Tuesday, April 23, 1996
After effects of massacre still felt 81 years laterBy Nuritsa
Ksachikyan
The Armenian Genocide began on April 24, 1915. The victims:
Armenians, including those living in Turkey and the neighboring
provinces. The perpetrators: the Ottoman Empire (or what is now
Turkey). The death count: 1.5 million martyrs.
Every year on April 24, Armenians around the world mourn the
deaths of their relatives and loved ones, and every year emerges a
new struggle to help recognize the occurrence of the genocide, a
massacre told to us by accounts such as those below:
AMERICAN CONSULATE
Aleppo, Syria; June 28, 1915
The Honorable Henry Morgenthau
American Ambassador
Constantinople, Turkey
"Sir:
I have the honor to quote the following from a communication
dated the 14 instant received from Rev. F.H. Leslie, of Ourfa,
viz:
‘I wish to inform you of conditions here. They are very bad and
daily getting worse … Such a reign of terror has begun in this
city also. Daily the police are searching the houses of Armenians
for weapons, and not finding any, they are taking the best and most
honorable men and imprisoning them; some of them they are exiling,
and others they are torturing with red hot irons to make them
reveal the supposedly concealed weapons … poor exiles were mostly
women, children and old men, and they were clubbed and beaten and
lashed along as though they had been wild animals, and their women
and girls were daily criminally outraged both by their guards and
the ruffians of every village through which they passed … ‘
Trusting that the foregoing will prove of interest to the
Embassy.
I have the honor, etc. etc. (Signed): Jackson."
TELEGRAM SENT
Department of State
Washington
July 15 (16), 1915
"Am embassy, Constantinople:
Your 841, July 10th Department approves your procedure in
pleading with Turkish Minister of Interior and Minister of War to
stop Armenian persecution and in attempting to enlist sympathies of
German and Austrian Ambassadors in this cause …
(Signed) LANSING"
"To the Government of Aleppo. Dec. 29, 1915 Â We hear that
there are numbers of alien officers on the roads who have seen the
corpses of the above-mentioned people (the Armenians) and are
photographing them. It is recommended as very important that those
corpses should at once be buried and not left so exposed.
Minister of the Interior
TALAAT"
"To the Government of Aleppo:
Nov. 23, 1915 Â Destroy by secret means the Armenians of
the Eastern Provinces who pass into your hands there.
Minister of the Interior
TALAAT"
"Collect and keep only those orphans who cannot remember the
tortures to which their parents have been subjected. Send the rest
away with the caravans.
Minister of the Interior
TALAAT"
THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, SEPT. 24, 1915:
"500,000 ARMENIANS SAID TO HAVE PERISHED"
Washington asked to stop slaughter of Christians by Turks and
Kurds. The records of the state department are replete with
detailed reports from American consular officers in Asia Minor,
which give harrowing tales of the treatment of the Armenian
Christians by the Turks and the Kurds. These reports have not been
made public. They indicate that the Turk has undertaken a war of
extermination on Armenians, especially those of the Gregorian
Church, to which about 90 percent of the Armenians belong. The
Turkish government originally ordered the deportation of all
Armenians …"
* * *
The Armenian people have been persecuted by the Ottoman Empire
from as early as 1895. After the successful revolution of 1908, the
"Young Turk" (the Committee of Union Progress) government plotted
the annihilation of the Armenians. The plan was constructed and
executed by three Ottoman "Pashas": Jemal, Enver and Talaat. The
goal was to annihilate the Armenians as a people, leaving only one
male and female "to be displayed in a museum."
The initial steps to the plan included disarming and brutally
killing the Armenian men serving in the Ottoman army. The second
step was executed on the night of April 24, 1915: the Turkish
officials arrested and deported 254 Armenian intellectuals to the
provinces of Ayash and Chankiri, where they were murdered.
After carrying out this "ingenious" portion of the plan, the
Ottoman Empire continued its bloody rage by dragging the Armenian
women, the elderly and the children out of their homes and across
the Syrian deserts. Many were killed along the routes of the exile,
and still others were kept in concentration camps in the Der Zor
Desert.
Photographs tell stories of Armenian women made to dance naked
circling a fire and then burnt alive; the heads of the Armenian
people lined up against walls or hanging from clotheslines;
mountains of skulls piled on top of each other  stripping the
people of their personal freedom and basic human right to live a
peaceful life and reducing them to temples for earthworms and
ants.
The Turkish population, be it those in Turkey or here at UCLA,
are divided into two parts when April 24 comes along  the
believers and the doubters. Despite the myriad of tangible evidence
and accounts, such as those cited above, many Turks claim that the
Armenian Genocide is a concoction of Armenian political figures for
"propaganda."
In fact, some are brazen enough to claim that it was actually
the reverse. To those I direct a challenge: explain to me articles
like the ones above. Explain to me the photographs exposing a group
of young Armenian girls lying on the sands of the Der Zor with
their breasts chopped off. Explain to me the six monuments spanning
the world (one of which was erected in Montebello, Calif.).
And finally, explain to me why an Armenian great-grandmother,
during the few precious years left in her life, is covered with
tattoo markings of the Turkish men to whom she was sold and why she
has to explain to her grandchildren why their great-grandfather
never left Der Zor.
Ksachikyan is a second-year physiological science student.