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ARMENIAN GENOCIDE THEN AND NOW
US Official News
April 14, 2015 Tuesday
Religious Freedom Coalition has issued the following news release:
Armenian-Canadian writer Raffi Bedrosyan sees Middle Eastern "history
repeating itself" in modern Christian suffering in the centennial of
the Ottoman Empire's 1915 genocide of Armenians and other Christian
populations. Bedrosyan and other participants of an all-day, March 28
Institute of World Politics (IWP) conference concerning the Ottoman
1915 genocides showed a disturbing continuity of Islamic human rights
violations by various actors across a century.
Before over 50 audience members filling IWP's conference room,
Institute of World Politics Professor Marek J. Chodakiewicz indicated
the confessional nature of 1915's slaughter in his presentation
on forms of "democide" or governmental mass murder. Descended from
"Christendom's eldest kingdom," most Armenians in 1915 had a pre-modern
understanding of nationality, he said. Despite recent secular legal
reforms in the Islamic Ottoman Empire, Armenians still suffered the
"scourge of sharia and the whims of the caliphate."
ArmenianGenocideProtestThe East Coast premiere of Turkey, the Legacy
of Silence, a French documentary about Turkish citizens uncovering
their hidden Armenian heritage, also featured a Christian-Islamic
confessional divide. A Turkish man, for example, recounted how
authorities in 1915 told one man concerning Armenians that "kill seven
and you will go to heaven," but instead he hid a boy who was later
raised a Muslim under the name Abdullah. After another woman's death,
relatives found a Bible in a ceremonial case that usually contains a
Quran in Turkish homes. Such individuals, the film noted, were hidden
survivors of a brutal attempt to create the fiction of Turkey as a
land that has been purely Turkish for millennia.
Concerns for physical survival and social acceptance caused many of
these individuals to keep secret their Armenian ancestry even if they
knew about it. A woman in the film narrated how Turkish nationalists
in the army killed her son on April 24, the day commemorating since
1915 the genocide, 17 days before he completed his military service.
Another man whose Armenian heritage became known faced the animosity
of his school classmates who read in Turkish textbooks that Armenians
betrayed the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Some individuals
nonetheless embraced their heritage like the man who accepted baptism
and rejected being an "Islamicized Armenian" after learning of his
true origins.
Bedrosyan elaborated upon "The Hidden Armenians of Turkey" following
the screening and during a subsequent interview. Islamization
of Armenians began in 1915 when the Ottoman government initially
allowed Armenians to convert to Islam and avoid ultimately deadly
deportations. Turkish army orphanages transformed orphan boys of
Armenian genocide victims into rabid Muslim Turks while orphan girls
became sex slaves or entered forced marriages. One Kurdish chieftain
took as his child bride a girl from among the 13 survivors of over
10,500 massacred Armenians from a suburb of southeastern Turkish
town Diyarbakir. Bedrosyan expressed amazement at how jihadists in
the Islamic State (IS) or Nigeria's Boko Haram displayed today the
same patterns of behavior.
Ottoman efforts to obliterate Armenian culture encompassed property
as well as persons. Bedrosyan cited 4,000 churches in Turkey that
after 1915 were destroyed or converted to other uses, including one
that became a brothel. He noted a destroyed Diyarbakir church used as
a government warehouse until its 2011 restoration by private groups
as a genocide memorial. Its official opening saw many individuals
disclose their Armenian ancestry.
An earlier presentation by stolen property expert Dr. Tania C.
Mastrapa elaborated that the Turkish government had closed certain
archives as a "national security threat." Their publication could
facilitate property claims by Armenians and others stemming from
1915 calculated in the trillions of dollars. Her co-panelist Kate
Nahapetian from the Armenian National Committee of America stated that
police today will investigate in certain Turkish villages visitors
suspected of searching for lost Armenian property.
Bedrosyan explained that Turkish government actions demonstrated how
the Turkish republic throughout its history has assiduously upheld
the myth of a homogenous Turkish and Sunni Muslim population. An
interviewed Genocide Watch President Gregory H. Stanton, whose
morning presentation concerned genocide denial, analogized between the
Khmer Rouge and Turkish Republic founding father Kemal Ataturk. Like
Cambodia's genocidal Communists who "wanted to start at year zero,"
Ataturk's "utopian vision for a new Turkey" sought cultural erasure
of even Christian populations like the Assyrians who predated Turkish
presence in Anatolia.
In this environment, Bedrosyan stated, Armenian/Christian affiliations
entail discrimination, meaning that many of Turkey's estimated 2.5
million people with Armenian descent do not recognize or reveal
their heritage and remain "Islamicized." Christians de facto "cannot
even become a garbage man" in the public sector, he stated while
discussing one public school teacher who broke a taboo by accepting
baptism after discovering Armenian roots. Individuals serving in the
military sometimes learn of the ineligibility for sensitive positions
such as fighter pilots when the government suddenly reveals records
of Armenian descent.
Individuals who know of their Armenian heritage therefore often
resort to subterfuge in a society where Armenian is a swear word
and graffiti like "1915 was a blessed year" vandalizes Istanbul
churches. Bedrosyan recounted how one hidden Armenian prayed to Jesus
at home while serving as a Muslim imam, while others secretly accepted
baptism in Europe before returning to Turkey. Amongst themselves,
hidden Armenians often know, and marry their children to, each other.
Steven Oshana, executive director of the Middle East minority advocacy
group A Demand for Action, reflected during an interview on the
historic continuity of Muslim repression suffered by his Armenian and
Assyrian ancestral communities. Assyrians, for example, fled Ottoman
genocide to areas of modern Iraq, only to endure the August 1933 Simele
massacre by Iraqi troops and another flight to Syria, where Assyrians
today are targets of IS. "The genocide just keeps following," the
"methods are the same, the brutality is the same," stated Oshana.
Oshana and other conference speakers noted how Islam played a role
among pious and non-pious alike in conflicts with Christian and
other minorities. While IS differed from the Ottomans in publicly
claiming credit for atrocities against non-Muslims, he stated that
"faith is always a pretext" for political calculations seeking to
stimulate violence against non-Christians. Bedrosyan concurred that
Ottoman leaders who saw during World War I threats in Armenians and
other Christians "were using Islam as an instrument" of mobilization
among Muslims like Kurds. This role of Islam was "very, very direct"
in the actions of Ottoman leaders, Stanton noted. They cynically urged
Muslim authorities such as muftis to call for the killing of Christians
considered allied with the Ottoman Empire's "infidel" enemies.
Institute of World Politics' Armenian genocide conference instructively
brought to light a past that has not passed, but rather remains
depressingly relevant today. Time and again Islamic doctrines have
repeatedly incited the same patterns of death, destruction, and
cultural cleansing against Christians and other non-Muslims. George
Santyana's dictum that "[t]hose who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it" is hardly more relevant than here. Forewarning
of these past lessons is necessary for policymakers who want to be
forearmed against future dangers.
US Official News
April 14, 2015 Tuesday
Religious Freedom Coalition has issued the following news release:
Armenian-Canadian writer Raffi Bedrosyan sees Middle Eastern "history
repeating itself" in modern Christian suffering in the centennial of
the Ottoman Empire's 1915 genocide of Armenians and other Christian
populations. Bedrosyan and other participants of an all-day, March 28
Institute of World Politics (IWP) conference concerning the Ottoman
1915 genocides showed a disturbing continuity of Islamic human rights
violations by various actors across a century.
Before over 50 audience members filling IWP's conference room,
Institute of World Politics Professor Marek J. Chodakiewicz indicated
the confessional nature of 1915's slaughter in his presentation
on forms of "democide" or governmental mass murder. Descended from
"Christendom's eldest kingdom," most Armenians in 1915 had a pre-modern
understanding of nationality, he said. Despite recent secular legal
reforms in the Islamic Ottoman Empire, Armenians still suffered the
"scourge of sharia and the whims of the caliphate."
ArmenianGenocideProtestThe East Coast premiere of Turkey, the Legacy
of Silence, a French documentary about Turkish citizens uncovering
their hidden Armenian heritage, also featured a Christian-Islamic
confessional divide. A Turkish man, for example, recounted how
authorities in 1915 told one man concerning Armenians that "kill seven
and you will go to heaven," but instead he hid a boy who was later
raised a Muslim under the name Abdullah. After another woman's death,
relatives found a Bible in a ceremonial case that usually contains a
Quran in Turkish homes. Such individuals, the film noted, were hidden
survivors of a brutal attempt to create the fiction of Turkey as a
land that has been purely Turkish for millennia.
Concerns for physical survival and social acceptance caused many of
these individuals to keep secret their Armenian ancestry even if they
knew about it. A woman in the film narrated how Turkish nationalists
in the army killed her son on April 24, the day commemorating since
1915 the genocide, 17 days before he completed his military service.
Another man whose Armenian heritage became known faced the animosity
of his school classmates who read in Turkish textbooks that Armenians
betrayed the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Some individuals
nonetheless embraced their heritage like the man who accepted baptism
and rejected being an "Islamicized Armenian" after learning of his
true origins.
Bedrosyan elaborated upon "The Hidden Armenians of Turkey" following
the screening and during a subsequent interview. Islamization
of Armenians began in 1915 when the Ottoman government initially
allowed Armenians to convert to Islam and avoid ultimately deadly
deportations. Turkish army orphanages transformed orphan boys of
Armenian genocide victims into rabid Muslim Turks while orphan girls
became sex slaves or entered forced marriages. One Kurdish chieftain
took as his child bride a girl from among the 13 survivors of over
10,500 massacred Armenians from a suburb of southeastern Turkish
town Diyarbakir. Bedrosyan expressed amazement at how jihadists in
the Islamic State (IS) or Nigeria's Boko Haram displayed today the
same patterns of behavior.
Ottoman efforts to obliterate Armenian culture encompassed property
as well as persons. Bedrosyan cited 4,000 churches in Turkey that
after 1915 were destroyed or converted to other uses, including one
that became a brothel. He noted a destroyed Diyarbakir church used as
a government warehouse until its 2011 restoration by private groups
as a genocide memorial. Its official opening saw many individuals
disclose their Armenian ancestry.
An earlier presentation by stolen property expert Dr. Tania C.
Mastrapa elaborated that the Turkish government had closed certain
archives as a "national security threat." Their publication could
facilitate property claims by Armenians and others stemming from
1915 calculated in the trillions of dollars. Her co-panelist Kate
Nahapetian from the Armenian National Committee of America stated that
police today will investigate in certain Turkish villages visitors
suspected of searching for lost Armenian property.
Bedrosyan explained that Turkish government actions demonstrated how
the Turkish republic throughout its history has assiduously upheld
the myth of a homogenous Turkish and Sunni Muslim population. An
interviewed Genocide Watch President Gregory H. Stanton, whose
morning presentation concerned genocide denial, analogized between the
Khmer Rouge and Turkish Republic founding father Kemal Ataturk. Like
Cambodia's genocidal Communists who "wanted to start at year zero,"
Ataturk's "utopian vision for a new Turkey" sought cultural erasure
of even Christian populations like the Assyrians who predated Turkish
presence in Anatolia.
In this environment, Bedrosyan stated, Armenian/Christian affiliations
entail discrimination, meaning that many of Turkey's estimated 2.5
million people with Armenian descent do not recognize or reveal
their heritage and remain "Islamicized." Christians de facto "cannot
even become a garbage man" in the public sector, he stated while
discussing one public school teacher who broke a taboo by accepting
baptism after discovering Armenian roots. Individuals serving in the
military sometimes learn of the ineligibility for sensitive positions
such as fighter pilots when the government suddenly reveals records
of Armenian descent.
Individuals who know of their Armenian heritage therefore often
resort to subterfuge in a society where Armenian is a swear word
and graffiti like "1915 was a blessed year" vandalizes Istanbul
churches. Bedrosyan recounted how one hidden Armenian prayed to Jesus
at home while serving as a Muslim imam, while others secretly accepted
baptism in Europe before returning to Turkey. Amongst themselves,
hidden Armenians often know, and marry their children to, each other.
Steven Oshana, executive director of the Middle East minority advocacy
group A Demand for Action, reflected during an interview on the
historic continuity of Muslim repression suffered by his Armenian and
Assyrian ancestral communities. Assyrians, for example, fled Ottoman
genocide to areas of modern Iraq, only to endure the August 1933 Simele
massacre by Iraqi troops and another flight to Syria, where Assyrians
today are targets of IS. "The genocide just keeps following," the
"methods are the same, the brutality is the same," stated Oshana.
Oshana and other conference speakers noted how Islam played a role
among pious and non-pious alike in conflicts with Christian and
other minorities. While IS differed from the Ottomans in publicly
claiming credit for atrocities against non-Muslims, he stated that
"faith is always a pretext" for political calculations seeking to
stimulate violence against non-Christians. Bedrosyan concurred that
Ottoman leaders who saw during World War I threats in Armenians and
other Christians "were using Islam as an instrument" of mobilization
among Muslims like Kurds. This role of Islam was "very, very direct"
in the actions of Ottoman leaders, Stanton noted. They cynically urged
Muslim authorities such as muftis to call for the killing of Christians
considered allied with the Ottoman Empire's "infidel" enemies.
Institute of World Politics' Armenian genocide conference instructively
brought to light a past that has not passed, but rather remains
depressingly relevant today. Time and again Islamic doctrines have
repeatedly incited the same patterns of death, destruction, and
cultural cleansing against Christians and other non-Muslims. George
Santyana's dictum that "[t]hose who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it" is hardly more relevant than here. Forewarning
of these past lessons is necessary for policymakers who want to be
forearmed against future dangers.