Defending Christian Armenia

I received this e-mail just now:

I am writing you from Armenia and thank you for this article, even though I am not surprised but I am still greatly disappointed by the response of American Christian organizations (political/religious) to what is really an attempt at a second Genocide in the 21st century. I know they don’t like Orthodox Christians, but I have come to the conclusion that they actually hate us. Thank you again for for posting this article.

The article he’s talking about appears on TAC, and is written by Uzay Bulut, a Turkish journalist who — this is extraordinarily brave for a Turk — is defending Armenia against Turkish and Azeri aggression.

I would correct my Armenian reader: Christians here don’t hate Orthodox Christians in the ancient Christian lands. They don’t know that you exist, and don’t particularly care. Maybe indifference is a form of hatred. Whatever the truth, it is deeply wrong. 

Most Americans have no idea that Armenia was the first nation to receive the Gospel as a nation. This is how long those people have been Christian. I strongly urge you to read Mark Movsesian’s backgrounder on the new fighting in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. 

And let me tell you something about Turkey, which is supporting the aggression against Armenia.

Most Americans have no idea that in the 20th century, the Turks waged a true genocide against the Armenian Christian people. The book to read is 2019’s The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924, by the Israeli historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi. I had to put it down — a lot — because its record of the atrocities the Turks wrought on innocent Armenians in the ethnic and religious cleansing of Turkey was too much to bear.

Here, for example, is an account of a massacre in Urfa in 1895, witnessed by Fitzmaurice, a British consular official:

Nazif [the local Turkish military commander] sent word to non-Armenian Christians “to assemble in their churches and not stir out” and to refrain from sheltering Armenians. In a further sign of official complicity, the captain of the gendarmes finally granted [missionary Corinna] Shattuck permission to leave on a long-planned trip to Antep, after weeks of rejections. (She didn’t go.) The troops were then drawn up at the entrances to the Armenian quarter. Behind them “an armed Mussulman mob [gathered], while the minarets were crowded with Moslems evidently in expectation of some stirring event. The Turkish women, too, crowded onto the roofs and the slopes of the fortress, which overlooked the Armenian Quarter.” The mob was “cheered on by their women, who kept up the well-known zilghit or peculiar throat noise, used on such occasions by Oriental women to encourage their braves.” At around noon a muezzin cried out the midday prayer as “a glittering glass ornament resembling a crescent was seen shining from the top of the fortress ” overlooking the town. “A mullah waved a green banner from a tall minaret overhanging the other end” of the town. Shots were fired and a “trumpet sounded the attack.” The soldiers opened their ranks so that the mob could pour into the quarter, assaulting “males over a certain age.”

According to Fitzmaurice’s investigation, Nazi was seen “motioning the crowd on,” the mob guided by troops who had familiarized themselves with the quarter during the siege. A “body of wood-cutters,” armed with axes, led the way, breaking down doors. Soldiers then rushed inside and shot the men. “A certain sheik,” Fitzmaurice wrote, “ordered his followers to bring as many stalwart young Armenians as they could find.To the number of about 100 they were thrown on their backs and held down by their hands and feet, while the sheik, with a combination of fanaticism and cruelty, proceeded, while reciting verses of the Koran, to cut their throats after the Mecca rite of sacrificing sheep. “Those hiding were dragged out and butchered — stones, shot, and set on fire with “matting saturated with petroleum.” Women were cut down shielding their husbands and fathers. More Armenians were shot as they scampered along rooftops trying to escape. When the killing subsided, the houses were looted and torched. As sunset approached, the trumpet sounded again, calling the troops and the mob to withdraw. …

More:

The atrocities resumed the following day, December 29, with a trumpet sound at dawn. The largest number were killed at the Armenian cathedral, where thousands had gathered for sanctuary. The attackers first fired through windows into the church, then smashed in the doors and killed the men clustered on the ground floor. Fitzmaurice relates that, as the mob plundered the church, they “mockingly call[ed] on Christ … to prove himself a greater prophet than Mohammed.” The Turks then shot at the “shrieking and terrified mass of women, children and some men” in the second-floor gallery. But gunning the Armenians down one by one was “too tedious,” so the mob brought in more petroleum-soaked bedding and set fire to the woodwork and the staircases leading up to the galleries. For several hours “the sickening odour of roasting flesh pervaded the town.” Writing the following March, Fitzmaurice noted, “Even today, the smell of putrescent and charred remains in the church is unbearable.” Shattuck described the horror as “a grand holocaust” and four days afterward watched “men lugging sacks filled with bones, ashes” from the cathedral.

Prior to the massacres, Urfa was home to about 20,000 Armenians. Between 8,000 and 10,000 died over two days — between 2,500 and 3,000 of them inside the Armenian cathedral. The Ottoman government in Istanbul denied that any massacre had occurred at all.

And that was just one event! Morris and Ze’evi conclude that, “It is therefore probable that the number of Armenians killed over the thirty-year period, 1894-1924, exceeded one million, perhaps substantially.” Armenians weren’t the only Christians the Turks killed in that period. Assyrian Christians and Greek Christians also suffered massacres. The Israelis write:

The preceding assessments suggest that the Turks and their helpers murdered, straightforwardly or indirectly, through privation and disease, between 1.5 and 2.5 million Christians between 1894 and 1924.

There is a sense, say these Israelis, in which the Armenian genocide was worse that the holocaust of the Jews:

The anti-Jewish campaign was not based on personal sadism, of the sort exhibited by SS officer Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List (1993). (In this sense, the movie was misleading.) Cruelty was pervasive, of course, and massive suffering was inflicted. But suffering was not the perpetrators’ purpose. In most cases the process was impersonal and cold, and geared only to extermination. The Turks’ mass murder and deportation of the Christians during 1894-1924, on the other hand, was highly upfront and personal and involved countless acts of individual sadism. Where the Nazis used guns and gas, many of the murdered Christians were killed with knives, bayonets, axes, and stones; thousands were burned alive (the Nazis burned corpses); tens of thousands of women and girls were gang-raped and murdered; clerics were crucified; and thousands of Christian dignitaries were tortured — eyes gouged out, noses and ears cut off, feet turned to mush — before being executed. In terms of the behavior of the perpetrators, on the level of individual actions, the Turkish massacre of the Christians was far more sadistic than the Nazi murder of the Jews.

This is the judgment of two Israeli Jewish historians, who have shown more sympathy and solidarity with Armenians persecuted by the Turks and their agents than have American Christians, to our great shame.

Here is a link to a short British TV documentary clip about the Armenian genocide. It’s only 8:29 long, and well worth watching to educate yourself about what those people suffered at the hands of the Turks.

NPR reports on the current fighting in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region:

According to de Waal, two new factors make the current situation more dangerous than before: Turkey’s open backing for one party and the United States’ “unusual disengagement.”

Trump likes Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, by the way, returned the ancient Christian cathedral of the Hagia Sophia to use as a mosque this year, a stinging humiliation to Orthodox Christians.

Why does my country’s government always seem to give the back of the hand to Christians of the Near East? No wonder the Armenians think we hate them.

 

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