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| Art by Rosanne Haddad |
In commemoration of the Armenian Genocide which is observed on April 24th, I am posting an excellent summary of the genocide by
http://silencethelies.com/history/
Summary of the Armenian Genocide of 1915
The Genocide of the Armenians by the Turkish government
during World War I represents a major tragedy of the modern age. In this
the first Genocide of the 20th century, almost an entire nation was
destroyed. The Armenian people were effectively eliminated from the
homeland they had occupied for nearly three thousand years. This
annihilation was premeditated and planned to be carried out under the
cover of war.
During the night of April 23-24, 1915, Armenian political, religious,
educational, and intellectual leaders in Istanbul were arrested,
deported to the interior, and mercilessly put to death. Next, the
Turkish government ordered the deportation of the Armenian people to
“relocation centers” – actually to the barren deserts of Syria and
Mesopotamia. The Armenians were driven out brutally from the length and
breadth of the empire. Secrecy, surprise, deception, torture,
dehumanization, rape and pillage were all a part of the process. The
whole of Asia Minor was put in motion.
The greatest torment was reserved for the women and children, who were driven for months over mountains and deserts [
see map],
often dehumanized by being stripped naked and repeatedly preyed upon
and abused. Intentionally deprived of food and water, they fell by the
hundreds of thousands along the routes to the desert.
There were some survivors scattered throughout the Middle East and
Transcaucasia. Thousands of them, refugees here and there, were to die
of starvation, epidemics, and exposure. Even the memory of the nation
was intended for obliteration. The former existence of Armenians in
Turkey was denied. Maps and history were rewritten. Churches, schools,
and cultural monuments were desecrated and misnamed. Small children,
snatched from their parents, were renamed and farmed out to be raised as
Turks. The Turks “annexed” ancestors of the area in ancient times to
claim falsely, by such deception, that they inhabited this region from
ancient days. A small remnant of the Armenian homeland remained
devastated by war and populated largely by starving refugees, only to be
subsequently overrun by the Bolshevik Red Army and incorporated into
the Soviet Union for seven decades, until its breakup in 1990. The word ”
genocide” had not yet been coined. Nonetheless, at the time, many
governmental spokesmen and statesmen decried the mass murder of the
Armenians as crimes against humanity, and murder of a nation.
Reports of the atrocities gradually came out and were eventually
disseminated the world over by newspapers, journals, and eyewitness
accounts. In the United States a number of prominent leaders and
organizations established fundraising drives for the remnants of the
“Starving Armenians”. In Europe the Allied Powers gave public notice
that they would hold personally responsible all members of the Turkish
government and others who had planned or participated in the massacres.
Yet, within a few years, these same governments and statesmen turned
away from the Armenians in total disregard of their pledges. Soon the
Armenian genocide had become the “Forgotten Genocide”.
In effect, the Turkish government had succeeded in its diabolical
plan to exterminate the Armenian population from what is now Turkey. The
failure of the international community to remember, or to honor their
promises to punish the perpetrators, or to cause Turkey to indemnify the
survivors helped convince Adolph Hitler some 20 years later to carry
out a similar policy of extermination against the Jews and certain other
non-Aryan populations of Europe.
http://silencethelies.com/history/
