Armenian Genocide The Silenced Extermination To the Reader You have every right to wonder what I have to do with the Armenians and why I should have decided, at the age of 86, to investigate the extermination they suffered as of 1915 at the hands of the Ottomans and Turks. It is not hard to understand. I grew up as a teenager during the war against the Nazi reign of terror and my Jewish roots led me to take part in militant activities in a youth organization that sought to create awareness in a small neighborhood of the city of Buenos Aires as regards the danger to humanity should Hitler and his supporters conquer the world. Only a few years after the defeat of the Third Reich I was able to travel to Germany and see the rubble in the streets of Berlin, the Reichstag gutted by fire, women driving tramways because the Nazis had condemned to death in foreign lands several generations of men trained to wipe six million Jews off the face of the earth, along with one million gypsies, thousands of democratic politicians, and many others, including the mentally retarded, homosexuals and disabled. The 20th century was a genocidal century. Large-scale genocides began with the massacre of 1,500,000 Armenians and over the following two decades the Nazis instrumented the Shoah. The Jewish genocide was judged at Nuremberg, but Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who created the term “genocide”, had already issued the warning before the Shoah: do not forget the Armenian extermination. My mother, Paulina, lived in Odesa during the Tsarist regime. Once in Argentina she told us as children that when the Cossack pogroms started, the Armenians used to keep their Jewish neighbors in hiding. It was, therefore, my mother who was the source of inspiration for this work. From her I inherited this debt of gratitude towards the Armenian community. Súlim* Granovsky (*) if you are intrigued by my name, I’d like to point out it is a phonetic version of the word PEACE in Yiddish. “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Adolf Hitler On 22nd August 1939 Hitler’s troops were preparing to invade Poland, as a prelude to their march east, their real aim being to seize Soviet wheat and oil, and, as a repugnant ideological justification – which Hitler was fully convinced of – to obliterate along the way any expression of an “inferior race” defying “Aryan purity‟. At a meeting with the highest commandants of the Wehrmacht, he harangued them and made them undertake to “put to death mercilessly and without compassion men, women and children of Polish derivation and language”. At that time Hitler’s target was solely Polish origin and language. Soon the other victims were to be added, in addition to the Jews: gypsies, politicians and public officials in the countries they invaded, mentally disabled, physically handicapped, homosexuals. Hitler said it clearly: “Our strength consists in our speed and our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a State. “It is a matter of indifference to me what a weak European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command – and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness (referring to the SS) for the present only in the east, with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion men, women and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need.” And to tranquillize the consciences of his generals, in case they were to harbor some humanitarian prejudice, Hitler guaranteed them impunity with this cynically savage expression: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” CONTENTS PROLOGUE - To keep silence or to speak out (Pascual C. Ohanian) - Debt of gratitude towards the Armenian community - Genocide: an international crime - The whole of humanity shudders at such a heartrending account (William Saroyan) - Notes on the history of Armenia. - The Ottoman Empire 1300-1922. - Destruction of the Armenian people’s cultural heritage. - Factors leading to the extermination - Mehmet Talaat, an emblematic genocide - Nothing changed with Mustapha Kemal. Are modernity and genocide therefore compatible? - Before and after Kemal, slavery and bartering of women - The genocides never concealed their intentions - Human rights violations - Martyr cities - Resistance and repression - Chronology of the extermination - Erosion of memory. When genocide is forgotten - Jewish holocaust and Armenian extermination - Voices in solidarity with the Armenian cause. - Turkish negation was never alone - Amnesty International criticizes Turkish criminal legislation. Derogation of Section 301 - A jump forward. Switzerland 2009: Protocol to silence the extermination? - Criticism of the Protocols - Anatole France and the Extermination - Greeks too were exterminated DOCUMENTS - Academic panel “The genocide of the Armenian people”. Philosophy and Letters College (University of Buenos Aires) - The Treaty of Sevres and the Armenian issue. Legal interrelationship between the Treaties of Sevres and Lausanne - Doctrine on genocide (by Raphael Lemkin) - Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) (UN, 1948) - Argentina: 24 April “Day of action for tolerance and respect among peoples” National Law 26199 BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES The author PROLOGUE TO KEEP SILENCE or to speak out Mankind is made up of beings restricted by the length of our life and the environment where we conduct our activities; yet our personal past is added to that of generations that came before us, who submerge us in History and project us into the future with the legacy of their personal spiritual content enclosed in their written word. And today, more than ever, we can expand this without limit instantly to the whole world, thanks to the almost incredible means of communication. It is at this point where a person comes to a fork in the road. Because each of us has a choice to make. In the face of a horrendous event that spells shame and dishonor to human nature, involving the massacre of multitudes simply because of their national origin, an event the perpetrators sought to conceal from the eyes of the world and today declare that what is an absolute truth affirmed daily by all never occurred, we are forced to choose between keeping silence or speaking out. Between saying nothing or communicating the truth to those around us. Súlim Granovsky has chosen to speak out, to write, to proclaim. And from that moment he has become one of a long line of people who uplift human condition, who have decided to show they are different from beasts, from monsters, from criminals. Súlim Granovsky is, therefore, a Man. And with his choice, his name and surname honor not only Eva, his wife, and his children Martín, Paula and Jorge, and his grandchildren Julieta, Iván and Bárbara, but also those who pondering on what is set forth in the following pages value his companionship amidst the pain. After perusing this book by Súlim Granovsky and reflecting on its profound significance, I am affirmed in the conviction that those who suffer ancestral grief are able to relate more easily with a feeling of solidarity to the experiences undergone by a nation awaiting justice, like Armenia. Pascual Carlos Ohanian Debt of gratitude towards the Armenian community I am Argentine-born, son of Ukrainian parents who emigrated to this country in the early years of the 20th century. In my note to my readers I went back to my childhood and my mother’s memory of her Armenian neighbor’s solidarity during tsarist pogroms. Her anecdotes often pictured the pogroms by the Tsar’s drunken Cossacks, obsessed by an irrational hatred, who invaded the homes of Jews, disemboweling mattresses in search of whatever might be found other than dire poverty, destroying religious books, murdering men and children, raping women. My mother remembered that in those years when the proximity of violence was presaged, the Armenians valorously concealed neighboring Jews in their homes. My mother transmitted to me that debt of gratitude towards the Armenian people, which to some extent helps to explain my decision to write about the different stages of their history dating back to pre-Christian times and particular devote myself to their sufferings both before and after the Extermination of 1915. Though I have earned my living as a journalist my resources as a researcher are modest, as will be seen in this paper. Understandably enough in the light of this I did what one of my college teachers waggishly advised when encouraging us to probe problems in depth, and not restrict our research to a single opinion. To free us of any feeling of guilt he admitted that resorting to more than two sources could already be called a creation. Which is what I have done. To be able to understand the facts I resorted to sources of scholars such as Vahan Adrián and Pascual C. Ohanian, among others. Reading their work and assimilating their lore allowed me to make use of it here - reinterpreted or simply repeated - in the hope that whoever reads this summary of tragic events against humankind is able to take it in, communicate it, and, if possible, go farther afield in studying what actually occurred. Knowledge of the millennial Armenian culture is not, however, restricted to studying the extermination that took place at the dawn of the 20th century, for the tragedy of the Armenian people at the hands of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey leads to the sad conclusion that it was a mass extermination which took a long time to be recognized as such.