Armenian News ... A Topalian ... Robert Fisk Lecture

The Armenian Genocide a Century On
Lecture by Robert Fisk at University College London
on 8 June 2015 

http://youtu.be/a9UgUCz37_c 


armenpress.am
ARAM I TO PRESENT ARMENIAN GENOCIDE CLAIMS AT 

FRENCH PARLIAMENT
19 June, 2015

PARIS, JUNE 19, ARMENPRESS: By the initiative of the Armenian
National Committee of France, an international conference devoted to
the Armenian Genocide will take place on June 19 at the Parliament of
France under the title "Justice and compensation of the consequences to
the Armenian nation". The member of the Armenian National Committee
of France Mourad Papazian told Armenpress that the key issue of
the conference will be the elimination of the consequences in the
Armenian Genocide issue and claims. The main rapporteur will be
the Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia His Holiness Aram I,
who will represent the details of the lawsuit to be submitted to the
Turkish Constitutional Court demanding to return the property of the
Seat of Sis of the Catholicosate.

"We must not satisfy only with the Genocide recognition but we should
politicize the compensation issue. The conference will be attended
by the right hand of Francois Hollande, the leader of the Socialist
Group of the Parliament Bruno Le Roux, who will deliver a comprehensive
speech", - stated Mourad Papazian, stressing that Armenian and French
politicians and lawyers will be present at the discussion.

"This is the first step of its kind, which will be followed by a hard
work in order to present the embassies of different countries the
issue of the claims and the compensation principle", - said Papazian,
adding that a declaration will be adopted at the end of the conference.


BRITISH PARLIAMENT'S POSITION ON SO-CALLED "ARMENIAN 

GENOCIDE" UNCHANGED
Azer News, Azerbaijan
June 19 2015
By Sara Rajabova

The United Kingdom has become another government to reject not only
recognizing but even considering the so-called "Armenian genocide"
in its legislative body.

The British parliament said it is not going to review its position
on the 1915 events, after a request was submitted to recognize what
transpired in the Ottoman Empire as a "genocide".

The question of recognition of the so-called "Armenian genocide"
was raised by Baroness Caroline Cox.

Earl of Courtown, James Stopford, who represented the government
during the discussion in the House of Lords on June 16, said the
British government recognizes the suffering of the Armenian people
and other groups in the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century,
Armenian media reported.

However, he stressed that at the moment the government has no plans
to revise its position on this issue.

Stopford said the British government encourages ties between Armenia
and Turkey.

Earlier, Spain's upper parliament had rejected a bill to recognize
Armenian claims regarding the 1915 events.

Many Armenian scholars these days argue that what happened to their
ancestors back in 1915 under the Ottoman Empire was a "mass murder"
which constitutes a "genocide".

Modern Turkey today is taking a very different approach to the events
of 1915. Ankara's approach now is to focus on the true nature of what
happened a hundred years ago.

Turkish officials say that to clearly understand what happened, it is
necessary to dig through historical archives from the middle of 19th
century to establish exactly what happened during the Ottoman Empire
- what were the major actors of the time, how nationalist tendencies
came into play, and how the Ottoman Empire was being dismembered.

Ankara believes that an investigation into the role that Armenians
played during those events is also important.

Yerevan, in turn, year on year exerts more efforts to achieve
international recognition and condemnation of its "genocide" claims
instead of supporting Ankara's invitation for a joint historical
investigation. Nonetheless, leading world powers including the U.S.,
the UK, Israel and others have abstained from joining "genocide"
sympathizers.


Europe Online Magazine
June 20 2015
Turkey slams Belgian premier over Armenian genocide remark
20.06.2015

Istanbul (dpa) - Turkey`s Foreign Ministry on Saturday took issue with
Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel for reportedly accusing the
Ottoman Empire of carrying out a genocide against Armenians during
World War I.

The ministry said it was "neither acceptable nor justifiable" for the
Belgian leader to politicize the issue and warned of consequences for
Ankara`s relations with the European nation.

Ankara recalled its ambassadors in Austria, Brazil, Luxembourg 

and the Vatican earlier this year after those countries also referred 

to the genocide.

Armenia says up to 1.5 million people were killed during two years of
deportations and massacres targeting Christian communities starting in
1915. Turkey says the number is inflated and people were killed on
both sides. 


London Review of Books

Sins of the Three Pashas 
Edward Luttwak 
‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’: A History of 

the Armenian Genocide by Ronald Grigor Suny Princeton, 

£24.95,  ISBN 978 0 691 14730 7 

Turkey is a country small in neither size nor population, yet its rulers 

have the privilege of being ignored most of the time, no doubt because

its language is remarkably little known, considering that for all its Arabic 

and Persian accretions it’s a most useful entry to the Oghuz Turkic 

tongues spoken from Moldova to China. This privilege was in evidence 

when Pope Francis chose in April to define the Armenian deportations,

 kidnappings, rapes and massacres that started in 1915 as a genocide. 

The Turkish government prefers fine terminological distinctions: what 

the pope, every Armenian and a great many others call a genocide 

should more properly be described as a First World War event involving 

mass killings (one of many such, down to the present day) and 

deportations (a wartime necessity given Armenian complicity in Russia’s 

invasion of North-east Anatolia); but in any case it was an unfortunate 

event that happened a long time ago, and an exception in Turkey’s 

fine tradition of tolerance. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu went on 

the offensive in the Washington Post : ‘I am addressing the pope: those

who escaped from the Catholic inquisition in Spain [Sephardic Jews] 

found peace in our just order in Istanbul and İzmir. We are ready to 

discuss historical issues, but we will not let people insult our nation 

through history.’ 

To pause on the effrontery of citing benevolence to 15th-century Jews 

at a time when his party and its leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, 

continually denigrate today’s Jews (he blames ‘the Saturday People’ 

for Turkey’s high interest rates, and explains modern history as the 

product of the Üst Akil , the global conspiracy of you-know-who) would 

be to miss the point entirely: the persecution of the Armenians didn’t 

start in 1915, and wasn’t a First World War event as per the official 

Turkish line – there had been massacres of Armenians before then, 

notably in 1894-96, leaving some fifty thousand orphans. And, more 

important, the persecution didn’t end with the First World War, but 

continues to this day. Its current form, aside from occasional non-state 

violence such as the 2007 murder of Hrant Dink, founding editor of 

the bilingual magazine Agos (dedicated to reconciliation), is Turkey’s 

artfully drafted legislation on non-profit trusts and foundations. The

 lack of a good law on foundations wasn’t one of the Ottoman Empire's

shortcomings; its simple and efficacious Vakf law long persisted 

unchanged in the successor states including decidedly non-Muslim 

Greece and Israel ( Agudat Ottomani ). But the new Turkish state 

needed something more modern – the text after all was in an Ottoman 

Turkish that was both Persianised and written in Arabic script – and 

laws were duly enacted. One such law of 1967 (number 743, or 472

1 in the current code), which amended Article 101 of the Turkish civil 

code, defines foundations in the usual way: charity groups that have 

the status of a legal entity formed by real persons or legal entities 

dedicating their private property and rights for public use etc. But 

then it adds: ‘Formation of a foundation contrary to the characteristics 

of the republic defined by the constitution, constitutional rules, laws, 

ethics, national integrity and national interest, or with the aim of 

supporting a distinctive race or community , is restricted’ [emphasis 

added] – which actually means that it is forbidden, because there are 

no provisions for exceptions.

That still left in place pre-existing foundations, allowing a dwindling 

number of Armenian and Greek churches as well as synagogues and

schools to keep going, but in 1974 new legislation determined that 

non-Muslim trusts couldn’t own property that hadn’t been registered 

under their name in 1936. With that, some 1400 churches, schools, 

residential buildings, hospitals, summer camps, cemeteries and 

orphanages were deemed illegal and seized by the state, unless a 

‘former owner’ could claim them. In 1986, under European pressure 

(at a time when Turkey’s accession to the EU was still treated as a 

realistic if long-term possibility), the laws that denied Armenian rights 

over ‘abandoned’ properties were abrogated. But any possibility of 

recovery was circumvented by a 29 June 2001 order by the land 

registry authority which effectively transferred all remaining ‘abandoned’ 

properties to the government. What’s more, no information regarding 

property titles may be disclosed, so claimants can’t even begin to 

avail themselves of the nominal restoration of 1986. Such seemingly

 technical administrative measures have sufficed to prevent the 

opening of any new church (Armenian or otherwise), synagogue or 

non-Muslim school since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 

1923.

Today ’s Islamist rulers are doing everything possible to obliterate 

Mustafa Kemal’s firmly secular Turkey – they are building mosques 

in universities where even headscarves were disallowed until very 

recently, and the official centennial documentary of his victorious 

Gallipoli campaign featured a fervently praying Erdoğan as well as 

re-enactors mouthing Islamic invocations while Kemal himself only 

flashed by as a silent image – but there’s one aspect of Kemalist 

Turkey that meets with their fullest approval: its uncompromising 

nationalism, which, though secular per se happens to define a ‘Turk’ 

as a Muslim Turk, treating all non-Muslim Turks as half citizens, with 

full obligations but few rights, and no chance of achieving political 

office. Kemal’s secularism, though commendable in its focus on the 

emancipation of women (Istanbul’s Sabiha Gökçen airport is named 

for his adopted daughter, who became a combat pilot in 1936) was 

not transitive: serenely non-believing himself, he strove to liberate 

the Turks from the lethargy of Islam, but didn’t proceed logically to 

accept non-Muslims as equals. 

Turkey’s current leaders often abrogate or subvert remnants of 

Kemalist rule with the aim of fully Islamising the country, but carefully 

preserve others to pursue the same aim. So in spite of repeated 

promises to Obama and all and sundry, they refuse to allow the 

reopening of the country’s only Greek Orthodox seminary at Halki

(closed in 1971 when the Turkish constitution of 1961 was properly 

interpreted: Article 132 specified that only the Turkish Armed Forces 

and police are allowed to open private colleges). With this, the 

Orthodox Church established in Constantinople in 330, whose 

patriarch is still the primus inter pares of all Greek Orthodox patriarchs, 

can survive only precariously, because another Kemalist survival 

prohibits the importation of foreign priests. 

Turkey was still fully Kemalist when the Armenians fell victim in a 

catastrophic way to its non-transitive secularism 27 years after the 

‘First World War events’ began, and two decades after the widespread 

if merely incidental killings of surviving Armenians in the course of the 

1919-22 Turkish war against the invading Greeks: on 11 November 

1942 the Turkish parliament enacted a one-off wealth tax (Law 4305 

in its admirably systematic civil code) on all fixed assets, land, 

buildings, commercial establishments and industrial enterprises. That 

tax was by no means unreasonable in itself: it was conceived when 

money was urgently needed to fund Turkey’s military forces in a 

dangerous phase of the Second World War, when the implicit British 

guarantee of its security had seemingly been invalidated by Germany’s 

spectacular advances across Russia and North Africa, which left 

Turkey as the potential prey of closing pincers. (As it happened, by 

the time the tax was enacted, El Alamein and Stalingrad had 

intervened.) 

But the way the tax was actually levied was savagely, destructively 

discriminatory. Wealthy Muslims were to pay a rate of 4.94 per cent 

of assessed value, which was nominally the agricultural rate (poorer 

Muslims paid nothing); Greeks were to pay a 156 per cent rate, which 

was evidently meant to immiserate them; Jews were levied a 179 per 

cent rate; but to make it perfectly clear that they were at the very 

bottom of the pile, the Armenian rate was set at 232 per cent. In the 

event of underpayment or non-payment, the law prescribed the 

confiscation of all related and non-related wealth attributable to any 

and all family members, and detention for forced labour. The ensuing 

events were best described by one of the officials in charge, Mehmet 

Faik Ökte, whose unvarnished and sincerely contrite account, Varlık 

Vergisi Faciası, was published in 1951: a mere 15 days were allowed 

for payment once the notice had been issued to a taxpayer; those who 

had marketable valuables tried to auction them, or sell them to Muslim 

shopkeepers; they offered them in street markets, or simply laid them 

out on their front steps; private homes and any other buildings were 

sold to anyone who would buy them for whatever they would offer 

before the deadline of the 15th day (many a Dutch auction was 

conducted as the days went by); entire businesses or inventories were 

sold to Muslim competitors for whatever they were willing to pay, thereby 

largely destroying the remaining non-Muslim merchant class (the wealth 

of today ’s few rich non-Muslims postdates the tax). 

Poor non-Muslims, servants, craftsmen and even beggars were also 

taxed on mostly imaginary wealth, and thus sent straight to work camps. 

The then immense sum of 324 million liras (equivalent to more than 

$4 billion in 2015) was collected in 15 days of frantic discounting of 

bonds, loans and deposits, panicked selling and rapacious buying, 

followed by the removal of those who hadn’t paid enough, including 

the old and the sick, to forced labour in open fields, where there were 

uncounted deaths of Armenians, Greeks and Jews – no Muslim is 

known to have been detained. Non-Muslim youths whose families 

could no longer afford to feed them left their confessional or private 

schools to seek any work that paid them enough to survive; women 

and girls became servants in Muslim households, waitresses or inmates 

of Istanbul’s brothels. There were of course many suicides. When 

emigration became possible with the end of the war, many of the newly 

impoverished Greeks went to Greece, many Jews left for Israel after 

14 May 1948 , and the Armenians started on long quests for 

immigration visas. The wealth tax irreversibly changed Istanbul’s 

demography and society, though the diminished Greek community 

was attacked once more, in the 6- 7 September 1955 pogrom in which 

mobs destroyed 73 churches, two monasteries and 26 schools, along 

with some five thousand homes and shops, 17 per cent of which were 

actually Armenian-owned (a synagogue was destroyed too), in 

accordance with the hadith that all unbelievers are one nation.

I have long believed that the very best introduction to the genocide 

question is Franz Werfel’s novel Die Vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh 

(‘The Forty Days of Musa Dagh’), that being the coastal mountain on 

which some 4500 Armenians successfully resisted vast numbers of 

soldiers, gendarmes and would-be looters until they were evacuated 

by French warships. Musa Dagh is also the site of Turkey’s single 

remaining Armenian village, Vak’if, resettled in 1918 when the area 

was under French rule. Werfel’s characters are his own, but the book 

starts with very well-documented accounts of the motives and methods 

of the three protagonists, the ‘Three Pashas’: Enver Pasha, the 

Ottoman war minister and ‘god of war’ who called for extermination 

and who would die in 1922 fighting the Russians for pan-Turkism; 

Talaat Pasha, the minister of the interior after whom many Turkish 

streets are now named, whose telegrams triggered the deportations 

in place after place and who was assassinated by an Armenian in 

Berlin in 1921; and Djemal Pasha, high military commander and 

mayor of Istanbul, where it all began with the mass arrests and 

executions of Armenian leaders on 23- 24 April 1915 . I realise, 

however, that an author whom I greatly admired at the age of 12, and 

whose final play became Me and the Colonel starring Danny Kaye, 

may not appear entirely authoritative to everyone, even though he 

had full access to the best diplomatic documentation (Germany’s), 

and was meticulous enough in his research to satisfy that insatiable 

perfectionist Alma Mahler.

Werfel’s novel provides a vital clue to the reason there was such 

especial vehemence against the Armenians. Its wealthy hero, Gabriel 

Bragadian, has returned from Paris to his native village of Yoghonoluk 

and slides into his dead father’s role as informal leader of his own and 

the neighbouring Armenian villages; he isn’t a separatist or sectarian 

but a loyal, indeed patriotic citizen of the Ottoman Empire, which has 

recently been reformed by the Young Turks. In 1908 their revolution 

allowed the emergence of political parties, instituted elections and 

ordained a new pluralist order whereby non-Muslim subjects were 

elevated into full citizens, who might serve in the armed forces as 

officers of any rank, and aim for high political office. Werfel’s Bagradian 

joins the army and serves bravely as an artillery officer in the 1912 

Balkan War, as many Armenians may have done in reality: quite a 

few young non-Muslims believed in the Young Turks promise, including 

David Ben-Gurion, who went to Istanbul University to study law in 

1912, envisaging a future as a community leader-cum-loyal official; 

in 1914 he personally raised a militia of forty Jews to serve the empire. 

For many in the Young Turks movement the response of the fictional 

Bragadian and the real Ben-Gurion was gratifying evidence that the 

best and brightest non-Muslims would pull their weight in the much 

needed modernisation of the newly constitutional empire. 

But for others, especially for the leaders of the Committee of Union 

and Progress, which started out as a secret society, became a political 

party and ended up as the empire’s ruling junta, the Bragadians and 

Ben-Gurions were a sinister threat precisely because of their patriotism. 

The non-Muslims were minorities but not insignificant ones, with 

Armenians and Greeks numbering in the millions; they loomed large 

in towns and cities, even outnumbering Muslims in a few places, such 

as Edirne (Adrianople). More important, their exemption from the 

lethargy of madrassa and mosque gave them advantages over the 

Muslims in both energy levels and skills. Having long dominated 

commerce, they might – once emancipated by the Young Turks – come 

to dominate army and state. 

The Three Pashas cited the danger that Armenian revolutionaries 

and separatists would assist a Russian invasion of eastern Anatolia, 

but it was the patriots they really feared, just as after 1492 it was not 

the crypto Jews in hiding that the Spanish elites feared but the ‘new 

Christians’, who were quickly rising in society and even in the church. 

The Greeks had their own state in which to pursue their political 

ambitions, the Assyrians were too few to matter and the Jews were 

even fewer, so it was the Bragadians alone who were a political threat. 

Kemal’s eventual remedy would be to try to take the Islam out of the 

Turk to make him more competitive, but by then the Three Pashas 

had done their best to eliminate the Armenian competitors.

In Werfel’s novel, Bagradian is concerned when he isn’t mobilised, 

given that the empire had joined the Central Powers in war in November 

1914 . He goes to the district capital to find out why, overhears officials, 

including the provincial governor, discussing Armenians in sinister 

fashion, and is finally warned of the imminent danger by an old Muslim

family friend. It’s the sort of conversation that many had, as Ronald 

Grigor Suny’s carefully researched history of the massacres shows. He 

quotes a credible third-party account of what ensued when an elected 

Armenian member of parliament, Vartkes Serengülian, went to see 

his erstwhile friend Talaat Pasha to ask about the rumours that Armenian 

leaders would soon be arrested. The reply was a tirade: ‘Now it is our 

turn … This is politics … This is our turn, and, now it is we who are 

strong. We are going to do what is necessary in the interests of 

Türklük [Turkishness].’ 

When the Young Turks summoned both Muslims and non-Muslims, 

both Turks and non-Turks to serve and strengthen the empire that was 

to be their common home, nothing had been said about Türklük. But 

in its name, Greeks, Assyrians, Jews and any other non-Turks would 

soon revert to subject status in a secular version of Islamic dhimmitude 

that did not exempt Arab Muslims or Kurds (at that point the empire 

still had vast Arabian, Levantine and Mesopotamian territories). The 

Armenians, who had their own villages and some towns, as well as 

their own nationalist organisations, and also potential allies in the 

invading Russians in north-east Anatolia, were marked for deportation 

along with Zionist colonists. But there was a vast difference: the Zionist 

colonists were allowed to prepare themselves before being sent by 

train to Syrian cities without immediate harm; the Armenians expelled 

from Bitlis, Iskenderun-Alexandretta, Adana, Aleppo, Diyarbakir, Hadjin, 

Sis, Sivas, Urfa, Van, Zeytun and elsewhere even before 24 April , 

were marched out without supplies or any provision for shelter, 

suffering extreme hardship and deadly violence from the start. 

Evidently Talaat’s feelings of friendship towards Vartkes weren’t 

extinguished: he reportedly told him to ‘Go. Leave now, don’t wait 

even a minute.’ By then Talaat had already sent out orders to decapitate 

the Armenian secular leadership in Istanbul by arresting some 250 

doctors, lawyers, journalists, writers and assorted others, including 

members of Armenian nationalist organisations as well as of the 

entirely legal, indeed quasi-official, Armenian National Assembly, 

headed by Boghos Nubar, son of a three-time prime minister of 

Egypt. Of those arrested, almost all were soon executed. 

Those first arrests started on the night of 23 April 1915 and were 

 completed the next day, when Talaat sent out his deadliest telegrams: 

one instructed the Ottoman Army High Command to disarm any 

Armenians in uniform anywhere in the empire, and send them to 

 forced labour; and to arrest any local members of any Armenian 

 organisation, and seize their institutions. Another was the warrant 

 for a much vaster catastrophe: Talaat changed the destination of 

 the mass deportations from central Anatolia, where survival was 

 possible, to the far deserts of Syria, notably Der Zor, to give it its 

dreaded Armenian name (Deir ez-Zor in Arabic), some 1500 kilometres 

 from Istanbul, and the site of a fine memorial church blown up last 

 September by Islamic State. It was by a series of individual miracles 

 that after many if not most of the able-bodied men were separated 

 early on for deadly forced labour or simply execution, tens of thousands 

 of women, children and elderly survivors arrived at Deir ez-Zor. 

 There, they were killed en masse along the banks of the Euphrates; 

 many times their number had already been murdered or died of thirst, 

 hunger, cold and sickness at the hands of their escorting soldiers and 

 gendarmes, the miserably paid, miserably clothed Zaptiehs. The 

 Zaptiehs scarcely tried to protect the endless processions from the 

 Turks, Kurds and Arabs who came in improvised hunting parties to 

 rob, kill, rape and abduct boys and girls for a day, night, week or for 

 ever. Even now, a century later, Armenian descendants emerge here 

 and there to reclaim their identity in such places as Diyarbakir, the 

 ancient city of Amida on the Tigris river, and in Dersim, now Tunceli 

 province, where the population, mostly identified as Kurdish or Zazaki, 

 may be of Armenian origin in large part; not coincidentally, the 

 inhabitants are mostly of the Alevi Bektashi faith, the world’s largest 

 ignored religion (it has at least ten million adherents), nominally a 

version of Shia Islam that strongly enjoins toleration, so  that they 

were more likely to save deportees than to kill them. 

Pope Francis’s condemnation of the events of April 1915 was only  

the first of many in this centenary year. On a visit to Yerevan, Vladimir 

Putin made a speech deploring the Armenian genocide. The Turkish 

Foreign Ministry went on the offensive: ‘Taking into account the  mass 

atrocities and exiles in Caucasus, in Central Asia and Eastern Europe 

committed by Russia for a century; collective punishment methods 

such as Holodomor [the Ukraine famine of 1932-33] as well as 

inhumane practices especially against Turkish and Muslim people 

in Russia’s own history, we consider that Russia is best suited 

to know what exactly “genocide” and its legal dimension are.’ Coming 

from a once smoothly professional Foreign Ministry, this wildly 

aggressive and entirely pointless reaction reflects the influence of 

Erdoğan on Turkish officialdom. In Austria, six parliamentary parties 

recognised the massacre as a genocide though the country’s official

stance hasn’t changed; Turkey’s response was to withdraw its 

ambassador with the warning that relations between Austria and 

Turkey had been damaged permanently. Given that the Turks have 

traditionally held Germany and the Germans in high regard, it’s 

remarkable that President Joachim Gauck’s use of the word genocide 

triggered another unrestrained response by the Foreign Ministry: it 

called his remarks ‘baseless allegations directed towards Turkish 

identity, history and society … President Gauck does not have the 

right to attribute to the Turkish people a crime which they have not 

committed.’ The anger of Turkish officials has even spilled over 

against the European Parliament, notwithstanding Turkey’s quest 

for accession. ‘Turkey ignores all such resolutions as null and void,’ 

Erdoğan said. ‘Whatever decision the European Parliament takes 

on the Armenian genocide claims, it will go in one ear and out the 

other.’ Davutoğlu called the resolution ‘a reflection of Europe’s racism

 … where are those aboriginal people? Where are the Native 

Americans? Where are the tribes of Africa? How were they wiped 

out from history?’