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Robert Fisk: A Reign of Terror Which History Has Chosen to Neglect

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  • Robert Fisk: A Reign of Terror Which History Has Chosen to Neglect

    Robert Fisk: A reign of terror which history has chosen to neglect

    The Independent
    Published: 12 October 2007

    The story of the last century's first Holocaust - Winston Churchill
    used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi
    murder of six million Jews - is well known, despite the refusal of
    modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with
    Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews idle ones.

    Turkey's reign of terror against the Armenian people was an attempt to
    destroy the Armenian race. While the Turks spoke publicly of the need
    to "resettle" their Armenian population - as the Germans were to speak
    later of the Jews of Europe - the true intentions of Enver Pasha's
    Committee of Union and Progress in Constantinople were quite clear.

    On 15 September 1915, for example (and a carbon of this document
    exists), Talaat Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an
    instruction to his prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the
    tens of thousands of Armenians in his city. "You have already been
    informed that the government... has decided to destroy completely all
    the indicated persons living in Turkey... Their existence must be
    terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard
    must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience."

    These words are almost identical to those used by Himmler to his SS
    killers in 1941.

    Taner Akcam, a prominent - and extremely brave - Turkish scholar who
    has visited the Yerevan museum, has used original Ottoman Turkish
    documents to authenticate the act of genocide. Now under fierce attack
    for doing so from his own government, he discovered in Turkish
    archives that individual Turkish officers often wrote "doubles" of
    their mass death-sentence orders, telegrams sent at precisely the same
    time that asked their subordinates to ensure there was sufficient
    protection and food for the Armenians during their "resettlement".
    This weirdly parallels the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, where
    officials were dispatching hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas
    chambers while assuring International Red Cross officials in Geneva
    that they were being well cared for and well fed.

    Ottoman Turkey's attempt to exterminate an entire Christian race in
    the Middle East - the Armenians, descended from the residents of
    ancient Urartu, became the first Christian nation when their king
    Drtad converted from paganism in AD301 - is a history of almost
    unrelieved horror at the hands of Turkish policemen and soldiers, and
    Kurdish tribesmen.

    In 1915, Turkey claimed that its Armenian population was supporting
    Turkey's Christian enemies in Britain, France and Russia. Several
    historians - including Churchill, who was responsible for the doomed
    venture at Gallipoli - have asked whether the Turkish victory there
    did not give them the excuse to turn against the Christian Armenians
    of Asia Minor, a people of mixed Persian, Roman and Byzantine blood,
    with what Churchill called "merciless fury".

    Armenian scholars have compiled a map of their people's persecution
    and deportation, a document that is as detailed as the maps of Europe
    that show the railway lines to Auschwitz and Treblinka; the Armenians
    of Erzerum, for example, were sent on their death march to Terjan and
    then to Erzinjan and on to Sivas province.

    The men would be executed by firing squad or hacked to death with axes
    outside villages, the women and children then driven on into the
    desert to die of thirst or disease or exhaustion or gang-rape. In one
    mass grave I myself discovered on a hillside at Hurgada in present-day
    Syria, there were thousands of skeletons, mostly of young people -
    their teeth were perfect. I even found a 100-year-old Armenian woman
    who had escaped the slaughter there and identified the hillside for
    me.

    There is debate in Yerevan today as to why the diaspora Armenians
    appear to care more about the genocide than the citizens of modern-day
    Armenia. Indeed, the Foreign minister of Armenia, Vardan Oskanian,
    actually told me that "days, weeks, even months go by" when he does
    not think of the genocide. One powerful argument put to me by an
    Armenian friend is that 70 years of Stalinism and official Soviet
    silence on the genocide deleted the historical memory in eastern
    Armenia - the present-day state of Armenia.

    Another argument suggests that the survivors of western Armenia - in
    what is now Turkey - lost their families and lands and still seek
    acknowledgement and maybe even restitution, while eastern Armenians
    did not lose their lands.

    Source: http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article3052373.ece
    What if I find someone else when looking for you? My soul shivers as the idea invades my mind.

  • #2
    Re: Robert Fisk: A Reign of Terror Which History Has Chosen to Neglect

    Its part of a series of articles that series he has written. Good journalist. He isn't scared to speak up his beliefs.

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