The Armenian Genocide
A Tragedy the World Would Like to Ignore
(In
memory of the victims of the Armenian Genocide and in honor of its survivors)
By Michael S. Ladah
Many historians record
that the Ottoman Turks blamed the minorities in their Ottoman Empire, especially the
Armenians, for all of their ills, and the Ottoman Empire had many. Starting with the last
decade of the 19th century and until after they lost their First World War
battles on both fronts, the Ottoman Turks conducted a process of retaliation and
“cleansing” that most of the world today cares little about. Some historians, in
spite of their accounts of the atrocities committed by the Turks, have been very kind to
the Ottoman Turks in their historical analysis of the reasons for the Turkish massacres of
the Armenians.
The Armenians were
totally different from the Turks. Among all the nations who were ruled by the Ottoman
Turks, the Armenians were the least compatible as a nation with the occupying and ruling
Turks. The Turks were Moslems, descendants of nomadic Mongol tribes who were converted to
Islam by the Arab invaders, and had very little civilization of their own. As a matter of
fact, the reign of the Ottoman Turks contributed almost nothing to the nations whom they
invaded and ruled. The Armenians were very devout Christians, with Armenia being the first
state ever to adopt Christianity. They were among the most educated people in the Eastern
part of the Ottoman Empire and, because of that, held the most sensitive positions in the
heart of the Empire, at the seat of its power, more than any of the other occupied
nations. The Turkish rulers did not trust their own people to hold sensitive positions.
Thus, they appointed minorities, especially Armenians, to hold such positions; their
purpose was to avoid the possibility that such positions, if otherwise given to Turks,
would take advantage of their power and overthrow the rule of those in power to substitute
a different Turkish rule.
Every change in power
in the Ottoman Empire brought with it the wrath of the new rulers against the Armenians
who were associated with the previous rule. The new rulers, in turn, did not trust the
sensitive positions to Turks and found it practical to continue to have Armenians in these
positions, for this provided better security for their regimes. The Armenians came to be
envied by many Turks who looked upon them as foreign minorities who were in positions that
the Turks thought they were more worthy of holding. The Armenians were hated more because
they were Christians, well educated, cultured and refined, and because they were blamed
for the failures of the rulers who employed them to protect their interests. Any mass
discrimination and hatred is extremely contagious. As the massacres of Armenians started,
the hatred of the Armenians in Turkey went totally out of control, among individuals and
organized groups. This was especially true among the Turkish military, which had the power
to act on their feelings of hatred. The Turkish military also started to incite, against
the Christian Armenians, those Moslem minorities who were the Armenian’s neighbors in
the eastern half of the Ottoman Empire. Once these actions were systematically started,
there was little that could be done by anyone there to stop the organized persecution of
Armenians, which snowballed into one of the most horrible genocides in history.
Those Armenians who
left western Armenia and today's eastern Turkey, were forced to abandon their homeland,
their homes and their belongings and walk from village to village and town to town risking
meeting the ravages of the Turkish soldier; nevertheless, they were the lucky ones to have
made it out of their villages. They traveled on foot, sometimes on roads and other times
cross-country, trying to dodge the bands of Turkish soldiers who were ravaging the
countryside looking for Armenians, by explicit orders of their government.
Many of the Armenian
refugees who were stopped for inspection by army regulars and army deserters tried to hide
their identities to escape the wrath of the Turkish soldier. Many of them pretended they
were Moslem Turks and called each other by typical Moslem names so that the soldiers might
sympathize with them. The soldiers confiscated their belongings, valuables and food; they
questioned young men and women and asked them to recite verses from the Koran to test
their claim that they were Moslems, a despicable abuse of the Holy Book. The results were
disastrous; men were shot on the spot and women were raped in front of their children and
were sent into the wilderness like wounded wild animals. Armenians, just like the Arabs,
Greeks, Bulgarians, Slovaks and most nations who came under the rule of the Turks during
the last few hundred years of the Ottoman Empire, knew the wrath of the Turkish soldier
and did everything possible to avoid the Turkish encounter. Many refugees took treacherous
mountainous roads to avoid Turkish soldiers. Some of them were lucky, for after months and
hundreds of miles they crossed into Syria. The first towns where they found tolerance and
common grievance against the Turks were the Arab towns of Iskenderun and Aleppo. Many of
them settled in Aleppo for years and then some of them slowly continued their journey to Lebanon,
which now has the largest concentration of Armenians outside Armenia. Some continued on to
Palestine.
The unlucky Armenians
were those who were rounded up from their villages with the whole village population, and
taken into the wilderness. They had to dig holes in the ground, under the threat of the
guns and swords of the Turkish soldiers. They had to walk down into the holes, large
enough to bury every man, woman and child in the procession, and lie face down; the
soldiers would shoot as many as they could; some would die immediately without much
physical suffering while others would just get injured, but lie there silently hoping to
escape death. But then, barrels and barrels of quicklime would be poured down the hole by
the soldiers until all the faces were covered by the white powder, or drowned by the
sometimes liquid which ate into their skin and their eyes. Finally, the soldiers would
start to cover the holes, if they could and if they were not too large.
The unlucky Armenians
were those who were stopped and murdered by the roaming bands of Turkish soldiers hunting
down Armenians to eliminate them. The unlucky Armenians were those who could not make the
escape journey, who could not survive the exposure to the weather or to hunger or thirst.
When it was all done, there were over 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children
tortured and killed, many of them buried alive.
Why did the Turks
massacre the Armenians? They massacred them because of hate; hate for people of different
culture, beliefs and religion. They massacred them because of hatred that was preached by
religious and secular organizations, every hour of the day. Thus, over time, the hate had
a cumulative brainwashing effect on the entire Turkish population and reached epidemic
proportion which made most Turks believe that it was okay to feel the hatred and justified
to act on those awful feelings.
By the time the orders
came down from the leadership to “cleanse” the empire of Armenian infidels, the
military was mentally prepared, the evil people were mentally prepared and even the
“good” people were mentally prepared and desensitized. The more Armenians were
massacred, the more desensitized the military felt to the atrocities and the more
atrocities they committed. It was this same kind of hate which was sown and which reaped
the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis in Europe later in the same century. It is this kind
of hate which is still being sown today in many parts of the world, unfortunately under
the banner of religion. It is the use of religion to perpetrate feelings and acts of hate
that is the most dangerous disease that humanity has ever known.
One and a half million
Armenians were massacred at the hands of the Turks, for no reason other than someone in
the Turkish Ottoman hierarchy singled them out as scapegoats for the ill fate of the Ottoman
Empire. The fact that so many of them, or any of them, were massacred is very disturbing
in itself. What is more disturbing is that the present Turkish authorities continue to
deny this fact, just like it was denied by their predecessors. More disturbing still is
that the massacres were and continue to be ignored by the world, except for a handful of
countries. Even some experts on the Jewish holocaust claim that the Jewish holocaust at
the hands of the Nazis was the first attempt in recent history at systematic mass murders
and annihilation of a race; this statement is disturbing because it does not acknowledge
the genocide of the Armenians. Unless any genocide is acknowledged, how can the world have
peace and how can humanity continue on a path of peace and respect for the most basic
human right, the right to life? About thirty years after the end of the Armenian genocide,
when his deputies tried to warn him of the repercussions of his planned extermination of
the Jews, Hitler is reported to have exclaimed “Who, after all, speaks today of the
annihilation of the Armenians?”
Even today, the world
has not even acknowledged the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks. The world had
acknowledged the holocaust of the Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany, perhaps because the
actions of the Germans were more apparent to the world and because there was more news
coverage of war and war atrocities. Even then, there are those who claim, and continue to
insist, that such atrocities never existed during the Second World War. But, with the
passage of time, all truths become known, and even the truth about the Armenian genocide,
which the Turks have so skillfully tried to hide, should have become known; yet the world
remains silent. The Turks have never acknowledged the atrocities committed by their
ancestors nor have they offered any apology to the world or material reparations to the
survivors or to the descendants of the victims.
It is time for the
Turks to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, and it is time for the world to apologize to
the Armenian victims and survivors of the Genocide for the world’s earlier denials.
© 2002 by Michael S. Ladah. The writer is the author of
“Quicksand, Oil and Dreams: The Story of One of Five Million Dispossessed
Palestinians.” This article is an extract
from the book. The author may be reached at
ladah@hotmail.com
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