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- In 1915 the rulers of the Ottoman empire turned their hatred on Armenians
- The Young Turks persecution of the minority turned to unbridled savagery
- Modern Turkey faces disgust over refusal to admit the historic genocide
- WARNING GRAPHIC IMAGES
Published:
22:56 GMT, 17 April 2015
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Updated:
00:53 GMT, 18 April 20151.8k
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She
was in bed when the soldiers came in the middle of the night and dragged
her father out of the family home in Diyarbakir, a city in eastern
Turkey.
The
last thing little Aghavni (her name means ‘dove’ in her native
Armenian) heard as she cowered in her room was his shout of defiance: ‘I
was born a Christian and I will die a Christian.’
Not
until first light did Aghavni dare to creep downstairs on that morning
100 years ago. ‘I saw an object sticking through the front door,’ she
later remembered. ‘I pushed it open and there lay two horseshoes nailed
to two feet.
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the ruling Turks had turned their
hatred on the 2 million men, women and children of Armenian extraction
who lived within their borders
‘My
eyes followed up to the blood-covered ankles, the disjointed knees, the
mound of blood where the genitals had been, to a long laceration
through the abdomen to the chest.
‘I
came to the hands, which were nailed horizontally on a board with big
spikes of iron, like a cross. The shoulders were remarkably clean and
white, but there was no head.
‘This
was lying on the steps, propped up by the nose. I recognised the neatly
trimmed beard along the cheekbones. It was my father.’
The
year was 1915. In the sprawling, beleaguered Ottoman Empire — an ally of
the German Kaiser in the world war that had engulfed Europe and parts
of Asia for nine months — the ruling Turks had turned their hatred on
the 2 million men, women and children of Armenian extraction who lived
within their borders.
The
Armenians — who lived on the eastern edge of the empire ruled from
Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) — were Christians and had been
since the year 301, making theirs the first nation officially to adopt
Christianity, even before Rome.
But
here, among the Islamic Turks, they had long been second-class
citizens, a persecuted minority. Now, as power in the land was seized by
a junta of nationalist officers known as the Young Turks, persecution
turned to unbridled savagery.
Over
the next six months, there was to be a systematic uprooting and
slaughter of perhaps as many as 1.5 million Armenians — on the grounds
that they were infidels, racially inferior ‘dogs’ and traitors who were
siding with Russia against Turkey.
Those
who weren’t put to death on the spot, their faith cruelly mocked — such
as Aghavni’s father, a mild-mannered, cultivated spice merchant who
spoke five languages — were hounded in columns, eastwards, into the
deserts of Syria and Iraq to die.
Their remains are long turned to dust, but the controversy that surrounds those terrible events is as alive as ever.
Just
this week at mass in St Peter’s in Rome, the Pope heralded the upcoming
centenary of the first killings on April 24 by describing the slaughter
of the Armenian Christians as ‘the first genocide of the 20th century’ —
only to be ticked off by Turkey in no uncertain terms for inflammatory
remarks.
A Turkish official teases starving Armenian children during the genocide in Turkey in 1915
Turkey
recalled its ambassador to the Vatican and accused the Pope of
spreading ‘hatred and animosity’ with ‘unfounded allegations’.
The
Turks take objection to the word ‘genocide’ — first coined in the 1940s
to describe what the Nazis did to the Jews, but also ever since applied
to the 1915 massacre of the Armenians.
Not true, has always been the official response from Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey’s capital.
Hundreds of thousands died in that era, they admit, (though they dispute the numbers are anywhere near as high as claimed).
But
this, they maintain, happened as a result of chaotic wartime
conditions, civil strife, starvation and in response to Armenian
violence, not because of a deliberate, officially organised and
systematic plan to eliminate an entire people.
Armenian children caught up in the 1915 genocide which modern Turkey still refuses to acknowledge
None of it, they continue to insist a century on, was sanctioned from on high.
What
seems to trouble the Turks is admitting that their country was founded
in modern times on a deliberate act of ethnic cleansing.
They
may also be concerned that an admission will bring an avalanche of
demands for reparations and, at the very least, the return of land and
wealth seized back in 1915.
So
they protest their innocence of genocide, even though historians who
disagree have formed long queues over the years with convincing and
detailed evidence that this is precisely what took place.
So,
too, have international lawyers, among them most recently Amal Clooney,
the glamorous human rights barrister and wife of Hollywood actor George
Clooney.
In
court in Switzerland earlier this year, she took up Armenia’s case and
challenged a nationalist Turkish MP who maintained in public that the
Armenian genocide was an ‘international lie’. There should be no
doubting the reality of genocide that Armenian people suffered a century
ago, she insisted.
In court in Switzerland earlier this
year, Amal Clooney (pictured) took up Armenia’s case and challenged a
nationalist Turkish MP who maintained in public that the Armenian
genocide was an ‘international lie’
Another
celebrity rooting for the Armenians over the injustice they have
suffered is, perhaps surprisingly, the reality TV star Kim Kardashian,
whose ancestors were lucky to flee to the U.S. from Armenia just two
years before the massacres.
Showing
a serious side not normally seen, she says that ‘until this crime is
resolved truthfully and fairly, the Armenian people will live with the
pain of what happened to their families’. This week, she visited the
country with her family to lay flowers at its memorial to the victims.
In
Turkey, to express such views is dangerous. Public debate is stifled by
a law that bans ‘insulting Turkishness’ and has been invoked against
those who speak out — including a Nobel Prize winner, whose books were
burned by protesters.
Another
writer was gunned down in the street in Istanbul by an offended
ultra-nationalist, who shouted ‘I shot the infidel’ as he delivered the
fatal shot.
Turkey
has also been accused of belittling the Armenian centenary by bringing
forward its commemorations of Gallipoli, the bloody 1915 battle on the
Turkish peninsula, from the traditional April 25 date to clash with the
April 24 memorial.
Outside
of Turkey, the position is strangely confused. Around two dozen
countries acknowledge the truth of the Armenian genocide, despite often
strong-arm diplomacy by Turkey to dissuade them and put Ankara’s gloss
on past events. They will be greatly heartened by the Pope’s stance.
But
others have chosen to sit on the fence, notably the United States,
unwilling to cross swords with a Nato ally that is geographically so
close to Russia.
Before
coming to office, President Obama promised his nation’s one million
people with Armenian roots that he would recognise that genocide had
occurred, but has not yet dared to utter the word, hiding behind the
less-damning Armenian phrase ‘Medz Yeghern’ — the great crime or the
great catastrophe.
Yet,
ironically, it was an American who first made the world aware of what
happened. Back in 1915, Henry Morgenthau was the U.S. Ambassador to the
Ottoman Empire, and on his desk in Constantinople landed reports from
American consuls in far-flung Turkish cities, documenting massacres and
death marches.
Former Armenian President Robert Kocharian (Left) takes part in the ceremony at the Genocide Memorial complex in Yerevan
He concluded: ‘I do not believe the darkest ages ever presented scenes more horrible.’
Unleashed
on the Armenians, Turkish policemen and soldiers ransacked Christian
churches and handed bishops and priests over to the mob.
Community
leaders such as doctors and teachers were hanged in batches on gallows
in town squares. An American missionary reported seeing men tied
together with their heads sticking through the rungs of a ladder to be
lopped off with swords.
Torture
was commonplace, Morgenthau maintained as he studied the evidence.
‘They would pull out eyebrows and beards almost hair by hair, extract
fingernails and toenails, apply red-hot irons and tear off flesh with
pincers, then pour boiled butter into the wounds.’
Crucifixion
was treated as a sport. ‘As the sufferer writhes in his agony, they
would cry: “Now let your Christ come and help you”.’
When
orders were given to assemble all the Armenians and march them out into
the desert, Morgenthau had no doubt that this was ‘the death warrant to
a whole race’.
Moreover, he said: ‘In their conversations with me, the
authorities made no particular attempt to conceal the fact’.
Children, whose parents had been killed for their ethnicity and religion in the brutal genocide here pictured together in 1918
He
wrote graphically of how men were taken from their ploughs, women from
their ovens and children from their beds to join ‘the panic-stricken
throng’. Young men were strung up or shot — ‘the only offence being that
they were Armenians’.
Convicts
were let out of prison to help with the killings. Locals joined in,
too. In Ankara, all Armenian men aged 15 to 70 were bound in fours and
led out to a secluded valley, where Turkish peasants hacked them to
death with scythes, spades and saws.
‘In this way, they exterminated the whole male population.’
For six months, as the enforced exodus went on, Morgenthau reported, roads and tracks were crowded with lines of Armenians.
Turkish Workers Party IP leader Dogu Perincek speaks to journalists in Switzerland during his trial on denial of genocide
‘They
could be seen winding through every valley and mountain-side, moving on
they scarcely knew where, except that every road led to death.
‘They
left behind the unburied dead, as well as men and women dying of
typhus, dysentery and cholera and children setting up their last piteous
wails for food and water.’
How
many died? Morgenthau reported that, on one particular death march, of
the 18,000 who set out, just 150 were alive a week later.
A
survivor recalled that ‘death was our constant companion. We fought the
threat of panic, hunger, fear and sleepless nights but, in the end,
they won. It seemed there was no pity or humanity in the hearts of our
captors’. As they crossed the Euphrates river, one witness reported how
‘bloated bodies lay on the bank, black from the sun, tongues hanging
out. Bones showed through decaying skin’.
‘The
stomachs of pregnant women had been slit open and their unborn children
placed in their hands like black grapes. Children were crying next to
dead parents. Women were delirious.’
So
many dead bodies clogged the river that its course was diverted for
several hundred yards. But at least the water gave relief to some.
Mothers sank into it gratefully, their babies in their arms, to drown
and end their misery.
Women
suffered special horrors. Aghavni — that girl whose story of stumbling
on her father’s crucified and decapitated body we saw earlier — recalled
how, in her home town, a group of 20 Armenian women were forced to
dance under a blue, cloudless sky.
‘Turkish
soldiers stood behind them shouting “Dance, sluts” and cracking their
whips across their breasts, so their clothes would fall off. Some were
half-naked, others tried to hold their clothes together.
‘The
women were praying as they moved in a slow circle, holding hands.
Occasionally, they would drop the hand next to them and quickly make the
sign of the cross.
‘When
they fell down, they were whipped until they got up and continued their
dance. Each crack of the whip and more of their clothing came off.
Over one million of the two million Armenians living within the borders of the Ottoman Empire were murdered
‘Around them stood their children, who were forced to clap, faster and faster. If they stopped, they were whipped.
‘Some
were two years old and barely able to stand up. They cried
uncontrollably, in a terrible, pitiful, hopeless way.’ All of this was
watched by a crowd of delighted Turkish townspeople in smart dresses and
business suits, ‘clapping, too, like cockroaches’.
What
came next was beyond belief. ‘Two soldiers pushed through the crowd,
swinging buckets, and doused the women with kerosene. As the women
screamed, another soldier came forward with a torch and lit each woman
by her hair.
Armenian widow with 3 children seeking
help from missionaries in 1899. Her husband was killed in the aftermath
of the Armenian Massacres of 1894-1896
‘At first, all I could see was smoke. Then I saw the fire coming off their bodies, and their screaming became unbearable.
‘The
children were being whipped furiously now, as if the burning mothers
had excited the soldiers, and they admonished the children to clap
faster and faster, telling them that if they stopped they, too, would be
set on fire.
‘As the women collapsed in burning heaps, oozing and black, the smell of burnt flesh made me sick and I fainted.’
On
the death march out into the desert, Aghavni remembered how women were
openly tortured and abused. ‘If a woman would not readily submit to sex,
she was whipped and, if she tried to run away, she was shot.’
She
could only watch in horror as a girl resisted and a policeman took out
his sword, ripped open her dress and then slashed off her breasts. ‘They
fell to the ground and she bled to death next to them.’ Aghavni
survived her ordeal — one of the few to do so. She lived, eventually
making her way to America to give her first-hand account of a genocide
that the Turkish authorities are still adamant did not take place.
Armenia
survived, too, as a country — becoming independent for a while after
the break-up of the Ottoman empire, before being sucked into the maw of
the Soviet Union for 70 years, from which it emerged as a state in its
own right in 1991.
This
week, Turkey’s president declared that Armenians pressing Turkey to
recognise massacres as genocide are simply trying to score points
against his country.
‘Their aim is not to search for the truth, but to attack Turkey and cause it harm,’ he contends.
But
such defiance flies in the face of history. Arnold J. Toynbee, a
British intelligence agent at the time (and later a distinguished
historian), wrote that ‘all this horror was inflicted on the Armenians
without a shadow of provocation’.
People from 12 countries (Germany,
Austria, Belgium, Bulgary, Cyprus, Spain, France, Greece, Italy,
Netherlands, UK and Sweden) demonstrate for recognition of the Armenian
Genocide
He
heard, back then, the Turkish argument that there was a war on and the
Armenians were traitors, ‘but such excuses are entirely contradicted by
the facts’.
‘None
of the towns and villages from which they were systematically deported
to their death were anywhere near the hostilities. The Ottoman
Government cannot disguise its crime as a preventive measure.’ Toynbee
wrote this in 1916.
That
in 2015 Turkey is still insisting on rewriting history should concern
us all — not least because in a world where Islamic forces are, once
again, brutally targeting Christians in the Middle East and Africa, the
lessons of the past need to be faced and finally learned.
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