Photo by JOSEPH EID/AFP/Getty Images
While we come together to remember fallen soldiers, the remains of orphaned survivors of the Armenian genocide are about to make way for a luxury hotel
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
Do we honour the dead or the corpses? I’m not talking about those poppy fashion accessories worn by the BBC’s clones, or PR Dave’s obscene bit of crimson Photoshopping, but the real, actual remains of the human beings slaughtered in the Great War of 1914-18. And, in this particular case, I’m talking not of the soldiers but of the civilians buried in 33 graves which I looked down upon last week from a windy hilltop beside the old Roman city of Byblos in Lebanon. Beneath those tombstones lie the bones of some survivors of the greatest war crime of that titanic conflict, the genocide of a million and a half Armenian Christians by the Turks in 1915. They died in one of the huge orphanages opened for thousands of children amid cholera and disease by European doctors and NGOs after the Great War ended, and were buried in the orphanage grounds.
Many of them saw their parents slaughtered in front of them, but escaped the massacre only to die in Lebanon. Some lived on to work among the orphans and died of old age. But they are the “honoured” dead, as surely as the soldiers who lie today in the cemeteries of the Somme and Verdun and the graves of those who endured the conflict. Or are they? For these individual Armenian graves, most of them bearing the names of the survivors, are soon to be disinterred and buried – mixed together – in a “common grave” beside the nearest Armenian church. Their names already appear on a marble stone near the hole where their bones will be placed – but their individuality will disappear, skulls and backbones and femurs jumbled together. What is left of their bodies will have lost their uniqueness.
Worse still, their own Armenian church which “protects” the old orphanage site, is to rent the land to a company that plans to construct a beach-front boutique hotel of wooden villas and, while the land where the graves now stand cannot be used for construction – it is too near the ancient Roman city – it will be landscaped and used, it now seems, for wedding photographs. The brides and grooms will not know whom they have displaced.
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