Today April 24th marks the 102nd anniversary of the commencement of the Armenian Genocide. This thread is to remember the 1.5 million people who died, including several of my own family members. May you forever rest in peace.
Armenian Genocide Remembrance
- Thread starter King Kendrick
- Start date
RIP. One of the most sickening acts in recent times.
May their souls rest in peace.
Truly terrible.
RIP
RIP
RIP to them all and sorry for your loss Kendrick
I visited Yerevan nine years ago, here's some pictures from the memorial:
RIP sorry for your loss mate
Rest in peace Armenians, Greeks, Christians, all victims of the genocides.
Pitiful that Turkey has never taken responsibility.
Interesting pictures @2cents
Pitiful that Turkey has never taken responsibility.
Interesting pictures @2cents
@King Kendrick sorry for your lost.
Shamefully my country(Ireland) will not recognise genocide that took place against the Armenian people. One of the most awful events in human history.
Shamefully my country(Ireland) will not recognise genocide that took place against the Armenian people. One of the most awful events in human history.
I was going to say similar, I don't understand why that's their stance but I don't want to make this thread about anything other than remembering those lost.
Oh god yeah, I felt a bit weird bringing it up but it just really angers me that some countries don't recognise the genocide.
I had no idea what this was until I saw Mikis tweet about it earlier. I then spent the next few hours reading about it and it is truly horrifying.
Remembered.
The subject was something I learned about in the last few years too, awful event.
The subject was something I learned about in the last few years too, awful event.
Sickening Stuff
R.I.P.
R.I.P.
Appropriately enough, this year Yom HaShoah/Holocaust Remembrance Day also fell on April 24th (it changes date each year to move with the Hebrew calendar).
RIP.
President Trump now to give a speech in remembrance of the Battle of Gallipoli.
Horrific stuff.
If I remember correctly - @2cents might know more about that and can hopefully correct me - both the Germany and at least parts of the British military knew about this but cared fairly little. The Germans, because they were allied with the Ottoman Empire and the British because they had other objectives. I think the full extend of German involvement is still a bit murky, but it was probably quite significant. I think I have read a letter from Colmar von der Goltz (a German general, who helped the Ottoman Empire to restructure their army) to the German ambassador in Turkey. At the beginning of the war he supported how Turkey acted against the Armenian people (I think initially he was even one of the creators of the plan to "re-settle" Armenians), but once he fully realized the scope of the slaughter, even he was completely horrified. Sadly that was too late. I think the only German general who actually tried to do anything against it was Otto Liman von Sanders (not out of humanitarian concerns so).
A very dark and sad chapter of history.
If I remember correctly - @2cents might know more about that and can hopefully correct me - both the Germany and at least parts of the British military knew about this but cared fairly little. The Germans, because they were allied with the Ottoman Empire and the British because they had other objectives. I think the full extend of German involvement is still a bit murky, but it was probably quite significant. I think I have read a letter from Colmar von der Goltz (a German general, who helped the Ottoman Empire to restructure their army) to the German ambassador in Turkey. At the beginning of the war he supported how Turkey acted against the Armenian people (I think initially he was even one of the creators of the plan to "re-settle" Armenians), but once he fully realized the scope of the slaughter, even he was completely horrified. Sadly that was too late. I think the only German general who actually tried to do anything against it was Otto Liman von Sanders (not out of humanitarian concerns so).
A very dark and sad chapter of history.
I don't know much on the particular details of what took place (certainly not from the German side of things), just the broad contextual outline really. With the British, my sense is that they felt the Armenians were expendable - they were facing the double disasters of Gallipoli and Kut just as the massacres were being carried out and were in no real position to help, although the image of the rampaging fanatical Turk was certainly put to use for propaganda purposes - they were certainly aware of much that was taking place. And in any case although the Armenian nationalists had appealed to them for aid in establishing an autonomous Armenian region for decades before WW1, the British never bought into or really encouraged the idea the way they did with the Greeks in their war of independence in the early 19th c. and the Arabs during WW1, correctly noting that neither the Ottomans or Russians would ever peacefully acquiesce in the project and staying faithful to their basic principle of maintaining the central integrity of the Ottoman Empire. So when war came they had no ties which might have sparked a sense of responsibility for the Armenian victims.
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I primarily know it from a German perspective. There were many documents published shortly afterwards but many were fabrications with the intention to hide the full involvement of the German military.
This website published and translated many of them. They also added some forwards/introductions. The "preface" link on top explains the overall relevance.
This website published and translated many of them. They also added some forwards/introductions. The "preface" link on top explains the overall relevance.
The other factor was that the Ottomans created the story that we led a religious uprising in order to try and destabilize the empire while it was facing the threat of the British/Greeks/Arabs in WW1. That cover story was debunked by American diplomat Henry Morgenthau, but they chose not to act on it because they had bigger fish to fry. Story of the Armenian people really. Same with the conclusion of the war and the Treaty of Sevres, but I think that the financial gain of the allies was more important than restitution. Honestly, had this happened in the contemporary period we would have gotten all of our land back. But alas, it happened a century ago. I could go on and on and on about this as I wrote a 50 page thesis on the buildup to, the events which occurred, and the aftermath of the events of the genocide. Here is a nice little piece that I've read that details Morgenthau's time there https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/02/03/the-great-crime/. Fascinating stuff really, but I graduated with a history degree so anything to do with historical narrative is fascinating to me.
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Thank you all for the well wishes, just came back from the Turkish embassy.
Out of curiosity, are you Armenian?I visited Yerevan nine years ago, here's some pictures from the memorial:
No, I was just visiting as a tourist during a trip around the region. And I've studied (am still studying) the period, although not the Genocide in particular.
Another couple of pictures you might find interesting, one of the last Armenian churches in Turkey left standing (or not converted into a mosque) on Akdamar Island in Lake Van (unfortunately because of the sun and scaffolding I couldn't get a clear shot that day). It's not in use obviously, just a small tourist attraction these days:
There's an interesting phenomenon in Turkey getting more attention lately - more and more 'Turks' and 'Kurds' are finding out that they have Armenian roots only going back to the Genocide. The few survivors who remained in Turkey (almost all women and children) were generally converted to Islam and kind of 'adopted' (for want of a better word) by local Turkish and Kurdish Muslim families. Some maintained a memory of their heritage and even continued on living as crypto-Christians, but most lost all memory of where they came from. Recently however there's been a trend of young Turks and Kurds discovering the truth about their background, with some reportedly even converting to Christianity and pushing for the restoration of old/destroyed Armenian churches. Obviously a controversial measure given the contest over religious spaces in Turkey today.
Here's an NYT article on this from a couple years ago - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/world/europe/armenians-turkey.html
We cannot bring back people. However, at a minimum recognition of the truth, compensation and any land forcibly taken should be given back.
We as humans have not learnt from genocides of the past. They continue to this day under such names as patriotism, nationalism, defence, business, and rallying to the flag. The world lacks unbiased leaders to judge situations and speak out on the basis of truth and justice. This is not about loyalty to a nation, faith, or a tribe, it should be loyalty to truth and justice.
We as humans have not learnt from genocides of the past. They continue to this day under such names as patriotism, nationalism, defence, business, and rallying to the flag. The world lacks unbiased leaders to judge situations and speak out on the basis of truth and justice. This is not about loyalty to a nation, faith, or a tribe, it should be loyalty to truth and justice.
Any killing and separation is sad. On this level its sickening. I agree with Sultan, only the truth and recognition should matter here.
A nice read on this subject is a book called My Grandmother by a Turkish writer called Fethiye Çetin, it is about her Armenian grandmother who survived the genocide after being 'adopted' by a Turkish military man. You can read a bit about it here - https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/11738693.pdf
Interesting. My maternal grandmother's family fled the genocide and were taken in by a Kurdish family in Mosul. She wound up being born there in the early 20s.
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Has she any photos or other records of her family in pre-1915 Anatolia?
Unfortunately she passed away last year. Not sure if there are any floating around with the rest of the family.
‘Sherlock Holmes of Armenian Genocide’ Uncovers Lost Evidence
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/22/world/europe/armenian-genocide-turkey.html
For more than a century, Turkey has denied any role in organizing the killing of Armenians in what historians have long accepted as a genocide that started in 1915, as World War I spread across continents. The Turkish narrative of denial has hinged on the argument that the original documents from postwar military tribunals that convicted the genocide’s planners were nowhere to be found.
Now, Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who has studied the genocide for decades by piecing together documents from around the world to establish state complicity in the killings, says he has unearthed an original telegram from the trials, in an archive held by the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem.
“Until recently, the smoking gun was missing,” Mr. Akcam said. “This is the smoking gun.” He called his find “an earthquake in our field,” and said he hoped it would remove “the last brick in the denialist wall.”
The story begins in 1915 in an office in the Turkish city of Erzurum, when a high-level official of the Ottoman Empire punched out a telegram in secret code to a colleague in the field, asking for details about the deportations and killings of Armenians in eastern Anatolia, the easternmost part of contemporary Turkey.
Later, a deciphered copy of the telegram helped convict the official, Behaeddin Shakir, for planning what scholars have long acknowledged and Turkey has long denied: the organized killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by the leaders of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, an atrocity widely recognized as the 20th century’s first genocide.
And then, just like that, most of the original documents and sworn testimony from the trials vanished, leaving researchers to rely mostly on summaries from the official Ottoman newspaper.
Mr. Akcam said he had little hope that his new finding would immediately change things, given Turkey’s ossified policy of denial and especially at a time of political turmoil when its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has turned more nationalist.
But Mr. Akcam’s life’s work has been to puncture, fact by fact, document by document, the denials of Turkey.
“My firm belief as a Turk is that democracy and human rights in Turkey can only be established by facing history and acknowledging historic wrongdoings,” he said.
The gutted and abandoned interior of an Armenian monastery, north of Diyarbakir, Turkey, which, according to locals, is now used to house livestock. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times
He broadened his point to argue that much of the chaos gripping the Middle East today was a result of mistrust between communities over historical wrongdoings that no one is willing to confront.
“The past is not the past in the Middle East,” he said. “This is the biggest obstacle to peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Eric D. Weitz, a history professor at the City College of New York and an expert on the Armenian genocide, called Mr. Akcam “the Sherlock Holmes of Armenian genocide.”
“He has piled clue upon clue upon clue,” Professor Weitz added.
Exactly where the telegram was all these years, and how Mr. Akcam found it, is a story in itself. With Turkish nationalists about to seize the country in 1922, the Armenian leadership in Istanbul shipped 24 boxes of court records to England for safekeeping.
The records were kept there by a bishop, then taken to France and, later, to Jerusalem. They have remained there since the 1930s, part of a huge archive that has mostly been inaccessible to scholars, for reasons that are not entirely clear. Mr. Akcam said he had tried for years to gain access to the archive, with no luck.
Instead, he found a photographic record of the Jerusalem archive in New York, held by the nephew of a Armenian monk, now dead, who was a survivor of the genocide.
While researching the genocide in Cairo in the 1940s, the monk, Krikor Guerguerian, met a former Ottoman judge who had presided over the postwar trials. The judge told him that many of the boxes of case files had wound up in Jerusalem, so Mr. Guerguerian went there and took pictures of everything.
The telegram was written under Ottoman letterhead and coded in Arabic lettering; four-digit numbers denoted words. When Mr. Akcam compared it with the known Ottoman Interior Ministry codes from the time, found in an official archive in Istanbul, he found a match, raising the likelihood that many other telegrams used in the postwar trials could one day be verified in the same way.
For historians, the court cases were one piece of a mountain of evidence that emerged over the years — including reports in several languages from diplomats, missionaries and journalists who witnessed the events as they happened — that established the historical fact of the killings and qualified them as a genocide.
Turkey has long resisted the word genocide, saying that the suffering of the Armenians had occurred during the chaos of a world war in which Turkish Muslims faced hardship, too.
Tripods used for hanging people during the Armenian genocide that started in 1915. Credit Culture Club/Getty Images
Turkey also claimed that the Armenians were traitors, and had been planning to join with Russia, then an enemy of the Ottoman Empire.
That position is deeply entwined in Turkish culture — it is standard in school curriculums — and polling has shown that a majority of Turks share the government’s position.
“My approach is that as much proof as you put in front of denialists, denialists will remain denialists,” said Bedross Der Matossian, a historian at the University of Nebraska and the author of “Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire.”
The genocide is commemorated each year on April 24, the day in 1915 that a group of Armenian notables from Istanbul were rounded up and deported.
It was the start of the enormous killing operation, which involved forced marches into the Syrian desert, summary executions and rapes.
Two years ago, Pope Francis referred to the killings as a genocide and faced a storm of criticism from within Turkey. Many countries, including France, Germany and Greece, have recognized the genocide, each time provoking diplomatic showdowns with Turkey.
The United States has not referred to the episode as genocide, out of concerns for alienating Turkey, a NATO ally and a partner in fighting terrorism in the Middle East. Barack Obama used the term when he was a candidate for president, but he refrained from doing so while in office.
This year, dozens of congressional leaders have signed a letter urging President Trump to recognize the genocide.
But that is unlikely, especially after Mr. Trump recently congratulated Mr. Erdogan for winning expanded powers in a referendum that critics say was marred by fraud.
Mr. Shakir, the Ottoman official who wrote the incriminating telegram discovered by Mr. Akcam, had fled the country by the time the military tribunal convicted him and sentenced him to death in absentia.
A few years later, he was gunned down in the streets of Berlin by two Armenian assassins described in an article by The New York Times as “slim, undersized, swarthy men lurking in a doorway.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/22/world/europe/armenian-genocide-turkey.html
For more than a century, Turkey has denied any role in organizing the killing of Armenians in what historians have long accepted as a genocide that started in 1915, as World War I spread across continents. The Turkish narrative of denial has hinged on the argument that the original documents from postwar military tribunals that convicted the genocide’s planners were nowhere to be found.
Now, Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who has studied the genocide for decades by piecing together documents from around the world to establish state complicity in the killings, says he has unearthed an original telegram from the trials, in an archive held by the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem.
“Until recently, the smoking gun was missing,” Mr. Akcam said. “This is the smoking gun.” He called his find “an earthquake in our field,” and said he hoped it would remove “the last brick in the denialist wall.”
The story begins in 1915 in an office in the Turkish city of Erzurum, when a high-level official of the Ottoman Empire punched out a telegram in secret code to a colleague in the field, asking for details about the deportations and killings of Armenians in eastern Anatolia, the easternmost part of contemporary Turkey.
Later, a deciphered copy of the telegram helped convict the official, Behaeddin Shakir, for planning what scholars have long acknowledged and Turkey has long denied: the organized killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by the leaders of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, an atrocity widely recognized as the 20th century’s first genocide.
And then, just like that, most of the original documents and sworn testimony from the trials vanished, leaving researchers to rely mostly on summaries from the official Ottoman newspaper.
Mr. Akcam said he had little hope that his new finding would immediately change things, given Turkey’s ossified policy of denial and especially at a time of political turmoil when its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has turned more nationalist.
But Mr. Akcam’s life’s work has been to puncture, fact by fact, document by document, the denials of Turkey.
“My firm belief as a Turk is that democracy and human rights in Turkey can only be established by facing history and acknowledging historic wrongdoings,” he said.
The gutted and abandoned interior of an Armenian monastery, north of Diyarbakir, Turkey, which, according to locals, is now used to house livestock. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times
He broadened his point to argue that much of the chaos gripping the Middle East today was a result of mistrust between communities over historical wrongdoings that no one is willing to confront.
“The past is not the past in the Middle East,” he said. “This is the biggest obstacle to peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Eric D. Weitz, a history professor at the City College of New York and an expert on the Armenian genocide, called Mr. Akcam “the Sherlock Holmes of Armenian genocide.”
“He has piled clue upon clue upon clue,” Professor Weitz added.
Exactly where the telegram was all these years, and how Mr. Akcam found it, is a story in itself. With Turkish nationalists about to seize the country in 1922, the Armenian leadership in Istanbul shipped 24 boxes of court records to England for safekeeping.
The records were kept there by a bishop, then taken to France and, later, to Jerusalem. They have remained there since the 1930s, part of a huge archive that has mostly been inaccessible to scholars, for reasons that are not entirely clear. Mr. Akcam said he had tried for years to gain access to the archive, with no luck.
Instead, he found a photographic record of the Jerusalem archive in New York, held by the nephew of a Armenian monk, now dead, who was a survivor of the genocide.
While researching the genocide in Cairo in the 1940s, the monk, Krikor Guerguerian, met a former Ottoman judge who had presided over the postwar trials. The judge told him that many of the boxes of case files had wound up in Jerusalem, so Mr. Guerguerian went there and took pictures of everything.
The telegram was written under Ottoman letterhead and coded in Arabic lettering; four-digit numbers denoted words. When Mr. Akcam compared it with the known Ottoman Interior Ministry codes from the time, found in an official archive in Istanbul, he found a match, raising the likelihood that many other telegrams used in the postwar trials could one day be verified in the same way.
For historians, the court cases were one piece of a mountain of evidence that emerged over the years — including reports in several languages from diplomats, missionaries and journalists who witnessed the events as they happened — that established the historical fact of the killings and qualified them as a genocide.
Turkey has long resisted the word genocide, saying that the suffering of the Armenians had occurred during the chaos of a world war in which Turkish Muslims faced hardship, too.
Tripods used for hanging people during the Armenian genocide that started in 1915. Credit Culture Club/Getty Images
Turkey also claimed that the Armenians were traitors, and had been planning to join with Russia, then an enemy of the Ottoman Empire.
That position is deeply entwined in Turkish culture — it is standard in school curriculums — and polling has shown that a majority of Turks share the government’s position.
“My approach is that as much proof as you put in front of denialists, denialists will remain denialists,” said Bedross Der Matossian, a historian at the University of Nebraska and the author of “Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire.”
The genocide is commemorated each year on April 24, the day in 1915 that a group of Armenian notables from Istanbul were rounded up and deported.
It was the start of the enormous killing operation, which involved forced marches into the Syrian desert, summary executions and rapes.
Two years ago, Pope Francis referred to the killings as a genocide and faced a storm of criticism from within Turkey. Many countries, including France, Germany and Greece, have recognized the genocide, each time provoking diplomatic showdowns with Turkey.
The United States has not referred to the episode as genocide, out of concerns for alienating Turkey, a NATO ally and a partner in fighting terrorism in the Middle East. Barack Obama used the term when he was a candidate for president, but he refrained from doing so while in office.
This year, dozens of congressional leaders have signed a letter urging President Trump to recognize the genocide.
But that is unlikely, especially after Mr. Trump recently congratulated Mr. Erdogan for winning expanded powers in a referendum that critics say was marred by fraud.
Mr. Shakir, the Ottoman official who wrote the incriminating telegram discovered by Mr. Akcam, had fled the country by the time the military tribunal convicted him and sentenced him to death in absentia.
A few years later, he was gunned down in the streets of Berlin by two Armenian assassins described in an article by The New York Times as “slim, undersized, swarthy men lurking in a doorway.”
103 years and counting today. RIP to the family members who died during these events.
It is sickening that the world (including the torch bearers of freedom, democracy and human rights) turn a blind eye and ignore this genocide due to geopolitics. No excuse given by turkey is a justification for condoning this genocide.
Any recommended history books on the Armenian genocide?
I only have a basic knowledge of the genocide from reading books on the Ottoman Empire.
I only have a basic knowledge of the genocide from reading books on the Ottoman Empire.
This (4:135)
Here's a good article to start with - The Armenian Genocide of 1915-1916: Cumulative Radicalization and the Development of a Destruction Policy
I've only briefly dipped in to these two books but they have been highly recommended to me:
A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility
A question of genocide : Armenians and Turks at the end of the Ottoman Empire
(Edit): another one, by the author of the article above - The great game of genocide : Imperialism, nationalism and the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians
Great! Thanks @2cents .
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Communal people in Istanbul dumped a truck load of rubbish in front of an Armenian church and wrote “This nation is ours” on its entrance and walls.
Did my dissertation on the Armenian Genocide and why it occured. Came across some really disturbing and sad stuff in my research.