The Armenian Genocide: A Warning Ignored, a Pattern Repeated - 24the April until 1917

A still frame from the 1919 documentary film Auction of Souls, which portrayed eye witnessed events from the Armenian Genocide, including raped, naked, and crucified Christian girls.

Raymond Ibrahim : Past and present, the same forces—and the same silence—continue to shape the fate of Christians.  Today, April 24, is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.

Because one cannot remember what one does not know, here is a summary of that tragic event which transpired during World War I (1914-1918):

From 1915 to 1917 the Young Turk regime in the Ottoman Empire carried out a systematic, premeditated, centrally planned genocide against the Armenian people…. More than one million Armenians perished as the result of execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical abuse. 

A people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years lost its homeland and was profoundly decimated in the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century. At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000…. 

Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors, denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.

The evidence is, indeed, overwhelming. As far back as 1920, U.S. Senate Resolution 316 heard eyewitness testimony concerning the “[m]utilation, violation, torture, and death [which] have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages.”

In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described how she was raped and thrown into a harem (in keeping with Islam’s rules of war). Unlike thousands of other Armenian girls who were discarded after being defiled, she managed to escape. In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 Christian girls crucified: “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross,” Aurora wrote, “spikes through her feet and hands, only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.” (Such scenes were portrayed in the 1919 documentary film Auction of Souls.)

Often overlooked, however, is that this was less a genocide of Armenians and more a genocide of Christians. Thus, the opening sentence of House Resolution 296, which passed on the hundredth anniversary of the genocide (2019), correctly mentions “the campaign of genocide against Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites, and other Christians.”

That last word—“Christians”—is key to understanding this tragic chapter of history: Christianity is what all of those otherwise diverse peoples had in common, and therefore it—not nationality, ethnicity, territory, or grievances—was the ultimate determining factor concerning who the Turks would and would not “purge.”

As one Armenian studies professor asked, “If it [the Armenian Genocide] was a feud between Turks and Armenians, what explains the genocide carried out by Turkey against the Christian Assyrians at the same time?”

According to another professor, Joseph Yacoub, author of Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide, the “policy of ethnic cleansing was stirred up by pan-Islamism and religious fanaticism. Christians were considered infidels (kafir). The call to Jihad … was part of the plan” to “combine and sweep over the lands of Christians and to exterminate them.” Several key documents, including a Syriac one from 1920, confirm that “there was an Ottoman plan to exterminate Turkey’s Christians.”

Yacoub recounts many “atrocities carried out by Turks and Kurds from town to town and from village to village without exception.” In one instance, Turks, Kurds, and other Sunni Muslims selected “eighteen of the most beautiful young girls” and hauled them into a local church, “where they were stripped naked and violated in turn on top of the Holy Gospel.” An eyewitness recalled that the “outrages” committed against “even children” were “so horrible that one recoils; it makes the flesh creep.”

The genocide is often conflated with the Armenians because many more of them than other Christians were killed—causing them to be the face of the genocide. According to generally accepted figures, the Turks massacred 1.5 million Armenians, 750,000 Greeks, and 300,000 Assyrians. In fact, relative to their numbers, more Assyrians—half of their total population of 600,000—were massacred.

Turkish official taunts starving “infidel” children with bread

Because all of these genocidal atrocities occurred during WWI, some, especially Turkey, argue that they were, ultimately, a reflection of just that—war, in all its death-dealing destruction.

War was a factor, but only because it offered the Turks the necessary cover to do what they had apparently long wanted to do.

After describing the massacres as an “administrative holocaust,” Winston Churchill observed that “The opportunity [WWI] presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race.” Or, in the unequivocal words of Talaat Pasha, the de facto leader of the Ottoman Empire during the genocide:

Turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate its internal foes, i.e., the indigenous Christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention…. The question is settled. There are no more Armenians.

As a reflection of how thorough the genocide was, Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and personal witness of the atrocities, attested that “I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this.” He added that what the Turks were doing was “a carefully planned scheme to thoroughly extinguish the Armenian race.”

In other writings, Morgenthau also made it clear that the ultimate target of the genocide was Christians:

Will the outrageous terrorizing, the cruel torturing, the driving of women into the harems, the debauchery of innocent girls, the sale of many of them at eighty cents each, the murdering of hundreds of thousands and the deportation to, and starvation in, the deserts of other hundreds of thousands, the destruction of hundreds of villages and cities, will the willful execution of this whole devilish scheme to annihilate the Armenian, Greek and Syrian [or Assyrian] Christians of Turkey—will all this go unpunished?

Not only has it gone unpunished; NATO ally Turkey has been accused of resuming the genocide against the very descendants of those whom the Turks nearly exterminated over a century ago—namely Armenians and Assyrians.