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24 April is Armenian Genocide Memorial Day. In Armenian, it is called Medz Yeghern, "The Great Cataclysm". This banner is posted here from armenica.org to "Light the Night" on the eve of 24 April, in memory of the victims of the Armenian Genocide.
Armenia, the first Christian nation, had been part of the Muslim Ottoman Empire since the 15th century. On 24 April 1915, the Ottoman government, controlled by the Young Turk Movement, ordered the arrest of hundreds of Armenian leaders—intellectuals, teachers, doctors, and political leaders. Many were tortured; all were soon executed. This was the first phase in the annihilation of at least one million Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish government. There were at that time about two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire and about four million worldwide.
The Ottoman government issued orders for all Armenians to evacuate their homes and be "temporarily relocated" to other parts of the country. Men were taken away first and either killed or worked to death in labour camps. This photo, from the front cover of Peter Balakian’s 1997 memoir Black Dog of Fate, was taken by a German businessman from his hotel window in 1915. It shows Armenian men being marched out of Kharpert (Harput) under armed guard. They were taken to a prison at Mezre and tortured to death.
Women, children, and the elderly were then deported from their towns and villages by Turkish armed forces to travel on foot across the arid plateaus and mountains of eastern and central Anatolia. It was a death march. People died of starvation, exhaustion, and exposure; many were set upon by mobs, brutalised, and murdered before their family and friends; young girls were carried away and forced to join harems. The ultimate destination of the few who survived was the desert of Deir Zor in present-day Syria, where many more were killed by government forces. The map below, downloaded from 24april1915.com, shows the staging areas and routes followed. Deir Zor is the white circle beside the number "6" on the bottom edge. (Click on map for larger view.)
Last week, the PBS television network in the US showed a new documentary film, "The Armenian Genocide". Archival photographs, news clippings, contemporary eyewitness statements, and interviews with historians and other scholars combine to present a horrifying account of atrocities and a compelling case for the genocidal intent of the Turkish action against the Armenians.
I have transcribed three brief narratives from the documentary's sound track, all eyewitness accounts of the horrors and barbarities suffered by the Armenian people.
Leslie A. Davis, US Consul in Harput (Kharput on the above map, the medium-size red dot about half-way between the two largest ones), wrote this in September 1915:
We saw hundreds of bodies and many bones in the water below. It was rumoured that many of the people who had been brought here had been pushed over the cliffs by their gendarmes. That rumour was fully confirmed by what we saw. In some of the valleys there were only a few bodies, but in others there were more than a thousand. I do not believe 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, or that a more fiendish diabolical scheme has ever been conceived by the mind of man.
Jesse Benjamin Jackson, US Consul at Aleppo, northwest of Deir Zor, wrote this, also in September 1915:
It is extremely rare to find a family intact that has come any considerable distance, invariably having lost members from disease and fatigue, young girls and boys carried off by hostile tribesmen, and about all the men having been separated from their families and having suffered fates that best be left unmentioned. Many being done away with in such atrocious manners before the eyes of their relatives and friends. So severe has been the treatment that careful estimates place the number of those surviving even this far at being less than 150,000. There seem to have been about one million persons lost up to this date.
Auguste Berneau, traveling businessman, wrote from Deir Zor in August 1916.
All that I have seen and heard surpasses all imagination. Speaking of a thousand and one horrors is very little in this case. I thought I was passing through a part of Hell. Everywhere is the same governmental barbarianism, which aims at the systematic annihilation through starvation of the survivors of the Armenian nation in Turkey. Everywhere is the same bestial inhumanity on the part of these executioners and the same tortures undergone by these victims all along the Euphrates to Deir Zor. Women who had not seen me arriving were searching in the dung of horses [for] barley seeds not yet digested to feed on. I gave them some bread. They threw themselves on it like dogs dying of hunger.
The film also shows archival film of Polish scholar Raphael Lempkin, the man who invented the term "genocide" in 1944, citing as his defining examples of genocide the Turkish annihilation of Armenia and the Nazi extermination of the Jews.
The Government of Turkey denies to this day that a genocide took place. Turkish schoolchildren are specifically taught that the Armenian Genocide is a myth. The documentary showed vigilante reprisals and official persecution of Turkish historians and writers who are willing to investigate and critically discuss the events of 1915. Germany, home of the perpetrators of the Jewish Holocaust, has earned a place among civilised countries by honestly admitting the atrocities it committed, expressing sincere national repentance, and producing the fruits of the same: condemnation of the guilty and vindication and memorialisation of the innocent. Until Turkey does this, can it be considered a civilised nation?
The International Association of Genocide Scholars estimate that one million Armenians died during the Armenian Genocide. Many experts place the toll as high as 1.5 million.
Last Friday, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a statement in honour of this year's Armenian Genocide Memorial Day re-affirming Canada's official recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
I would like to extend my sincere greetings to all of those marking this sombre anniversary of the Medz Yeghern.
Ninety-one years ago the Armenian people experienced terrible suffering and loss of life. In recent years the Senate of Canada adopted a motion acknowledging this period as the first genocide of the twentieth century, while the House of Commons adopted a motion that acknowledges the Armenian genocide of 1915 and condemns this act as a crime against humanity. I and my party supported those resolutions, and continue to recognize them today.
We must never forget the lessons of history. Nor should we allow the enmities of history to divide us. The freedom, democracy, and human rights enjoyed by all Canadians are rooted in our mutual respect for one another.
I join with you today in remembering the past, while I encourage you to continue honouring your forefathers by building a bright future for all in Canada.
A prayer for vindication, from Psalm 35:22-24
You have seen, O LORD; be not silent!
O Lord, be not far from me!
Awake and rouse yourself for my vindication,
for my cause, my God and my Lord!
Vindicate me, O LORD, my God,
according to your righteousness,
and let them not rejoice over me!
