ARMENIA’S ‘CHRISTIAN HOLOCAUST’
By David Smith
Jerusalem Post
April 25 2008
In late August 1939, the day before his invasion of Poland, Adolf
Hitler gathered his commanders at his home and informed them he had
placed "death’s head" military formations in the east with orders
"to send to death mercilessly and without compassion men, women and
children of Polish derivation and language."
He assured his commanders the world would not long condemn them,
justifying his brutality by asking rhetorically, "Who, after all,
speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" Hitler was
referring to the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turkish
forces beginning in April 1915. Until today, the Turkish government
denies the authenticity of both Hitler’s statement and the genocide
itself.
Tel Aviv University professor Israel Charny, chief editor of the
Encyclopedia of Genocide, insists the statement was recorded by "an
indisputably serious" Associated Press correspondent, and that other
remarks were made by Hitler that "confirm that the Armenian genocide
was an active guiding concept in the monster’s mind."
Kevork Kahvedjian, son of Jerusalem photographer and Armenian genocide
survivor Elia Kahvedjian, explains his father was personal testimony
to the genocide and its savagery. "When it started, he was only five
years old, but he remembered it very clearly. Especially the last
year of his life he remembered it…" Kevork continually slipped
into the first person while recounting his father’s story, as if it
had happened to him: "I used to see lots of dead people, piles of
them. Some had been burned. Until today I remember the smell of burned
flesh," he narrated, detailing the death march through the desert.
He remembered the sound of the German cannons pounding the city, then
a lull of about a month before the Turkish soldiers entered his home
and took Elia, his mother, a sister and two brothers – one brother
was just a few months old. Two older brothers had already been hanged.
"Soldiers came and started pushing my mother. She tried to go back
to the house but the soldiers hit her with rifle butts and she had
to take the children and start walking." The Armenians were allowed
only what they could carry. They walked for weeks through the desert
of Deir Zor with soldiers on both sides. The soldiers offered neither
food nor water, but the prisoners ate some plants and drank brackish
water on the way.
After weeks of carrying her six-month-old baby, Elia’s mother,
exhausted, set the infant in the shade of a tree and abandoned him,
hoping some kind person would find him. The older sister, about 12
years old during the march, was abducted. Elia found her 18 years
later and discovered she had been forced to serve in a harem.
In a wadi, near the end of the trek, "I heard my mother say, ‘Today,
I think they’re going to kill us.’" It happened that that a Kurd
was passing by. She called the Kurd and told him, "Take this boy and
go." The Kurd took Elia and the boy remembered, "At the top of the
hill we turned around and saw the soldiers killing everyone." The
Kurd took Elia, burned his clothes, gave him medicine for dysentery,
and sold him to a blacksmith, who eventually sent him away. Elia
sought refuge in a Syrian convent. In 1918, when the war was over, the
American Near East Relief Foundation began to gather Armenian orphans
and distribute them in its orphanages throughout the Middle East.
Elia was transferred to Lebanon, then to Nazareth in 1920. There,
one of the teachers was a photographer and Elia worked for him. Elia
learned the photography trade and became a prominent photographer. Many
beloved pictures of early 20th-century Jerusalem were taken by Elia;
the album, Through My Father’s Eyes, celebrates his work.
Turkish authorities strive to discredit accounts such as Elia’s,
although his testimony is confirmed by an abundance of contemporary
journalism, eyewitness accounts by statesmen such as American
ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau, as well as German
and Austrian documentation.
Charny claims there was "most certainly" a religious element in
the persecution of the Armenians, the first empire to embrace the
faith. (Armenia officially adopted Christianity as the state religion
in 301 CE, about 25 years before the Roman Empire did so.) "There are
even some who want to refer to this period overall as ‘The Christian
Genocide,’ because the victims of the Turks’ genocide were not
only Armenians but also Assyrians and Greeks," he explains. Still,
he is reticent to use that term as it "could seem to remove from
the Armenian community their hard-won gains for recognition of the
genocide of their people."
According to Charney, "What stands out about the denials of the
Armenian genocide is that for many years, the full power of the
Turkish government has been devoted to denials of the genocide. Turkey
literally spends millions on advertising agencies and on publicity
efforts. It also throws the considerable weight of its government
behind coercing denials from other countries, with threats to the
United States of not allowing American military planes to use Turkish
air space or threatening to pull out of joint NATO military exercises,
as well as with threats of major economic retaliation should or when a
country, such as France, confirms recognition of the Armenian genocide.
"Israel is regularly the object of threats by the Turks and,
regrettably to say the least, for many years has kowtowed to these
threats. But then too so has the stronger United States"
MK Haim Oron (Meretz) proposed in March that the Knesset appoint a
committee to consider recognizing the Armenian genocide, adding,
"It is unacceptable that the Jewish people is not making itself
heard." Although the measure passed, MK Shalom Simhon (Likud)
responded, "this has become a politically charged issue between
Armenians and Turks, and Israel is not interested in taking sides."
Many Israelis are eager for their country to recognize the
genocide. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem will hold an event titled
"A Symposium in Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide" at its Givat
Ram campus on April 29 at 6:30 p.m. Both Kevork Kahvedjian and Charney
will speak.
Israel will eventually recognize the genocide, insists Kevork, who
manages his father’s business, Elia Photo Service, in Jerusalem’s
Old City. Kevork, named for the baby left under a tree in the desert,
believes, "One day they are going to say, ‘Yes, it happened.’ If not
now, then in 50 years!"
Otherwise, Armenians worry, states that refuse to recognize the
genocide risk rendering Hitler’s rhetorical question a reality.