Armenian genocide, the forgotten massacre of 109 years ago that many insist on remembering every 24 April

BEIRUT – Like every year on April 24, Armenians all over the world come together to walk together, to commemorate the martyrs of Medz Yeghern, the Big Bad. They remember the night of 1915 when the government ofYoung Turks” triggered the first genocide of the 20th century. In Beirut they will march from Bourj Hammoud, the Armenian neighborhood of the capital founded in 1915 as a refugee camp to welcome the survivors of the “death marches”, to the Catholicos, the main headquarters of the Armenian Apostolic church.

The witness. “We walk to remember our grandparents, those who were massacred and those who survived, but whose lives were marked by the genocide.” The speaker is Marie Helene, born in Lebanon, but first and foremost an Armenian, granddaughter of someone who had suffered the Medz Yeghern. “When I was a child, my grandmother’s screams often woke us up at night. Throughout her life her memories of her beheaded father and of her march on foot in the desert from Sis to Der el-Zor accompanied her and materialized in her night terrors.”

The forgotten Genocide. The first genocide of the 20th century is not that far away in history, it occurred at the gates of Europe and affected a population close to the West and Christian. Despite this, it is ignored or forgotten by most. Yet, in that tragedy almost two million people were exterminated and, ironically, it is from this event that the crime of genocide is codified in international law. The Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin dedicated his life to the study of crimes against humanity, laying the foundations for states to assume responsibility, which led to the establishment of the Permanent People’s Tribunal. Lemkin, after having known the extermination of the Armenians and the ferocity perpetrated by the Nazis, coined the term genocide, adopted by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948.

In Türkiye, talking about it is a crime. To date, however, only around thirty countries have recognized the Armenian genocide, and in Turkey talking about it is a crime. The massacre of the elites and the death marches On the night between 23 and 24 April 1915 the extermination of the Armenians began. Intellectuals, artists, priests, bankers and deputies were taken from their homes, deported to Anatolia and massacred along the way. The majority of the men, 350,000 of those who were soldiers of the Turkish army alone, were massacred. Children, women and the elderly were forced on “death marches” in the desert, from Anatolia to Der el-Zoor, in present-day Syria. One and a half million left, but hundreds of thousands died of hunger, disease and torture. Hundreds of thousands more were massacred by the Kurdish militia and Turkish army throughout the Ottoman Empire.

At the origins of the genocide. The reasons that led to this massacre are the same as those underlying every genocide. The Ottoman Empire was experiencing the crisis that would lead to its dissolution at the end of the First World War. In power was the formation of the “Young Turks”, an extremist faction of the “Union and Progress” party. Strong nationalism was the foundation of their politics and was difficult to reconcile with the presence of minorities in the Empire, especially the Armenian one, integrated but not assimilated into the dominant culture and religion. Furthermore, confiscated goods and lands represented a tasty loot.

Still on the run. Today there are around six million Armenians, just under three live in the Armenian Republic and the rest mainly in the Middle East, France, the United States and Africa. But the story of pain of the Armenian people does not seem destined to end, as shown by the recent conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijan. Nagorno-Karabakh is a small enclave, 4,400 km2, inhabited almost exclusively by Armenians, which due to the peace treaties following the two world wars and the dissolution of the Soviet Union had remained in zero territory. From 1989 to last year the two countries clashed, on and off, even militarily, in a situation of substantial balance. In September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a new offensive and, thanks to the armaments sold by Israel, in a few days it occupied the enclave and 200,000 Armenians abandoned their homes and took refuge in Armenia.

An island in the mountains. “We have always been like an island in the mountains,” says Vasquen Krikorjian, an Armenian journalist in Beirut. “In 301 AD the Armenians become Christians and then spend their entire history in a Muslim world. For a long time we have coexisted with our neighbors in peace and cooperation, like pieces of a mosaic rich in culture and diversity. Then the genocide and the end of that wonderful balance. Today Armenians are fleeing Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh and Jerusalem. They are mosaic pieces that go away, but the picture as a whole changes and the new one that appears seems increasingly poorer and more violent to me.”