Armenian Genocide Day - For Justice

Reminder: Tomorrow is the little thought-about genocide commemoration of 1.5 million Armenian people

April 23, 2009

I'm going to be marching with and writing about the Armenian Genocide memorial day tomorrow in Jerusalem. For those not familiar with this Holocaust, I have compiled some information. The Turks have rewritten history, have raised a generation believing a lie and, some countries, like the US and Israel, have let them get away with it in the name of strategic relations. The Armenian people cannot begin to heal unless their pain has been acknowledged.

Info from this site.

One and a half million Armenians were killed in the Armenian Genocide, carried out by the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1916. Armenians commemorate this on April 24, because it was on that day in 1915 when 300 Armenian leaders, writers, thinkers and professionals in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) were rounded up, deported and killed. On that same day, 5,000 of the poorest Armenians were butchered in the streets and in their homes. 

The genocide was systematic: Armenians in the army were disarmed, placed into labor battalions, and then killed. Then the Armenian political and intellectual leaders were killed. Finally, Armenians were told they were being relocated so they embarked upon what became known as "death marches." Many died in this way - either starving to death or succumbing to the brutal conditions of the desert. On the Black Sea coast, Turks loaded Armenians on barges and sank them out at sea.

The Turkish government denies that there was an Armenian genocide and claims that Armenians were only removed from the eastern "war zone."

The Armenian Genocide, however, occurred all over Anatolia [present-day Turkey], and not just in the so-called "war zone." Deportations and killings occurred in the west, in and around Ismid (Izmit) and Broussa (Bursa); in the center, in and around Angora (Ankara); in the south-west, in and around Konia (Konya) and Adana (which is near the Mediterranean Sea); in the central portion of Anatolia, in and around Diyarbekir (Diyarbakir), Harpout (Harput), Marash, Sivas (Sepastia), Shabin Kara-Hissar (þebin Karahisar), and Ourfa (Urfa); and on the Black Sea coast, in and around Trebizond (Trabzon), all of which are not part of a war zone. Only Erzeroum, Bitlis, and Van in the east were in the war zone.

The American people, via local Protestant missionaries, did the most to save the wretched remnants of the death marches, the orphaned children. The New York Times published some 150 articles on the slaughters in 1915. (from a documentary on the Genocide by Two Cats Productions.)

Despite Turkish denial, there is no doubt about the Armenian Genocide. For example, German ambassador Count von Wolff-Metternich, Turkey's ally in World War I, wrote his government in 1916 saying: "The Committee [of Union and Progress] demands the annihilation of the last remnants of the Armenians and the [Ottoman] government must bow to its demands."

Much documentation exists from foreign consuls and businessmen, not to mention genocide survivors. Henry Morgenthau Sr., the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, sent a cable to the U.S. State Department in 1915: "Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses [sic] it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion."

Morgenthau's successor as Ambassador to Turkey, Abram Elkus, cabled the U.S. State Department in 1916 that the Young Turks were continuing an ". . . unchecked policy of extermination through starvation, exhaustion, and brutality of treatment hardly surpassed even in Turkish history."

One Turkish government, that of Damad Ferit Pasha, has recognized the Armenian genocide. In fact, that government held war crimes trials and condemned to death the major leaders responsible.