Whole mountains of skulls

[15levels]

Let us all be greatful for the just stance Dutch journalist (and dutch press in its majority) takes on this painful subject for us.

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De Elsevier (Dutch weekly magazine)

 

Friday July 27 2001

 

Whole mountains of skulls

 

The only Armenian ambition is recognition of the genocide by the Turks in

1915. Turkey is not worried.

 

One and a half million Armenians were killed in the last century by the

Turks. In a civil war, says Turkey. In a genocide that later inspired

Hitler, say Armenians. The worldwide Armenian diaspora is zealous for

recognition of the genocide. "I do this for the family that I lost."

 

by Jacqueline de Gier in Van (Turkey)

 

The museum of Van, in Eastern Turkey, has a permanent exhibition of skulls

and bones. The wall-high showcases are all filled to the brim. This

department is called the genocide section. But it is not a confession of

guilt for the murder on the Armenian people, wherein one and a half million

people died. According to the official text these skulls and bones belong to

Turks and Kurds who were killed bloodthirstily by Armenians, with Russian

help. The toffee-colored skulls do not indicate whether they were Kurds,

Turks or Armenians. Most skulls have cracks and dents. It seems as if these

people were cudgeled to death like seals.

 

No lack of skulls. The Armenian genocide in 1915, the first holocaust of the

twentieth century, was such a success -as well as its denial by the Turks-

that Adolf Hitler used it as inspiration for the systematic extermination of

undesirable peoples. Hitler said in 1939:"After all, who still remembers the

annihilation of the Armenians?" His contemporary Winston Churchill:"History

will vainly search for the word 'Armenian'."

 

In 1915 the Armenian nation was ordered by the Turks to leave Turkish

Armenia. The men were often shot outside their villages. Women and children

were deported and forced to long marches through Mesopotamia, into the

desert. In Anatolia some eight-hundred-thousand men, women and children

died. Whoever survived the death-marches, was locked up in camps in Ottoman

Syria. The American consul Leslie Davis witnessed these deportations. In

some places the mountains of corpses were so high that he had to chase his

horse through them. Davis wrote:"Day 52-9. Naked, without food or beverage.

Women bowed down with shame. Hundreds die in heat. Obliged to pay for water.

Many throw themselves down ravines. Arab villagers give clothes."

 

World War One was the "absolute solution" of the "Armenian problem", but the

Armenians had already received their first warning under the cruel rule of

sultan Abdul Hamid II. He formed the Kurdish-Hamidian regiment, that became

synonymous to terror. Between 1895 and 1920 the Armenian nation lost one and

a half million people. One third of all Armenians died an atrocious death.

Another half million people became refugees, whose descendants now live in

the worldwide Armenian diaspora.

 

The revolution of the Young Turks (1908) ended the reign of the sultan.

There was hope that there would be an end to oppression, but the Young Turk

regime drifted toward dictatorship. It became a brutal instrument of Turkish

nationalism and pan-Turkism. It involved unification of the superior Turkish

race from the Balkans to Mongolia under one ruler, who would revive the days

of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane the Lame.

 

Few Turks worry about recognizing the genocide. According to the Turks a

vicious civil war was raging around the beginning of World War One, the type

in which many people always die. Ankara spends capitals on pr-offices in the

United States, where a powerful Armenian lobby is also seated, to

demonstrate that Armenians are fantasts. Recently a harsh anti-Armenian book

by the Turkish author Kamuran Gürün appeared, which Turkish embassies are

spreading in high numbers. And yet, a reconciliation commission was formed

recently by people from both countries that is meant to improve relations

between Armenians and Turks.

 

ROCK-CONCERTS

The skull plays a big part in Armenian symbolism. The Bulgarian-Armenian

author Sevda Sevan, whose family was driven out of Turkish Rodosto, does not

write a novel without "her" skull on the table. Skulls are popular at

Armenian rock-concerts in Los Angeles, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires

and Beirut, where many Armenians live. In Istanbul, where there is still a

small but prosperous Armenian community and where the Armenian patriarch is

still seated, the skull has also been signaled. A small skull worn by brave

young Armenians is coupled with the cross around the neck.

 

The Armenians are a successful people. There's only about eight million

left, of which the majority lives in the former-Soviet republic Armenia and

Russia. The most prosperous Armenian community, of more than a million

people, lives in the United States, where they belong to the highest

educated Americans. The most prominent Armenian was George Deukmeijian,

govenor of California in the 80s. France has, with its four-hundred-thousand

people, the largest Armenian community in Europe. All over the Middle-East,

like in Jerusalem and Damascus, there are Armenian communities. Aleppo, the

second city of Syria, is predominantly Armenian.

 

Throughout the centuries the Armenians were to be found on the crossroads of

business and silk routes: Shanghai, Bombay, Singapore. A small but

determined group is quartered in Nagorno-Karabach, the Armenian enclave in

Azerbaijan, that is being supported by America and Turkey because of the

"Turkish" ethnicity of the Azeris, but it is mostly for the oil.

 

The Turks and many of their friends in the West -Turkey is, after Israel,

the greatest recipient of American military aid- have always denied the

genocide. The lobby against the "Armenian lie" is tough. But the Armenians

are not quiet either. For years now they have been trying to pass a law in

the American Congress to recognize April 24 as the International Day of

Crimes against Humanity. The Zoryan Institute in Massachusetts does research

and provides evidence. And in Washington, DC, there will be, almost next to

the Jewish Holocaust Museum, the Armenian Holocaust Museum.

 

In the meantime, the genocide has been recognized by the permanent

UN-nations' tribunal consisted of eminent international lawyers in Geneva.

France recognized the genocide in the days of François Mitterand. The

French-Armenian singer/songwriter Charles Aznavour sees himself as the

international ambassador for the Armenian cause. The recognition of the

genocide, he says, is also important for the Turks themselves. "For every

Turkish murderer there were many more Turks trying to help the Armenians. I

do not feel any hatred towards the Turks."

 

Armenia is what travel-novelist Robert Kaplan calls the "typical nation of

the Middle-East." Conquered, territorially "scarred", but that one way or

the other has existed for 2600 years. The country is mentioned in Persian

inscriptions, just like historian Herodotus, and the writers Xenophon and

Strabo. The Armenians trace their roots back to Haik, the son of Torgom, the

great-grandson of Japeth, and he was a son of Noah. His ark most probably

landed on Ararat, the holy Armenian mountain. The quaint, with its eternal

snow-caps to be seen from Yerevan, the current capital of the republic of

Armenia. Ararat is now in Turkey. An Armenian poet wrote:"We have seen the

other side of the moon, when will we see the other side of Ararat?"

 

The city Van lies at Van Golu, a big lake. The absence of Armenians in this

region where they have always lived, is stressed by the presence of hundreds

of ruins of churches and monuments. Van is the heart of historic

Great-Armenia. The Armenians call Armenia Hayastan. In the first century

before Christ, Tigran the Great, stretched Hayastan from the Caspian Sea in

the east to what is now Central Turkey. It occupied large parts of the

Caucasus, a piece of Iran and all of Syria. In the year 301 Armenians became

the first nation to adopt christianity, before even Constantine converted

and Constantinople, present Istanbul, took over the role of Rome. It is

therefore the oldest christian nation in the world, that is celebrating the

1700th anniversay of her church this year.

 

EVIL SPIRIT

Throughout the centuries Armenia fell under Turks, Persians and later

Russian czars, until a fraction of it was annexed under the bolsheviks as

the soviet republic. Old-Armenia also overlaps a part of the dreamed

Kurdistan. Many Kurds settled in Armenian houses and lands after the

deportations. Fleeing Armenian girls were kidnapped by Kurds and forced into

marriage. In Kurdish folk tales the Armenian djin -evil spirit- regularly

pops up. Western sympathizers of the Kurds would rather ignore the Armenian

issue. He who supports one nation, must let go of the other.

 

Van is now a "Kurdish" city and the central base for the Kurdish Worker's

Party PKK. The Armenians disappeared from Van -killed, fled- but the memory

of 1915 is there. Despite the official denial not a single attempt has been

made to hide the massacre. From the Rock of Van, a dramatic rock that rises

hundred meters out of the water, you have the best view of the old, Armenian

city. From this rock Turks and their Kurdish accomplices harassed the

Armenians. In the silver morning mist the city looks like a charcoal sketch

with parts erased.

 

There are still a few hotheads in the diaspora who still dream of the

Great-Armenia from ancient days, but of Armenian aspirations for Turkish -or

Iranian- land there is no talk. There is a homeland in the Caucasus with its

own Caucasian problems. There is the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra led by

British-Armenian conductor Loris Tcheknavorian. The landscape is prey to

heavy earthquakes and a severe climate; the country is kept alive by the

wealthy diaspora. And the new Armenian metropolis is not the capital

Yerevan, but for the last half century has been Beirut, the capital of

Lebanon. The Armenian community in Lebanon has freed itself from its

refugee-miseries and is now prosperous and influential.

 

PHILANTHROPISTS

The power of the Armenians is attributed to their strong church and culture

of self-help. They have their own Armenian Red Cross and a network of relief

organizations, such as the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lissabon and

London. (Gulbenkian was an oil-baron who a century ago made his fortune,

like Nelson Rockefeller, in Baku.) Philanthropists like Alex Manoogian, an

American industrial, finance a number of relief-projects, while

international scholarships have to ensure that no Armenian talent and

potential is lost. "As an Armenian you grow up with a load of obligations.

The richer you are, the more obligations you have," says Kaspar Manoogian

(33) from Boston. "Don't behave like the sultan," my grandfather always

said. Your money, your knowledge, everything you have, should be dedicated

to your people. Because a day will come when we too might need your help."

 

The only big Armenian ambition in the year 2001 is recognition of the

genocide. The evidence is overwhelming. Recent research in Turkish sources,

published by Yale Journal of International Law, again testifies to the

deliberate nature of the genocide. The Armenians themselves were also

responsible for a number of publicity blunders, such as publishing falsified

sources. However like prominent historian Erik J. Zürcher, professor of

modern Ottoman and Turkish history at the University of Amsterdam, explains

in his book Turkey, A Modern History, it is the sources of Turkey's allies

during World War One that deliver the evidence. As far as he's concerned, it

is fact that the Young Turks were occupied with a premeditated

extermination. To an Austrian ambassador Talaat *****, one of the three

Young Turk leaders of the revolution in 1908, even bragged that there were

"no more Armenians" left. The ambassador writes:"It seems like the plan to

exterminate the Armenian race, has succeeded."

 

The official version of Ankara meets, outside of pure "turcophile" circles,

little response. Wherefrom then the heavy denial? The crimes were committed

before the present republic was established in 1923. No Turkish general

needs to fear that he will be treated like Augusto Pinochet. No Turkish

politician will be deported in handcuffs to a tribunal.

 

Ankara says that recognition of the genocide is "dangerous" for the

stability in the region. The government is partly right. Recognition would

mean that confiscated land would have to be returned, compensation paid and

Kurds would have to be removed from Armenian houses. It opens the door, fear

many Turkish intellectuals, to even more ethnic and nationalistic fighting.

But above all, the myth of cultural homogeneity would be turned upside-down.

There are at least 35 ethnic minorities in Turkey. But the present ideology

of the "secular" republic is based on that myth of ethnic homogeneity. The

state undermines its denial.

 

A Draconian constitution must protect that ideology, that myth ‹even human

rights' violations are justified for this goal. The same constitution also

justifies actions -burning villages, death-sentence for teenagers, torture-

against the Kurds now.

 

Any reference to "Turkish Armenia" is, like so much else in Turkey,

forbidden. The Turkish publisher of the opponent of the Winkler Prins

Encyclopedia was threatened with emprisonment for mentioning the Armenian

Kingdom in Cilicia between 1080 and 1375. Turkish historians like to claim

that the deportations were necessary, because the "whole Armenian

population" was a dangerous "fifth-columnist" of Russia, Turkey's

arch-enemy, which was threatening to invade the east. The Ottoman Empire

fell and the Russians had promised the Armenians their own state. Like

Charles Aznavour says:"The tendency is: there was no genocide, but it was

needed."

 

PHOTO 1: Armenian deaths in Turkey at the beginning of last century

PHOTO 2: American-Armenians know their roots. Last month a group visited the

ruins of Ani, once the center of Armenian culture, in Turkey

PHOTO 3: In the first century before Christ Great-Armenia was called

Hayastan

PHOTO 4: Angry Armenian protestors burning a Turkish flag in Athens------------------------------------

[Pilafhead]

Is this generally recognized??? I didn't know this. Martin at one time posted an article that claimed the classic pirate skull and crossbones has an Armenian connection. Strange. Coincidentally (or not), I wear a skull ring that was given to me by my grandfather. And all these years my family thought I was the weird one for liking skulls!

[ August 02, 2001: Message edited by: Aghmug ]