Announcement

Collapse

Forum Rules (Everyone Must Read!!!)

1] What you CAN NOT post.

You agree, through your use of this service, that you will not use this forum to post any material which is:
- abusive
- vulgar
- hateful
- harassing
- personal attacks
- obscene

You also may not:
- post images that are too large (max is 500*500px)
- post any copyrighted material unless the copyright is owned by you or cited properly.
- post in UPPER CASE, which is considered yelling
- post messages which insult the Armenians, Armenian culture, traditions, etc
- post racist or other intentionally insensitive material that insults or attacks another culture (including Turks)

The Ankap thread is excluded from the strict rules because that place is more relaxed and you can vent and engage in light insults and humor. Notice it's not a blank ticket, but just a place to vent. If you go into the Ankap thread, you enter at your own risk of being clowned on.
What you PROBABLY SHOULD NOT post...
Do not post information that you will regret putting out in public. This site comes up on Google, is cached, and all of that, so be aware of that as you post. Do not ask the staff to go through and delete things that you regret making available on the web for all to see because we will not do it. Think before you post!


2] Use descriptive subject lines & research your post. This means use the SEARCH.

This reduces the chances of double-posting and it also makes it easier for people to see what they do/don't want to read. Using the search function will identify existing threads on the topic so we do not have multiple threads on the same topic.

3] Keep the focus.

Each forum has a focus on a certain topic. Questions outside the scope of a certain forum will either be moved to the appropriate forum, closed, or simply be deleted. Please post your topic in the most appropriate forum. Users that keep doing this will be warned, then banned.

4] Behave as you would in a public location.

This forum is no different than a public place. Behave yourself and act like a decent human being (i.e. be respectful). If you're unable to do so, you're not welcome here and will be made to leave.

5] Respect the authority of moderators/admins.

Public discussions of moderator/admin actions are not allowed on the forum. It is also prohibited to protest moderator actions in titles, avatars, and signatures. If you don't like something that a moderator did, PM or email the moderator and try your best to resolve the problem or difference in private.

6] Promotion of sites or products is not permitted.

Advertisements are not allowed in this venue. No blatant advertising or solicitations of or for business is prohibited.
This includes, but not limited to, personal resumes and links to products or
services with which the poster is affiliated, whether or not a fee is charged
for the product or service. Spamming, in which a user posts the same message repeatedly, is also prohibited.

7] We retain the right to remove any posts and/or Members for any reason, without prior notice.


- PLEASE READ -

Members are welcome to read posts and though we encourage your active participation in the forum, it is not required. If you do participate by posting, however, we expect that on the whole you contribute something to the forum. This means that the bulk of your posts should not be in "fun" threads (e.g. Ankap, Keep & Kill, This or That, etc.). Further, while occasionally it is appropriate to simply voice your agreement or approval, not all of your posts should be of this variety: "LOL Member213!" "I agree."
If it is evident that a member is simply posting for the sake of posting, they will be removed.


8] These Rules & Guidelines may be amended at any time. (last update September 17, 2009)

If you believe an individual is repeatedly breaking the rules, please report to admin/moderator.
See more
See less

Armenia - Genocide Denied

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Armenia - Genocide Denied

    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.

  • #2
    Part II

    But, for the Armenians, the nightmare was just beginning. After the initial massacres, the survivors were then ordered to the Syrian desert in death marches. 95-year-old Sultanik Manougian says her memory of that terror is clear.

    SULTANIK MANOUGIAN: Of course, I remember everything, everything I remember as if today. Every night, before I go to sleep, I remember. I pray for them.

    Sultanik's march, like many others, went on for weeks. Many starved to death, their possessions stolen and girls raped.

    SULTANIK MANOUGIAN: An old man refused. They shot him. They took the girls, they went.

    In the end, out of 20 members of her family on the march, only two survived. Sultanik settled in Jerusalem and married a fellow survivor. Another death march survivor, Bedros Gulluzian is now 97 but back in 1915, his mother saved him when the Turks were doing their final cull.

    BEDROS GULLUZIAN (Translation): My mother gave me to the Arabs. Others, about 3,000, went to the Deir el-Zour desert. On the other side of the river, they poured petrol on them, and burnt them. 3,000 boys. Yes, in Deir el-Zour. Everybody knows that. Deir el-Zour. They surrounded them with wire, poured petrol over them, and burnt them. All 3,000 of them.

    Over the years, the Armenians have collected thousands of testimonies like these. But in the face of them, the Turkish Government continues to say they are blameless. They even make the claim their troops were protecting the Armenians.

    ARSLAN TERZIOGLU (Translation): Some were ambushed to be robbed of their belongings by Kurdish and Bedouin bandits and killed in these attacks despite efforts by the Turkish forces to protect them. If there were some who were killed by Turkish forces to be robbed of their belongings those who've perpetrated these crimes were hanged under a special law. It is documented that 600 such people were hanged.

    HILAL BERKTAY, TURKISH HISTORIAN: Are we really being asked to believe that all those convoy commanders, all those commanders of escorts and their men were genuinely determined to protect the detainees entrusted to their care and did their best to defend them and, you know, 450,000 or 600,000 or 800,000 people were massacred despite the escort's best efforts at protecting their detainees? This is simply not credible.

    To complete the genocide, the Turks tried to erase any evidence of Armenian existence. For almost 3,000 years, the Armenians were based here in present-day eastern Turkey and its surrounds. This church at Akhtamar is one of the last reminders of their civilisation. It was built in 915 AD and is regarded as one of the finest churches of its time. Many monuments like this have been destroyed. Around 1900, this was the Varagavank monastery, one of the richest in Van. This is the monastery today. The Turks smashed it in 1915 and, in the 1950s, moved a Kurdish village on to the site. The five churches near Khtzkonk is another example. This photograph again was taken around 1900. This is the same site taken in the 1960s, with only one church standing. Armenians say the Turks blew up the other four. Claims, of course, the Turks deny. These photos are damning evidence of Turkish responsibility for the Armenian genocide. But to escape international prosecution, Halil Berktay says the government has tried to rewrite history by shredding its archives, most recently in the 1980s, when Turkey started courting European Union membership.

    HALIL BERKTAY: A very high team, a committee of three people, including retired ambassadors and retired generals went through all the files or sections that they could identify as potentially dangerous and eliminated a second round. There was a second massive, at least a second massive purge of the archives prior to their being declared formally more open than previously, let's say, to foreign researchers, to foreign investigators.

    For his efforts to expose the truth, Professor Berktay has been vilified in the Turkish popular press, and ultranationalist groups are campaigning to get him removed from his academic post. But he's determined to go on.

    HALIL BERKTAY: In the long run, I'm one of your incorrigible optimists who continues to believe as - that, as more and more honest and sincere historians and public intellectuals of integrity keep speaking up, this dam will be breached, this dam of silence will be breached and conversation will be increasingly normalised and this will be a fundamental dimension of internal democratisation of Turkish society.

    REPORTER: And that's why it's so important for you?

    HALIL BERKTAY: That is why it is so important. It is a question of, it is a question of democracy and freedom of conscience and freedom of scientific research and all that, academic freedom, democracy and academic freedom in Turkey, and of the gradual maturing and relaxation of tensions in Turkish society.

    One place where you might expect the Armenians to find compassion and refuge is Israel. Both races have suffered the horrors of genocide. But, despite this common history, the opposite has happened. On this Armenian genocide poster in the old city of Jerusalem is scrawled in Hebrew, "You deserve it." The Israelis have become vocal deniers of the Armenian genocide and, worse still, they have colluded with other states to ensure it remains denied.

    DR YAIR AURON, OPEN UNIVERSITY, TEL AVIV: Because, unfortunately, more and more Israel took sides with the Turkey side and, today, Israel in one way or another says that the Armenian genocide had not happened and this is unacceptable morally for me and, of course, it's incorrect historically speaking.

    GEORGE HINTILIAN, ARMENIAN HISTORIAN: To hear it from the Israeli people that our, we didn't have a genocide. or our genocide is simply 'atrocities' or 'tragedy', this is very painful for us and this is very artificial.

    The Armenians also feel the Israelis are forcing them out of Jerusalem. Armenia was the first territory in the world to convert to Christianity and in 500 AD, they established a community in the Holy City. They've been here ever since. A section of the old city is named the Armenian Quarter. In Jerusalem, the Armenians have been survivors, but since the creation of Israel in 1948, their community has shrunk to a fifth of its size. This church was to be a memorial to the Armenian holocaust but, in 1975, the Israelis stopped the community from building it, claiming they had no approval. For 27 years, it's remained skeleton-like, a half-built monument to a holocaust denied. And there is little the Armenians can do about it. The Israelis don't allow them any representation on the Jerusalem Municipality. Samuel Avyatar is their government-appointed representative. He's an Israeli and isn't very sympathetic to their cause.

    SAMUEL AVYATAR: We don't understand what do they want. I understand that they see that we talk a lot about our own holocaust and sort of ignore the others. I think we simply have no energy left because, here, we have family that suffered. We are really preoccupied with our own disaster, which was far larger than any and with different reasons. So, maybe, there is a situation in which we don't have a lot of place, of room, to talk about the other tragedies in the world. We are preoccupied with our own, but this is not an anti-Armenian thing.

    Yair Auron is the author of the book, 'The Banality of Indifference'. It details the Israeli denial of the Armenian genocide. Auron is one of the few pushing for recognition of the Armenian genocide in Israel.

    DR YAIR AURON: Unfortunately, there are segments in this society who want to keep the monopoly of the fact that we were victims. They think, wrongly in my opinion, that by recognising other genocides, maybe our monopoly will be damaged in one way or another.

    Samuel Avyatar says, in the future, the church will be built, but the Armenians remain sceptical, with good reason. Since Israel took control of their quarter in 1967, they haven't been granted a single building licence. This also means no housing can be constructed. Like most Armenian youth, Hargot Kirkorian is preparing to emigrate. He doesn't see a future under Israeli administration. Despite having top grades, he can't find a job or a place at university.

    HARGOT KIRKORIAN: The Israelis doesn't want you to advance in your life more than a certain limit. They draw a red line and that's where you can go, that is as far as you can reach. And I think that's really bad because they are, they are people that passed discrimination and they are doing it the same towards us and towards the Arabs.

    The Armenians have never challenged or opposed the state of Israel, but they are treated with the same suspicions and restrictions as the Palestinians.

    HARGOT KIRKORIAN: For Israelis, if you're not a Jew, then you're an Arab. It doesn't matter what you are. That's how it works here in the Middle East. That's what they do to everybody. In my ID, it's written 'Armenian' but the policeman doesn't even care to look at it. He says, "You're not Jewish. Then you're an Arab, probably."

    SAMUEL AVYATAR: In Israel, they will always be, as I can see it, a little bit looked upon in a special way, because they don't serve in the army. In Israel, this is like the visiting card to enter society. They don't want to do it. I think that it's wrong from their point of view. It's also wrong from our point of view that we don't force them, because we let them fall into this trap. So they don't feel full partnership in the country, and then they pay the price.

    And when the Armenians leave, Jewish settlers, backed with American money, are standing by to take their houses and deepen their hold in the old city.

    HARGOT KIRKORIAN: The Jewish settlers, I think they wait for an opportunity like this to get a house. It doesn't matter where it is, or how good it is. They pay huge amounts of money to get that property.

    The senior Israeli politician leading the denial is Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. In a trip to Turkey in April 2000, Peres stated, "We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to a holocaust occurred. It was a tragedy what the Armenians went through, but not a genocide." Yair Auron sees Peres's position as pure political expediency, downgrading Armenian suffering to appease Turkey, Israel's only ally in a hostile region.

    DR YAIR AURON: When I published my book 'The Banality of Indifference', Peres sent me a letter where he congratulated me for my efforts. So, of course, he's aware about the fact, because he's, yeah, of course he's aware about the facts and he knows really that it was a genocide but he decided, unfortunately, because of political consideration to go further than - to the best of my knowledge - than any other political in the Western states.

    In October 2000, it looked as though the Armenians were at last going to see some justice.

    CONGRESSMAN IN US CONGRESS: There reaches a point, my colleagues, when we must put people before politics.

    The American Congress was set to pass a resolution recognising the Armenian genocide. Both Israel and Turkey lobbied hard to stop the resolution and, at the last minute, it was dropped.

    GEORGE HINTILIAN: When we had the majority in the Senate and in the Congress, it was the Israeli Embassy and the Jewish lobby, and Mr Shimon Peres in person, who really influenced the decision not to be taken on the recognition of the Armenian genocide.

    The Israelis have demanded that the world never forget their holocaust, and deniers like David Irving are routinely vilified. Yair Auron says the contradiction with the Israeli attitude to the Armenian genocide is dangerous hypocrisy.

    DR YAIR AURON: This is a moral issue. We have to struggle against denial, because denying genocide is preparing the land for another genocide in the future. And in this moral struggle, we have to be consistent because, if we are not consistent, people will utilise our very inconsistency to deny genocide.

    Humanity has failed the Armenians. If the world had handled the Jewish Holocaust in the same way it's treated the Armenians, there would be an outrage. Instead, there is silence and denial, in effect, completing the original intention of the genocide. But there is a huge irony in the denial, especially for the Jews. When Hitler was planning his 'final solution', he was asked by one of his generals how history would judge such extreme action. His chilling response was, "Who remembers the extermination of the Armenians?"



    Comment


    • #3
      Poster's Note:

      "But there is a huge irony in the denial, especially for the Jews. When Hitler was planning his 'final solution', he was asked by one of his generals how history would judge such extreme action. His chilling response was, "Who remembers the extermination of the Armenians?"


      The above statement is highly inaccurate as Hitler was referring to Poles, not jews. The statement was made prior to his invasion of Poland and there is no proof of any "final solution."

      Comment

      Working...
      X