Armenian Genocide
Turkey's Day of Denial Amid Remembrance for a Genocide in All
But Name
By Robert Fisk
April 25, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "The
Independent" - They were brave Turks
and they were brave Armenians, the descendants of the murderers
of 1915 and the descendants of their victims.
They stood together outside the old Istanbul
prison where the first 250 Armenians – intellectuals, lawyers,
teachers, journalists – were imprisoned by the Ottoman Turks exactly
100 years ago, and they travelled across the Bosphorus to sit next
to each other outside the gaunt pseudo-Gothic hulk of what was once
the Anatolia Station.
From here, those 250 men were sent to their fate.
Yesterday, the Turks and the Armenians held a sign in their hands
and repeated one word in Turkish: “Soykirim”. It means “genocide”.
How they humbled the great and the good of our
Western world, as they commemorated together the planned slaughter
of one and a half million Armenian men, women and children.
For despite his first pre-election pledge to the
contrary, Barack Obama once more refused to use the word “genocide”
on Thursday. The Brits ducked the word again. The Turkish president,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, stubbornly maintaining his country’s ossified
policy of denial – once more both Armenians and Turks had to listen
to the usual “fog of war” explanation for the 20th century’s first
holocaust – was sitting 180 miles away, next to Prince Charles, to
honour the dead of the 1915 battle of Gallipoli.
But Professor Ayhan Aktar, a proud Turk whose
family emigrated from the Balkans in 1912, understood the cynical
history of the Gallipoli ceremony. For on 24 April, as the first
Armenians were being rounded up, absolutely nothing happened at
Gallipoli. The battle began the next day, when the Irish and the
Lancashire soldiers landed on the peninsula. The Erdogan government
in Ankara was using Gallipoli as a smoke screen. “We all know why
Erdogan chose 24 April, and of course it was a genocide,” Ayhan
Aktar said, his voice booming with indignation. “Ankara will NEVER
use the word ‘genocide’. Sixty per cent of Turks will one day use
the word – and still Ankara will say ‘no’. Yes, I have made enemies,
but also some very interesting friends. It was all worth it.”
The professor’s scorn came from deep historical
soil. “When my Armenian journalist friend Hrant Dink was
assassinated by a Turkish nationalist outside his newspaper office
in February 2007, I was shocked and deeply depressed,” he said.
“I promised myself that because of Hrant’s death,
I would write about 1915. With a colleague of mine, we went through
documents – and we wrote about the Turkish bureaucrats who resisted
the Armenian deportations. I read more and more and I started to use
the word ‘genocide’. It was the truth.”
And so two sets of names – all dead – dominated
those few hundred courageous souls who, in what was once the capital
of the Ottoman Empire, turned their back on the hypocrisy of those
diplomats and prime ministers 200 miles away in Gallipoli. There was
Faik Ali, Turkish governor of Kutahya in 1915 and his contemporary
Mehmet Celal in Konya and there was Huseyin Nesimi, the deputy
Turkish governor in Lice. “All fed the persecuted Armenians, all
refused to kill them,” the professor said. “Faik Ali and Huseyin
Nesimi were both dismissed. Nesimi was murdered on the orders of his
senior governor, Dr Reshid.”
These were the good Turks who tried to maintain
their country’s honour in its hour of shame. The few hundred equally
honourable Turks and Armenians who crossed the Bosphorus to the
German-built railway station on Friday then sat down on the sunny
steps and held up photographs of the 250 Armenians who were put
aboard the cattle wagons inside.
There was Ardashes Harutunian, Dr Garabed Pasayian
Han, Karekin Cakalian, Atom Yercanjian and Siamonto, the pen name of
Atom Yarjanian, a landmark figure of Armenia’s golden age of
poetry.
Siamonto’s great nephew had arrived from Paris for
his first visit – ever – to the land in which his people were
destroyed. “You must understand the significance of Gallipoli in all
this,” Manouk Atomyan explained. “At first, the Turks didn’t kill
them (the Armenians) – because they thought the Allies would win at
Gallipoli and rescue them all. But by July, it was obvious the
Allies were losing. So the Turks set about the killing.”
The 250 men, the cream of Armenian Istanbul
society, were put on a train which stopped before Ankara. The first
carriages were sent on to Ankara, where most of the passengers were
executed. Of the 250, 175 were killed, shot in the head beside
prepared graves.
Narin Kurumlu bears a Turkish name and is indeed a
Turk, but she is also Armenian, one of the few people of her race
whose family clung onto their land – Turkish land – amid their
people’s persecution.
“I am a Turk but I call this a genocide,” she
said. “It is the truth. I am a tour guide and I was trained by the
Turkish tourist people. Yes, I go to Van and the old Armenian areas.
I don’t go into details and when I’m asked about the genocide, I say
the figures are disputed. I say that some think it was a million and
a half Armenians killed, but that it was at least a million.” I ask
her to write down her original Armenian family name. “I’d rather
not,” she says. “There are good reasons for this… they listen to my
phone and they read my e-mails.”
These were perhaps the most deeply moving – and
distressing – words uttered among the small crowd of truth-tellers
outside the Anatolia station yesterday. All were escorted – at a
distance, of course – by a small posse of Turkish state police, some
in uniform. They were not there to threaten the brave Turks or the
brave Armenians. They were present to ensure that no-one else
threatened them, the sort of people, for instance, who murdered
Hrant Dink eight years ago. For that would take the headlines away
from another ceremony, wouldn’t it? And remind the world that the
130,000 Allied and Turkish dead of Gallipoli were outnumbered by one
and a half million civilian dead whose genocide we must still
obediently deny.