razmouhi

Tell me... Is this crap? ==== Jerusalem Post In Jerusalem Friday, 3 May 2002 A Perplexing Indifference Last week, Armenians around the world commemorated the genocide of their people. Few Israelis took notice. By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollhei Jerusalemite George Hintlian faces an uphill struggle to make others remember. Last week, he joined hundreds in a procession to a local cemetery. But there were few graves at which to mourn. April 24 is the day Armenians remember their 1.5 million dead, killed on death marches in what Armenians say was the first genocide of the 20th Century. Few Israelis know what the day signifies. No Knesset member attended the ceremony in St. James' Cathedral in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City. There were no documentaries on Israeli television. Maps and pictures pasted on walls in the Quarter detailing the killings have been torn down or defaced. Ignorance or indifference? Both, according to Hintlian, a historian of the Armenian people and child of survivors. "Nobody knows about the Armenian genocide because until 1990, our country, Armenia was inside the Soviet Union, where ethnic and religious minorities were repressed. Also, Turkey was a member of NATO, and in the context of the Cold War it was considered impolite to bring up the Armenian issue." Turkey has consistently played down the figures of Armenians killed, and has denied that there was a premeditated plan to extinguish the Christian minority in Turkey. According to the official Turkish line, Christians and Muslims alike lost their lives in civil unrest in the context of WWI. According to the Armenians, when Turkey went to war against Russia, Armenians all over the country- but particularly near the Russian border-were accused of sympathizing with the enemy and were "deported," ostensibly to southern areas of the Ottoman Empire. But effectively, the deportations were death marches, in which hundreds of thousands men, women and children died of disease and starvation in the Syrian desert, or were slaughtered along the way by Turkish military police and their henchmen. The international community's indifference was decried even by contemporaries such as Henry Morgenthau, then the American Ambassador to Turkey, Viscount Gladstone, and Winston Churchill. Adolf Hitler referred to the Armenian genocide on a number of occasions. In one speech in 1939, in which he spoke of his plan to "exterminate without mercy or pity men, women and children belonging to the Polish-speaking race", he said, "after all, who remembers today the extermination of the Armenians?" Armenian remembrance day was first commemorated in 1965, 50 years after the beginning of the deportations. April 24 was the Armenian Kristallnacht. That night in 1915, Turkish police rounded up, imprisoned and executed Armenian intellectuals- journalists, doctors, lawyers and priests - across the country. Sine 1965, Armenians have pushed for greater awareness and recognition of their people's sufferings, with some success. About a dozen Western countries now recognize the Armenian genocide. Many have official ceremonies on April 24. In February of this year, the European Parliament followed suit, expressing the hope that Turkey will face up to its responsibility - but stopping short of making Turkey's accession to the European Union dependent on recognition, let alone remorse. In Israel, two factors contribute to burying the Armenian issue. One is the country's strategically vital relations with Turkey, its only strong Muslim ally in the region. The second, more elusive, is a largely unspoken concern that recognition of the Armenian "genocide" will detract from the uniqueness, and horror, of the Holocaust. Earlier this month, when Turkish prime minister Bulent Ecevit accused Israel of carrying out a "genocide" against the Palestinian population, relations between the two countries turned chilly. Ecevit was rebuked not only by Israel, but also by Turkish politicians who underlined Israel's continued help with the "Armenian question." Jewish-American lobbies protested Ecevit's comments by pointing to their staunch support of Turkey in the face of Armenian claims of genocide. Turkey's foreign minister Ismail Cem told Turkish television that "especially in the US, the Jewish lobby has always supported Turkey against any injustices that have been made or that were going to be made." Turkish sensitivities aside, Israel has always been reluctant to use the term "genocide" to refer to anything but the Holocaust. Earlier this year, Rivka Kohen, the Israeli ambassador to Armenia, upset Armenians by questioning the term in relation to deportations of Armenians in WWI. The Israeli foreign ministry, responding to an angry diplomatic note from its Armenian counterpart, reinforced Kohen's position. "Israel recognizes the tragedy of the Armenians and the plight of the Armenian people," it read. "Nevertheless, the events cannot be compared to genocide, and that does not in any way diminish the magnitude of the tragedy... This issue requires extensive research by a wide spectrum of people and academic dialogue that is based on testimony and proof." Hintlian believes there is solid proof of genocide, and points out that many of the contemporary accounts of deportations and massacres come from foreign diplomats who were stationed across Turkey. Some of the most shocking photos of atrocities - piles of corpses, half naked Armenian women being tormented by uniformed Turks, Turkish officers proudly posing with severed heads - were taken by a German officer. Germany was Turkey's ally at the time, and officially approved the policy of "deportation." "The Armenian genocide is different from the Holocaust," says Hintlian, "but there are similarities. Both were planned, both were premeditated, both happened when a particular political party came to power. In both cases it was an inner cabinet decision. These are the common factors. The Armenian genocide didn't't happen for racial reasons, it didn't't happen for ideological reasons - it happened for political reasons." Hintlian is not alone in denouncing Israel's ostrich-like attitude to the Armenian issue. Two years ago, then- education minister Yossi Sarid attended the remembrance ceremony and pledged that the Armenian genocide would be taught in Israeli schools as part of the history curriculum. His comments drew criticism at the time, much of it from colleagues in the Israeli government. His plan never saw the light. Yair Auron of the Kibbutzim College of Education in Tel Aviv designed a syllabus for teaching the genocide of the Armenians and the persecution of gypsies in World War II to Israeli high-school students. His book, The Banality of Indifference, examines Jewish attitudes to the Armenian genocide. A number of Israeli intellectuals, including Yad Vashem's Yehuda Baur and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, have spoken out against the apparent conspiracy of silence. Some argue that precisely because the Holocaust is unique, it is imperative to study other genocides as well. Yet the Armenian tragedy has sparked more than indifference in some. In the past five years, maps of the Armenian genocide with pictures of victims have been vandalized and torn down from walls in the Quarter. Hintlian says he saw people- young and old- tearing down posters in broad daylight. One yeshiva student he caught in the act told him he was offended by the photographs of naked bodies on the posters. Another poster had "not true" scrawled over it. Ultimately, though, Armenians are less concerned with Israel than with Turkey. "My problem is with the Turks," says Hintlian. "And it is really a spiritual and intellectual problem. What I would like is not recognition- I don't need a Turk to be thinking about this - but, for God's sake, a feeling of regret...! The people suffered need not recognition, but dialogue. What I need first of all is a dialogue with a Turkish intellectual. And then I need reconciliation. My healing will come only from such dialogue. For now, we are stuck in a monologue. And that is the painful part." At 94, Sultanik Manougian has lost her eyesight and much of her hearing, but her memory remains sharp. "I remember everything as if it happened yesterday." She says in clear, if halting, English." I was born in Telas. I was seven years old when I was expelled from my home. When the war broke out (in 1915), the Turkish government took all the men, intellectuals, doctors, lawyers, and killed them. They were killed with knives, axes, beatings. Then all the others had to leave. My mother kissed the door of our home - it was a very nice house we had, with a big garden. "The Turks had sent everyone letters saying either change your religion or leave. One or two families converted. Everybody else was evicted. It was a very hot summer, dust everywhere. We had to walk, and on either side there were gendarmes, they would beat us. We saw bodies by the side of the road. When darkness fell on the first day, we saw we were in the same place we had been in hours before. They would take us in circles like that for days. For 10 days we walked in the desert. People remained on the ground from hunger, thirst. We reached Bozanti and there was some water, dirty water, with buffalos and cows standing in it. We drank it anyway. Then I became very ill. Again, we had to walk." In the next town they reached, Manougian was saved by an uncle who worked for the Baghdad railway and was able to intercede on her behalf with the Turks. Her mother pleaded with the man to also save her little boy who was four, but the Turkish police said boys had to stay in the march. Manougian, who had contracted typhoid from the filthy water she had drunk, remained in Bozanti for the remainder of the war. Eventually, via Istanbul and Beirut, she came to Jerusalem where she continues to live inside the walls of the Armenian convent. Out of 20 members of her family, only two others survived. All the rest died in the desert. When Manougian hears that her story will be printed in the Jerusalem Post - more than 50 years after the newspaper changed its name she still calls it the Palestine Post - she gets agitated. Do we have to use her name? Could we perhaps use a pseudonym instead? "You cannot print what I said about the Turks. They will come and kill me!" Eighty-seven years later, the fear of persecution and death is still raw. This year, the Sunday following Armenian remembrance day was Palm Sunday in the Armenian church calendar. Manougian was too frail to attend the mass in St. James' Cathedral, a mixture of religious ceremony and social happening. In the semi-darkness of the church, the silver and brass oil lamps, blue-and-white tiled columns, and deep red rugs compete to catch the few shafts of light that come in through the small windows. The walls of the church were covered in an eclectic collection of colorful curtains, some hundreds of years old, many richly embroidered in silver and gold thread. At the climax of the ceremony, dozens of children pull open the curtains to symbolize the opening of the gates of Jerusalem for Jesus' entry. Armenian families as far afield as California or Holland pay handsome donations to the church for the privilege of having a curtain pulled open in their name. Prices start at a couple of hundred dollars and go up to $1,000 for the massive curtain at the center of the church. This year, Sultanik Manougian had delved deep in her pocket for the honor of having her name read out first. The main curtain was drawn in memory of her husband, who died last year. But for the 94-year old survivor, memory is not a luxury. It is a vital part of her being. -CdFW

I also found this statement of yours very interesting. "thus I did not save the CRAP that was there for future arguments with anyone" How do you know it was crap, you didn't see it? Are you again taking Domino's word for it?

I hope you are honest enough Azat to see for yourself who brought that discussion here. Hello? Who started this thread? I really think Domino's claims smell of extreme dishonesty. Right here, another poster provided us with what happened, you saw that, didn't you? I'd like Domino to explain how it went from that civilized discussion to all out war. Why did it happen? Since he brought it up here and decided to get all these other people involved with his problems.

Domino did lie when he said the stuff about posting trash, did you see any trash and do you know first hand yourself what transpired? Yet you tell ME to refrain from commenting when you don't know any more than I do about the subject other than what Domino said? Then he claims there were death threats. Where is the proof of that? Do you blindly accept everything he says? It seems like he is very much prone to exaggeration. Exactly what was this so-called trash? I want to know and have it explained in precise detail.

Also, Domino, what do you mean by "scraping" the Armenian Diaspora forum? Last time I looked it was still there. Of course there a Stalinist moderation over there, whoever runs the place must be a student of Joe Stalin.

We have whose word about so-called "loud" extremists. It seems like you are the loud one Domino and I think extremist could ONLY be applied to the anti-Armenian element. Are you part of that? You have come here with no proof whatsoever and now we see from this last post that you were not telling the truth. Why is it that we can't see or hear for ourselves?

They are awesome! Have you ever gone to their forum? They are bringing knowledge of the Armenian Genocide to many young people all over! It's fantastic!

Russians have always shown the utmost support and respect concerning the Armenian Genocide. One shining example is the late General Lebed who was very, very pro-Armenian! If I can find it, I have some information about that you'd probably like to read.

I agree with Gamavor. It's shameful to block Armenians out just because you don't like what they say. That's fascism at its worst. Hagarag really sounds paranoid to the extreme. What's with that?

hagarag you are so full of s.hit, it's ridiculous. Gamavor is just telling the truth and the brain dysfunction is all yours.

kaan please tell everyone that you are turkish. I know this turk propagandist from another Armenian Genocide forum. Beware of speaking to it because he is a shameless liar and spammer.

The last name would suggest the Italian comes from her father's side. However, check it out, she is Armenian as well. http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby...celibrities.htm