Christopher Atamian / Writer/Producer/Director
The 1896 Erzerum Massacres of Armenians
In the ensuing decade, the entire Armenian Plateau and
the rest of the Ottoman Empire was ethnically cleansed of 1.5 Million Armenians
as well as 1.5 million Assyrian and Pontic Greeks--nearly the entire empire's
Christian population. Christians were rounded up and locked inside churches
that were set on fire and burned alive or thrown into caves with sulfur thrown
on top of them and cremated in primitive gas chambers. The Turks, aided and
abetted by their ally the German Kaiser seized Christian properties and bank
accounts, raped and enslaved women and children and forced thousands to convert
to Islam under pain of death. The vast majority of the Armenian population was
deported to concentration camps in Syria--a thousand-mile trek through the
desert that few survived. Those that did often ended up dying of disease and
malnutrition. The local Arab population recalls seeing the Armenian survivors
straggle in emaciated and famished like wild animals, emerging from the desert
sands like some frightening army of living dead. Many fell to their knees and
broke down, invoking the name of all-powerful Allah to ask what could possibly
have befallen these poor refugees.
One hundred years of official Turkish state denial have
left Armenians alone and bitter, but all over the world, this Christian people
known as the "Jews of the Caucasus" have rebuilt communities and
prospered as they have in Soviet and now independent Armenia. The reasons
behind the Armenian Genocide include a surreal mix of ethnic and financial
jealousy--the Armenian Amira class for example ran everything from the state
mint to the bread factories and most of the empire's industry, while the Greeks
and Levantines were the most successful diplomats and merchants as well.
Taking advantage of Christian missionary zeal in the
Empire, Armenians were also its most educated element. The Turks, who had lost
the entire Western part of their empire during the Serbian and Greek Wars of
Independence reacted to the cloak of opportunity presented by WWI when the West
had other concerns, to launch a veritable full-scale jihad against the infidel
dhimmi or non-Muslim minorities.
A century later we know that unfortunately genocide is
not a Turkish specialty, though they carried theirs out with a sometime
grotesque zeal, releasing prisoners and the insane from jails so that the
Armenians and other Christians would be massacred with particular viciousness.
The Holocaust of the Jews in World War Two, the killing fields of Cambodia, the
Bosnian cleansing by Serbs only twenty five years ago and most recently the
Rwandan Genocide when brother tribes of Hutu set upon their Tutsi brothers,
hacking people to death by the thousands with primitive machetes, lead us to
the unfortunate conclusion that the genocidal instinct is deeply ingrained in
human DNA. As the theorist Marc Nichanian has pointed out elsewhere, what was
the Trojan War if not an example of early ethnic cleansing as the Greeks laid
waste to Troy's entire population, also of Hellenic ethnicity?
Today, Nicholas Kristof and other leading journalists
bring us news of another frightening instance of ethnic cleansing -- this time
of the Muslim Rohingya minority in Myanmar. Reacting against the supposed fear
of Muslim fundamentalism and population rates in Myanmar, the Rohingya have
been rounded up and put in primitive camps without access to any medical
treatment and insufficient food. They are often tortured. Women are dying in
childbirth. To me, perhaps the most shocking aspect of this
genocide-in-progress is that it is being carried out by Buddhists, led by the
particularly controversial monk Wirathu, who heads the "969 Movement"
and is quoted in a New York Times Op Doc as saying that the Muslim Rohingya
minority "reproduce like fish (rabbits) and should all be killed."
As someone who practices Buddhist meditation and who has
always admired Buddhism for its emphasis on peace and non-violence, these
stomach-turning events are particularly sickening. Where is the West during all
this? Where is President Obama? Even more reprehensible is the silence of Nobel
Laureate and famed dissident Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar, who was jailed for
years by that country's military junta and that of the country's current
president Thein Sein who denies that the Rohingya are being persecuted. To
date, the Rohingya have not yet been exterminated, but they will if we do not
speak up. So please when you read these words, write your senators and
representatives. Write Samantha Power at the U.N. and anyone else in your
community who wields political and/or religious authority and tell them: STOP
THE GENOCIDE OF THE ROHINGYA people. Speak up now or forever hold your peace.
And rest assured, if you do not, one day you or your descendants or those of
someone you know may unfortunately find themselves in a similar situation -- as
history does indeed have the unfortunate habit or repeating itself.
For more Information on Twentieth Century Genocides,
please consult Samantha Power's contemporary classic A Problem from Hell:
America and the Age of Genocide and Raymond Kevorkian's brilliant The Armenian
Genocide: a Complete History
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