The Armenian Genocide

By Jennifer Gnana

Louis de Berniere, in his book, Birds without Wings recounts a poignant episode that foreshadowed the eventual pogrom against Armenians throughout the Ottoman Empire and the silence of the empire's ethnically diverse subjects.

Levon the Armenian accidentally brushes against Constantinos, his neighbour in the fictional Ottoman village of Eskibahçe.

The drunken Greek lashes out against Levon and within seconds, the Armenian is on the ground pleading for his life.

His mercy plea is interesting to hear, "I am a loyal Ottoman. Long live the Sultan Padishah. I am an Ottoman Long live the Sultan. Long live the Empire.'

Constantinos lowers his foot at that instant and curses him as a pig.

What is galling, the author observes later is the initial laughter and the silence of the people who stood around and watched Levon's humiliation.

"Shame on you all," Levon says to the crowd as he makes his way out.

As events unfolded for the worse in Eskibahçe, Levon and his family would perish as they were led away to a "safe haven" as decreed by the Sultan by bands of armed Kurds called hamidye.

Only his three pretty daughters were spared, thanks to the intervention of the local Turkish landlord Rustem Bey who was benevolent to all his subjects regardless of whether they were Greek or Armenian, Christian or Muslim.

For more than a million other Armenians however, there was no Rustem Bey and no intervention as they were massacred in the most heartless manner throughout the Ottoman Empire.

Forced marches, to a supposedly better place where they would be "safe" resulted in the starvation, torture, death and rape of thousands of Armenians.

The holocaust of the Armenians, preceded that of the Jewish race by Nazi Germany.

While the latter is widely acknowledged, the former is not.

The genocide of the 1.5million Armenians was the outcome of the Armenian question that troubled the Ottoman empire during the last days of its existence.

Can Christians under the rule of the Sultan be accorded equal treatment as its Muslim subjects?

Under the caliphate, the Christians living in the empire, Armenians, the Assyrians as well as the Greeks had to pay taxes for being dhimmi, or infidels.

The overtaxed and overworked Armenians were also looked upon with despise as they occupied a lot of service sector jobs.

In the same book by de Berniere, a Greek boy teaches his Muslim friend the Greek alphabet and the latter uses the script to write Turkish.

His reason for learning to write in Greek language was to be educated so he can earn as much as the Greeks and Armenians.

Education amongst the Armenians enabled them to be skilled unlike the Muslims who were often educated only in the tenets of Islam.

The first phase of the Armenian holocaust, according to some is classified to have taken place from 1894 to 1896 when the Sultan became increasingly paranoid and hostile to any calls for reforms in the treatment of his subjects.

He blamed the Armenians for the "hostilities and endless persecutions from the Christian world".

Influenced by American Protestants who had made gradual inroads into the largely Orthodox Christian populations and established schools, the Armenians began to stir against being treated as second class citizens.

When the calls for equal treatment also seemed to come from Western powers, the Sultan became increasingly annoyed.

What irked him further was the increasing closeness of the Armenians to Russia whom they even served as volunteers in the army.

The sultan's settlement of the Armenian question was their elimination. In this he was no different from the Adolf Hitler whose 'Final Solution' was also the wiping out of the Jewish race.

Sultan Hamid's paranoia and hatred eventually led to the deaths of 80,000 to 300,000 Armenians and earned him the name "Bloody Sultan'' in the foreign press.

The newly formed Young Turks movement that deposed of the Sultan and sought to build a Turkish nation based on the rising Turkish nationalism was no kinder to the Armenians who had hoped for the much needed reforms.

When the new government led by War Minister Enver Pasha decided to win back lands claimed by the Russians, the latter conscripted Armenians to be volunteers.

When the Turks were defeated in their endeavour, Pasha blamed the Armenians for the defeat.

The mistrust that followed was translated into a blueprint for genocide, assiduously followed by Nazis only a few years later.

Armenians, by virtue of being Christians were disqualified from serving in the Ottoman army and forced to join the labour battalions instead.

A precursor to the labour camps organised by the Nazis, many Armenians were executed in these "battalions" by the Turks.

The deportation of some 250 Armenian intellectuals from Constantinople on April 24, 1915 marked the beginning of the new government's extermination campaign.

What followed after was a spectacle of utmost cruelty.

Entire populations of women and children were burned as the quickest way to kill them en masse by Turkish forces, while others were killed by being thrown overboard ships.

Turkish doctors also participated in the mass extermination campaign by administering overdose of morphine to children, gassing them as well as inoculating them with the blood of typhoid patients.

The consequence of such widespread barbarity that resulted in over a million deaths was the coining of the word 'genocide' in the year 1943.

However, definitions as they are solve little of the problem, they do not deliver justice, expiate sins or help a reconciliation and healing process.