by ARMEN T. MARSOOBIAN
The Eternal Flame, at the Armenian Genocide Memorial, at Tsitsernakaberd, Yerevan
In the late evening and early dawn hours of April 24-25th, 1915, angry voices and shouts of protest reverberated throughout the streets of Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire’s imperial capital. In the days ahead this phenomenon would recur and soon spread across the Empire’s vast stretches. The Armenian intellectual, political and religious elite were arrested and transported to prisons in the Anatolian interior. Most would eventually perish, sharing the fate of well over one million of their compatriots. What we now recognise as the Armenian Genocide had begun. The arrests and executions effectively decapitated the Armenian nation’s leadership, presaging one of the 20th century’s greatest crimes against humanity. That this crime still captures headlines today finds its origins in how this history was at first silenced and then revised in the following decades.
Two different stories of this genocide were written, even as the events were unfolding. A young Arnold Toynbee was tasked with gathering evidence for what, a year earlier, the Entente powers of Britain, France and Russia had declared ‘a crime against humanity and civilisation’. The resulting 1916 volume, co-edited with Viscount Bryce, contained hundreds of highly credible eyewitness accounts of Armenian persecutions, arrests, murders and deportations. Dismissed by the Young Turks and their German allies as wartime propaganda, the work has withstood modern historical scrutiny: in 2005 Ara Sarafian published it in an uncensored critical edition, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916, an invaluable guide for exploring the microhistory of individual events within the broader genocide. Almost simultaneous with this 1916 publication was the first denialist publication written by one of the genocide’s chief architects, Talaat Pasha (Ermeni vah?eti [Armenian Atrocities]). This photographically illustrated account of Armenian ‘revolutionary’ activities attempted to justify the state’s benign ‘relocation’ of women, children and the elderly away from the war zone. Thoroughly discredited, this work and its underlying thesis of Arm-enian disloyalty are still cited by the current Turkish government and the historians under its patronage. My grandfather, a photographer in Marsovan, took one of the photographs used in this book; the family memoirs explain that the photograph was a total fabrication.
History Today for more