FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - ARMENIAN GENOCIDE; 99th ANNIVERSARY - ERDOGAN OFFERS 'CONDOLENCES'

Rant Number 583        1 May 2014 Ararat. The mountain on which Noah’s Ark came to rest, after the Flood. And the Armenians are the ancient people of Ararat – observe: both words share the root ‘Ar’. As to the tall, black hood worn by priests of the Armenian Church… It is Ararat-shaped! QED. Men once grew so wicked that God decided to wipe them out, the Bible states. And so he did – righteous Noah and his family apart. Divine genocide? Nah! A parable of God’s tough love. Also a tremendous illustration of what sin does to man. Likewise, the genocide of the Armenians is a fearful reminder of how that aboriginal evil still rages in the human heart. The first nation in history to convert to Christianity, Armenians were a thrifty, trading people. ‘Christian Jews’, somebody termed them. In the Ottoman Empire despite disabilities and sporadic pogroms they lived in relative peace and prosperity. Then in 1908 the Young Turks seized power. At first secular and egalitarian, liberal and Masonic, the new rulers underwent a Jekyll to Hyde transformation. First, the ideology of Panturkism, nationalistic and xenophobic, signalled the end of the old, multinational and multifaith sultanate. Instead, ‘one nation – one people’ became the new rulers’ ominous slogan. Second, it was WWI, fought by the Ottomans in alliance with Germany and Austria, that unleashed the annihilation of defenceless minorities perceived as hateful aliens. US Ambassador to Constantinople Henry Morgenthau’s Secrets of the Bosphorusmakes harrowing reading. ‘The death warrant of a whole race’ that noble American Jew calls the Young Turks’ extermination plans. In 1915 Talat Pasha had more than one and a half million Armenians deported to the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. Those serving in the Ottoman Armies had been previously disarmed and slaughtered in batches. In the caravans men were separated from others, taken out and murdered outright. The sadistic tortures to which the Turkish gendarmerie submitted their prisoners do not bear repetition. Bandits and Kurdish tribesmen harassed and raped the distraught female survivors. To escape the torments, women and children, dehumanised and abused, often committed suicide by flinging themselves into chasms and rivers. Of the survivors to reach the Arab provinces, many more, naked and sick, died of starvation, exposure and epidemic. Thus the biblical land of Ararat was bereft of its ancient people. A case of Muslim executioners versus Christian victims? Not quite. The Young Turks exploited religious prejudice but their ideology was secularist, un-Islamic and, by today’s reckoning, even racist, based as it was on the doctrine of Pan-Turanism - the alleged superiority of Turks over others. Besides, the writer Franz Werfel, in his novel, The 40 Days of Musa Dag (a must read!), relates a telling episode. The Sheikh of the Mevlevi order of dervishes, the highest Sufi brotherhood in the Ottoman lands, secretly meets with an Armenian leader and warns him of the government’s intentions. You learn that Sufis and the Young Turks gang are like chalk and cheese, with diametrically opposed world-views. Speaking for Islam, the Sheikh refuses to collude with mass murder. Genuine believers do not condone the killing of the innocent, of whatever race or religion. Did the novelist make the story up or is it true? Regardless, it is a splendid one. The partial extermination of the Armenians took place 99 years ago. Another century. Another world. There was never a Nuremberg trial for the Young Turks. Shouldn’t we let bygones be bygones? But no one says the WWII massacres of the Jews happened half a century ago, therefore let’s put it behind us & let’s forget it. What is more, you don’t travel to Berlin and view a museum dedicated to ‘the victims of the Jewish genocide’- meaning Germans massacred by the Jews. I have seen such museum. It reverses roles - Armenians murdering Turks - near Lake Van, in Eastern Turkey. An obscenity. The very occurrence of the genocide is denied by the Turkish state. The Turkish penal code makes it a crime even to mention that historical fact – writer Orhan Pamuk was prosecuted for daring merely to allude to it in his book Snow. Revisionism – pseudo-academic denial of the genocide – is a government-sponsored activity. Again, fancy the German authorities commissioned ‘scholars’ to cast doubt on the genocide of Jews and gypsies in WWII – can you picture it? No, you can’t. But in Turkey it is true, all too true. As a friend of Turks and Armenians I am moderately happy that Turkish PM Erdogan, has offered condolences to the people of Armenia, on the genocide 99th anniversary. (Israel, by the way, also refuses to acknowledge the obliteration of this other race – for opportunistic reasons – keeping in with Turkey - shame on her!) Erdogan has spoken of ‘our shared pain’. Unfortunately that won’t do. Fancy the world’s indignation if Merkel told the Israelis of ‘our shared pain’ concerning the extermination of the Jews! He merely equivocates. But why? He must lack either the courage or the intelligence. As I have pointed out, the massacres should not be laid at Islam’s door. Xenophobic, secularist nationalism. Erdogan would score a moral victory by owning up to historical truth. Will he ever have the guts, the brains to do it? Allah a’alam. Revd Frank Julian Gelli    follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend  Copyright © Fr Frank Gelli