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FISK: Nearly a century after the Armenian genocide, these people...

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  • FISK: Nearly a century after the Armenian genocide, these people...

    Nearly a century after the Armenian genocide, these people are still being
    slaughtered in Syria

    Robert Fisk
    Sunday 1 December 2013


    And now, almost unmentioned in the media, their holy places are also being
    desecrated

    Just over 30 years ago, I dug the bones and skulls of Armenian genocide
    victims out of a hillside above the Khabur River in Syria. They were young
    people - the teeth were not decayed - and they were just a few of the
    million-and-a-half Armenian Christians slaughtered in the first Holocaust
    of the 20th century, the deliberate, planned mass destruction of a people
    by the Ottoman Turks in 1915.

    It was difficult to find these bones because the Khabur River - north of
    the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zour - had changed. So many were the bodies
    heaped in its flow that the waters moved to the east. The very river had
    altered its course. But Armenian friends who were with me took the remains
    and placed them in the crypt of the great Armenian church at Deir ez-Zour,
    which is dedicated to the memory of those Armenians who were killed - and
    shame upon the `modern' Turkish state which still denies this Holocaust -
    in that industrial mass murder.

    And now, almost unmentioned in the media, these ghastly killing fields have
    become the killing fields of a new war. Upon the bones of the dead
    Armenians, the Syrian conflict is being fought. And the descendants of the
    Armenian Christian survivors who found sanctuary in the old Syrian lands
    have been forced to flee again - to Lebanon, to Europe, to America. The
    very church in which the bones of the murdered Armenians found their
    supposedly final resting place has been damaged in the new war, although no
    one knows the culprits.

    Yesterday, I called Bishop Armash Nalbandian of Damascus, who told me that
    while the church at Deir ez-Zour was indeed damaged, the shrine remained
    untouched. The church itself, he said, was less important than the memory
    of the Armenian genocide - and it is this memory which might be destroyed.
    He is right. But the church - not a very beautiful building, I have to say
    - is nonetheless a witness, a memorial to the Holocaust of Armenians every
    bit as sacred as the Yad Vashem memorial to the victims of the Jewish
    Holocaust in Israel. And although the Israeli state, with a shame equal to
    the Turks, claims that the Armenian genocide was not a genocide, Israelis
    themselves use the word Shoah - Holocaust - for the Armenian killings.

    In Aleppo, an Armenian church has been vandalised by the Free Syrian Army,
    the `good' rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad's regime, funded and armed by
    the Americans as well as the Gulf Sunni Arabs. But in Raqqa, the only
    regional capital to be totally captured by the opposition in Syria,
    Salafist fighters trashed the Armenian Catholic Church of the Martyrs and
    set fire to its furnishings. And - God spare us the thought - many hundreds
    of Turkish fighters, descendants of the same Turks who tried to destroy the
    Armenian race in 1915, have now joined the al-Qa'ida-affiliated fighters
    who attacked the Armenian church. The cross on top of the clock tower was
    destroyed, to be replaced by the flag of the Islamic State of Iraq and the
    Levant.

    Nor is that all. On 11 November, when the world honoured the dead of the
    Great War, which did not give the Armenians the state they deserved, a
    mortar shell fell outside the Holy Translators Armenian National School in
    Damascus and two other shells fell on school buses. Hovhannes Atokanian and
    Vanessa Bedros, both Armenian schoolchildren, died. A day later, a bus load
    of Armenians travelling from Beirut to Aleppo were robbed at gunpoint. Two
    days later, Kevork Bogasian was killed by a mortar shell in Aleppo. The
    Armenian death toll in Syria is a mere 65; but I suppose we might make that
    1,500,065. More than a hundred Armenians have been kidnapped. The
    Armenians, of course, like many other Christians in Syria, do not support
    the revolution against the Assad regime - although they could hardly be
    called Assad supporters.

    Two years from now, they will commemorate the 100th anniversary of their
    Holocaust. I have met many survivors, all now dead. But the Turkish state,
    supporting the present revolution in Syria, will be memorialising its
    victory at Gallipoli that same year, a heroic battle in which Mustafa Kemal
    Ataturk saved his country from Allied occupation. Armenians also fought in
    that battle - in the uniform of the Turkish army, of course - but I will
    wager as many dollars as you want that they will not be remembered in 2015
    by the Turkish state which was so soon to destroy their families.

    http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/nearly-a-century-after-the-armenian-genocide-these-people-are-still-being-slaughtered-in-syria-8975976.html

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