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APRIL 24TH: REMEMBERING THE ARMENIAN DEAD
Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-atamian/april-24th-remembering-th_b_1447345.html
April 24 2012
Christopher Atamian.Writer, director, producer and translator
On April 24, Armenians across the world will march, give speeches,
attend church services and otherwise commemorate the official beginning
of the terrible events known as the Armenian Genocide. On April 24,
1915, Turkish authorities in the Ottoman Empire rounded up close to
one hundred leading Armenians in Constantinople (today's Istanbul) and
deported them to Ayash and Chankari -- concentration camp equivalents
to Auschwitz and Treblinka some thirty years later.
Many were killed along the way in the most gruesome manner: beaten,
stoned, tortured. Komitas Vartabed, Armenia's leading musicologist who
recorded forever the folk and church music of Anatolia, went mad after
barely escaping with his life. Led by the triumvirate of Talaat, Enver
and Djemal Pasha over the next eight years, the so-called Young Turks
-- a horde of thugs, killers and thieves that would not be seen again
until the Nazis came to power in Germany in the 1940s -- deported,
raped, set on fire and other murdered three million Christians --
almost the entire Christian population of the Ottoman Empire: 1.5
million Armenians, 1 million Pontic Greeks and 500,000 Assyrians
perished in the conflagration that Armenians call the Medz Yeghern
or Great Calamity.
The goal of the Young Turks was simple: to complete the eradication of
the empire's Christians, which had begun some twenty years earlier
under the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid and to expropriated their
considerable wealth, in the process creating a pure purely Turkish
state. As was the case with the Jews in Western Europe, Christians
in the Ottoman Empire were allowed to trade money and charge interest
on it and hence -- for this reason and others -- they quickly became
the most advanced group financially and educationally, which bred
huge resentment from the Muslim majority. The Ottoman Ballet, the
Ottoman Opera and many of the Empire's finest cultural institutions
were in fact founded by Armenians and the wealthy Amira group which
controlled among other things the Ottoman mint, munitions, bread
factories and other key institutions, while the Greeks handled much
of the empire's foreign diplomacy, for example.
After the Armenian intellectuals had been eradicated -- the
community's symbolic head -- the Turks were particularly ruthless
in their eradication campaign: in village after village throughout
what remained of the Ottoman Empire, Armenian men were separated from
their women and either shot at close range or lit on fire in sulfur
caves-primitive gas chambers. Entire congregations were burned alive
inside churches during Sunday services. The women who managed to
escape being raped and killed were sent on deportation marches with
their remaining children into the Syrian desert -- a sure road to
death that few escaped.
Today Turks continue to deny en masse that anything ever happened
to its Christian minorities, even though pogroms against Christians
and Jews occurred throughout the 20th century including after the
imposition in 1942 of the Varlık Vergisi or wealth taxes on Jews
and Christians which set exorbitant rates of over to 100 percent on
minority wealth. The remaining Jews, Armenians and Greeks in Istanbul
-- none of whom could pay such ridiculous fines -- were sent to a
labor camp known as Aškale where most either perished or returned
broken and unable to function anymore.
To return to 1915: During the Armenian Genocide, trillions of
dollars of Armenian property and goods were expropriated and an
entire ethnically Turkish and religiously Muslim middle class was
formed. For Armenians, this was just a repeat of past events and
attempts to genocidally remove them from their native lands. The
Adana Massacre of 1909 and the killings instigated by Sultan Abdul
Hamid -- otherwise known as the Bloody Sultan -- took place all over
the Armenian Plateau from 1894-1895.
Most recently Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu has gone on a
charm offensive to try to convince the rather large and influential
Armenian Diaspora to drop its claims against Turkey in a misguided
effort at reconciliation. There can be no true reconciliation or
friendship between the Armenian and Turkish people until the Turkish
government publicly and officially apologizes to the Armenians --
following in the footsteps -- albeit belatedly -- of Germany towards
Israel and the Jews and the recent Australian prime minister's public
apology to the Aborigines. This apology must be followed by proper
monetary restitution to Armenians in Armenia and the Diaspora, and a
complete return of lands, property and churches to Armenians. Turning
the famed church of Aght'Amar on Lake Van into a museum owned by the
Turkish government and flying Turkish flags around the church -- as the
Turkish government recently did -- is a degrading insult to Armenians
everywhere, even if the church has been renovated. Aght'Amar and
the thousands of other Armenian churches across Anatolia -- including
those in the famed Armenian capital city of Ani -- belong to Armenians,
period. Turkey should also push for the killer and planners of Armenian
journalist Hrant Dink's murder several years back to be jailed for
life and begin a campaign in Turkish schools to tell the Turkish
people the truth about what happened to their Christian minorities.
If Turkey does so, it can also set an example for other countries
the Middle East such as Iraq, and Egypt where Christians continue to
be persecuted and forced to leave their ancestral lands. Anything
less is unacceptable. Turkey can delay, it can hem and haw and try
to dissimulate, but the reality is that Armenians -- and their Greek
and Assyrian counterparts -- have truth on their side; and as we have
seen before in the course of human history, truth has a strange way
of winning out, eventually.
Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-atamian/april-24th-remembering-th_b_1447345.html
April 24 2012
Christopher Atamian.Writer, director, producer and translator
On April 24, Armenians across the world will march, give speeches,
attend church services and otherwise commemorate the official beginning
of the terrible events known as the Armenian Genocide. On April 24,
1915, Turkish authorities in the Ottoman Empire rounded up close to
one hundred leading Armenians in Constantinople (today's Istanbul) and
deported them to Ayash and Chankari -- concentration camp equivalents
to Auschwitz and Treblinka some thirty years later.
Many were killed along the way in the most gruesome manner: beaten,
stoned, tortured. Komitas Vartabed, Armenia's leading musicologist who
recorded forever the folk and church music of Anatolia, went mad after
barely escaping with his life. Led by the triumvirate of Talaat, Enver
and Djemal Pasha over the next eight years, the so-called Young Turks
-- a horde of thugs, killers and thieves that would not be seen again
until the Nazis came to power in Germany in the 1940s -- deported,
raped, set on fire and other murdered three million Christians --
almost the entire Christian population of the Ottoman Empire: 1.5
million Armenians, 1 million Pontic Greeks and 500,000 Assyrians
perished in the conflagration that Armenians call the Medz Yeghern
or Great Calamity.
The goal of the Young Turks was simple: to complete the eradication of
the empire's Christians, which had begun some twenty years earlier
under the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid and to expropriated their
considerable wealth, in the process creating a pure purely Turkish
state. As was the case with the Jews in Western Europe, Christians
in the Ottoman Empire were allowed to trade money and charge interest
on it and hence -- for this reason and others -- they quickly became
the most advanced group financially and educationally, which bred
huge resentment from the Muslim majority. The Ottoman Ballet, the
Ottoman Opera and many of the Empire's finest cultural institutions
were in fact founded by Armenians and the wealthy Amira group which
controlled among other things the Ottoman mint, munitions, bread
factories and other key institutions, while the Greeks handled much
of the empire's foreign diplomacy, for example.
After the Armenian intellectuals had been eradicated -- the
community's symbolic head -- the Turks were particularly ruthless
in their eradication campaign: in village after village throughout
what remained of the Ottoman Empire, Armenian men were separated from
their women and either shot at close range or lit on fire in sulfur
caves-primitive gas chambers. Entire congregations were burned alive
inside churches during Sunday services. The women who managed to
escape being raped and killed were sent on deportation marches with
their remaining children into the Syrian desert -- a sure road to
death that few escaped.
Today Turks continue to deny en masse that anything ever happened
to its Christian minorities, even though pogroms against Christians
and Jews occurred throughout the 20th century including after the
imposition in 1942 of the Varlık Vergisi or wealth taxes on Jews
and Christians which set exorbitant rates of over to 100 percent on
minority wealth. The remaining Jews, Armenians and Greeks in Istanbul
-- none of whom could pay such ridiculous fines -- were sent to a
labor camp known as Aškale where most either perished or returned
broken and unable to function anymore.
To return to 1915: During the Armenian Genocide, trillions of
dollars of Armenian property and goods were expropriated and an
entire ethnically Turkish and religiously Muslim middle class was
formed. For Armenians, this was just a repeat of past events and
attempts to genocidally remove them from their native lands. The
Adana Massacre of 1909 and the killings instigated by Sultan Abdul
Hamid -- otherwise known as the Bloody Sultan -- took place all over
the Armenian Plateau from 1894-1895.
Most recently Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu has gone on a
charm offensive to try to convince the rather large and influential
Armenian Diaspora to drop its claims against Turkey in a misguided
effort at reconciliation. There can be no true reconciliation or
friendship between the Armenian and Turkish people until the Turkish
government publicly and officially apologizes to the Armenians --
following in the footsteps -- albeit belatedly -- of Germany towards
Israel and the Jews and the recent Australian prime minister's public
apology to the Aborigines. This apology must be followed by proper
monetary restitution to Armenians in Armenia and the Diaspora, and a
complete return of lands, property and churches to Armenians. Turning
the famed church of Aght'Amar on Lake Van into a museum owned by the
Turkish government and flying Turkish flags around the church -- as the
Turkish government recently did -- is a degrading insult to Armenians
everywhere, even if the church has been renovated. Aght'Amar and
the thousands of other Armenian churches across Anatolia -- including
those in the famed Armenian capital city of Ani -- belong to Armenians,
period. Turkey should also push for the killer and planners of Armenian
journalist Hrant Dink's murder several years back to be jailed for
life and begin a campaign in Turkish schools to tell the Turkish
people the truth about what happened to their Christian minorities.
If Turkey does so, it can also set an example for other countries
the Middle East such as Iraq, and Egypt where Christians continue to
be persecuted and forced to leave their ancestral lands. Anything
less is unacceptable. Turkey can delay, it can hem and haw and try
to dissimulate, but the reality is that Armenians -- and their Greek
and Assyrian counterparts -- have truth on their side; and as we have
seen before in the course of human history, truth has a strange way
of winning out, eventually.