The 1915 Armenian genocide: Finding a fit testament to a timeless crime

As the last survivors die out, academics must consider how best to create a lasting memorial to the 1.5 million who were murdered. Images of a genocide: Victims of the ‘Great Slaughter

Η Γενοκτονία των Αρμενίων
Ένα άρθρο του γνωστού αρθρογράφου Ρόπερτ Φίσκ στην βρετανική
Ιντεπεντεντ 6 Απριλίου 2014 που θα πρέπει να διαβάσει  ΟΛΟΣ ο κόσμος
αλλά πρώτοι απ όλους οι ΕΛΛΗΝΕΣ της Κύπρου, Ελλάδας και αποδημίας. 
 
Ειδικά εκείνοι τα μυαλά των οποίων έχουν δηλητηριαστεί από τα λεγόμενα
και σκόπιμα «επαναπροσεγγιστικά» σεμινάρια, και συστηματικές προσπάθειες
για επιβολή της τουρκο-βρετανικής Διζωνικής Δικοινοτικής Ομοσπονδίας,
που ξεκίνησαν από το Κάμπτεν Τάουν του Λονδίνου αμέσως μετά την τουρκική
βάρβαρη εισβολή και κατοχή της μισής μας πατρίδας (Κύπρου). 

Μέσω της διαβόητης επιτροπής «Φίλοι της Κύπρου» που ίδρυσε τότε ο τελευταίος
διχοτόμος αποικιακός κυβερνήτης της Κύπρου σερ Χιού Φούτ πλάι σε
κάποιους ανεκδιήγητους φιλόαγγλους δικούς μας όπως τον περιβόητο
εφοπλιστή Κώστα Καρρά, τον μ. ΄Ομηρο Χαπίπη (πρόεδρο της Κυπριακής
Ομοσπονδίας Κυπρίων Βρετανίας μέχρι τον θάνατό του) και ορισμένους
άλλους υποταγμένους που δεν μπορούσαν να «κακοφανίσουν» τους φίλους
Βρετανούς.
 

Τον Φούτ διαδέχθηκε ο φλεγματικός και αυτός μ. λόρδος Μπέθελ
(πράκτορες της ΜΙ6 σε σχέση με την Ρωσία και όχι μόνον) ο οποίος δεν
ήθελε να δει μπροστά του Ελληνοκύπριο πρόσφυγα. Κατά την εμφάνιση του
εκτρώματος Ανάν η διαχρονικά «γραμματέας» των τάχατες φίλων (που έχουν
μείνει 3 και ο κούκος) περσονα νον γκράτα για την σημερινή ηγεσία της
ομογένειας Βρετανίας, Μαίρη Σάουθκοτ, είχε ξεσπαθώσει υπέρ του σχεδίου
με φιλοτουρκικές θέσεις και εμετικές δηλώσεις σε τουρκικά έντυπα…

Και όλοι αυτοί να ΞΕΧΝΟΥΝ ή να ΑΓΝΟΟΥΝ ΕΝΣΥΝΕΙΔΗΤΑ (και να
προσπαθούν να προσηλυτίζουν δικούς μας στις φιλοτουρκικές αυτές θέσεις
τους – στόχος της περιβόητης αυτής Μαίρης Σάουθκοτ είναι οι …φοιτητές
μας! ) τις σφαγές, γενοκτονίες, ξεριζωμούς, βιασμούς, συλήσεις,
εγκλωβισμούς, τους αγνοούμενους μας, την ΠΡΟΣΦΥΓΙΑ τω ν 200,000 τόσων
συμπατριωτών μας, στο πάγιο πρότυπο των Τούρκων (γενοκτονία Αρμενίων και
Ελλήνων Πόντου και Μ. Ασίας) και μοναδικό στόχο να έχουν την εξασφάλιση
των τουρκο-βρετανικών στόχων από το 1956…

Ο λόγος λοιπόν που θα πρέπει το άρθρο αυτό του Φίσκ να το
διαβάσουν επι τω πλείστον ΔΙΚΟΙ ΜΑΣ, είναι για να συνέλθουν, αν τα
καταφέρουν, και δουν την ωμή πραγματικότητα (εκτός του ότι την χάραξε 
βαθιά στον κατεχόμενο Πενταδάκτυλο ο μ. Ντενκτάς πριν φύγει, που βλέπουν
κάθε μέρα αλλά δεν αγανακτούν) και θυμηθούν, πέραν του ποίοι φταίνε, τι
ΕΚΑΝΑΝ σε δικούς μας ανθρώπους οι Τούρκοι βοηθούμενοι και από
Τουρκοκύπριους το 1974.

Γιατί ακόμα και εκεί η Ιστορία δεν λέχθηκε όπως
πρέπει, αλλά, όπως συμφέρει σε κάποια κόμματα και τους συνοδοιπόρους
τους – για να αποκαλυφθούν και ποίοι δικοί μας και πως συνέβαλαν και με
την δική τους αλαζονική και όχι μόνον νοοτροπία και χειρισμό του
Κυπριακού,  στην τραγωδία του 1974…

Επειδή και η οικογένεια του πατέρα μου ήσαν Έλληνες πρόσφυγες
της Μικράς Ασίας το 1922 και άκουσα και έμαθα για πολλά τέτοια τουρκικά
εγκλήματα από αυτόπτες μάρτυρες,  γιαγιές και θείες μου  που η μοίρα
τους έταξε να ξαναγίνουν πρόσφυγες στην νέα τους πατρίδα την Κύπρο το
1963 και το 1974 ( η υπόλοιπη οικογένεια βρήκε καταφύγιο στην Ελλάδα),
γι΄αυτό και ένα από τα 9 βιβλία μου,  το αφιέρωσα στην έρευνα (μέσω των
βρετανικών επισήμων εγγράφων στο Κρατικό Αρχείο) στην Γενοκτονία των
Ελλήνων Ποντίων και Μ. Ασίας. Γι΄αυτό άρθρα σαν του Ρόπερτ Φίσκ πρέπει
να διαφυλάσσονται, να εκτιμούνται και να χρησιμοποιούνται ως εργαλεία
βαθύτερης γνώσης για τις τραγωδίες για τις οποίες ευθύνονται οι
κατακτητές Τούρκοι.

Τούρκοι ακαδημαϊκοί, γράφει ο Φίσκ, τώρα άρχισαν να αναγνωρίζουν την αλήθεια…

Τους Τούρκους πήρε βέβαια, έναν ολόκληρο αιώνα για να φτάσουν
έστω και λίγοι, σ΄αυτό το σημείο.

Ας ελπίζουμε ότι δεν θα χρειαστούν
άλλα τόσα για την περίπτωση της Κύπρου και το άνοιγμα του λεγόμενου
«Φακέλου της Κύπρου». ΄Ηδη πέρασαν τα 40 και ακόμα…

Δίχως να γνωρίζουμε το παρελθόν και ποίοι έφταιξαν,
απελευθερωμένοι από προσωπολατρίες και ψευδαισθήσεις,  δεν μπορούμε να
δούμε το μέλλον.

Φανούλα Αργυρού – Λονδίνο  6.4.2014

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-1915-armenian-genocide-finding-a-fit-testament-to-a-timeless-crime-9241154.html

The 1915 Armenian genocide: Finding a fit testament to a timeless crime

As the last survivors die out, academics must consider how best to
create a lasting memorial to the 1.5 million who were murdered

Robert Fisk
Sunday 06 April 2014

• The very last Armenian survivors of the 1915 genocide – in which a
  million and a half Christians were slaughtered by the Ottoman Turks –
  are dying, and Armenians are now facing the same fearful dilemma that
  Jews around the world will confront in scarcely three decades’ time: how
  to keep the memory of their holocausts alive when the last living
  witnesses of Ottoman and Nazi evil are dead?

At a recent conference in California, Armenians have been discussing
how to maintain the integrity of their historical tragedy in hundreds of
years to come – when even the grandchildren of the survivors and
victims have gone. Like Jews in Israel, Europe and America, the
Armenians have amassed tens of thousands of documents, photographs,
digital recordings of survivors’ testimony and files from Ottoman
archives showing the orders for the destruction of Turkey’s Ottoman
Christians. But will that be enough, in 500 years’ time, say, to
separate the unique wickedness of the Armenian genocide – and, by
extension, the Nazi destruction of the Jews – from all the other mass
crimes against humanity in history?
Israelis use the same Hebrew word, shoah (holocaust), for the
liquidation of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, as they do for Hitler’s
killing of six million Jews in Europe. The two events, despite the
numerical difference in the total dead, have much in common. The
Armenians were told they would be “resettled” in other lands of the
Ottoman empire, before being deliberately sent on death marches of rape,
pillage and mass slaughter across the deserts during the First World
War. Their homes and property were confiscated, hundreds of thousands of
Armenian men were separated and slaughtered with knives and axes in
ravines by “special units” of the Ottoman government – the equivalent of
Hitler’s Einsatzkommandos in the occupied Soviet Union – while their
women and children were robbed, violated, starved to death and butchered
by the roadside.
Ottoman soldiers posing in front of Armenians they have hanged The
Turks used railway wagons to transport Armenian men, women and children
to their deaths, while in the northern Syrian desert – the scene of
further killing in the present civil war – the Ottomans engineered the
first primitive gas chambers by driving thousands of Armenians into rock
caves and asphyxiating them by lighting bonfires at the entrances.

Ottoman soldiers posing in front of Armenians they have hanged

I have personally interviewed dozens of Armenian survivors – all now
dead – who described the rape and murder in front of them of their
sisters and mothers. One elderly Armenian lady told me of how Turkish
gendarmes piled up babies and set them on fire; her mother tried to
console her child by explaining that the cries were “the sound of the
babies’ souls going up to heaven”. The Armenian conference in California
watched graphic evidence of how the Turks “Islamised” Christian
Armenian children in an orphanage north of Beirut; some of the small,
starving inmates stayed alive only by grinding up and eating the bones
of other children who had died.
The principal focus of the international conference at the
Ararat-Eskijian Museum in California last month, in which I also
participated, was to honour “those who helped rescue a generation of
Armenians between 1915 and 1930″ and included graphic footage of the
largest home for child survivors after the genocide: a converted Tsarist
barracks at Alexandrapole in which 22,000 children who had lost their
parents were cared for by foreign NGOs, including the American Near East
Relief fund.
Thousands of children emerged from their unspeakable ordeal blinded
by trachoma after drinking contaminated water. “The sand would get into
their eyes and doctors would have to open their eyelids and scrape the
sand from their pupils,” researcher Missak Keleshian said.
There are direct links between the Armenian and Jewish holocausts.
Several junior German officers training Ottoman forces in Turkey
witnessed the death marches and – in some cases – the results of mass
killings. Some of these Germans later turned up as senior Wehrmacht
officers in the Jewish killing fields of Belarussia and Ukraine after
the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union in 1941. Hitler himself asked
“who now remembers the Armenians?” – before urging his generals to
unleash their soldiers’ brutality against the Jews of Poland.
But how to extend the “life” of these memories beyond the still just-living world of the survivors?
Because of the quarter-century gap between the two holocausts, the
Armenians have far less movie footage and far fewer photographs and
documents than, for example, the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial outside
Jerusalem.
Armenian and Jewish scholars have long collaborated and advised each
other on the collection of witness testimonies and documentation of
their suffering. Although the Israeli government, to its shame, still
does not recognise the Armenian suffering as a genocide, Israel’s top
genocide researcher thinks otherwise, recognising that the Ottoman Turks
were deliberately attempting to destroy an entire race of their people.
Armenians have for some years debated whether to open their own “book
of the righteous”, to honour those brave Turks who tried to save
Armenian lives – at mortal danger to themselves and their families – in
just the same way as the Israelis acknowledge those gentiles who risked
their lives to save Jewish victims of Hitler during the Second World
War. There are two advantages to this: the first, and most important,
would be a truthful declaration that not all Turks supported the
genocide, and that there were men – soldiers, gendarmes and, in at least
one case, a Turkish provincial governor – who redeemed their country’s
honour by refusing to participate in this monstrous war crime of 1915.
Secondly, the Turkish government still today, shamefully, refuses to
acknowledge the Armenian genocide – the Armenians were “victims of the
chaos of war” is their fearful excuse. But an Armenian “role of honour”
would place Turkey’s holocaust “deniers” in a difficult position: could
they refuse to honour those of their own people who behaved with courage
and integrity in the face of such barbarity, especially when the
Armenians wish to acknowledge them?
Turkish academics are now themselves acknowledging the truth. Inside
Turkey, many men and women are discovering that they have Armenian
grandmothers – the very same women and young girls who were taken, or
kidnapped, by Muslim men and shipped to their homes during the genocide.
But how to perpetuate for ever the uniqueness of these holocausts of
the 20th century? I recall how, at a Muslim conference in Chicago, a
Turkish man approached a stand where an Armenian was selling books on
Middle East history, one of them a book of mine, which includes a
substantial chapter on the Armenian genocide. He didn’t believe that the
Armenians lost so many men and women, he told the bookseller and added:
“Well, if it’s true, the Armenians must have done something wrong!”
This is the archetypal argument of the anti-Semite who denies the
Jewish Holocaust. Blame the victim, not just as the cause of his own
suffering, but as the perpetrator. Yet the vital element that was
missing in this atrocious argument was not the identity of the victims,
but the comprehension that the victims were human beings like you and
me.
Surely that was why my own mother insisted that the first book I
should read on my own – at the age of eight, I think – was the diary of
Anne Frank, the German Jewish girl who was betrayed to the Nazis, along
with her family, in her hiding-place in Amsterdam, and sent to Belsen
where she died of typhus. Anne’s story was profoundly moving for
millions around the world, not because she was Jewish but because she
reminded every reader, Jewish or otherwise, of their own sisters and
cousins and daughters. Indeed, Anne reminded them of themselves.
I am not suggesting that the Armenian and Jewish identities of the
victims of two great holocausts of the last century – with their total
dead of 7,500,000, perhaps more –should be diminished. The Jews were
murdered because they were Jews and thus doomed under Hitler’s racist
regime. The Armenian Christians were killed by the Turks because they
were Armenians. Had they been Muslim Ottoman citizens – which a few were
forced to become – they would have survived. But the common bond that
we today share with the dead is our common humanity. The final horror of
these genocides does not lie in the racial origins of the victims –
that, in a sense, is to play Hitler’s game and that of the Young Turk
pashas who massacred the Armenians.
The absolute and total historical memory of these appalling
historical facts can, I suspect, only be perpetuated for hundreds of
years by more closely associating the victims with ourselves. I have
argued with Jewish readers over this. Some have insisted that by
identifying the Jewish victims of the Holocaust as identical to Europe’s
present-day non-Jewish peoples, the world would be denying the very
Jewish identity of the six million dead. The Armenians, for various
cultural, historical – and perhaps religious – reasons, have not taken
this view. They are more inclined to accept that their victimhood should
be shared.
After years interviewing Armenian survivors – and Jewish Holocaust
survivors – I am not certain how the continuum of memory can be
protected into coming centuries. The suffering of the Armenians and Jews
is surely something beyond tears, a tragedy that should remain engraved
in history forever – despite our disposition to lose interest in the
crimes of ancient history. Who now mourns for the Huguenots or the dead
of the Hundred Years War or the mass victims of Ghengis Khan? The
Armenians and Jews of the 20th century, however, were the first victims
of industrial genocide, a crime fuelled by nationalism.
If there is a message that will last for hundreds of years, perhaps
it has to be focused on the absolute conviction that these people were
our people. Their fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters were our
fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters.

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