Assyrian Democratic Organization ADO
The first genocide of the 20th century took place in Turkey between 1915 and 1919. About two million people lost their lives in mass-scale massacres which had been masterminded by the "Young Turks", Enver Bey and Minister of Interior Talat Pasha. Most of the victims were Armenian Christians, thereby giving it the name of the Armenian genocide. There are, however, other Christian groups which have been forgotten in that tragedy: Greek Orthodox, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Orthodox and Catholic Syriacs. It was also forgotten that the killings against Christian minorities had already started decades earlier, a fact about which no one had cared.
This first genocide was announcing the Holocaust that was perpetrated on the occasion of WW II. In 1940-1945, a specific group was also targeted all over Europe under Nazi yoke, the Jews, but people seemed to forget that other minorities, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Romas, homosexuals and others, had also shared their tragic fate. The persecution of these minority groups had already started before WW II in the general international indifference and passivity. That page of WW II is now being rewritten. The page on the so-called Armenian genocide should, therefore, also be rewritten.
Two wars, two genocides but one and the same pattern. Ignoring the first genocide paved the way for the second one because no lesson had been drawn from history. Before planning the Holocaust, Hitler said to the leaders of his party "Who now still remembers the Armenian genocide?"
The Genocide, A Taboo Issue
In Turkey, the genocide is still a taboo issue almost 90 years after it took place and there is no sign of change in sight. Those who want to combat revisionist and negationist theses and who want to rewrite history risk to lose their freedom and even their lives in Turkey.
In 2000, Father Yusuf Akbulut, a Syriac Orthodox priest, was arrested, jailed and prosecuted on the grounds of treason because he had told a journalist that the "Armenian genocide" was a reality but that other Christian minorities had also been massacred. On 4 October 2000, the newspaper "Hurryiet" entitled the interview "A traitor among us". Two days later, Turkish military security agents arrested the priest.
The position of the successive Turkish governments has always been that during WW I Armenians and other Christian minorities were displaced because they were traitors who had taken sides with the enemies of the Ottoman Empire: Russia, France and UK.
The Armenian thesis, shared and supported by many independent historians and academics, is that the so-called war deportations were only a pretext for some nationalistic masterminds in Istanbul to plan the extermination and the systematic execution of the Armenian people, and more widely of the Christian populations living in the eastern provinces, so as to achieve an ethnically homogeneous Turkish state.
Genocide In International Law
The word genocide is sometimes abused in media language and does not always correspond to the reality of the facts. So, what is a genocide? The United Nations answered that question in 1948 in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, art. 2:
"In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Numerous experts have abundantly illustrated the aforementioned criteria with concrete examples (3). There is no doubt that the mass-scale massacre of Christian minorities was a genocide.
Moral Recognition of the 1915-1919 Genocide
Of course, the U.N. Convention cannot be applied retroactively although Turkey has signed it and ratified it. But Turkey could recognise the genocide, point at its masterminds, condemn them at least morally, apologise for it and pay damages under one form or another to the minority groups that have been exterminated. One form of compensation could be to recognise those groups as national minorities and to grant them rights that are enshrined in the Framework Convention on National Minorities which Turkey has, up to now, failed to sign and to ratify.
‘Cultural’ Genocide
Unfortunately, in the last decades, Ankara has chosen another way and has pursued its policy of extinction of the Christian communities in the south-east of the country through means of a cultural genocide. The war against the Kurds was a good pretext to put the Christian minorities under pressure, to make their lives unbearable and to push them to emigration. In the last 20 years, 90% of the Christians have emigrated from Turkey. All the methods listed in the U.N. definition of the genocide were used against them. Villages were burnt down and evacuated. Fields and vineyards were damaged and rendered useless for cultivation. Graveyards and houses were destroyed. A number of Christians were deprived of their Turkish citizenship. Young girls were abducted and forcibly married to Muslims while others were released in exchange for a ransom. Christians were arrested on the ground of alleged collaboration with the Kurdish fighters; others disappeared, were killed or are still missing. Churches and monasteries became derelict and beyond repair. Everything was done in order to prevent the survival of their language and their culture.
The Turkish state either carried out that cultural genocide or turned a blind eye to the exactions committed by the Kurdish Muslims against the Christian populations.
Framework Convention on National Minorities
The only way the current Turkish government can repair the damage caused by the Ottoman Empire is to sign, ratify and implement the Framework Convention on National Minorities and to implement it without any restrictions.
Considering the aforementioned facts, Human Rights Without Frontiers recommends to the Turkish state uarantee the life and property of people belonging to those Christian minorities
– to promote tolerance
– to prosecute any individual or organisation which would spread ethnic or religious hatred.
By doing this, the present-day Turkish government would show its willingness to make up for the damages and losses inflicted to a number of its minorities under previous rules, and would improve its moral profile on the international scene thereby further removing a major obstacle to EU membership…
Willy Fautré
Human Rights Without Frontiers Int.
Avenue Winston Churchill 11/33, 1180 Brussels, Belgium
Phone: 32 2 3456145 – Fax: 32 2 3437491
(1) See Sébastien de Courtois, Le génocide oublié. Chrétiens d’Orient, les derniers araméens, Paris, 2002, 297 p., Ellipses Ed., 32 rue Bargue, 75740 Paris Cedex 15 – http://www.editions-ellipses.com
(2) Anti-Christian massacres had already started in the 1880s, long before WW1. See Georges Brezol, Les Turcs ont passé là…, Paris, 1911, 398 p. (Recueil de documents, dossiers, enquêtes, et suppliques. Récit des massacres d’Adana en 1909)
(3) See Eugène Griselle, Syriens et chaldéens, leur martyr, leur espérance, Paris, 1918, n°115-116, 123 p. – Jean Naayem, Les Assyro-Chaldéens et les Arméniens massacrés par les Turcs, Paris, Bloud & Gay, 1920, 170 p.
(Témoignages sur les massacres d’Urfa, de Seert, de Kharpoût et Diyarbakir) – Joseph Yacoub, Les réfugiés assyro-chaldéens de Turquie, Forcalquier, CEDRI, 1966.
