A lesser-known genocide

A week after Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jerusalem’s Armenians are marking the centenary of their people’s massacre – which they are still fighting for the world to recognize.

By ANNA PAZOS
St. Tarkmantchatz pupils stand for the Holocaust Remembrance Day siren last Thursday morning. (photo credit: ANNA PAZOS)
St. Tarkmantchatz pupils stand for the Holocaust Remembrance Day siren last Thursday morning.
(photo credit: ANNA PAZOS)
At 10 a.m. on April 16, when the Holocaust Remembrance Day siren wailed throughout the country, the 160 students of the only Armenian school in Jerusalem stopped their classes and stood up in respect.
Shortly after, movement returned to the St. Tarkmantchatz school, a small stone building in the heart of the Old City’s Armenian Quarter. Children wearing blue uniforms ran up and down the aisles among maps of Greater Armenia, pictures of saints and drawings of prominent Christian Orthodox cathedrals. These days are particularly moving for the school, which this week is commemorating the centenary of an earlier 20th-century tragedy: the Armenian genocide – the systematic killing and displacement of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, of whom most of these students are descendants.
“We want them to understand that it’s very important to commemorate other nations’ genocides,” says Mihran Der Matossian, director of the school and a descendant of Armenian survivors. “Because we have also been through this hard track, it is our duty to respect other people’s pain – as we expect others to respect ours.”
St. Tarkmantchatz school was created in 1929 to meet the needs of Jerusalem’s growing Armenian community, whose presence in the city had increased exponentially after the arrival of thousands of refugees from other parts of the Ottoman Empire, including hundreds of orphans. They were fleeing the massacres and deportations that the Young Turks had carried out from 1915 to 1923, in what would later be described as a genocide. The few Armenians living in Ottoman Palestine were luckier than their counterparts in Anatolia, whom Turkish rulers saw as a potential threat.
Hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes and forced to walk to the point of exhaustion through desert landscapes.
Only one-third of the 2.5 million Armenians who lived in the Ottoman Empire survived the death marches. To this day, Turkey has refused to take any responsibility and declares that the killings were not systematic, but collateral damage from the violence that arose during the empire’s collapse.
“When it happened, the word ‘genocide’ didn’t yet exist,” the school director points out, standing in a hall of portraits of prominent Armenians who died in the killings. It was Raphael Lemkins, a Polish Jew whose parents were killed in Auschwitz, who coined the term in 1944, stating that the Armenian was the first genocide of modern history. Another Jew, the Austrian-Bohemian Franz Werfel, wrote the most prominent novel about Armenian resistance, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto later used as a handbook.
And yet, no official act of remembrance will take place in Israel on April 24, the date that marks the beginning of the massacres. Only a few symbolic events are happening in Jerusalem. On Thursday, April 23, 18 church bells were set to toll in unison 100 times, coinciding with the canonization of the victims in Armenia.
On the 24th, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is hosting a common prayer for the memory of the dead.
ARMENIAN PRESENCE in the Holy Land has fluctuated over the past century. In 1948, during the war that followed Israel’s declaration of independence, those who had settled in British-ruled Palestine after escaping the massacres were caught in the crossfire between Arabs and Jews. About 10,000 left their homes in Jaffa and Haifa and emigrated elsewhere, leaving behind a community of approximately 5,000. While endogamy within the Armenian population limited its growth, many more emigrated to the United States, Canada or Australia in the following years, fleeing the harsh conditions of living in the newborn State of Israel.
“They just didn’t see a bright future here, mainly because of unemployment,” says Der Matossian.
Their situation nowadays isn’t much better.
“Almost every family thinks about whether they should stay or leave,” says Arda, a Jerusalem-born Armenian filmmaker and producer. “The country has become too politicized.”
With some exceptions, Armenians don’t hold Israeli citizenship, and their status is the same as that of Palestinians from east Jerusalem: They hold a residence permit and are allowed to vote in municipal elections, but travel with Jordanian passports.
“We are the grandchildren of the genocide,” says John Garibian, who moved to Los Angeles in the ’70s but comes to Israel every year to visit his family. “My grandparents were both slaughtered by the Turks in front of my father. He was three years old. After the war, French officials put him in a trailer and took him to an orphanage in Lebanon. He ran away at 10, and at 16 he obtained a driving license and came to Jerusalem to get married.”
Such stories constitute a common background for most of the Armenian Diaspora, including the 2,000 who live today in Jerusalem. Their quarter occupies about a fifth of the Old City, sprawling around St.
James Monastery. Its internal courtyard – itself a part of the neighborhood – is a haven of tranquility amid the bustle of tourists, visitors and worshipers who come and go in the surrounding streets. These days, a huge red, blue and orange Armenian flag covers the façade of one of its buildings; here and there, one can see posters with the purple forget-me-not that symbolizes the centenary of the genocide.
This month, the Armenian quarter has been unusually hectic. The celebration of Orthodox Easter has coincided with the preparations for the centenary commemoration; worshipers attending the solemn liturgies in the monastery intermingled with Armenian statesmen and even Armenian celebrities such as Kim Kardashian.
However, all commemorative events are being organized without official support. On the eve of the 100th anniversary of the massacre, Armenians in Jerusalem and elsewhere are still struggling for recognition.
“A human tragedy has been politicized,” says George Hintlian, a historian and activist who has dedicated his life to documenting the mass killings. Born in Jerusalem in 1945, he has interviewed more than 800 genocide survivors and eventually became the de facto spokesman for the community.
Hintlian, whose family lost several members in the death marches, exudes bitterness when referring to the non-response of the international community: “The world betrayed Armenia. When the Turks said they would give minority rights to the few survivors remaining in the country, everyone pretended to believe it and just turned the page.”
Israel is among the countries that haven’t recognized the genocide; Hintlian claims it is due to geopolitical reasons, namely the country’s strategic alliance with Turkey and Azerbaijan. The latter is a newly independent state officially at war with Armenia, and a strong client of Israel’s weapons market.
Sitting in a dimly lit corner of the Gulbenkian Armenian library, Hintlian unfolds a map of the Ottoman Empire. A mesh of red arrows and circles represents the massacres, deportations and sites of Armenian resistance between 1915 and 1923.
“Here they took thousands of people in boats and threw them into the sea,” he says, pointing at the Pontos in northeastern Turkey. Further south, “in Shebinkarahisar, like in Masada, a whole village committed suicide to not have to surrender to the Turks.”
His finger traces the territory and stops in the heart of Eastern Anatolia, where Turkish officials “gathered villagers in barns and set them on fire; in two weeks they put about 200 villages to the torch.”
Looking up from the map, he recounts some of the personal tragedies he’s come across during his research.
Rape and sexual abuse are a common factor to almost all women’s stories.
“The moment a government starts a genocide, you stop being a citizen and become nobody. Law just doesn’t protect you,” he sums up.
In the case of forced displacement, when people slowly died of disease, fatigue or thirst, death was almost a relief.
“Recognition and condemnation are essential to prevent similar crimes in the future,” says Hintlian. As he points out, some of the German officials who served with the Turks and witnessed their methods – such as the German vice consul in Erzurum, Max von Scheubner- Richter – later became advisers to Adolf Hitler.
YET SOME small steps have been made toward worldwide recognition. In January 2012, the French parliament pushed for a bill criminalizing denials of the 1915 killings (it didn’t pass). In the weeks prior to the centenary, Pope Francis called the mass killing of Armenians “the first genocide of the 20th century,” and the European Parliament urged Turkey to recognize the event. Hintlian maintains that a paradigm shift could eventually take place due to international pressure and the sheer impossibility of constantly denying evidence.
“We would like to have a human understanding with the Turks,” he says. “The only thing they have to do is apologize. We are ready to forgive.”
Nevertheless, the general feeling is one of precaution and resentment.
“I always try not to be optimistic,” says Setrag Bailan, an 18-year-old economics student from a family of potters. “Every time a country starts talking about recognition, we get high hopes, but then it turns out to be nothing. It’s really frustrating.”
Bailan’s great-grandfather came to Jerusalem in 1919 from his native Kütahya, a Turkish town in central Anatolia that used to be the artistic center of Armenian pottery. The British authorities brought him to help renovate the tiles of the Dome of the Rock. In 1922, he opened a ceramics workshop that ultimately became a multinational company.
“We made all the street names and numbers of the Old City,” says Bailan proudly.
Bailan wants to dedicate his future to lobbying for the Armenian cause, now that the task of providing evidence of the genocide is complete: “We just need political strength. The only things that matter now are power and money. It has been proved that justice and humanitarianism are overrated.”