Munich American
Peace Committee (MAPC)
Radio Lora, 14. Januar 2008
Alternative Radio
Robert Fisk
Araxie (und David) Barsamian
Der armenische Holocaust
Robert Fisk ist Mittelostkorrespondent der englischen Zeitung "The
Independent" Der Autor von "Pity the Nation, The Abduction of Lebanon"
ist Träger des UK Press Awards von Amnesty International und des Lamnan
Prize for Cultural Freedom. Zuletzt erschien von ihm: "The Great War
for Civilization"
Araxie Barsamian wurde 1905 im Südosten der
Türkei, in der Nähe der heutigen Stadt Diyabakir geboren. Sie überlebte
den Völkermord an den Armeniern, ihre Eltern, vier Brüder und
zahlreiche Verwandte nicht. 1986, kurz vor ihrem Tod, schilderte sie
Geschichtsstudenten der Universität von Colorado ihre Erlebnisse.
April ist der grausamste Monat, er treibt
Flieder aus toter Erde, er mischt
Erinnern und Begehren, er weckt
Dumpfe Wurzeln mit Lenzregen
T.S. Eliot, Das wüste Land, übersetzt von E.R. Curtius.
David Basamian:
Für Armenier ist der April ein grausamer Monat mit grausamen
Erinnerungen, denn am 24. April 1915, begann die von der
türkischen Regierung von langer Hand geplante Vertreibung und
Vernichtung der Armenier. 1,5 Millionen Menschen fielen diesem ersten
Völkermord des 20. Jahrhunderts zum Opfer. Die Überlebenden
waren über den Mittleren Osten und über die ganze Welt
zerstreut.
Adolf Hitler blieb es nicht verborgen, dass kein einziger
türkischer Amtsträger je für diesen Völkermord zur
Rechenschaft gezogen wurde. Er sah, dass es möglich war, eine
Minderheit ungestraft auszulöschen. Mit dem Leugnen dieses
Verbrechen verhindert die Türkei bis heute dessen juristische
Aufarbeitung. Von Völkermord zu sprechen gilt noch immer als
Verbrechen. Als der Literaturnobelpreisträger Orhan Pamuk es
dennoch tat, wurde er nicht nur vor Gericht gestellt, sondern erhielt
ebenso wie der Historiker Taner Akcam und der Schriftsteller Elif
Shafak massive Todesdrohungen. Der armenisch stämmige Journalist
Hrant Dink bezahlte seinen Mut mit dem Leben. Seinem Sarg folgten
Zehntausende Türken und Armeniern, viele von ihnen trugen
Transparente mit der Aufschrift: "Wir alle sind Armenier."
Robert Fisk:
Vor drei Tagen erhielt meine Redaktion folgende Email: "Sehr geehrte
Herren, mit seinem heutigen, von einseitigen, dummen Tiraden
strotzenden Artikel, wie man sie sonst nur von ungebildeten, schlecht
informierten und blutrünstigen US-Armeniern der 3. Generation
kennt, hat Herr Fisk gezeigt, welch Geistes Kind er ist." Ich weiss
also wovon ich zu Ihnen spreche.
An einem grauen, nasskalten Tag im März 1992 wanderte ich in
Nordsyrien den Hügel von Margada hinab. Eine alte Armenierin hatte
mich dorthin geschickt. Da der Regen das Erdreich weggeschwemmt hatte,
fanden wir auf dem darunter liegenden Vulkangestein, das, was wir dort
zu finden erwartet hatten: menschliche Schädel und Knochen, die
dort seit 77 Jahren, seit dem Massaker von 1915, dicht an dicht
verscharrt gelegen hatten. Der kleine Sohn meines armenischen
Begleiters meinte "das war es also."
Die Beweise für den ersten Holocaust des 20. Jahrhunderts liegen
unter dem Sand der nordsyrischen Wüste, unter türkischen
Feldern, an Flussufern und in Höhlen am Khabur Fluss, in denen
Menschen wie in primitiven Gaskammern in Rauchschwaden erstickt wurden.
Solange die Geschichtsbücher diese Qualen verschweigen und die
Wahrheit verleugnen, können die Wunden nicht heilen.
- 2 -
Bei meinem Besuch nationalsozialistischer Vernichtungslager, in denen 6
Millionen Juden ermordet worden waren, fielen mir in der Nähe vom
Lager Birkenau in Ausschwitz kleine Weiher auf. Dorthin hatten die
Deutschen tonnenweise menschliche Asche gekippt. Die Asche der Bewohner
ganzer Städte, die Opfer des jüdischen Holocausts geworden
waren, liegt noch heute am Grunde dieser Teiche. Niemals darf dieses
massenhafte Töten in Vergessenheit geraten!
Warum aber tut man den Völkermord an den Armeniern als bloße
Behauptung ab, während niemand die historische Tatsache des
jüdischen Holocausts bestreitet? Als Hitler die europäischen
Juden abschlachten ließ, konnte er davon ausgehen, dass sich
niemand an das Schicksal der Armenier erinnern würde. Aber ist das
eine Entschuldigung dafür, dass man die Armenier am britischen
Holocaust Gedenktag nicht erwähnt und die BBC so beiläufig
über die 1,5 Millionen getöteten Armenier berichtet, dass es
die Leugner und Revisionisten erst gar nicht bemerken.
Wir alle kennen die türkischen Lobbyisten, die beharrlich
behaupten, dass es nie einen armenischen Völkermord gegeben habe
und Ihre Vorfahren in einem Bürgerkrieg umkamen, der sogar mehr
türkische als armenische Opfer gefordert hat. Als die Türkei
gegen Frankreich Wirtschaftssanktionen verhängte, nachdem
Präsident Chirac den armenischen Völkermord offiziell
anerkannte, fürchtet Großbritannien um seine
Wirtschaftsbeziehungen mit der Türkei und Präsident Clinton
versuchte sogar mit dem bizarren Hinweis auf die angebliche Gefahr
für Leib und Leben der US Bürger, die Anerkennung des
armenischen Holocausts zu verhindern. Nie hätte er eine
ähnlich ungeheuerliche Behauptung aufgestellt, wenn Deutschland im
Falle einer Anerkennung des jüdischen Holocausts
Wirtschaftssanktionen angedroht hätte.
Doch auch meine eigenen Journalistenkollegen messen mit zweierlei
Maß. Wie kann es sein, dass man Leugner des jüdischen
Holocausts völlig zu Recht als gefährliche, rechtsextreme
Spinner kritisiert, aber gleichzeitig den Leugnern des Verbrechens an
den Armeniern Glauben schenkt? So schreibt die New York Times vom 25.
März 1998, von einer "großen Menge" von Armeniern, die im
Frühjahr 1915 einer "umstrittenen" ethnischen Säuberung durch
"pro-osmanische" Truppen zum Opfer fielen. Kein Wort darüber, dass
es mehr als eine Million Opfer waren und es damals nicht um begrenzte
ethnische Säuberungen ging, wie wir sie seit dem Krieg der Serben
gegen die Muslime in Bosnien und die Albaner im Kosovo kennen. Die
Mörder waren auch keine Türken oder Osmanen, sondern"
pro-osmanische Truppen". Und mit der Formulierung "umstritten" macht
sich der Autor dieses Artikels vollends zum Sprachrohr derjenigen, die
den armenischen Holocaust leugnen. Seine Überschrift "Armenien
sollte endlich vergessen!" dürfte der türkischen Regierung
gefallen haben
- 3 -
Auch in der Türkei gibt es immer mehr Stimmen, die sich zu dem
Völkermord bekennen. Während im türkischen Fernsehen ein
Film über die angeblich von den Armeniern begangenen Massaker
lief, forderte Yavuz Baydan von der Zeitung Milliyet endlich Mechmed
Talaal Pascha, den ehemaligen Innenminister und Hauptverantwortlichen
des Völkermordes an den Armeniern und seine Helfershelfer zur
Rechenschaft zu ziehen. Im Anschluß an diese Sendung
plädierte der türkische Armenienexperte, Dr. Taner Akcam,
für ein Ende sowohl der türkischen Unschuldsbeteuerungen als
auch der Rufe nach Vergeltung für die Gewalttaten, die die in der
Armee des russischen Zaren gegen die Türkei kämpfenden
Armenier begangen haben. Laut Akcam spiele es auch keine Rolle, ob man
das türkische Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit als
Völkermord oder als Massaker bezeichnet, wichtig sei allein, das
armenische Volk um Vergebung zu bitten und den innertürkischen
Streit darüber beizulegen.
In Israel werden nichtjüdische Männer und Frauen, die
versuchten, Juden zu retten, in der Allee der Gerechten geehrt.
Könnten die Armenier nicht etwas Ähnliches für die
Türken und Kurden tun, die den Mut hatten, Ihre Vorfahren zu
retten? .
Ich denke dabei an Jelal Pascha, den Gouverneur von Aleppo, an Rachmi
Bey aus Izmir oder den Albaner Ismael Kemal Bey der seines
Gouverneursposten enthoben wurde, und ich denke an die vielen kleinen
Leute, die Armenier bei sich versteckten, ihnen, als sie in den
syrischen Bergen ausgesetzt wurden, Essen brachten oder gefangene
Mädchen wieder freigaben. Tahin Bey aus Erzerum widersetzte sich
lange dem Befehl, alle Armenier zu ermorden. Dabei war er - wie Oskar
Schindler - keineswegs ein Heiliger. Türkische Soldaten retteten
junge Mädchen vor kurdischen Vergewaltigern, kümmerten sich
um Neugeborene, besorgten Trinkwasser für die Deportierte. Warum
sollen Sie, die Nachkommen der so geretteten armenischen
Überlebenden diese mutigen Taten nicht anerkennen? Sie erwarten
von den Türken die Anerkennung des Holocausts, den türkische
Offizielle immer noch als "Mythos" bezeichnen. Doch wie würden
diese Leute reagieren, wenn die Armenier dem Mut und der
Selbstaufopferung der türkischen Retter ein ehrendes Andenken
bewahrten? Könnte sie es ablehnen, ihren eigenen mutigen
Bürgern Ehre zu erweisen? Und würden sie, in dem sie ihr
Andenken ehren, damit nicht auch den armenischen Völkermord
anerkennen? Damit wäre unter die Geschichte noch kein
Schlußstrich gezogen, aber ein kleiner Schritt getan in Richtung
auf die Toten in der syrischen Wüste.
Vielen Dank für Ihre Aufmerksamkeit.
David Barsamian:
Es folgt ein Augenzeugenbericht meiner Mutter, Araxie Barsamian, die
den Völkermord überlebte. Ihre Eltern, ihre vier Brüder
und zahlreiche Verwandte überlebten die Katastrophe nicht. Araxie
wurde 1905 im Dorf Dubne nördlich der heutigen Stadt Diyabakir
geboren. Als es dort im Frühjahr 1915 eine Heuschreckenplage gab,
sahen viele darin ein böses Omen. Während der Getreideernte
brach die Katastrophe herein. Die Türken überfielen das Dorf
und erschossen alle Männer und Jungen. Frauen und Kinder mussten
sich vor der Kirche versammeln. Sie sollten in Hunderte von Kilometern
entfernte, unbewohnbare Wüstengebiete "umgesiedelt", also
deportiert werden. Schutzlos den ständigen Angriffen und
Überfällen ausgeliefert, von Entführungen und
Vergewaltigungen bedroht, starben viele an Hunger, an Krankheiten und
erschöpft von den Anstrengungen des Fußmarsches. In Urfa
wurde Araxie von ihrer Familie und ihren kleinen Brüdern getrennt.
Auf Umwegen landete sie schließlich in einem Waisenhaus in
Aleppo. Im August 1921 heiratete sie in Beirut meinen Vater. Drei
Monate später waren sie in New York. Im darauffolgenden Jahr - sie
war gerade 17 Jahre alt - kam das erste ihrer vier Kinder zur Welt.
1986, kurz vor ihrem Tod, schilderte sie einer Gruppe von
Geschichtsstudenten der Universität von Colorado,. was sie und
mein Vater erlebt haben.
ROBERT FISK
ARAXIE BARSAMIAN
The Armenian Holocaust
San Francisco, CA 3 March 2001
University of Colorado, Denver 26 Sept 1986
Robert Fisk, based in Beirut, is the
Middle East correspondent for “The Independent.” He is the
author of “Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon.” He
is winner of the Amnesty International UK Press Award and the Lannan
Prize for Cultural Freedom. His latest book is “The Great War for
Civilization"
Araxie Barsamian was born in 1905 in
Dubne, a village north of the historic Armenian city of Dikranagerd,
today called Diyarbakir. She survived the Turkish genocide of the
Armenians. Her parents, four brothers, and other members of her
extended family were not so fortunate. In 1986, just a few months
before her death, she spoke about her experiences to a history class at
the University of Colorado at Denver.
From T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land –
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
April has special resonance for
Armenians everywhere. It was on April 24, 1915 that the Turkish
government launched a premeditated, organized campaign to eliminate the
millennia old Armenians from their historical lands in what is now
southeastern Turkey. As many as 1.5 million people perished in the 20th
century’s first genocide. Survivors were scattered all over the
Middle East and the rest of the world.
The Turkish officials
responsible for the genocide were never brought to account. This was
not lost on Adolf Hitler. He saw that a minority could be wiped out
with impunity. Just days before launching World War Two he told his
generals, “Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of
the Armenians?” What makes the genocide of the Armenians unique
is that Turkey refuses to acknowledge it ever happen. And that denial
is the final stage of genocide: closure and justice is denied to the
victims and their descendents.
In Turkey today to speak
of the genocide is a crime. Orhan Pamuk, author of “Snow”
and Turkey’s Nobel Prize winner for literature, was prosecuted
for mentioning it. Pamuk, under death threats, has left Turkey. Others
who have spoken out such as historian Taner Akcam and novelist Elif
Shafak have also been threatened. Journalist Hrant Dink was murdered on
January 19, 2007 right in front of his newspaper office on one of
Istanbul’s most prominent boulevards. Dink too, dared to utter
the unutterable. A Turkish citizen of Armenian origin, Dink was perhaps
the most visible and prominent member of that beleaguered community.
His murder and funeral brought large crowds of Turks and Armenians onto
the streets of Istanbul in solidarity. Many signs said, “We are
All Armenians.” Elsewhere, in another demonstration, a woman held
up a sign that said, “1,500,000 million plus 1.”
-David Barsamian
Robert Fisk - I don't use
e-mail, but about three days ago my paper received this e-mail from
Mustafa Gulek of Ankara. It's to me, of course. “Dear Sir: I had
no idea what bad feelings Mr. Fisk harbored until I read in your paper
today the one-sided, ignorant rantings that one usually only hears from
badly educated, ill-informed, and bloodthirsty third-generation U.S.
Armenians.” So, obviously, ladies and gentlemen, we have a lot in
common tonight.
Ladies and gentlemen, eight years ago, on a gray, cold, damp day in the
first week of March of 1992, I walked the side of the hill of Margada,
a place of the volcanic stones high above what had once been the valley
of the Khabur River in northern Syria. An old Armenian woman, Serpouhi
Papazian—she's dead now—had sent me here from her village
12 miles away. She thought, she said, she thought she remembered
finding the bones of Armenians below the hill of Margada 77 years
earlier. She was looking for the bones of her sisters and father.
So I had gone to Margada, found the hill, realized that the river had
changed course over the decades, and I wandered down the hillside in
the steady rain. It had poured rain so much over the previous weekend
that small streams had opened fissures in the hillside. It was almost
at the bottom that we saw what we suspected all along lay in this
volcanic earth: a mass of skulls and bones embedded in a wall of earth
on the side of a crack in the hill. I used my car keys to scrape away
the mud, and the bones began to fall out of the earth into my own
hands—rib cages, femurs, an entire skeleton, then another and a
third, so closely packed that the bones had become tangled with each
other. There were sets of teeth, fibulae, eye sockets, tightly squeezed
together, as they had been on the day they had died in terror in 1915,
roped together to die in their thousands. Each skull became clammy as I
held it in my hand, and in its the first contact with the air since the
Armenian genocide, they began to become soft and disintegrate. The
teeth were clean, undamaged, the teeth of young people—children,
teenagers. My Armenian companion and his little boy held one of the
skulls. “It is finished,” he said. We later handed these
bones to the Armenian church in Deir-el-Zor for proper burial.
Yes, the evidence of the 20th century's first Holocaust—and yes,
I call it a Holocaust, not an Armenian claim—lies under those
desert sands of northern Syria. Countless thousands of those skeletons,
of course, lie beneath Margada and beneath the fields and riverbanks of
Turkey. Further north up the Khabur River, I came across caves with
bones inside. Armenians there remember that this is where their
ancestors were driven below ground and asphyxiated with the smoke of
bonfires. They were, of course, the world's first, primitive gas
chambers.
But my Armenian friend, I think, was wrong. It is not finished. For I
believe, after 25 years, watching the tragedy of the modern-day Middle
East, that history cannot be buried or denied beneath the earth. As
long as a people cannot receive acknowledgment of their torment, it is
never finished. Until the history books are accepted and honored as
true, the story has not ended.
When I wrote my book on the history of the Lebanon war, Pity the
Nation, I decided to visit, for reasons too long to explain here, some
of the Nazi extermination camps in which 6 million Jews were murdered
in the Second World War. Next to the Birkenau camp at Auschwitz there
were small lakes in which the Germans had tipped tons of human ash. And
they still lay there, whole cities of people, the people of the Jewish
Holocaust, as ash at the bottom of the ponds. For every good and
honorable reason, we should never forget that mass human slaughter nor
doubt its extent. But the Holocaust which began the 20th century
happens to have taken place in the lands that I now cover as a
correspondent. Indeed with my frequent trips to the Balkans, I
sometimes think I must be the Ottoman correspondent of the Independent
rather than the Middle East. So the Armenians met their fate in the
lands I now regularly visit and on which I now report.
So I found myself thinking, not long after I arrived in the Middle
East, how come the first act of genocide was so often referred to as a
claim, when the second great act of genocide, the Jewish Holocaust, was
accepted as a terrible fact of history? Of course, we all know that
Hitler, before planning the slaughter of Europe's Jews, asked if anyone
still remembered the Armenians. But is there any excuse for us to cast
doubt on what happened to the Armenians? Is this any reason for the
Armenians to be virtually excluded, as they virtually were, from
Britain's Holocaust Day memorial in January?
What was the BBC producer —and I have the letter
here—Daniel Brittain-Catlin, doing writing to an Armenian group
in France last 16th January? “BBC coverage,” he wrote,
“is likely to include reference to, albeit briefly, the Armenian
genocide.” I liked the “albeit briefly” bit. So
briefly, so briefly perhaps, that the deniers and revisionists of the
Armenian Holocaust might not notice the BBC's puny supply of courage in
making any reference to a million and a half murdered Armenians at all.
Of course, I know and we all know in this room of the Turkish lobby
groups which perpetuate the myth that there was no Armenian genocide,
that your ancestors died in a civil war in which Turks died in even
greater numbers. We all know about the economic sanctions levied on
France after President Chirac signed the document acknowledging the
Armenian genocide. We know how Britain, my country, fears to lose its
own economic contracts in Turkey. And we know surely, as many of you
do, the extraordinary, in other circumstances I would say bizarre, way
in which President Clinton persuaded your lawmakers not to acknowledge
the Armenian Holocaust because, he said, it might put American lives
and interests at risk. What was he thinking? That an American genocide
might follow the Armenian genocide? What was this great danger? What
would have happened, for example, if today's Germany had threatened
economic penalties if any acknowledgment was made of the Jewish
Holocaust? Would Mr. Clinton have made the same incredible statement?
Of course not.
But let's turn to my own profession, journalism. How is it that we free
people, we reporters, we who are supposed to be the first witnesses of
history, play a double standard over the Armenian and Jewish
Holocausts. How can we lend credence to one group of deniers while
rightfully denouncing the other group as right-wing fanatics. Let me
take, for example, a New York Times
report of the 25th of March, 1998, about those few Armenians, 70,000 in
all, who survive in present-day Turkey. Here now is a key paragraph
from that report by the New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer. Please do not chuckle at various points. Listen to these words.
“Relations between Turks and Armenians were good during much of
the Ottoman period, but they were deeply scarred by massacres of
Armenians by pro-Ottoman forces in eastern Anatolia carried out in the
spring of 1915. Details of what happened there are still hotly debated
but it is clear that vast numbers of Armenians were killed or left to
die during forced marches in a burst of what is now called
‘ethnic cleansing.’”
I have, ladies and gentlemen, a serious problem with that paragraph.
First of all, the figure of a million and a half Armenians, or even a
million Armenians, the all important statistic that puts you in the
genocide bracket, indeed marks the Armenians as victims of the first
Holocaust, has totally disappeared from the record. It's not in that
paragraph. We are left with what Mr. Kinzer calls vast numbers of
killed, which keeps The New York Times
out of harm's way with the Turks. Then genocide is reduced, you will
notice, to what Mr. Kinzer calls “ethnic cleansing,” a
phrase familiar to us from the Serb war against the Muslims of Bosnia
and against the Albanians of Kosovo, but on an infinitely less terrible
scale than the massacres of 1915. So the million and a half has been
deleted and we've lowered the potency of what actually happened.And
note the reference to”pro-Ottoman forces,” not even Ottoman
forces, and certainly not Turks. Note that the word “Turks”
is not used in reference to the killers at all. Then we are told that
the issue is “hotly debated.” How very fair of The New York Times
to remind us so tamely that a campaign exists to deny the truth of the
Armenian Holocaust. It's a lie every bit as evil, in my view, as those
who wickedly claim that the Jewish Holocaust never happened. What am I
as a journalist to make of this? Did I imagine, did I imagine all those
bones tumbling into my hands in northern Syria? Were they not real? And
what am I to make of this headline, from the same series on another of
Mr. Kinzer's articles? “Armenia Never Forgets—Maybe It
Should.”
Now let me speak frankly. I think the New York Times
reporter didn't want to offend the present Turkish government, he
didn't want his feature article to be called controversial, he didn't
want to stir things up. So he softened the truth. And the Turkish
government must have been delighted. Note, by the way, how it was a
“burst” of ethnic cleansing that destroyed the Armenians in
this article. A burst. A sudden, spontaneous act. Not an act of
genocide. Words, words, words tell us all.
Now let's apply a simple test. Let's turn to that later and more
numerically terrible Holocaust, that of the Jews of Europe. Would Mr.
Kinzer have written in the same way about that mass slaughter? Would he
have told us that German-Jewish relations were merely “deeply
scarred” by the Nazi slaughter? Would he have suggested, even for
a moment, that the details were “hotly debated”? Would he
have compared the massacre of the Jews to the Bosnian war? No, he would
not. But Mr. Kinzer did raise doubts about the Armenian Holocaust. He
called it “hotly debated.” Even Reuters and the Associated
Press, I notice today, now always add a paragraph about Turkish denial
of the Armenian genocide. Why? Who are they afraid of?
I've written frequently of the Armenian slaughter, and I did so again
at the beginning of last year. I had been deeply moved by a meeting I
had with a 101-year-old blind Armenian in the Armenian old people's
home in Beirut. He was called Haroutioun, and he remembered how in the
Syrian desert in 1915 his mother pleaded with Turks not to rape her
18-year-old daughter, Haroutioun 's sister. “As she begged them
not to take my sister, they beat her to death,” he told me.
“I remember her dying, shouting ‘Haroutioun, Haroutioun,
Haroutioun,’ over and over. When she was dead, they took my
sister away on a horse. I never saw her again.” Then, after years
of bitterness and longing for revenge, what Haroutioun called his
Christian belief overcame him, and he decided to abandon the notion of
revenge. “When the Turkish earthquake killed so many
people,” he told me, “I prayed for the poor Turkish
people.”
In my article in which I wrote of Haroutioun, I used a capital H in my
reference to both the Armenian and Jewish Holocausts. Chatting to an
Armenian acquaintance, I mentioned that I had used a capital letter for
both genocides. I believe that capital H should be attached to all
holocausts. Little could I have guessed how quickly the dead would rise
from their graves. When my article appeared in my paper, a paper which
has never failed to dig into human wickedness visited upon every race
and creed, my reference to the Jewish Holocaust remained with a capital
H, but the Armenian Holocaust had been downgraded to a little h.
“Tell me, Robert,” my Armenian friend asked me, “tell
me, didn't the Turks kill enough of us?”
Of course, I at once investigated what had happened. There are no conspiracies on the Independent
sub-editor's desk, just a no-nonsense rule that our articles follow
what is called a house style. Through common usage, as it's
called—I love that term, “common usage”—the
Jewish Holocaust takes a capital H, other Holocausts don't. No one is
quite sure why, though the practice has been followed in books and
articles worldwide.
A debate then opened within my own paper, the Independent,
encouraged, by the way, by my editor, who is a friend of mine. One of
our top word experts was asked to comment. Why not a capital H for the
Armenian Holocaust? He cited Chambers Dictionary, which stated that the
Jewish Holocaust was usually capitalized. “And,” our expert
said, “it's in the nature of a proper noun to apply to only one
thing. Thus,” he said, “there could be many crusades but
only one Crusade, with a capital C; only one Renaissance,” a
European one, of course. I love the Eurocentric quality of these
arguments. “Is the Jewish Holocaust really unique?” he
asked. “Yes.” I'm quoting him. “It was perpetrated by
modern Europeans. Its purported justification was a perversion of
Darwin. Above all, in the gas chambers and crematoria it manufactured
death by modern industrial methods. The Jewish Holocaust,” our
word expert went on, “says to modern Western man that his
technological mastery will not save him from sin but, rather, magnify
the results of his sins. There have been acts of genocide throughout
history,” he said, “but we call the Nazi Holocaust the
Holocaust, with a capital, because it is our holocaust.”
“Powerful arguments,” I replied, “but ones with which
I disagree. The Jewish Holocaust should be capitalized,” I said,
“not because its victims were European Jews, or that of any other
race, but because its victims were human beings.” It was, after
all, the Independent's
editorial policy, my paper's policy, that the world must fight against
all atrocities, a belief which underlay our demands for humanitarian
action in Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor. This did not mean that I
regarded Kosovo or East Timor as holocausts but that we should never
accept the idea that one group of victims have special status over the
other. When Armenians in Israel speak of their people's suffering they
use the Hebrew word “shoah,” which means holocaust. Common
usage,” I said, “can't decide morality.” As for there
being only one crusade, my dad, who was much older than my mother,
fought in the 1914-18 war. And when my father originally spoke of it,
he called it The Great War. But when the Second World War happened, he
called it the First World War.
So the Independent then ran an
article by a Turkish Cypriot academic denouncing my own report on the
Armenians, but on top of his article we used the words “Armenian
Holocaust,” with a capital H. And so we always have since. The
Turks did not complain. The world did not end. There was an Armenian
Holocaust. Those skulls I found in the desert were real.
But you should not believe that the debate over the Armenian genocide
does not take place inside Turkey. It does. I have several good Turkish
friends who tell me privately that they believe there was a genocide,
that Ottoman Turkey was responsible, and the statistics are right. One
of these Turks is a senior government civil servant in Ankara. And
though most of you may not realize this, a debate has just actually
occurred on Turkish Ankara television, beginning with film of what the
program claimed were massacres perpetrated by Armenians. That same day,
in the newspaper Milliyet, the journalist Yavuz Baydar was quoted as
saying that “I was always convinced of the necessity to show
courage and to take to task Talaat and company for their misdeeds.
These men are our Pol Pots, Berias, and Stalins, and the sooner we call
their crimes to account, the better our chances of redeeming ourselves
from this scourge of being accused of genocide.” This, of course,
doesn't go quite far enough. But on the program phoning in, Dr. Taner
Akçam, author of several Armenian studies, said, “The
constant refrain of we Turks are not guilty and the parallel blaming of
the Armenians who are the victims, very much hurts the cause of
Turkey.” Unless we distance ourselves from the perpetrators of
this crime, which was a genocide”—soykirim in
Turkish—“we will never be able to relieve ourselves of this
terrible burden.” And Dr. Akçam condemned the mentality of
wholesale retribution, this in reference to those Armenians who fought
in the Czarist army.
At this point the voice of the past came bursting into this television
program. It was Semra Özal, wife of the late Turkish president
Turgut Özal, shouting, “How dare you let this man speak?
Shut him up.” But Akçam had the last word, saying that
“[t]he destruction of the Armenians is a historical fact,
organized by the government of the day. If you can't bring yourself to
describe it as genocide, call it a massacre if you want,” he
said, “but it was a crime against humanity.” Then
Akçam added, “Ask for forgiveness from the Armenian people
and make a commitment within Turkey political dissent and disagreement
should no longer be treated as an offense.”
Ladies and gentlemen, I want to ask you an important question. It's not
a proposal. I'm a newspaper reporter, and nothing I'm saying to you
tonight I haven't written in my paper or spoken of before. But it's a
question I'd like to put to you. In Israel they honor the non-Jewish
men and women who tried or succeeded in saving the lives of the Jewish
victims of the Jewish Holocaust. They include people of every nation.
They honor what they call the righteous Gentile. And I've always
thought this a fine idea. And I've wondered from time to time—I'm
just asking this question—why you haven't thought of doing the
same? I don't just mean thanking the foreigners, the German
missionaries, the Swiss, the Dutch, the English and American teachers,
the French and British and American navies, the saviors of the people
of Musa Dagh. No, I'm thinking of those examples—I've heard about
them from aging survivors and I've come across them in contemporary
documents—I'm thinking of those people who tried to help your
ancestors and who were Turks. I'm talking about the good Turks, the
very occasional Ottoman official who was appalled at the atrocities
committed against the Armenian people, the Turkish or Kurdish villager
whose courage stood out when his own people were turning so brutally
against your ancestors.
Many of you will remember from your school books, I think, the story of
Jelal Pasha, the vali, governor, of Aleppo. He said he was a governor,
not an executioner, and thus saved thousands of Armenian lives. It was
he who said that “[i]t is a natural right of the human beings to
live. The Armenians will defend themselves.” In September 1915,
Rachmi Bey of Smyrna (Izmir) was quoted as saying he would not expel
the Armenians. Then there is Ismael Kemal Bey, an Albanian, a governor
who was dismissed because he refused the genocide orders of the Turkish
Committee of Union and Progress.
Then there are the little men. Zakar Berberian, who was 12 when the
Turkish Army and gendarmerie came to Marash in 1915. Before he died in
Beirut, he told me how he saw babies being dropped on the roadway by
Turkish gendarmes, how if they survived, their brains would be beaten
on the road, how his parents died of cholera. “I should have
died,” he added, “but a Turk gave me food to
survive.” Indeed, in almost every interview I conducted of that
time, Armenian survivors would recall few but individual Turks who,
driven by their Muslim religion or common humanity, disobeyed the
fascistic orders of the rulers in Constantinople and sheltered
Armenians in their homes.
You can find their ghosts even in the great Bryce report (The Treatment
of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916) on the Armenian
genocide, published by the British Foreign Office in 1916, a volume
unlikely to have recorded the good deeds of Turks or Kurds or Arabs had
they not been true. An Armenian report included in a State Department
dispatch of the 17th of September, 1915, quotes a report from Arab
deputies from Baghdad and Syria who recall that “[t]he railway to
Aleppo discharges into the mountains vast numbers of Armenians, who are
abandoned there without bread or water. In the towns and villages the
Arabs try to bring them some relief.”
A statement by the Reverend William Shea of the Presbyterian mission
during the Urmiya massacres of 1915. After describing the vile
treatment of civilians at the hands of Turkish troops and militias, who
participated in the worst of the slaughter, records that “[t]here
were many villagers who showed only kindness. The Persian governor made
it possible by his cooperation for the American missionaries to do what
they did. The Kurds responded to appeals for mercy and in some cases
returned captive girls unsolicited and did other humane service. A few
individual Turkish officers and a number of their soldiers took strong
measures to keep order. One such officer saved the city from loot when
riot had already begun.”
There are words of praise for the humanity of Tahsin Bey, governor of
Erzurum in 1915. “About this time,” two American clerics
wrote, “orders arrived by which Tahsin Bey was instructed that
all Armenians should be killed. Tahsin refused to carry this out, and
indeed all through the time he was reluctant to mistreat the Armenians
but was overruled by force majeure.” Tahsin Bey, I should add,
does not always appear in such a humanitarian light, but, then again,
Oskar Schindler was a member of the Nazi party.
Then, on the deportation to Ras-ul-Ain in 1915, Maritza Kedjedjian was
a witness to the rape of young women by Kurds. “When they were
going to carry off another girl,” she wrote shortly afterwards,
“I asked Omer Chavoush, a man from Mardin, to help us.”
Chavoush shows the Turk was a sergeant in the army. Maritza goes on,
“He stopped them at once and did not let them take the girl away.
The Kurds from the surrounding villages attacked us that night. Omer,
who was in charge of us, immediately went up to the heights and
harangued them in Kurdish, telling them not to attack us. We were
hungry and thirsty and had no water to drink. Omer took some of our
drinking vessels and brought us water from a long way off. The wife of
my brother-in-law had a baby born that night. The next morning we
started again. Corporal Omer left some women with her and kept an eye
on her from a distance. Then he put the mother and the newborn child on
a beast and brought her to us in safety.”
There are other examples, in the Bryce records and elsewhere, of such
humane behavior by men who clearly disobeyed the orders of their brutal
masters. So terrible was the year 1915 in the Armenian lands under
Turkish control and in the deserts of northern Syria and so wicked were
the Turkish authorities of the time that I think it is necessary to
remember that Muslims, including brave Turks, sometimes risked their
lives for your doomed ancestors.
And so I ask again why the descendants of those Armenians don't
acknowledge in some form that courage. Armenians demand that the Turks
acknowledge their Holocaust. The Turkish authorities still call it a
myth. But how would they react to an Armenian démarche to
remember the Turks who showed bravery and honor during that time of
atrocities? Those Turks may be painfully few in number, but you would
be showing modern-day Turkey that you acknowledge the humanity of some
of their former citizens.
How would the Turks react to such a gesture? By refusing to honor their
own brave Turks? Or would they remember the courage of those Turks and
by the same token accept the fact of the Armenian genocide? It's only a
question I'm asking. Taner Akçam might be able to respond to it.
So might journalist Yavuz Baydar, Corporal Omer would be remembered,
and the Turk who gave 12- year-old Zakar Berberian food. So would Jelal
Pasha of Aleppo. And it might be a very small step in the story of the
Syrian desert, of those skulls which prompted my Armenian friend to say
it is finished when, in my view, for the historical record, the story
has still not ended.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for the invitation to address you tonight and for your patience in listening to me.
Next is eyewitness testimony from
Araxie Barsamian. She survived the Turkish genocide of the Armenians.
Her parents, four brothers, and members of her extended family were not
so fortunate. She was born in 1905 in the village of Dubne, north of
the historic Armenian city, Dikranagert, now called Diyarbakir. Her
parents were Giragos and Maryam Giragosian. Her younger brothers were
Sarkis, Mardiros, Hovsep and Tavit. Unaware of the looming calamity
about to envelop her she remembers an omen. Early in 1915, the village
was covered with grasshoppers. Elders said it was a bad sign. A few
months later, the wheat was ripe and about to be harvested when the end
came. The Turks came to the village, took all the men and young boys,
marched them outside of town, and shot them. The remaining women, and
children were told to assemble at the church. They were going to be
resettled, deported, exiled to the uninhabitable desert wastes hundreds
of miles to the south. They were to walk to their new homes. Promises
that they would be protected en route were quickly broken. The
defenseless caravans were waylaid and attacked throughout the
deportation march. Girls were kidnapped and raped. Starvation and
disease took care of many of those the Turks did not kill. Araxie
walked as far as the city of Urfa, where she was separated from her
mother, brothers and other relatives. She eventually found her way into
an orphanage in Aleppo in northern Syria.
In August 1921, she married my father
Bedros Barsamian in Beirut. Three months later, they were living in a
tenement walkup on Horatio Street in New York's West Village. The
following year, at 17, she had the first of her four children.
In 1986, she spoke to a history class
at the University of Colorado at Denver. I was there with her, helping
with translation. She begins by describing what happened to her father.
-David Barsamian
Araxie Barsamian - When
we left, my family was 25 in the family. They took all the men folks.
They asked my father, “Where is your ammunition?” He says,
“I sold it.” So they says, “Go get it.” So when
he went to the Kurd town, to get it, they beat him and they took him
all his clothes. And when he came back—this is my mother tells me
story—when he came back there, naked body, he went in the jail,
they cut his arms. “Where is ammunition?” He says, “I
haven't got it. They didn't give me.” So he die in the jail. And
They took all the mens in the field, they tied their
hands, and they shooted, killed every one of them. I remember they
collect the only 15-years-old boys, just like this they were sitting
in. Their hands are tied back.
And they took all the mens in the field, they shoot them, too. Nothing
left, only woman and small children. We were deported in some city. No
food, nothing to eat. They took everything from us. They say—they
put in the church—“When you come back, we will give you
back.” Which is not true.
So we wented some city. My aunt give birth, she left her baby over
there. And then we walk, walk, walk, so many, no water. I remember my
mother used to damp her handkerchief in, excuse me, horse urine and
wipe our mouths, we were so dry. Just think that. And then I forgot.
Lots things. If I remembered things, day and night I tell and not
finish. And then we came to Diyarbakir. We sit there. My mother covered
me with a blanket. They took all the good-looking ladies, young ladies
and girls, they captured it. My mother put my young brothers on top of
me so they wouldn't see me. So from there. And then the news came that
kaimakam—what’s kaimakam means?—
District administrator.
—he says that “Take them and throw all these ladies in dijlees ked—
The Tigris River.
—the Tigris River. I remember very well it was a moon and then gendarma came—
Kind of a police.
—police came, say, government has forgived them. Take this
different city. And we walk in the night, night, night, and we walk. We
came in city that they were very well Turk, they were very well. Also,
my aunt save me under the blankets so they will not capture me. I had a
girlfriend, she had hair long as here and gendarma came. They grab her
by the hair and throw her back of him on the horse. And they give us
bread that was made from the hay. But we got to eat, because we were
hungry. This took a month, you know, we came there. And then we came
Urfa, they call it. Every refugee was in Urfa. And my mother got sick.
Also, they want us to move from there. So my grandmother made herself
sick and stayed by my mother, three children, one my aunt—five,
six children around my mother. And my aunt grabbed me and we went. We
went Aleppo, Syria. Later on, I met my grandmother. They took her to
Deir el-Zor. Main thing, Deir el-Zor, they kill so many Armenians over
there. Most Armenians they kill in Deir el-Zor.
Deir el-Zor is in the Syrian desert, and that was the main killing
field. In these deportation columns, in these caravans of hundreds of
thousands of people, those who were “lucky enough” to
survive were killed in the Syrian desert. That was the final
destination. Henry Morgenthau, who was the U.S. ambassador to Turkey at
the time, confronted one of the genocidists, Talaat Pasha, and he said,
“What are you doing with the Armenians? Where are they
going?” And the quote was—and that was documented in
Morgenthau's autobiography—that “[t]he final destination of
the Armenians is the abyss.” And that was Deir el-Zor, the Syrian
desert.
And then we came to Aleppo. My aunt took me to the orphanage. I stayed
there a few years. And then she was working in American missionary, so
she says, “They're going to deport us again. I want you come with
me because since this time I saved you, I don't want to leave you in
orphanage.” So we went to Hama. That's also Syria. That's big
place. The ditch was five times longer than this room. Anybody, dead or
not, they throw in there. Somebody had a tent. Me, my aunt, and her
sister they grabbed under the tent. We got saved that way. And then
from there-many people they have no tent—they had to go more into
Syrian, more Arabic desert.
And then from that people who saved us, we went to Selemyah. They
called Christian Arab. Nice people. They give us a room. My aunt stay
one of the family working there. And I was playing with the children,
speaking Arabic like anything. But I forgot later. Then my aunt heard
that year after that everybody is going to Aleppo, it's clear now. So
nighttime we used to walk and daytime we hide ourselves until we reach
Aleppo. And then she put me in the same orphanage again and she went to
work American missionary.
Not long—I don't know how long it last—again we have to
move. My aunt says we have to go to different city now. So she came to
me, she says, “You have to come with me again.” So we
went—we were sitting on a train, and I said, “Aunt, look,
look. The mountain is running.” I never saw anything like that.
But I was in a train. We reach Dortyol place. Dortyol means 4 roads,
Dortyol, they call it, and the people they are doing their living with
the orange and lemon and grapefruit. Also, we were lucky. Somebody took
us, gave us a room. And my aunt—oh, I didn’t tell. My
mother died when we left there. Later on, I found out my mother and
four children, four brothers, my aunt, everybody died. And then this
Dortyol, my aunt start working with somebody. And she was speaking
English, so anybody came to town, they came to her house. And her
husband was collecting orange and lemon and grapefruit to send city to
city. So he says to me, “Araxie, you come. You watch these people
how they doing, how they pack orange.” There is a funny way, you
know, in the boxes. And we did for a while over there again. And then
we moved again.
The AGBU (Armenian General Benevolent Union) built two buildings,
orphanages, one for boys and one for girls. For the girl is the Sisvan
and boys Kelegian, and separate places. I didn't like to go to school.
I liked to sew. And my teacher's wife know how to sew. She says,
“Araxie, we take you to America, and I buy you a sewing machine,
I send you to school.” Which is nothing happen. And then we
came—my principal says that “You can do this way. I want to
know my students where to go.”
He sent a letter to my husband, future husband. He was just new came
out from army, 1918. Discharged from Mississippi camp. He got his
citizenship. My principal says, “I want to know his background.
Is he healthy or not? You know, to send it. So my principal give his
nice clothes, I wear it, and my picture came out nice. We send it to my
husband. So when he receive it, his friend says, “Peter, this
girl if comes America, she's not going to marry to you.”
My husband hasn't no penny in his pocket. He borrow money, took an affidavit, and then comes Beirut.
He came Beirut. We were in Dortyol. At that time was small—1921
also they were bombing all over. He stayed three months in Beirut until
I come to Beirut. We got married over there. And consul, says,
“Where are you taking this little girl? She's too young.” I
was 16 years old.
So anyway, I got married, I became a citizen, and we came America. God
bless America. I had four children, nice husband. So here I am today.
This program is dedicated to my
mother Araxie Barsamian, Hrant Dink and the victims and descendants of
the first genocide of the 20th century.
-David Barsamian
Other related AR programs:
Peter Balakian – Remembering the Armenian Genocide
Robert Jay Lifton, et al – Turkish Denial of the Armenian Genocide
For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, cassettes or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
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