Remembering the history

[MosJan]

Remembering the history

Years of events led up to the killing of 1.5 million Armenians under Turkish rule

 

By Karen S. Kim

GLENDALE -- When Samuel Kadorian was 13, waiting at Ellis Island to receive his citizenship papers in 1920, he came across a woman whose baby was wailing inconsolably.

 

Immigration officials called for someone to translate the woman's frantic words. Kadorian, an Armenian refugee who fled to America after the Armenian Genocide in Turkey, offered to help because he could speak six languages, he said.

 

But the moment he heard the women's pleas, Kadorian was struck with a moral dilemma. He had just fled a country where his sisters and brothers had died of starvation in a Turkish jail, and now a Turkish woman was begging for his help, he said.

 

"I'm 13 years old, and I have to make a decision," said Kadorian, 95. "If I translate it wrong with the guards, that baby would die. If I said the truth, the baby would live.

 

"As a good Christian, as a good person, I told the truth, but there was a part of me that didn't want to when I thought of my brothers and sisters."

 

Kadorian's brothers and sisters were among the 1.5 million Armenians estimated to have been killed by Turkish forces during the Armenian Genocide.

 

The Turkish government denies allegations of a genocide, and the U.S. does not officially recognize it. But thousands of local Armenians will commemorate the 86th anniversary of the killings on Wednesday.

 

The day recognizes the mass arrest, imprisonment and murder of about 5,000 Armenian intellectuals and other community leaders on April 24, 1915. The incident marked the beginning of years of murder, starvation, deportation and what Armenians call the attempted extermination of their population by the Turkish government.

 

Armenia became a subject of the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s, after being bombarded and weakened by a series of invasions from different countries over several hundred years.

 

Armenians were able to maintain some cultural and religious autonomy in an empire that was mainly Muslim. This autonomy is what some say contributed to the genocide in later years.

 

"They were distinct and different from the Turks," USC Religion Professor Donald Miller. "Because they were Christians, there was very, very little intermarriage with the Turks, and it identified them as a non-Turkish, non-Muslim population."

 

For five centuries, under Ottoman rule, most Armenians lived in the eastern part of the country as peasants.

 

But the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 brought to power a new regime.

 

The group struggled against ultranationalist factions within itself until 1913. Then the nationalists orchestrated a military coup and assumed power, installing a military dictatorship, according to "The Armenian Genocide: 1915-1923," by UCLA history professor Simon Payaslian.

 

The coup led to the practice of extreme Turkish nationalism, called Pan-Turkism, that some scholars contend led to the Armenian Genocide.

 

"This was really an attempt to 'Turkify' Turkey," said Miller, who cowrote "Survivors: An oral history of the Armenian Genocide" with his wife Lorna Touryan Miller. "The notion of Turkey for the Turks. That's the sense in which I say this was a genocide."

 

The onset of World War I in August 1914 brought the armies of Great Britain, France and Russia invading all sides of Turkey, which had sided with Germany.

 

Turkish officials point to Armenian support of the invading Allies as one of the root causes of the Armenian massacres.

 

The Armenian population on the eastern side of Turkey had pledged its allegiance to the invading powers in hopes of independence after the war, said Aykut Berk, consul general of Turkey in Los Angeles.

 

"The Armenians have been, since the beginning of the war, de facto belligerents ... since they have fought alongside the Allies on all fronts," Berk read from a 1919 translated letter from Boghos Nubar, head of the Armenian Delegation to the Paris Peace Conference to the French foreign minister.

 

During the course of the war, Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army were disarmed, used for labor, starved and ultimately murdered, Payaslian wrote in his book. Next, 5,000 Armenian intellectuals were killed in April 1915. In May of the same year, the Turkish government began deporting caravans of Armenians in the Eastern provinces, forced to march south through rough terrain with no rest, food or protection from frequent attacks and massacres.

 

"Yes, there was suffering and tragic things happened then," Berk said. "But [the Armenians] became such a threat that the Ottoman Empire had no other choice but to move these people to other provinces [away from invading Russian forces.] They were a threat to the very existence of the state. This was a mini-war within a larger war."

 

Berk contends that the killings were political and military acts during war, not a genocide. Armenians should also recognize that 2.5 million Turks were killed during World War I as well, Berk said.

 

But Rouben Adalian, director of the Washington D.C-based Armenian National Institute, said the killing of 1.5 million Armenians was indeed a genocide.

 

"You have an organized, systematic process eliminating and reducing a population that's organized by the state," Adalian said. "They wanted to make sure that historic Armenia did not have the ability to revive a separate country. The way to do that was to destroy the population."

 

Miller agreed, "Even if there were liberation attempts, does that justify slaughtering the entire population? I think, by any account, the answer to that is no."