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NINETY YEARS HAVE PASSED
since the extermination of
1.5 million Armenian men, women, and children at
the hands of the Ottoman Turkish government, and
the deportation of almost the entire Armenian
population from its ancestral lands.
90 years or 900 years-
WE WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
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The roots of Genocide |
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The Turkish slaughter of more than a
million Armenians in 1915-1916 was a virtual template for the
20th-century horrors that followed, chillingly familiar: inhuman
brutality; mass deportations of helpless civilians (often in
overcrowded railroad boxcars); headlines screaming of
"systematic race extermination"; activists and intellectuals
calling for intervention; and, most devastatingly, the lack of
political will in the West to intervene to stop the slaughter.
The roots of the genocide are in the "total war" atmosphere of
WWI, which combusted with the pan-Turkish nationalism of the
Young Turk government, inflamed Muslim rage against "infidel"
Armenian Christians, and a long-simmering Ottoman hatred of the
Armenians dating to Sultan Abdul Hamid II and his slaughters in
the 1890s.The Armenians' brave but doomed stand in Van should be
as celebrated as the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and the
corpse-strewn Lake Gaeljak as well known as Babi Yar. |
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Adolf Hitler |
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While persuading his associates that a
Jewish holocaust would be tolerated by the west stated...
Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the
Armenians? |
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Turks protest at Armenian
forum
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 "If
we have confidence in our own beliefs, we should not
fear freedom of thought," Turkish prime minister
told a gathering of academics on Saturday.
**Forget about Freedom of Expression in Turkey, they
have a problem of Freedom of Thought. How sad. |
Tsitsernakaberd
April 24 Memorial in Yerevan, Armenia
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Soghomon Tehlirian |
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A survivor of the Armenian
Genocide, assassinated Talaat Pasha in Berlin in
1921. Talaat, Minister of the Interior and
mastermind of the Genocide, had fled Turkey to seek
refuge in Germany where he continued to labor for
Pan-Turkism. He had been tried in abstentia by the
Turkish authorities and sentenced to death for the
atrocities he planned and carried out, but no
official effort had been made to apprehend him and
bring him to justice.
After Talaat's assassination in Berlin, Soghomon
Tehlirian, who admitted committing the murder, was
given a jury trial. During the two-day trial, expert
witnesses and eye-witnesses testified not only about
the murder itself, but about the details of the
Armenian Genocide and Tehlirian's physical and
mental condition as the only survivor in his family.
The jury acquitted Tehlirian of the crime. He
eventually moved to the United States and lived out
his years in San Francisco. |
 
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Mer Hayrenik
