Arts and the Armenian Genocide

From the spring of 1915 to the fall of 1916, the Ottoman “Young Turks” and their auxiliary and civilian sympathizers murdered between 664,000 and 1.2 million Christian Armenians in the Medz Yeghern (the Great Crime) otherwise known as the Armenian Genocide. Western Armenia, the area under Ottoman control was full of intellectual and religious life and important sites such as the Narekavank Monastery, the city of Van, and even the highly symbolic Mount Ararat, just 8km across the modern Armenian border from the Khor Virap Monastery. The Armenian genocide happened in phases of oppression and deportation beginning with the targeting of Armenian intellectuals, such as the composer Komitas Vardapet after the rise of the CUP (Committee of Union and Progress) and Talaat Pasha. After the intellectuals, civilians were systematically and individually massacred and sent on death marches out of Ottoman Armenia, many of them ending up in the Syrian desert, with Der Zor (Deir ez-Zor) as the final destination and killing center for the deportees. ^[1]

The Ottoman Turks used the First World War as a pretext for the genocide, claiming that Armenians would join forces with their enemies. The Armenians stood in the way of the “Pan-Turkism” which the Turkish government hoped to implement to create a super-empire stretching from Turkey through the Turkic-speaking countries of Central Asia all the way to China. The Ottomans provided the model for the genocide that followed. First, there are the fractures of imperialism, of “shatterzones” and “bloodlands” between empires, and of ethnic minorities caught between superpowers or not aligning with supra-state ethnic aims.^[2] The second, is the cover of warfare for genocide. For the Armenians it was the First World War, for the Holocaust it was the Second World War and this continued into the latter 20^th century with genocide in Cambodia, Sudan, and of the Yazidis in Iraq. The Armenian genocide was in many ways the template for the Nazi and subsequent genocides; as Hitler wrote, “who, after all, today speaks of the extermination of the Armenians?”

The first two phases of the Armenian Genocide focused on the conscription and murder of Armenian men followed by the extermination of the civilian population beginning with intellectuals. The third phase of the genocide is characterized by the murder of women, children, and the elderly to Der Zor. During this phase, women were also raped and forcibly converted to Islam, the resulting children were raised in Turkish households of the perpetrators, and children were stolen from Armenian families and taken to be raised in Islamic homes. The forced conversion of women, the use of rape and intermarriage, the theft of children, and the mass murder of intellectuals have left an indelible mark on the Armenian cultural and national heritage.^[3]

Lawyer Raphael Lemkin studied the Armenian case carefully as he prepared for the Nuremberg trials. He successfully lobbied for the specific term “genocide” to describe the destruction of civilian populations as defined in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.  Part of this resolution is the foundational “Article II” which addresses the crimes of the Armenian Genocide as much as the Holocaust including explicitly describing the theft and forcible conversion of children as a genocidal crime. Because the Armenian Church was such an integral part of culture, churches, monasteries, and the clergy were the first targets of the genocide, and thousands of manuscripts and medieval artifacts were destroyed in the genocide. The holy city of Van remains in modern Turkish territory, formerly Western Armenia, and remaining Armenian historic sites have been renamed, Turkified, and destroyed even since the 1980s.