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October 09, 2002 - Armenia - Genocide Denied
This year an expected 500,000 people will visit the Holocaust Museum in Auschwitz, Poland. Israel, quite rightly, wants the world to remember the attempted extermination of European Jewry. But that wasn't the first genocide of the 20th century. Though few remember, in 1915 the Ottoman Turkish empire slaughtered its minority Armenian population. But the Turkish Government maintains the Armenian genocide never happened and it dismisses countless eyewitness testimonies as propaganda. Turkey receives endorsement from an unlikely source - it's Middle Eastern ally - Israel. But now prominent intellectuals in both Turkey and Israel are speaking out against their governments' policies of denial. Dateline's Matthew Carney reports.
REPORTER: Matthew Carney
We have come to the desert in northern Syria to look for evidence of a mass murder, the first genocide of the 20th century. My guide is Bishop Panossian, and, like most Armenians, the remains of his family lie in the sands around here.
BISHOP PANOSSIAN: They brought them here and they chose - separated men from women and children, to make easy to kill them. My grandfather and grandmother were killed here and my father escaped from here.
The local Arab Bedouin tell the Bishop that the site of Magaday, an infamous Turkish extermination camp, is just up the road. In 1915, the Ottoman Turks expelled the entire Christian Armenian population from their homelands in eastern Turkey. Then they forced them south in death marches to the Syrian desert. If they survived, Magaday was to be one of the final destinations. Here, the Turks slaughtered thousands in the crudest of fashions. Groups were tied together and were burnt or clubbed to death. And, today, it's not hard to find the evidence in this dried-out riverbank. This appears to be a bone from a human leg. And, after it's exposed to the air for the first time in 87 years, it collapses. Just next to it is the outline of a skull. With the dirt gone, the white cranium is revealed. The Bedouin still can't believe the slaughter that took place here.
BEDOUIN (Translation): It's forbidden by God. The visitors faint when they realise what happened.
These hills are full of Armenian bones. Everywhere you look and scratch the surface, skull shards, finger bones and parts of spinal cords appear. When the Ottoman Turks had finished their campaign of slaughter, at least a million Armenians had been killed.
BISHOP PANOSSIAN: It was planned very carefully and decided and studied, organised genocide.
Later, Bishop Panossian tracks down the only Armenians surviving in the area. Nori Latif says his father, Megar, who was eight years old at the time, arrived with 5,000 other Armenians at Magaday. It was a scene of horror.
NORI LATIF (Tranlation): The Turks brought us... brought them to the hill, to the mountain. They forced them between two mountains and started shooting them. They'd lined them up, three or four deep and shoot once, so they saved bullets. They also shot the women. Some women were disembowelled with bayonets. When they saw all that, and the shooting, many of them fled, including a little boy. He threw himself in the river. Rather than give himself up. Yes. Two men chased him but they lost him. An Arab family found him and hid him for four days.
The Bedouin saved hundreds of Armenian children fleeing from the massacres. Nori's father was brought up by an Arab family. He later married and had 11 children. They all now live in this small village as Arabs, but Megar always made his children aware of their Armenian heritage and Nori hasn't forgotten.
NORI LATIF (Translation): What's important for us is to find out where our town is and where our relatives are.
BISHOP PANOSSIAN: They are asking strongly, shaking us that "We like to return to our identity. We like to return to our homeland. What is the way? You are a Bishop. You came here. You saw us and asked questions. We are telling you our - we cannot deny our" - they say, this is their words. You see, they say, "We cannot deny our identity." It is something burning in their side, very naturally.
But the reality is that they have nothing to return to. The Turks have destroyed their villages and churches. So to keep their inspirations alive, the Bishop leaves them a gift - the Armenian alphabet. Before the Bishop returns to his Armenian parish in Beirut, he has one more pilgrimage to make. As the Ottoman Turks continued with their slaughter, thousands of bodies littered the desert and fouled the rivers. They brought the bodies and the half-dead to this place, Sheddadiye. A network of caves.
BISHOP PANOSSIAN: Everybody come, makes prayer. This is the tomb. So all this area you are seeing, you see, it is not easy, 1.5 million deported, they were killing and not finishing and so they saw there are caves here. They brought them, they started and threw down.
The locals say this labyrinth continues underground for 60km. Deep underground lies the physical evidence that the Turks wanted to hide from the world - one of the biggest mass graves of the 20th century. For almost a century, the mass graves of the Syrian desert have not been disturbed or examined. They are a testament to a holocaust denied. Much of the world still does not recognise the Armenian genocide and the Turks strongly deny any role in it.
BISHOP PANOSSIAN: We want them to come and see and to witness what happened, why they did it and to confess that this is done by them. They cannot prove against all of this. No any possibility for them and for other people or nations or great powers saying that it didn't happen.
In Turkey, the government is pouring a lot of money and effort into denying the Armenian genocide. They have set up the Armenian Research Institute to manage the denial and its spokesperson, Arslan Terzioglu, claims the mass killings are lies, someone else's fault, or caused by disease.
ARSLAN TERZIOGLU (Translation): Imagine them moving from a cold climate to a hot one. Imagine the hygiene conditions of the time. As I've said, they die due to contagious diseases like typhus and as a result of attacks by Kurdish and Bedouin bandits. This is in fact what happened. There were a few incidents like everywhere. It is impossible to represent this as deliberate and as genocide.
At the time, the world reacted with horror and the crimes were denounced in Paris, Washington and London. Dozens of diplomats, historians and journalists documented and photographed the genocide. Viscount James Bryce, investigating the situation for the British Government, concluded in 1916 that three-quarters or four-fifths of a nation had been wiped out. Henry Morgenthau, the American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and one of the first to warn the world of the massacres, wrote, "None of the horrors of any war compare with the lot of the Armenians." But in Turkey, it's been a taboo subject for almost a century. The mere mention of the Armenian genocide resulted in lengthy jail terms. But now, Halil Berktay, a prominent Turkish historian, is speaking out.
HALIL BERKTAY: I would like to emphasise that this was and is ethnic cleansing in itself, because all Armenians in groups and as individuals were ordered to be gathered up, detained and deported, simply because they were Armenians, on no other grounds, and they were identified as such.
The Armenian genocide was organised by the fanatical nationalists Enver Pasha and Talaat Pasha. They led a group called the Young Turks who ruled in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. In World War I, their empire faced collapse, with the Russians attacking from the north-east and the Allies from the south and, fearing a rise of Armenian nationalism, they sent in the death squads.
HALIL BERKTAY: Just as official state orders for regular convoys of deportees to be organised and sent out into the east and south-east, simultaneously, Enver and Talaat ordered their Teskilati Mahsusa - their Special Organisation, their most loyal henchmen - to go out into eastern and south-eastern Anatolia and organise death squads to systematically attack the moving convoys, and exterminate the Armenians.
It was a meticulously planned exercise. The first part of the plan was to kill all Armenian leaders, intellectuals and professionals in their towns and villages before starting the deportations. Most eyewitnesses to these atrocities are dead. But we tracked down a few that are still alive. As a young girl hiding in a neighbour's house, Araxi Felekian saw the Turks brutally murdering the young men from her village. She was saved by a sympathetic Turkish neighbour.
ARAXI FELEKIAN (Translation): So, they went and got 15 young boys by force. They couldn't run away. They just rounded them up. I'm telling you what I saw. Even though I was a child, I was old enough to understand. I was a smart child. I understood everything. They brought skewers and poked them into their eyes. They were screaming. But who cared? They did that to all of them, one by one. They blinded all the 15 young men. Then they brought another 15. They crushed garlic and put it into one eye, blinding it. They were screaming. Crushed garlic hurts, you know! They tortured them and just dumped them. I had escaped then, and I was... I was hiding with a Muslim family. What else could I do? I had run away. My mother... At the time, I was about four or five years old. That's why I was old enough to remember.
Araxi is still traumatised by the madness and slaughter that ensued in the town of Adana.
ARAXI FELEKIAN: Three days and nights... Tell this to the gentlemen... For three days and nights the fire from within, and the enemy's swords and cannons from outside, wiped out the Armenians, whose blood ran in the Adana River.
This year an expected 500,000 people will visit the Holocaust Museum in Auschwitz, Poland. Israel, quite rightly, wants the world to remember the attempted extermination of European Jewry. But that wasn't the first genocide of the 20th century. Though few remember, in 1915 the Ottoman Turkish empire slaughtered its minority Armenian population. But the Turkish Government maintains the Armenian genocide never happened and it dismisses countless eyewitness testimonies as propaganda. Turkey receives endorsement from an unlikely source - it's Middle Eastern ally - Israel. But now prominent intellectuals in both Turkey and Israel are speaking out against their governments' policies of denial. Dateline's Matthew Carney reports.
REPORTER: Matthew Carney
We have come to the desert in northern Syria to look for evidence of a mass murder, the first genocide of the 20th century. My guide is Bishop Panossian, and, like most Armenians, the remains of his family lie in the sands around here.
BISHOP PANOSSIAN: They brought them here and they chose - separated men from women and children, to make easy to kill them. My grandfather and grandmother were killed here and my father escaped from here.
The local Arab Bedouin tell the Bishop that the site of Magaday, an infamous Turkish extermination camp, is just up the road. In 1915, the Ottoman Turks expelled the entire Christian Armenian population from their homelands in eastern Turkey. Then they forced them south in death marches to the Syrian desert. If they survived, Magaday was to be one of the final destinations. Here, the Turks slaughtered thousands in the crudest of fashions. Groups were tied together and were burnt or clubbed to death. And, today, it's not hard to find the evidence in this dried-out riverbank. This appears to be a bone from a human leg. And, after it's exposed to the air for the first time in 87 years, it collapses. Just next to it is the outline of a skull. With the dirt gone, the white cranium is revealed. The Bedouin still can't believe the slaughter that took place here.
BEDOUIN (Translation): It's forbidden by God. The visitors faint when they realise what happened.
These hills are full of Armenian bones. Everywhere you look and scratch the surface, skull shards, finger bones and parts of spinal cords appear. When the Ottoman Turks had finished their campaign of slaughter, at least a million Armenians had been killed.
BISHOP PANOSSIAN: It was planned very carefully and decided and studied, organised genocide.
Later, Bishop Panossian tracks down the only Armenians surviving in the area. Nori Latif says his father, Megar, who was eight years old at the time, arrived with 5,000 other Armenians at Magaday. It was a scene of horror.
NORI LATIF (Tranlation): The Turks brought us... brought them to the hill, to the mountain. They forced them between two mountains and started shooting them. They'd lined them up, three or four deep and shoot once, so they saved bullets. They also shot the women. Some women were disembowelled with bayonets. When they saw all that, and the shooting, many of them fled, including a little boy. He threw himself in the river. Rather than give himself up. Yes. Two men chased him but they lost him. An Arab family found him and hid him for four days.
The Bedouin saved hundreds of Armenian children fleeing from the massacres. Nori's father was brought up by an Arab family. He later married and had 11 children. They all now live in this small village as Arabs, but Megar always made his children aware of their Armenian heritage and Nori hasn't forgotten.
NORI LATIF (Translation): What's important for us is to find out where our town is and where our relatives are.
BISHOP PANOSSIAN: They are asking strongly, shaking us that "We like to return to our identity. We like to return to our homeland. What is the way? You are a Bishop. You came here. You saw us and asked questions. We are telling you our - we cannot deny our" - they say, this is their words. You see, they say, "We cannot deny our identity." It is something burning in their side, very naturally.
But the reality is that they have nothing to return to. The Turks have destroyed their villages and churches. So to keep their inspirations alive, the Bishop leaves them a gift - the Armenian alphabet. Before the Bishop returns to his Armenian parish in Beirut, he has one more pilgrimage to make. As the Ottoman Turks continued with their slaughter, thousands of bodies littered the desert and fouled the rivers. They brought the bodies and the half-dead to this place, Sheddadiye. A network of caves.
BISHOP PANOSSIAN: Everybody come, makes prayer. This is the tomb. So all this area you are seeing, you see, it is not easy, 1.5 million deported, they were killing and not finishing and so they saw there are caves here. They brought them, they started and threw down.
The locals say this labyrinth continues underground for 60km. Deep underground lies the physical evidence that the Turks wanted to hide from the world - one of the biggest mass graves of the 20th century. For almost a century, the mass graves of the Syrian desert have not been disturbed or examined. They are a testament to a holocaust denied. Much of the world still does not recognise the Armenian genocide and the Turks strongly deny any role in it.
BISHOP PANOSSIAN: We want them to come and see and to witness what happened, why they did it and to confess that this is done by them. They cannot prove against all of this. No any possibility for them and for other people or nations or great powers saying that it didn't happen.
In Turkey, the government is pouring a lot of money and effort into denying the Armenian genocide. They have set up the Armenian Research Institute to manage the denial and its spokesperson, Arslan Terzioglu, claims the mass killings are lies, someone else's fault, or caused by disease.
ARSLAN TERZIOGLU (Translation): Imagine them moving from a cold climate to a hot one. Imagine the hygiene conditions of the time. As I've said, they die due to contagious diseases like typhus and as a result of attacks by Kurdish and Bedouin bandits. This is in fact what happened. There were a few incidents like everywhere. It is impossible to represent this as deliberate and as genocide.
At the time, the world reacted with horror and the crimes were denounced in Paris, Washington and London. Dozens of diplomats, historians and journalists documented and photographed the genocide. Viscount James Bryce, investigating the situation for the British Government, concluded in 1916 that three-quarters or four-fifths of a nation had been wiped out. Henry Morgenthau, the American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and one of the first to warn the world of the massacres, wrote, "None of the horrors of any war compare with the lot of the Armenians." But in Turkey, it's been a taboo subject for almost a century. The mere mention of the Armenian genocide resulted in lengthy jail terms. But now, Halil Berktay, a prominent Turkish historian, is speaking out.
HALIL BERKTAY: I would like to emphasise that this was and is ethnic cleansing in itself, because all Armenians in groups and as individuals were ordered to be gathered up, detained and deported, simply because they were Armenians, on no other grounds, and they were identified as such.
The Armenian genocide was organised by the fanatical nationalists Enver Pasha and Talaat Pasha. They led a group called the Young Turks who ruled in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. In World War I, their empire faced collapse, with the Russians attacking from the north-east and the Allies from the south and, fearing a rise of Armenian nationalism, they sent in the death squads.
HALIL BERKTAY: Just as official state orders for regular convoys of deportees to be organised and sent out into the east and south-east, simultaneously, Enver and Talaat ordered their Teskilati Mahsusa - their Special Organisation, their most loyal henchmen - to go out into eastern and south-eastern Anatolia and organise death squads to systematically attack the moving convoys, and exterminate the Armenians.
It was a meticulously planned exercise. The first part of the plan was to kill all Armenian leaders, intellectuals and professionals in their towns and villages before starting the deportations. Most eyewitnesses to these atrocities are dead. But we tracked down a few that are still alive. As a young girl hiding in a neighbour's house, Araxi Felekian saw the Turks brutally murdering the young men from her village. She was saved by a sympathetic Turkish neighbour.
ARAXI FELEKIAN (Translation): So, they went and got 15 young boys by force. They couldn't run away. They just rounded them up. I'm telling you what I saw. Even though I was a child, I was old enough to understand. I was a smart child. I understood everything. They brought skewers and poked them into their eyes. They were screaming. But who cared? They did that to all of them, one by one. They blinded all the 15 young men. Then they brought another 15. They crushed garlic and put it into one eye, blinding it. They were screaming. Crushed garlic hurts, you know! They tortured them and just dumped them. I had escaped then, and I was... I was hiding with a Muslim family. What else could I do? I had run away. My mother... At the time, I was about four or five years old. That's why I was old enough to remember.
Araxi is still traumatised by the madness and slaughter that ensued in the town of Adana.
ARAXI FELEKIAN: Three days and nights... Tell this to the gentlemen... For three days and nights the fire from within, and the enemy's swords and cannons from outside, wiped out the Armenians, whose blood ran in the Adana River.
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