In his CBC Radio program The Sunday Edition, Michael Enright reminded us that this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide of 1915. The Turkish military authorities arrested, tortured, and executed the Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople, and local authorities drove the populations out of Armenian villages and urban enclaves all over the nation. Men, women and children were herded on forced marches into arid regions lacking water, food, and shelter. Women and girls were subjected to mass rape, many who fell by the wayside on forced marches because they were too feeble or too ill to continue, were summarily executed - which, it could be argued, was a kinder fate than forcing them to keep walking until they died. An estimated one and a half million Armenians died in the genocide of 1915. Abundant documentary and photographic records confirm that this genocide really happened. Among other more or less impartial observers, the German ambassador and American consular officials reported back to their leaders in Berlin and Washington quite detailed accounts of what was happening. In the protracted discussions in Paris in 1919 to draft a peace treaty after the carnage of the Great War of 1914-1918, the 'allies' who claimed victory were anxious to win over the charismatic Turkish army officer Mustafa Kemal (later to name himself Kemal Attaturk). They therefore refrained from drawing attention to the brutal slaughter, rapes, dispossession, destruction of churches - obliteration of all traces of Armenian culture - in order to get Kemal's signature and support for the peace treaty.
The mass killings, rapes, dispossession, destruction of cultural artifacts, obliteration of an ethnic and cultural minority in Turkey are now recognized almost everywhere as a genocide. The most recent leader to acknowledge publicly what happened is Pope Francis. Almost the only national leaders to deny what happened are in Turkey. American presidents, anxious to retain Turkish friendship, have equivocated and never stated in forthright language that there was a genocide. The US Congress voted a few years ago that there was a genocide.
Why did it happen? The Armenian population in Turkey was a distinct, readily recognizable group. The Armenians are Christian, the oldest or second oldest Christian community in the world. They are mostly well educated, relatively well-to-do, rather influential movers and shakers. These qualities are enough to arouse the envy and suspicion of the majority. A paranoid belief took root that Armenians were traitors, spies, supported the Russians, and sought to bring about the defeat of Turkey, Austria and Germany in the Great War.
One consequence of the genocide was the Armenian diaspora. Gifted writers, artists, actors, musicians, film makers of Armenian heritage have greatly enriched the intellectual life of many Western nations in the 100 years since the genocide. The first to cross my cultural horizon was William Saroyan. His parents had actually left Armenia earlier and he was born in an agricultural community in California in 1903; he and the Armenian community to which he belonged, became hosts to survivors of the genocide, some of whom considerably strengthened the nascent film industry. One consequence of my peripatetic life is that I've been obliged to discard many books as I've moved from one country to another. I acquired William Saroyan's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Human Comedy early in my medical student years and kept it, I recall, long enough for it to migrate from Adelaide, Australia to Edinburgh, Scotland. As best as I can recall, Saroyan's allusions to the Armenian genocide in that charming novel are oblique and low-key. His comments in some of his other writing, which I also had and have discarded, were angrier, more demanding from the Turkish authorities an acknowledgement that a genocide occurred in 1915, and suggesting that they should plead for forgiveness. That's all the Armenians want: they don't seek revenge, just recognition by the Turks that they wronged and harmed their Armenian minority, and should ask for forgiveness. Well educated modern Turks are aware of what happened. Some, including the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, have spoken out courageously. How much longer will the Armenians have to wait?
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