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ARMENIA'S BURDEN, BY ROBERT FISK
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/how-i-watched-the-world-turn-the-independents-foreign-correspondents-look-back-at-the-major-events-of-2012-8431224.html?origin=internalSearch
TUESDAY 25 DECEMBER 2012
How I watched the world turn: The Independent's foreign correspondents
look back at the major events of 2012
>From Syria to Sandy, 2012 has been a momentous year for our
award-winning foreign correspondents. In the first of a two-part
series, they pick the stories that affected them the most
Between wars, I lecture on the Middle East. But rarely have I seen an
audience so moved, so trapped by history, so tearful as one night in
Sharjah last spring. Nothing I said upset them. But the pictures I
showed them were terrifying. In front of me, young and middle-aged
Armenians - well-off for the most part, businessmen and women,
well-educated - sat in an almost religious silence as they watched
a succession of four photographs. Each showed the progress of an
Armenian death march from Erzerum, old people, carts, young men with
hidden faces, the doomed on their way to death 97 years ago.
The four pictures were taken by Victor Pitchman, an Austrian soldier
in the Turkish army, who could not have known that these men and women
were about to die. Nor could they have known. They are heading in a
straight line, down a straight road, women with scarves, over-burdened
donkeys, past the same bunch of trees which feature in each photograph,
a pale line of hills on the far horizon. All the Armenians of Erzerum
were to die at the hands of the Turks in the 1915 genocide.
There are many photographs of Armenian survivors. And there are
pictures of their corpses. But few show the living just before they
were slaughtered. These people, in the pictures I had been trawling
through from the Armenian genocide museum in Yerevan, were the living
dead. Shellfire, wounds, death. Each year, we report this miserable
saga. But old wars and other genocides lean heavily upon us, as
they did upon my Armenian audience in the Gulf. These were their
grandparents and great-grandparents, plodding along, possessions
piled on horse-carts, a pleasant enough, sunny day, clouds high in
the sky. Only the grave awaits them.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/how-i-watched-the-world-turn-the-independents-foreign-correspondents-look-back-at-the-major-events-of-2012-8431224.html?origin=internalSearch
TUESDAY 25 DECEMBER 2012
How I watched the world turn: The Independent's foreign correspondents
look back at the major events of 2012
>From Syria to Sandy, 2012 has been a momentous year for our
award-winning foreign correspondents. In the first of a two-part
series, they pick the stories that affected them the most
Between wars, I lecture on the Middle East. But rarely have I seen an
audience so moved, so trapped by history, so tearful as one night in
Sharjah last spring. Nothing I said upset them. But the pictures I
showed them were terrifying. In front of me, young and middle-aged
Armenians - well-off for the most part, businessmen and women,
well-educated - sat in an almost religious silence as they watched
a succession of four photographs. Each showed the progress of an
Armenian death march from Erzerum, old people, carts, young men with
hidden faces, the doomed on their way to death 97 years ago.
The four pictures were taken by Victor Pitchman, an Austrian soldier
in the Turkish army, who could not have known that these men and women
were about to die. Nor could they have known. They are heading in a
straight line, down a straight road, women with scarves, over-burdened
donkeys, past the same bunch of trees which feature in each photograph,
a pale line of hills on the far horizon. All the Armenians of Erzerum
were to die at the hands of the Turks in the 1915 genocide.
There are many photographs of Armenian survivors. And there are
pictures of their corpses. But few show the living just before they
were slaughtered. These people, in the pictures I had been trawling
through from the Armenian genocide museum in Yerevan, were the living
dead. Shellfire, wounds, death. Each year, we report this miserable
saga. But old wars and other genocides lean heavily upon us, as
they did upon my Armenian audience in the Gulf. These were their
grandparents and great-grandparents, plodding along, possessions
piled on horse-carts, a pleasant enough, sunny day, clouds high in
the sky. Only the grave awaits them.