Who remembers the Armenians?

'Who remembers the Armenians?' was supposed to have been Hitler's scornful question to his commanders as he urged them to be pitiless to the people of Poland on the eve of the German invasion in 1939. He was referring to the massacre of the Armenian Christian minority in the Turkish Ottoman Empire 100 years ago.

A century on, the answer to Hitler's question seems to be: 'quite a lot of people.' Over the past week, remembrance ceremonies have been held all over the world, and the French president, Francois Hollande, urged Turkey to recognise the massacre of up to 1.5 million people as genocide.

Turkey's president said his country 'shared the pain' of the Armenians, but rejected the suggestion that the killings were part of a systematic campaign, and said that many innocent Muslims also perished during the horrors of the First World War.

The fate of the Armenians has long been a subject of bitter controversy in Turkey. In 2006, Orhan Pamuk, the first Turk to win the Nobel Prize for literature, was charged with'insulting Turkish identity' when he referred to the massacre, and the following year, a journalist of Armenian descent was shot dead in Istanbul after he described it as 'genocide'.

Who remembers the Armenians? Many people

‘Who remembers the Armenians?’, Hitler is supposed to have asked scornfully as he prepared to invade Poland in 1939, referring to the deaths of perhaps 1m people during the First World War at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, now Turkey.

Now for the first time, the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has offered his ‘condolences’ over the mass killings. The Turks still reject the idea that they constituted genocide, and Mr Egoyan talked instead of the ‘shared pain’ of the Turkish and Armenian peoples for their losses in World War One.

Even so, the comments are a marked step forward. In 2006, Orhan Pamuk, the first Turk to win the Nobel Prize, was threatened with prosecution for insulting ‘Turkish identity’ when he drew attention to the killings.

At the start of the First World War, after years of inter-communal tension the Turks feared the Christian Armenians might help their enemy, Russia. They began a mass deportation during which perhaps 600,000 were murdered, while another 400,000 died from hardship.

*Tomorrow at Shoe Lane Library, London EC4, 1230 my talk on Flood: Nature and Culture

http://disasterhistorian.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/talk-on-flood-nature-and-culture.html

Who remembers the Armenians?

“Who remembers the Armenians?” was supposed to have been Hitler’s scornful question as he tried to stiffen the backbone of his generals on the eve of the invasion of Poland. And the failure of the victorious allies of World War One to call anyone to account for the massacre of this Christian minority in Turkey was said to have made him believe he could, literally, get away with murder.

But 90 years on, the answer to Hitler’s question seems to be “quite a lot of people.” Yesterday, the US Congress’s Foreign Affairs Committee, despite pleas from Hilary Clinton, has declared that the massacre amounted to genocide.

Turkey had sent MPs to Washington to lobby against the resolution, and the country’s president, Abdullah Gul, has branded the committee’s decision "an injustice to history". It has recalled its US ambassador for consultations and hints that further sanctions may be on the way.

It is estimated that 600,000 Armenians were massacred and that another 400,000 perished from the hardships and brutality of forced deportations. Turkey accepts that atrocities were committed but argues they were a by-product of the Great War, in which Turkey fought on Germany’s side, and that there was no systematic attempt to destroy the Armenian people.