Anniversary of a genocide

Armenians remain traumatized not only because of the annihilation of their kin 100 years ago, but also by Turkey’s steadfast denial of the genocide.

By ANDREW FRIEDMAN
Archbishop Aris Shirvanian, Director of the Ecumenical and Foreign Relations of the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem’s Old City. (photo credit: REUTERS)
Archbishop Aris Shirvanian, Director of the Ecumenical and Foreign Relations of the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem’s Old City.
(photo credit: REUTERS)
AS AN Armenian child growing up in Jerusalem in the 1940s and 50s, George Hintlian was raised on stories of the Armenian Genocide, the systematic extermination of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks. The starting date is held to be April 24, 1915, the day some 300 Armenian academics and community leaders were rounded up in Istanbul.
“My grandfather and uncle were axed to death, as were more than 20 members of their extended family,” Hintlian, 70, tells The Jerusalem Report. “My father, who was then 17 years old, walked 500 kilometers from Kayseri in Turkey to Aleppo, Syria.
On the way, they were held in concentration camps without food or medical treatment.
People died like flies from starvation, disease, beatings by the Turks, you name it.
“Still, they were the lucky ones. From eastern Turkey, very few survived. Between April and September 1915, the Turks murdered 800,000 people, with some of the most brutal tactics known to man. Thousands were butchered with knives and axes, beaten to death, shot at point-blank range or simply died of starvation and/or disease.”
Hintlian’s voice remains steady, almost academic, as he describes the massacres, but his eyes and body language reveal a man for whom the genocide is a permanent, ongoing, weight to bear. It is a description he accepts: He never married and has no children, saying that instead he has been married to the cause of memory.
For decades, he has served as the community’s unofficial spokesman and historian of the genocide, a role he says he was never asked to perform, but which his inherited trauma did not allow him to forego.
“It all happened so quickly that people had trouble understanding what was going on – kids got home from school at noon, by 12:30 the gendarmes had arrived and pushed them out on the forced march without food or water. They weren’t even allowed to finish eating their lunch – people were whipped and beaten if they tried to ‘steal’ a drink from a nearby stream or something.”
Eventually, the elder Hintlian made his way to Jerusalem via several Armenian diaspora communities, including Cairo.
There, he met George’s mother.
Three generations later, however, Armenian communities remain traumatized not only because of the killings, but also by Turkey’s steadfast denial that the genocide even happened.
AS ARMENIAN communities around the world prepared to mark the 100th anniversary of the onset of the massacres, Hintlian and other Armenian officials in Jerusalem say they are marking the milestone with a bitter mixture of sadness at the fact of the murders, along with a healthy dose of frustration that the international community, including Israel, has largely acceded to Turkey’s attempt to excise the genocide from the historical record.
The Armenian Quarter is different from the Jewish, Christian and Muslim quarters that make up Jerusalem’s Old City.
Although hooded, black-clad Armenian monks stand out, the Armenian presence is more understated than the others. The quarter’s 1,500 inhabitants comprise the smallest community within the walled city, and while residents are on the whole friendly, there is also a sense that outsiders are kept at a distance.
Compared to the bustling Jewish, Christian and Muslim quarters, the Armenian Quarter is hidden and secretive. Whereas pilgrimage sites like the Western Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher are celebrated religious and historical sites pulsing 24/7 with visitors of all denominations and nationalities, there is little for the average tourist to amble across in the Armenian Quarter, save for two or three Armenian pottery shops located along Armenian Patriarchate Street, the main thoroughfare through the heart of the quarter.
Likewise, the architectural and historic gems located at the heart of the Armenian Quarter – the Cathedral of St. James, a historic Armenian orphanage, the community’s library and archives – are all hidden behind high stone walls, deterring random visitors. Even the memorial site commemorating the genocide, located on the grounds of the Armenian convent and seminary, is shielded from outside eyes.
THE VEIL surrounding the community seems to be one of privacy, rather than secrecy. In sharp contrast to the Jewish style of memory, with its focus on searing emotion and a clear message that Jews will never again allow themselves to be the victims of genocide, Armenian leaders and laypeople talk about the genocide with facts and a marked lack of emotion.
For Armenians, the stories of brutality and of families lost seem almost to be a corollary to the real story of the Armenian Genocide: the fight for recognition.
To be sure, the stories of the Turkish persecution of the Armenian community are no less brutal than the Nazis’ treatment of Jews a generation later – one man told me of an entire community that had waited in line patiently for a Turkish executioner to bludgeon their heads with an axe.
There is a direct historical link between Turkish and German murder squads. Prior to invading Poland in 1939, Hitler even pointed to the Armenian massacres as proof that Germany could massacre Polish civilians without too much objection or intervention from the international community.
As a result, many Armenians today appear resigned to the fact that while outsiders may be able to offer support, and even empathy, for the massacres that occurred a century ago, there is also a keen awareness that individuals outside the community are unable to fully share the community’s sense of frustration over the political history that followed.
Even Turkey’s stubborn denial that a genocide took place is little more than a game of semantics. There is little serious debate about the events of 1915-23, and even Turkey acknowledged the excesses with a series of court martials against the perpetrators of the “extermination” of Armenian civilians. According to Turkish records published on the Armenian- Genocide.org website, the tribunals acknowledged the “massacre and destruction of the Armenians and the looting and plunder of their properties” and “murder of people, plunder of goods and money, gutting houses and corpses, rape and the indulging in all sorts of tortures and shameful acts.”
Despite the historical record, however, Turkish representatives remain committed not only to denying that the genocide took place, but also to ensuring that the international community denies recognition as well.
To a large degree, those efforts have been successful mostly due to the demands of realpolitik – most countries have more to lose by alienating Turkey, with its 78 million people, powerful military and $1.5 trillion GDP than they have to gain by siding with the present-day Republic Armenia, landlocked, resource poor and with a population of just over three million.
As a result, so far only 22 of the world’s close to 200 countries have officially described the massacres as “genocide.” In addition, 45 of the 50 US states have issued proclamations with the “G-word” and every state in the US marks April 24 as an Armenian memorial day. On the other hand, every US president since Ronald Reagan has issued a statement of support to the Armenian community on April 24 – without calling it genocide.
Away from the political stage, academics who have wanted to publish research with the word “genocide” say they have encountered censorship from department and university heads, who fear losing Turkish funding. In Israel, Hintlian says, a 1972 film by the late filmmaker Micha Shagrir about the Armenian Quarter has been subject to an unofficial ban because of a five-minute segment that features eyewitness accounts of the Armenian Genocide. He says the film has never been shown in its entirety in Israel.
“There is no question, governments are guided by interests, not ethics,” says Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to Turkey. “Take apartheid South Africa, for example. Most governments supported the Afrikaner government until it became clear that it was only a matter of time until it all collapsed.
“You see the same phenomenon with regard to Israeli-Palestinian issues. In Europe, you’ve got something like 12 parliaments around the continent that have ‘recognized’ a Palestinian state, even though no such state exists. But as soon as the parliament does that, the prime minister is on the phone to Bibi to smooth things over and to say ‘don’t worry about it.’ So the public can often feel one way –that is represented by national parliaments – but governments deal with interests,” Liel tells The Report.
In many ways, the frustrating hope for recognition and the community’s inability to evoke true feelings of empathy, identification or support from non-Armenians seems to define the essence of what it means to be Armenian in the 21st century.
Interviews and conversations spanning multiple generations of Armenians, including native Jerusalemites, members of the Armenian diaspora and young Armenians who represent the first generation raised in independent, post-Soviet Armenia, reveal that to be Armenian today is to face the world not only with overwhelming sadness over the killings, but also with a devastating sense of having been abandoned ever since.
Perhaps as a result of that reality, Armenians seem wary of allowing outsiders to share in their pain after generations of abandonment by the international community.
Older Armenians say the humiliation of having to fight merely for acknowledgement of the genocide is “devastating,” mixed with immense anger at international media that routinely use the April 24 memorial day to advise Armenians to “let bygones be bygones.”
Younger Armenians, on the other hand, agree that all Armenians have been affected by the history of the genocide. But, in contrast to their parents’ generation, they say they are committed to engaging the world, both to let it know about the genocide but also to show off the positive aspects of Armenian culture.
“We want to show the world that we are peaceful. Armenians do not want to go to war; we are creative and have advanced arts – music, literature and architecture.
History has been cruel to us, but we are here to bring the world a message of harmony and peace,” says 36-yearold Roseanna Badalyan, the director of a song-and-dance troupe from Yerevan.
Sitting on a stone wall inside the Armenian Quarter during a mid-March tour of the Holy Land, Badalyan compares the Armenians to the Jews – both are ancient peoples who have suffered as minorities at the hands of other nations but who have ultimately outlived many oppressors.
Asked whether young Armenians look to Jews to learn about how to cope with the emotional fallout of having been descendants of the victims of genocide, Badalyan tells The Report that many of her friends view Jews with admiration for being “such a strong-willed nation.”
On the other hand, community leaders note that Israel’s record in relating to the Armenian Genocide has been disappointing.
On the one hand, the issue is one of the few areas of agreement among ideologues such as left-wing Meretz chairwoman Zehava Gal-On and right-wing Likud leader Menachem Begin, who consistently called on Israel to recognize the genocide. Another supporter of that position is President Reuven Rivlin.
SEVERAL INDIVIDUALS named former president Shimon Peres and former foreign minister Avigdor Liberman as the “worst” Israeli politicians on the issue, using it as a political chip rather than as a moral imperative. “We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. What the Armenians went through is a tragedy, but not genocide,” Peres said in 2001.
This is an issue that has caused repercussions in Israel. In April 2000, then-education minister Yossi Sarid (Meretz) said he would introduce studies on the Armenian Genocide into the high school curriculum. “The next day, Peres flew to Ankara to apologize,” Hintlian says.
Sitting in his sparsely decorated office deep inside the Armenian Patriarchate, Archbishop Aris Shirvanian, director of the community’s Ecumenical and Foreign Relations division, says the disconnect between the support the Armenian community has always received from Jewish groups and Israel’s checkered record on the genocide has long been a source of frustration and confusion.
“Of course we sympathize with our Jewish brothers and sisters for the Holocaust that they suffered,” the 81-year-old Shirvanian tells The Report. “We always emphasize the fact that Hitler used the Armenian massacres to plan the annihilation of the Jewish nation. We wonder why the Israeli government has so far refused to recognize the Armenian Genocide, the first genocide of the 20th century, which also served as a model for Hitler.”
Shirvanian, who has served in his current capacity since 1998, after 30 years in the US, notes that while the shared historical memory of genocide creates a strong link between Jews and Armenians, the Armenian community also identifies strongly with the Palestinian narrative of dispossession in the wake of the establishment of the State of Israel. He points out, however, that while this reality could theoretically give the community a platform to serve as a bridge between Israel and the Palestinians, in reality the small Armenian presence in the Holy Land means the community has little influence on either side of that dividing line.
THERE IS no indication that Ankara is preparing to rethink official Turkish policy on the events of 100 years ago. Armenian officials say there is no expectation either that US President Barack Obama or Congress will produce any major statement on the genocide, mainly because the US needs Turkey’s support on Syria and a host of other regional issues.
The same is true in Israel, where the Foreign Ministry is likely to continue its long-standing policy of discouraging – or actively dissuading – Israeli officials and academics from using the word “genocide,” despite the fact that ties with the current Turkish leadership are in deep freeze mode with no change expected in the foreseeable future.
However, Hintlian and Shirvanian say there are tangible developments in Turkey and elsewhere. “Things are changing, and not in Turkey’s favor. The Pope’s statement in Rome on April 12 was critical,” asserts Hintlian. “But even more importantly, Turkish academics like Hassan Jamal are starting to push back against the official line, telling the truth about the massacres. The highest number of books being published right now in Turkey is about the Armenian Genocide. They cannot complain anymore that they are not informed,” he notes.
Shirvanian concurs. “Armenians will continue to fight for justice – for an admission of guilt by Turkey, and for compensation – for the 2,000 monasteries and church properties that were stolen. Then, once the religious institutions get their property back, it will move to bank accounts and people will ask for their individual houses. Turkey will be cornered.”
Ultimately, however, Hintlian, Shirvanian and others agreed that the compensation the Armenians need most is an apology from Turkey. That would hardly help Armenia eliminate its economic challenges, but it would certainly go a long way toward helping the Armenian community progress after a century of denials and political wrangling over communal memory.
“There have been a number of phases over the past 100 years. Our parents’ generation suffered intensely, mourning the deaths of their parents and suffering the trauma of having survived that experience.
But they are gone now. As for their descendants, we no longer mourn the victims directly.
”An injustice was committed – we will persevere with this issue as long as there is some ray of hope that the nations of the world will eventually pay attention to the Armenian demands,” Shirvanian declares.