haykakan Zhamanak writes.

Source: Panorama.am

“POPE FRANCIS HAS TORN THE VEIL ON THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE”

The Pilot
April 15 2015

On: 4/15/2015,
By Salvatore Cernuzio

Rome (ZENIT) — One hundred years are not enough to forget, especially
if it is about a massacre such as the “Great Evil” that profoundly
affected the Armenian people at the beginning of the 20thcentury,
exterminating 1.5 million men, women, children and families.

Vatican expert, Franca Giansoldati knows it well. A journalist for
the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero, recently authored a new book
entitled “La Marcia Senza Ritorno: Il Genocidio Armeno (The March
without Return. The Armenian Genocide).

Giansoldati, who spent years of study and research for the new book,
even shed tears as she went deeper into the details of the cruel event
which still remains a gap in history. In an interview with ZENIT,
Giansoldati speaks on her work, which was also ‘blessed’ by the Pope,
and explains the reason for the troubled reactions of Turkey to the
Pontiff’s words last Sunday regarding what was, to all intents and
purposes, “the first genocide of the 20thcentury.”

* * *

ZENIT: The Pope said the word “genocide.” And this marks a turn in
the history of the papacy and of the Vatican, notwithstanding that St.

John Paul II already pronounced this word in the “Joint Declaration”
with Karekin II of 2001. In your opinion, how is Francis’ gesture
interpreted, as a hazard or a courageous move?

TURKEY TO DISREGARD EUROPEAN DEBATE ON ARMENIAN ‘GENOCIDE’

Deutsche Welle, Germany
April 15 2015

The European Parliament is due to vote on a resolution defining the
deaths of Armenians in World War I as “genocide.” But Turkish President
Erdogan has said the words would “go in one ear and out the other”
in Ankara.

The European Parliament is set to debate a resolution on Wednesday,
to mark the 100th anniversary of the killing of as many as 1.5 million
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The authors of the motion called
the event “Armenian genocide” in the document.

“Whatever decision the European Parliament takes on Armenian genocide
claims, it would go in one ear and out the other,” Turkish President
Erdogan told a news conference on Wednesday, before departing on an
official visit to Kazakhstan.

Turkey is strongly opposed to qualifying the deaths as genocide,
saying that hundreds of thousands of both Turks and Christian Armenians
lost their lives in the struggle between the Ottoman forces and the
Russian Empire over eastern Anatolia during in World War I.

Erdogan added that it would not be possible for Turkey, which inherited
the Ottoman Empire, “to accept such sin or crime.”

Erdogan warns the pope

The debate about the tragedy has been raging for decades. The European
Parliament first formally defined the killings as genocide back in
1987, and twenty countries including France, Italy and Russia share
that view, alongside a significant number of historians.

Earlier this week, Pope Francis described the 1915 event as genocide,
prompting Istanbul to recall their envoy to the Holy See in protest.

The Turkish government also summoned the Vatican ambassador in
Istanbul, with President Erdogan accusing the Pope of spouting
“nonsense.”

“We will not allow historical incidents to be taken out of their
genuine context and be used as a tool to campaign against our country,”
Erdogan said in a speech to a business group. “I condemn the pope
and would like to warn him not to make similar mistakes again.”

The United States called for “full, frank” acknowledgement of the
mass killings on Tuesday, without calling them “genocide”.

The German parliament is also set to discuss the issue later this
month; the debate has added significance in Berlin, as the Ottoman
Empire was allied to Germany during the First World War.

‘Not possible to understand’

On Wednesday, Erdogan also pointed out that Turkey is a home to some
100,000 Armenian citizens. Some of them work in the country illegally,
the Turkish president said, and are never mistreated. There are also
around 60,000 Turkish Armenians, mostly based in Istanbul.

“Both citizens and non-citizen Armenians are enjoying the opportunities
of our country. We could have deported them, but we didn’t,” Erdogan
said. “We’re still hosting them in our country. It is not possible to
understand such a stance against a country which displays hospitality.”

Armenia and Armenians around the world claim their forefathers died
in an organized eradication campaign by Ottoman forces. They intend
to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the tragedy on April 24.

NEW STREET PHOTOGRAPHY BOOK ON POST-GENOCIDE ERA TO BE PUBLISHED

April 16, 2015 – 14:22 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net – On the occasion of the Armenian Genocide centennial
and the 40th anniversary of the start of the Lebanese Civil War,
filmmaker and documentarian Ara Madzounian is releasing a book of
original photographs that chronicles Bourj Hammoud, the Beirut suburb
which became home for Armenian Genocide survivors.

Madzounian, who was born in Bourj Hammoud to parents who survived
the Armenian Genocide, has been at the helm of scores of Armenian
and non-Armenian multimedia projects around the world. His resume
includes directing films, documentaries, producing popular music and
telethons and performing theatrical productions.

After wrapping up his feature cinematography work on the feature film
Meltdown, to be released in August, he is turning his focus on BIRD’S
NEST, a published book of talking pictures and essays by a selected
group of academicians, writers and artists, a press release says.

“I wanted to create a lasting legacy about this place,” says
Madzounian. “For more than 50 years, Bourj Hammoud served as the
cultural, intellectual and political beacon for the Armenian Diaspora.”

BIRD’S NEST is the culmination of Madzounian’s laborious and
emotion-provoking work to capture the soul and preserve the memories
of his birthplace, one of the first post-Genocide communities to
be established.

For generations, Bourj Hammoud was the safe harbor that allowed broken
families to get on their feet again after one of the most tragic
chapters in their history. In the safety of Lebanon, the community
flourished before it abruptly found itself in the middle of their
host nation’s civil war.

The survivors of the Armenian Genocide and their progeny were once
again victimized when Lebanese brothers took up arms against one
another. Many residents of the Armenian enclave of Bourj Hammoud were
killed and injured; others were forced to leave their homes as they
had during the Genocide.

“Ara’s photographs of the faces, the streets, the old buildings and the
narrow alleyways of Bourj Hammoud recall to me all of the richness of
the place, the personal histories and the grand narratives of the past
hundred years,” says cultural anthropologist at the Kevorkian Center
for Near Eastern Studies at New York University, Joanne Randa Nucho.

A Kickstarter campaign launched on April 13, the 40th anniversary of
the start of the Lebanese civil war that began in 1975 and continued
until 1990. Crowdsourcing will fund the costs of publishing BIRD’S
NEST, a book of photographs Nucho says capture “the ephemeral moments
of life in this place.”

BIRD’S NEST is the product of Madzounian’s years of meticulous and
insightful photography with the goal to capture the essence and
historic importance of his own birthplace.

After leaving his nest, Madzounian earned a master’s degree in film
at the University of California, Los Angeles. The filmmaker then
spent years working on commercial and independent productions and
directing and producing his own projects.

“These photographs are an amazing legacy to a vanishing pocket of
Armenian culture,” says Oscar nominated director Atom Egoyan. “For
those who have never visited Bourj Hammoud, the fabled Armenian
neighborhood in Beirut, this collection will be overwhelming.”

WHY THE GHOST OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE HAUNTS THE KURDS OF TURKEY

AINA Assyrian International News Agency
April 15 2015

By Anne Andlauer

Posted 2015-04-15 18:48 GMT

Inside Diyarbakir’s Surp Giragos Armenian Church.DIYARBAKIR — Leaning
against a basalt pillar, young Muhammad Enes calls out in his reedy
voice to anybody who approaches, advertising a closer look at the
historical site here in the eastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir. “Do
you want to visit?” the boy asks. “The Surp Giragos is the oldest
Armenian church in the entire Middle East. It sheltered 3,000
worshippers and a cannon destroyed its bell tower in 1915.”

Muhammad is too young to have played in the ruins of Surp Giragos,
restored and reopened to worshipers in 2011. He is also too young to
fully understand the massacres and deportations that these walls, this
town, this part of the Turkish region of Anatolia witnessed, almost a
century before he was born.

Still the children of Diyarbakir who hear the bells toll at recess
time already know more than what their school history books will ever
tell them about the Armenian genocide, which began 100 years ago this
week.

Too often, too soon, when it’s about Turkey and the Armenian genocide,
the Turkish state’s denial is understood as the denial of the society
as a whole. That would be forgetting that the memory of the Armenian
people is inscribed in the land where they lived for so long, and in
the minds of the peoples they long lived alongside, including another
population with a history of conflict with the Turkish state: the
Kurds.

“The people of this region know there was a genocide and they don’t
deny it,” says Aram Hacikyan, the Surp Giragos church’s guardian.

Aram talks about his grandfather, who was an orphan of 1915, taken in
by a Kurd who converted to Islam, but “never hid that he was Armenian.

In our family, unlike what happened in other families, this was never
a secret.”

In 1914, some 60,000 Armenians were living in Diyarbakir, notes Adnan
Celik, a researcher at the Parisian School for Advanced Studies in the
Social Sciences. “It’s a symbolic location of the genocide because
there used to be a mixed population here — of Armenians, Kurds,
Syriacs, Turkmens,” Celik says.

This is also the province, whose governor, Mehmed Reshid, dubbed the
“butcher of Diyarbakir” infamously sent a telegram in 1915
congratulating himself for having doomed as many as 160,000 Armenians
to deportation and death.

Adnan Celik, whose grandmother was also a bavfilleh (a Kurdish word
used to refer to Armenians who converted to Islam), recently published
a book about the memory of the genocide among the Kurdish people of
Diyarbakir. “The absence of Armenians, here, is an infinite loss.

People recount stories of an unbelievable violence with such details,
as if it had happened yesterday,” he says.

The young anthropologist stops a moment to talk about the role played
by the Kurdish political movement, which “from the start has been
questioning the official version of the story, talking about the
genocide and the part the Kurds played in this genocide.”

Heaven by sword

As enthusiastic and zealous as he might have been, Reshid probably
couldn’t have led 160,000 Armenians to death without the active help
of several of Diyarbakir’s important families and Kurdish tribe
leaders. These men were promised and often obtained a certain plot of
land or home after the Armenian owner was executed. Muslims who were
promised heaven for every seven Christians they put to the sword.

“Careful to avoid any anachronism here,” warns Adnan Celik. “In 1915,
nationalist claims from the Kurds of this region didn’t exist yet.

Those who took part in the genocide often did so as Muslims against
non-Muslim infidels.”

Abdullah Demirbas’s face looks chastened when he talks about these
“Kurds misled by the state to slaughter Armenians,” despite having
lived alongside them for centuries.

“My grandfather would tell me the story of a priest who, to convince
one Kurd not to kill him, supposedly told him, ‘We are the breakfast,
you’ll be the lunch.’ And that’s what happened,” he sighs.

Like many in Diyarbakir, Abdullah Demirbas, a local political leader,
sees a continuity between the genocide of the Armenians of the Ottoman
Empire and the killings, a decade later of Kurds at the outset of the
Turkish Republic until the end of the 20th century.

“It’s important that we, the grandchildren of those who helped in the
genocide, face this past, not only to settle our debt but also to
build a future together,” he insists.

For the former mayor of Sur, an ancient neighborhood in Diyarbakir
where many Armenians used to live, “a future together” is more than
just a slogan. In 2009, Abdullah Demirbas played a key role in the
restoration of the Armenian church, with the support of the Diyarbakir
city council and the Surp Giragos Foundation.

Demirbas, a brawny and imposing figure, admits he “almost cried” when
it was inaugurated. “I feel I’ve repaid part of my debt,” he says.

Aram Hacikyan says the site is more than a church: “It’s becoming a
gathering point for all Armenians,” he notes, citing visitors from
Europe, Armenia and the United States. “Some people in the diaspora
are less scared of coming to Turkey, where the genocide took place,
since they know that the church is back.”

Abdullah Demirbas, the former mayor, believes they have to go further
and encourage the Armenians of Diyarbakir to come back. He mentions a
school, and even offers to build a “genocide museum.”

“We can’t wait for the Turkish authorities to do something on their
own, so we must force them to do it,” he says.

Adnan Celik is more skeptical. “Many Kurdish recognize the genocide,
they apologize, and then what? Are they the only guilty?” he asks.

“The real question is what the state, which has been denying it for
100 years, is going to do about it.”

In the church’s yard, still wet after the last rain shower, Armen
Demirdjian nods. He found out about his Armenian origins at the age of
30. His grandparents were killed during the genocide. His father, aged
4 in 1915, never talked about it and Armen never asked. But now he
wants to know, and wants the world to know too. “We can’t keep
sweeping the dirt under the rug forever,” he says. “Sooner or later,
we will have to lift it up and shake it, and let all the dirt come out
for everyone to see.”