Robert Fisk Author
Biography
Islamists’ destruction of a shrine to the victims of
genocide marks the latest chapter in a tragic national history. Robert Fisk
reports from Qamishli, north-eastern Syria. In the most savage act of vandalism against Syria’s
Christians, Islamists have blown up the great Armenian church in Deir el-Zour,
built in dedication to the one and a half million Armenians slaughtered by the
Turks during the 1915 genocide. All of the church archives, dating back to 1841
and containing thousands of documents on the Armenian holocaust, were burned to
ashes, while the bones of hundreds of genocide victims, packed into the
church’s crypt in memory of the mass killings 99 years ago, were thrown into
the street beside the ruins.
This act of sacrilege will cause huge pain among the
Armenians scattered across the world – as well as in the rump state of Armenia
which emerged after the 1914-1918 war, not least because many hundreds of thousands
of victims died in death camps around the very same city of Deir el-Zour.
Jabhat al-Nusra rebels appear to have been the culprits this time, but since
many Syrians believe that the group has received arms from Turkey, the
destruction will be regarded by many Armenians as a further stage in their
historical annihilation by the descendants of those who perpetrated the
genocide 99 years ago.
Turkey, of course, miserably claims there was no genocide –
the equivalent of modern day Germany denying the Jewish Holocaust – but
hundreds of historians, including one prominent Turkish academic, have proved
beyond any doubt that the Armenians were deliberately massacred on the orders
of the Ottoman Turkish government across all of modern-day Turkey and inside
the desert of what is now northern Syria – the very region where Isis and its
kindred ideological armed groups now hold. Even Israelis refer to the Armenian
genocide with the same Hebrew word they use for their own destruction by Nazi
Germany: “Shoah”, which means “holocaust”.
Timeline: The emergence of Isis
The Armenian priest responsible for the Deir el-Zour
district, Monsignor Antranik Ayvazian, revealed to me that before the
explosions tore the church apart towards the end of September, he received a
message from the Islamists promising to spare the church archives if he
acknowledged them as the legislative authority in that part of Syria. “I
refused,” he said. “And after I refused, they destroyed all our papers and
endowments. The only genocide victims’ bones left were further north in the
Murgada sanctuary and I buried them before I left. They destroyed the church
there, but now if I could go back, I don’t even know if I could find where I
put the bones.”
The Armenian church in Deir el-Zour in 2009 during an
anniversary service for the genocide The Armenian church in Deir el-Zour in
2009 during an anniversary service for the genocide
Msr Ayvazian later received a photograph taken in secret and
smuggled to him from the Isis-controlled area, showing clearly that only part
of the central tower of the Deir el-Zour church, built in 1846 and renovated 43
years later, remains. Every Armenian who has returned to the killing fields of
the genocide has prayed at the church. Across these same lands, broken skulls
and bones from 1915 still lie in the sand. When I investigated the death
marches in this same region 22 years ago with a French photographer, we
uncovered dozens of skeletons in the crevasse of a hill at a point where so
many Armenian dead were thrown into the waters of the Khabur that the river changed
its course forever. I gave some of the skulls and bones we found to an Armenian
friend who placed them in the crypt of the Deir el-Zour church – the very same
building which now lies in ruins.
“During the Armenian
genocide, the Turks entered the church and killed its priest, Father Petrus
Terzibashian, in front of the congregation,” Msr Ayvazian said. “Then they
threw his body into the Euphrates. This time when the Islamists came, our
priest there fled for his life.” Msr Ayvazian suffered his own personal loss in
the Syrian war when Islamist fighters broke into the Mediterranean town of
Qassab on 22 April this year. “They burned all my books and documents, many of
them very old, and left my library with nothing but 60cm of ash on the floor.” Msr
Ayvazian showed me a photograph of the Qassab church altar, upon which one of
the Islamists had written in Arabic: “Thanks be to God for al-Qaeda, the Nusra
Front and Bilal al-Sham” (another Islamist group). The town was retaken by
Syrian government troops on 22 June.
Msr Ayvazian recounted his own extraordinary story of how he
tried to prevent foreign Islamist fighters from taking over or destroying an
Armenian-built hospital – how he drove to meet the Islamist gunmen and agreed
to recover the corpses of some of their comrades killed in battle in return for
a promise not to damage the hospital. “As I approached the hospital, a Syrian
jet flew over me and dropped a bomb 40 metres from the building. I know the
officer who sent the aircraft. He said it was his way of trying to warn the
rebels not to harm me. They came out of the hospital like rats – but they did
not harm me.”
I spoke later to the local Syrian military air force
dispatcher and he confirmed that he had indeed sent a MiG fighter-bomber to
attack waste ground near the building. Msr Ayvazian subsequently went to the
old battlefield with Syrian government permission and recovered several bodies,
all in a state of advanced decay and one with a leg eaten off by dogs. But he
bravely set off with trucks carrying the dead and handed the remains to the
Islamists. “They kept their word and later withdrew all their foreign fighters
from the province of Hassake. I later received a letter from one of their
emirs, very polite, telling me – and here the priest produced a copy of the
note – that: “We vow to keep your property and your cherished possessions,
which we also hold dear to us.” Msr Ayvazian looked scornfully at the letter.
“Look, here at the start,” he said, “they have even made a mistake in their first
quotation from the Koran! And then look what happened at Deir el-Zour. It was
all for nothing.”
Each year, thousands of Armenians have gathered at their
church in Deir el-Zour on 25 April – the date they commemorate the start of the
genocide, when Armenian lawyers, teachers and doctors were arrested and later
executed by the Turks outside Istanbul – to remember their million and a half
dead. The 100th anniversary of the mass slaughter would have been a major event
in Deir ez-Zour’s history. And although Syrian soldiers are still holding out
in part of the town today, and Syrian authorities have promised to rebuild
Armenian churches when their lands are retaken from the Islamists, there is
little hope that any Armenians will be able to visit the ruins of their church
in five months’ time. As for the Turks, they will do their best to stifle
interest in the Armenian holocaust by holding their own commemorations next
year – to mark their victory over Allied troops at the 1915 battle for
Gallipoli.
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