The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Back in the United States, Armenians demanded compensation from U.S. companies with whom their families—murdered in 1915—had insured their lives. If it took Jewish Holocaust survivors forty years to gain recompense from such companies, it took the Armenian Holocaust survivors and descendants eighty-five years. New York Life Insurance agreed to settle a class-action suit for $20 million, but even then its chairman, Sy Sternberg—who said that a third of the claims were settled after the murders—used the neutral language favoured by Turkey. Prompt payment had been made on claims, he said, “when it became clear that many of our Armenian policyholders perished in the tragic events of 1915.” Perished? Tragic events? Several companies in the United States initially declined to pay out because “no one came forward” to make claims. Andrew Kevorkian, one of the most outspoken British Armenians on 1915, asked: “What did they expect? That the Turks would write a little note—‘To Whom It May Concern’—stating the date of the murder each time they killed these men and women?”

  When the Armenian community in the United States asked George W. Bush for his policy on their genocide if he were elected president, he stated on 19 February 2000 that “the Armenians were subjected to a genocidal campaign . . . an awful crime in a century of bloody crimes against humanity. If elected President, I would ensure that our nation properly recognizes the tragic suffering of the Armenian people.” Once he became president, however, Bush lost his courage, failed to honour his promise to the Armenian community and resorted to the usual weasel-words. Addressing Armenians on 24 April 2001, the eighty-sixth anniversary of the start of the slaughter, Bush no longer used the word “genocide.” Instead, it became “one of the great tragedies of history”; he talked only about “infamous killings” and “the tragedy that scarred the history of the Armenian people” and their “bitter fate” at “the end of the Ottoman Empire.”

  On the same day a year later, Bush called the genocide “an appalling tragedy,” talked about “horrific killings” but referred only to “this horrendous loss of life.” Again, “genocide” had disappeared and there was even a mystifying remark about “the wounds that remain painful for people in Armenia, in Turkey, and around the globe.” In April 2003 it was “a horrible tragedy” and “a great calamity” but one which—for some reason best known to Bush—reflected “a deep sorrow that continues to haunt them and their neighbours, the Turkish people.” This was preposterous. The Turkish government was denying the genocide—not feeling sorry about it. In the words of the Armenian National Committee of America, Bush, despite his calls for “moral clarity” in international affairs, had “allowed pressure by a foreign government to reduce the President of the United States to using evasive and euphemistic terminology to avoid properly identifying the Armenian genocide . . .”

  This, it should be remembered, was the same president who thought he was fighting a “war against terror,” who claimed he was fighting “evil” but who, when confronted with inescapable evidence of both terror and evil on a scale outreaching anything perpetrated against Americans, got cold feet and ran away from the truth. Indeed, there are times when the very existence of the Armenian genocide— for so many nations around the world—seems to have become far more dangerous than the weapons of mass destruction Bush and Blair lied about in Iraq. In this parallel but more realistic universe, it is the Turks who are telling Bush and Blair: You are either with us or against us. And both men have lined up alongside the Turks to deny history.

  So now let me shine some sad, wintry sunlight over the West’s miserable, cowardly and dangerous response to the twentieth century’s first Holocaust. The genocide of 1915 was “forcefully remembered” at Westminster Abbey in 1996 when Sir Michael Mayne, the Dean Emeritus of Westminster, commissioned an Irish artist to carve a stone to lie outside the west doors. “REMEMBER,” the inscription reads, “all innocent victims of oppression, violence and war.” Round the edge is written: “Is it nothing to you, all you that pass by?” Queen Elizabeth unveiled the stone in the presence of men and women who had suffered in Auschwitz, Rwanda, Bosnia, Siberia, Soweto and Armenia. Among them was eighty-nine-year-old Yervant Shekerdemian, who as a boy experienced the Armenian massacres and lost most of his family in the genocide.

  And after the months of mean refusal to acknowledge the truth of history, an outpouring of public anger eventually forced the Blair government, at the very last moment, to give way and allow more than twenty Armenians to attend the first Holocaust Memorial Day in 2001. Shekerdemian and another genocide survivor, Anig Bodossian, were belatedly invited. The Armenian Bishop in Britain was given a place of honour with other senior clergy, including the Chief Rabbi, and was among those who lit a candle before Blair and other politicians.

  Not long afterwards, on Turkish television, an extraordinary event took place. A Turkish writer and historian, Taner Akçam, lectured his people on the facts—the reality—of the 1915 Armenian genocide. In front of a nationwide audience, he advised penitence. “If you can’t bring yourself to describe it as genocide, call it a massacre if you want,” he said. “But it was a crime against humanity . . . Ask forgiveness from the Armenian people and . . . make a commitment that in Turkey, political dissent and disagreement should no longer be treated as an offence.”

  These were difficult, treacherous things for a Turkish audience to hear. So Akçam was interrupted during the bitter six-hour television debate on 3 February 2001. “How dare you let this man speak? Shut him up!” came an imperious voice over a phone link-up. It was Semra Özal, widow of former Turkish president Turgut Özal. But Dr. Akçam did not give up. “Unless we distance ourselves from the perpetrators of this crime, which was a genocide, we will never be able to relieve ourselves of this terrible burden,” he said. He used the Turkish for genocide—soykırım—throughout the programme. “The constant refrain of ‘We are not guilty,’ and the parallel blaming of the Armenians, the victims, very much hurts the cause of Turkey,” he said. Akçam even quoted Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish state, who on 23 April 1920 denounced the “Armenian massacres” as “a shameful act.”

  Hikmet Çiçek, the editor of Aydınlık , immediately denounced Akçam as a “traitor,” but other journalists were more courageous. Columnist Ertuğrul Özkök of Hurriyet had written the same day that the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide were “our Pol Pots, Berias and Stalins and the sooner we call their crimes to account . . . the better our chances of redeeming ourselves from this scourge of being accused of genocide.”

  Almost exactly three years after Akçam’s television “debate,” more than 500 Turkish intellectuals—university teachers, authors, writers and human rights officials—protested at a new school history curriculum which ordered teachers to denounce to their children “the unfounded allegations” of the Armenians. Nor was this the first time that Turkish intellectuals had confronted their government. Three Turks were prosecuted in Istanbul in March 1994 for translating into Turkish and publishing 15,000 copies of a French book on the Armenian genocide. The book had been banned in January of that year by the Istanbul State Security Court No. 3, and they had been accused of inciting “belligerency, racial and territorial segregation and undermining the territorial integrity of Turkey.” An Armenian Rights Group campaigned for the three Turks.

  During the Jewish Holocaust, the Jews of Europe found their “righteous gentiles,” the non-Jewish men and women living under Nazi occupation who risked their lives to save those of Jews. And the ghosts of another group of saviours pass through the pages of the massive Bryce report on the Armenian Holocaust. Two American witnesses record how orders arrived for Tahsin Bey, the governor of Erzurum, in 1915, instructing him “that all Armenians should be killed. Tahsin refused to carry this out and, indeed, all through the time he was reluctant to maltreat the Armenians, but was overruled by force majeure.”77

  Armenians themselves are taught at school of the brave governor of Aleppo, Jelal Pasha, who said he was a governor, not an executioner—w
ho said “it is the natural right of a human being to live.” He saved thousands of lives. But it is the small man—the good Turk—who occasionally shines out of the Bryce report. On the deportation to Ras al-Ain, Maritza Kedjedjian was the witness to the rape of young women by Kurds. “When they were going to carry off another girl,” she wrote later, “I asked Euomer Çavuş, a Mardin man, to help us.” Çavu ş means he was a Turkish army sergeant. Maritza goes on:

  He stopped them at once and did not let them take [the girl] away . . . The Kurds from the surrounding villages attacked us that night. Euomer, who was in charge of us, immediately went up to the heights and harangued them in Kurdish, telling them not to attack us. We were hungry and thirsty and had no water to drink. Euomer took some of our [drinking] vessels and brought us water from a long way off . . . The wife of my brother-in-law . . . had a baby born that night. The next morning we started again. Sergeant Euomer left some women with her and kept an eye on her from a distance. Then he put the mother and the new-born child on a beast, and brought her to us in safety.

  Could there be a more moving story from the bloody fields of the Armenian Holocaust? And so I return to my original question. Should not the Armenians commemorate all those brave Turks who acted out of compassion and refused to obey orders? Though these Turks were painfully few in number, Armenians would be acknowledging their humanity. And how would the Turks react? By refusing to honour these courageous fellow Turks? Or by remembering their courage and thus—by the same token—accepting the fact of the Armenian genocide? Taner Akçam deserves such a gesture. So does Sergeant Euomer.

  SO DO THE ARMENIANS. In 2002, Aram Kevorkian sent me an account of his visit to Chunkoush, the Armenian town in Turkey where his father Karnig was born. He found the rubble of the Armenian homes of ninety years ago, and the still standing wreckage of two Armenian churches. And he went to the ravine where his people had been murdered in April 1915. “There the Armenians had been forced to undress, their hands had been tied, and their throats slit or their heads shattered with axes, and their bodies thrown into the pits.” Kevorkian stood and read from Yeats’s poem of hope, “Lapis Lazuli”:

  On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,

  Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,

  Old civilisations put to the sword.

  Then they and their wisdom went to rack:

  No handiwork of Callimachus,

  Who handled marble as if it were bronze,

  Made draperies that seemed to rise

  When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;

  His long lamp-chimney shaped like the stem

  Of a slender palm, stood but a day;

  All things fall and are built again . . .

  It is 1992, and I am at Margara on the border of Turkey and Armenia—the real Armenian state, free at last of its dark Soviet cloak—and I look at the snow-peak of Mount Ararat beyond the Turkish border; for Ararat, the national symbol of Armenia, is inside Turkey, a place to be looked at and wondered at from afar. I stand in the garden of Levon Karapegian, and above his tomato bushes and potato beds, his cucumbers and sick-looking cherry trees, I see a Turkish flag drooping in the midday heat on top of a wooden guard post. “Sometimes I see the Turkish soldiers standing over there by the little tree on the other side of the fence,” Karapegian says. What Armenian, I ask myself, wants to live within 6 metres of the nation whose Ottoman rulers annihilated his people?

  There are not many villagers left; today they are outnumbered by the storks that nest on the disused factory crane, on the telegraph poles, on the roof of the crumbling public library, on top of the marble podium commemorating those Armenians who fell in the 1941–45 “Great Patriotic War” against Hitler. Karapegian is a teacher of Armenian history at the local secondary school, educating the great-grandchildren of those who survived the genocide and fled—in most cases from villages scarcely 25 kilometres away on the other side of the Turkish border—between 1915 and 1918.

  As I sit with Levon Karapegian and his family at a table in their garden, eating plates of cherries, a cuckoo calls from beyond the trees, from Turkey, from what the family call western Armenia. And his wife points to a line of poplars behind the Turkish guard post. “That was our family home,” she says. “I remember my father putting me on his shoulders when I was small and telling me how my grandfather planted all those trees.”

  Five years later and 3,500 kilometres away, the sea mist curling over the Sussex dunes on a damp English evening, Astrid Aghajanian is pouring tea for me from a big, heavy pot. She is one of the last survivors. Eighty-two years ago, the Turks shot her grandfather, grandmother and uncle.

  What was left of the family all walked and walked. At a village one night, my father who had been deported with us came to see us. He told my mother that he thought he was being allowed to say goodbye, that he would be shot with the other men. I remember my mother told me that my father’s last words were: “The only way to remember me is to look after Astrid.” We never saw him again. It was a long march and the Turks and Kurds came to carry off girls for rape. My mother would run from one end of the column to the other each time she saw them attacking us. My other grandmother died along the way. So did my newly-born brother Vartkes. We had to leave him by the roadside. One day, the Turks said they wanted to collect all the young children and look after them. Some women, who couldn’t feed their children, let them go. Then my mother saw them piling the children on top of each other and setting them on fire. My mother pushed me under another pile of corpses. She buried herself with me under those bodies. Even today I cannot stand to be in darkness or to be on my own. My mother saved me from the fire. She used to tell me afterwards that when she heard the screams of the children and saw the flames, it was as if their souls were going up to heaven.

  Astrid Aghajanian’s mother eventually carried her to a Bedouin camp and, after reaching Aleppo—with the help of a Turkish officer—she remarried and moved to the newly mandated territory of Palestine. In Jerusalem young Astrid was to meet her future husband Gaspar, whose family had lived in Palestine for generations. But her Armenian agony had not ended. They were forced to flee the 1948 Arab–Israeli war and took refuge in Jordan—where Gaspar Aghajanian secured British citizenship—and then moved to Cyprus. But when the Turks invaded the island in 1974, after the Greek coup d’état, the couple were dispossessed once again. Astrid was now a refugee from the Turks twice in the same century. The Turkish army moved into what had been their family home. Could history torture anyone more than this?

  It could. The Aghajanians received money for their lost home, but when Gaspar demanded compensation for the couple’s possessions—Persian carpets, furniture, an ancient coin collection, photographs of massacred relatives from 1915, a piano and a large library of valuable books all stolen by the Turks—he received a letter from the British Foreign Office stating that “the Turkish Cypriot authorities . . . enacted ‘legislation’ to exclude claims made by those persons who were deemed to have Greek or Greek Cypriot connections. They have now extended this exclusion to cover claims by persons deemed to be of Armenian descent.”

  The couple were never Greek Cypriots and never asked for Greek Cypriot passports. “We were full British citizens,” Gaspar Aghajanian says. “But we were refused compensation on grounds of our ethnic background.” When he heard that Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister, was to visit Turkey in 1990 for ceremonies marking the 1915 Gallipoli battle—another full-circle of the catastrophe—Astrid’s husband wrote to his MP to complain, adding that his wife was a survivor of the Armenian genocide. Back came a letter from Foreign Office minister Francis Maude, saying—and here the reader of this book may be permitted to scream—that while the government “regard the loss of so many lives as a tragedy . . . we have long considered that it would not be right to raise with, or attribute to, the present Turkish government acts which took place 75 years ago during the time of the Ottoman empire . . .”

  Catch-22 is a clich
é compared to this. In order to maintain relations with Turkey, the British government no longer acknowledges that the Armenian genocide happened. But it cannot obtain compensation for the Aghajanians because the Turks refuse to compensate British citizens of Armenian descent—because of the 1915 Armenian genocide. To this day, the couple have received nothing for their possessions.

  If there was any international kindness to be bestowed upon the Aghajanians, however, it came in 2003 when a young Turkish woman, a student from Chicago, asked to see them. The girl, whose identity it is still better to protect, had moved from Turkey to the United States and found herself living among Armenians and insisted on hearing the story of their genocide. She began academic work to discover what happened in 1915. One afternoon she came to the little bungalow in Shoreham in southern England and expressed her sorrow to Astrid, and her remorse for what her Turkish people had done. She gently produced a tape recorder. And so Astrid Aghajanian’s memories—of her father’s last goodbye, of the death of her baby brother and of the burning children whose souls went up to heaven—are now safeguarded by a young Turkish woman.78

  In Beirut, the Armenian home for the blind—now for all elderly Armenians— is warmer now than it was during the last days of the civil war. There are new doors and central heating, although all the Holocaust survivors I met there in 1994 are dead. There are only two new patients who are survivors. There will be no more. One is an old lady who can only remember the songs her mother taught her of the horrors of the march and the deportation. She squeals them out in Turkish because she never learned Armenian, so that the staff have to find a nurse who speaks the Turkish language to translate. I know these songs. They have been meticulously collected by an Armenian academic: