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Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Can Armenians forgive the Kurds for their role in the genocide of 1915?


I  know for sure that my neighbour. who has her roots in Turkey will never forgive nor forget.  She was born decades later, but the horror tales handed down from her parents and paternal grandparents have turned her against the Turks, the Kurds and islam and its followers.  She has horror tales to tell of how her maternal grandfather and his wife, the husband was a teacher and a writer and thus his fate was sealed,  were taken away along with other intellectuals and were  never heard from again.  Tales of a young bride-to-be from the family whisked away by the Turks and whereabouts unknown.  Tales of entire families disappearing during the night, taken away and never heard from or heard of again, etc.etc.etc.  Some things can never be forgiven nor forgotten,  and shouldn't be ... no matter how much the Christian faith wants one to do so.  It's just  not natural.

Amberin Zaman writing at Al-Monitor:
.....“The Armenian population is melting.”   
This bleak assessment was pronounced by Sahak Mashalyan, an Armenian Orthodox priest, during a recent Sunday mass at the Asdvadzadzin church in Istanbul. Reeling off the statistics: 482 funerals, 236 baptisms and 191 weddings, the black-robed cleric solemnly intoned, “These figures point to a community … that is dying.”

Little over a century ago, the Armenian Patriarchate put Anatolia’s Armenian population at more than two million. In 1915, tragedy struck. Estimated figures vary, but between 800,000 and a million Armenians are thought to have been slaughtered by Ottoman forces and their Kurdish allies in what many respected historians call the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey vehemently denies any genocidal intent. The official line is that most of the Armenians died from hunger and disease, as they were forcibly deported to the deserts of Syria amid the upheaval of the collapsing empire. 

The ruling Islamic Justice and Development Party has done more than any of its pro-secular predecessors to improve the lot of Christian minorities and to encourage freer debate of the horrors that befell them. Yet it has also showered millions of dollars on international lobbying firms in a vain effort to peddle the official version of events. A steady trickle of nations continue to recognize the events of 1915 as genocide. Turkey’s biggest worry is that on the centenary in 2015, the United States will risk wrecking relations and follow suit.

In Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeastern province of Diyarbakir, global diplomacy does not figure in the calculations of Abdullah Demirbas, the mayor of the city’s ancient Sur district. A maze of narrow cobbled streets lined with decrepit stone houses, Sur used to be known as the “neighborhood of the infidels” because of the large number of Armenians, Syrian Orthodox Christians and Jews who once lived there. Since being twice elected to office on the ticket of Turkey's largest pro-Kurdish party, Peace and Democracy (BDP), Demirbas, a stocky former schoolteacher with an easy smile, has thrown himself wholeheartedly into making amends for the past. 

“As Kurds, we also bear responsibility for the suffering of the Armenians,” he told Al-Monitor over glasses of ruby-red tea. “We are sorry, and we need to prove it.” As a first step, Demirbas launched free Armenian-language classes two years ago at the municipality offices. “They were an instant hit,” Demirbas said. Many of those who enrolled were thought to be “hidden Armenians” or the descendants of those who converted to Islam to survive.

One such "hidden Armenian," a gnarled octogenarian called Ismail, confided to Al-Monitor that his father’s real name was Leon.

“They wiped out his entire family, out in the fields,” he said as he awaited an audience with Demirbas. The old man’s voice cracked with emotion. “My father was rescued by a Turkish officer and became a Muslim. But though, praise God, I am a good Muslim too, praying five times a day, I know I am not accepted,” he added. “In their minds, I am always the son of the unbeliever.”

The Kurds’ role in the killings has been well documented, increasingly now by the Kurds themselves.
Egged on by their Ottoman rulers, Kurdish tribal chieftains raped, murdered and pillaged their way through the southeast provinces where for centuries they had co-existed, if uneasily, with the Armenians and other non-Muslims. Henry Morgenthau, who served as US ambassador in Constantinople at the height of the bloodshed, described the Kurds' complicity in his chilling 1918 memoir Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story thusly:...

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