ROBERT FISK: GENOCIDE FORGOTTEN: ARMENIANS HORRIFIED BY TREATY WITH TURKEY
Independent
Thursday, 8 October 2009
UK
A new trade deal is set to gloss over the murder of 1.5 million people
Armenians hold a candle light protest in Lebanon
In the autumn of 1915, an Austrian engineer called Litzmayer, who
was helping build the Constantinople-Baghdad railway, saw what he
thought was a large Turkish army heading for Mesopotamia. But as
the crowd came closer, he realised it was a huge caravan of women,
moving forward under the supervision of soldiers.
The 40,000 or so women were all Armenians, separated from their men –
most of whom had already had their throats cut by Turkish gendarmerie –
and deported on a genocidal death march during which up to 1.5 million
Armenians died.
Subjected to constant rape and beatings, some had already swallowed
poison on their way from their homes in Erzerum, Serena, Sivas, Bitlis
and other cities in Turkish western Armenia. "Some of them," Bishop
Grigoris Balakian, one of Litzmayer’s contemporaries, recorded, "had
been driven to such a state that they were mere skeletons enveloped
in rags, with skin that had turned leathery, burned from the sun,
cold, and wind. Many pregnant women, having become numb, had left
their newborns on the side of the road as a protest against mankind
and God." Every year, new evidence emerges about this m ass ethnic
cleansing, the first holocaust of the last century; and every year,
Turkey denies that it ever committed genocide. Yet on Saturday –
to the horror of millions of descendants of Armenian survivors – the
President of Armenia, Serg Sarkissian, plans to agree to a protocol
with Turkey to re-open diplomatic relations, which should allow for
new trade concessions and oil interests. And he proposes to do this
without honouring his most important promise to Armenians abroad – to
demand that Turkey admit it carried out the Armenian genocide in 1915.
In Beirut yesterday, outside Mr Sarkissian’s hotel, thousands of
Armenians protested against this trade-for-denial treaty. "We will not
forget," their banners read. "Armenian history is not for sale." They
called the President a traitor. "Why should our million and a half
martyrs be put up for sale?"
one of them asked. "And what about our Armenian lands in Turkey, the
homes our grandparents left behind? Sarkissian is selling them too."
The sad truth is that the 5.7 million Armenian diaspora, scattered
across Russia, the US, France, Lebanon and many other countries,
are the descendants of the western Armenians who bore the brunt of
Turkish Ottoman brutality in 1915.
Tiny, landlocked, modern-day Armenia – its population a mere 3.2
million, living in what was once called eastern Armenia – is poor,
flaunts a dubious version of democracy and i s deeply corrupt. It
relies on remittances from its wealthier cousins overseas; hence
Mr Sarkissian’s hopeless mission to New York, Los Angeles, Paris,
Beirut and Rostov-on-Don to persuade them to support the treaty, to
be signed by the Armenian and Turkish Foreign Ministers in Switzerland.
The Turks have also been trumpeting a possible settlement to the
territory of Nagorno-Karabagh, part of historic Armenia seized from
Azerbaijan by Armenian militias almost two decades ago – not without
a little ethnic cleansing by Armenians, it should be added. But it is
the refusal of the Yerevan government to make Turkey’s acknowledgement
of the genocide a condition of talks that has infuriated the diaspora.
"The Armenian government is trying to sweeten the taste for us by
suggesting that Turkish and Armenian historians sit down to decide
what happened in 1915," one of the Armenians protesting in Beirut said.
"But would the Israelis maintain diplomatic relations if the German
government suddenly called the Jewish Holocaust into question and
suggested it all be mulled over by historians?"
Betrayal has always been in the air. Barack Obama was the third
successive US President to promise Armenian electors that he would
acknowledge the genocide if he won office – and then to betray them,
once elected, by refusing even to use the word. Despite thunderous
denunciations in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide by Lloyd George
and Churchill – the first British politician to call it a holocaust –
the Foreign Office also now meekly claims that the "details" of the
1915 massacres are still in question. Yet still the evidence comes in,
even from this newspaper’s readers. In a letter to me, an Australian,
Robert Davidson, said his grandfather, John "Jock" Davidson, a First
World War veteran of the Australian Light Horse, had witnessed the
Armenian genocide: "He wrote of the hundreds of Armenian carcasses
outside the walls of Homs.
They were men, women and children and were all naked and had been
left to rot or be devoured by dogs.
"The Australian Light Horsemen were appalled at the brutality done to
these people. In another instance his company came upon an Armenian
woman and two children in skeletal condition. She signed to them that
the Turks had cut the throats of her husband and two elder children."
In his new book on Bishop Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, the historian
Peter Balakian (the bishop’s great-nephew) records how British soldiers
who had surrendered to the Turks at Kut al-Amara in present-day Iraq
and were sent on their own death march north – of 13,000 British and
Indian soldiers, only 1,600 would survive – had spoken of frightful
scenes of Armenian carnage near Deir ez-Zour, not far from Homs in
Syria. "In those vast deserts," the Bishop said, "they had come upon
piles of human bones, crushed skulls , and skeletons stretched out
everywhere, and heaps of skeletons of murdered children."
When the foreign ministers sit down to sign their protocol in
Switzerland on Saturday, they must hope that blood does not run out
of their pens.