History should acknowledge tragedy of genocide

  Illustration by Kristen Gilette/Daily Bruin

By Harout Semerdjian

In July of 1915, dispatch was sent to the American Embassy in
Istanbul (Turkey). The American Consul in Harput, Leslie A. Davis,
wrote, “I do not believe that there has ever been a massacre
in the history of the world so general and thorough as that which
is now being perpetrated in this region.”

Consul Davis was talking about what became known as the Armenian
Genocide, one of history’s most violent and tragic chapters
that eliminated a people from their homeland of 3,000 years and
wiped out nearly all physical evidence of their ancient presence on
those very lands.

The Armenian Genocide can be viewed within two contexts. First,
it can be seen as the culmination of a continuous Armenian struggle
for survival in an increasingly oppressive Muslim empire where they
were subject to organized pogroms and massacres beginning in the
mid-1890s.

Second, it can be placed in a greater context of immense changes
that brought an end to the multiethnic Ottoman Empire and led to
the emergence of the Turkish Republic based on monoethnic and
nationalist ideologies.

As the 20th century began, the Ottoman Turkish Empire, known at
this time as the “Sick Man of Europe,” was collapsing.
Most of its European and African colonies were already lost, and
there was fear of further loss of whatever was left of the empire
““ Anatolia, western Armenia, and parts of Europe and the Arab
Middle East.

With the rise of Turkish nationalism and the development of the
racist ideology of Pan-Turkism, combined with the fear of
territorial losses, the new “Young Turk” government of
the Ottoman Empire arrived at a decision to get rid of its
Christian Armenian population, which was mostly concentrated in the
six Armenian provinces in the east and in Cilicia.

This action followed decades of Turkish persecution punctuated
by the 1894-96 empire-wide massacres and the ensuing 1909 Adana
massacre, claiming 200,000 Armenian victims.

The plan to destroy the Armenians was initiated under the guise
of “deportations.” First, beginning on April 24, 1915,
the empire’s Armenian intellectuals were arrested, taken to
the interior of the country and executed. This was followed by the
systematic extermination of the Armenian male population under the
age of 50, including those in the Ottoman army.

In provinces such as Bitlis and Harput, thousands of Armenian
civilians were burned alive. Others were killed through mutilation,
torture, rape and plunder or were drowned in the Black Sea and the
Euphrates river. The main instrument used in these large-scale
atrocities were the thousands of convicts, “bloodthirsty
criminals,” released from the Empire’s prisons to
perform this lethal task.

In his memoirs, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau
wrote: “Whatever crimes the most perverted instincts of the
human mind can devise, and whatever refinements of persecution and
injustice the most debased imagination can conceive, became the
daily misfortunes of this devoted people (Armenians).”

These methodical killings were followed by the
“deportation” of the remainder of the Armenian
population, mostly women, children and the elderly, to the Syrian
desert. Leslie Davis said “the killing of people a few hours
after their departure is barbarous and shows that the real
intention of the (Turkish) Government is not to exile them but to
kill them.”

The American Consul arrived at the above conclusion after he
himself secretly visited several massacre grounds as “the
only foreign official to witness it, powerless to prevent
it.” He labeled Turkey “one vast
slaughterhouse.”

By the end of 1923, the entire Armenian population of western
Armenia and Asia Minor was either destroyed or deported. Well over
one million Armenians were known to have died out of a population
of approximately two million. In the meantime, the Christian Greek
and Assyrian populations of Anatolia also suffered immensely as a
result of racist Ottoman policies, eventually culminating in their
elimination from their historical homelands as well.

The survivors of the Armenian Genocide, mainly those of the less
affected southern districts, scattered all over the world to form
the Armenian Diaspora.

Despite overwhelming evidence and indisputable facts, the
Turkish government to this day denies that a genocide ever took
place. While they may agree that as many as a few hundred thousand
Armenians might have died, they dismiss the deaths as either World
War I casualties, a result of an alleged “civil war” or
explained the deaths as a necessary result of security measures
taken due to a Russian threat from the Caucasus.

Over the past 86 years, Turkey has vigorously embarked on a
campaign of denial through various means ““ by buying off
professors and professorships at American universities with the
intention to rewrite history; by spending millions of dollars
lobbying U.S. Congress against a Genocide Resolution; and, most
serious of all, by depriving its own citizens of the truth about
the tragedy.

Dr. Taner Akcam, one of the few Turkish scholars who
acknowledges the genocide, puts it well when he says, “We
must reflect on our history if we want Turkey to become a
democracy.” This is especially true now that Turkey is
aspiring for democratic standards and desperately seeking
membership into the European Union.