AKP Forces bomb Armenian church hoping to hide historical facts
In the most savage act of vandalism against Syria’s Christians, Islamists have blown up the great Armenian church in Deir el-Zour, built in dedication to the one and a half million Armenians slaughtered by the Turks during the 1915 genocide. All of the church archives, dating back to 1841 and containing thousands of documents on the Armenian holocaust, were burned to ashes, while the bones of hundreds of genocide victims, packed into the church’s crypt in memory of the mass killings 99 years ago, were thrown into the street beside the ruins.
This act of sacrilege will cause huge pain among the Armenians scattered across the world – as well as in the rump state of Armenia which emerged after the 1914-1918 war, not least because many hundreds of thousands of victims died in death camps around the very same city of Deir el-Zour. Jabhat al-Nusra rebels appear to have been the culprits this time, but since many Syrians believe that the group has received arms from Turkey, the destruction will be regarded by many Armenians as a further stage in their historical annihilation by the descendants of those who perpetrated the genocide 99 years ago.
Turkey, of course, miserably claims there was no genocide – the equivalent of modern day Germany denying the Jewish Holocaust – but hundreds of historians, including one prominent Turkish academic, have proved beyond any doubt that the Armenians were deliberately massacred on the orders of the Ottoman Turkish government across all of modern-day Turkey and inside the desert of what is now northern Syria – the very region where Isis and its kindred ideological armed groups now hold. Even Israelis refer to the Armenian genocide with the same Hebrew word they use for their own destruction by Nazi Germany: “Shoah”, which means “holocaust”.
The Armenian priest responsible for the Deir el-Zour district, Monsignor Antranik Ayvazian, revealed to me that before the explosions tore the church apart towards the end of September, he received a message from the Islamists promising to spare the church archives if he acknowledged them as the legislative authority in that part of Syria. “I refused,” he said. “And after I refused, they destroyed all our papers and endowments. The only genocide victims’ bones left were further north in the Murgada sanctuary and I buried them before I left. They destroyed the church there, but now if I could go back, I don’t even know if I could find where I put the bones.”
Msr Ayvazian later received a photograph taken in secret and smuggled to him from the Isis-controlled area, showing clearly that only part of the central tower of the Deir el-Zour church, built in 1846 and renovated 43 years later, remains. Every Armenian who has returned to the killing fields of the genocide has prayed at the church. Across these same lands, broken skulls and bones from 1915 still lie in the sand. When I investigated the death marches in this same region 22 years ago with a French photographer, we uncovered dozens of skeletons in the crevasse of a hill at a point where so many Armenian dead were thrown into the waters of the Khabur that the river changed its course forever. I gave some of the skulls and bones we found to an Armenian friend who placed them in the crypt of the Deir el-Zour church – the very same building which now lies in ruins.
“During the Armenian genocide, the Turks entered the church and killed its priest, Father Petrus Terzibashian, in front of the congregation,” Msr Ayvazian said. “Then they threw his body into the Euphrates. This time when the Islamists came, our priest there fled for his life.” Msr Ayvazian suffered his own personal loss in the Syrian war when Islamist fighters broke into the Mediterranean town of Qassab on 22 April this year. “They burned all my books and documents, many of them very old, and left my library with nothing but 60cm of ash on the floor.” Msr Ayvazian showed me a photograph of the Qassab church altar, upon which one of the Islamists had written in Arabic: “Thanks be to God for al-Qaeda, the Nusra Front and Bilal al-Sham” (another Islamist group). The town was retaken by Syrian government troops on 22 June.
Msr Ayvazian recounted his own extraordinary story of how he tried to prevent foreign Islamist fighters from taking over or destroying an Armenian-built hospital – how he drove to meet the Islamist gunmen and agreed to recover the corpses of some of their comrades killed in battle in return for a promise not to damage the hospital. “As I approached the hospital, a Syrian jet flew over me and dropped a bomb 40 metres from the building. I know the officer who sent the aircraft. He said it was his way of trying to warn the rebels not to harm me. They came out of the hospital like rats – but they did not harm me.”
I spoke later to the local Syrian military air force dispatcher and he confirmed that he had indeed sent a MiG fighter-bomber to attack waste ground near the building. Msr Ayvazian subsequently went to the old battlefield with Syrian government permission and recovered several bodies, all in a state of advanced decay and one with a leg eaten off by dogs. But he bravely set off with trucks carrying the dead and handed the remains to the Islamists. “They kept their word and later withdrew all their foreign fighters from the province of Hassake. I later received a letter from one of their emirs, very polite, telling me – and here the priest produced a copy of the note – that: “We vow to keep your property and your cherished possessions, which we also hold dear to us.” Msr Ayvazian looked scornfully at the letter. “Look, here at the start,” he said, “they have even made a mistake in their first quotation from the Koran! And then look what happened at Deir el-Zour. It was all for nothing.”
Each year, thousands of Armenians have gathered at their church in Deir el-Zour on 25 April – the date they commemorate the start of the genocide, when Armenian lawyers, teachers and doctors were arrested and later executed by the Turks outside Istanbul – to remember their million and a half dead. The 100th anniversary of the mass slaughter would have been a major event in Deir ez-Zour’s history. And although Syrian soldiers are still holding out in part of the town today, and Syrian authorities have promised to rebuild Armenian churches when their lands are retaken from the Islamists, there is little hope that any Armenians will be able to visit the ruins of their church in five months’ time. As for the Turks, they will do their best to stifle interest in the Armenian holocaust by holding their own commemorations next year – to mark their victory over Allied troops at the 1915 battle for Gallipoli.
Jabhat al-Nusra blows up Armenian church in Deir el-Zour: A savage blow that echoes through Armenian history - Middle East - World - The Independent
________________________________________________________________________________
This shows that terrorists groups are funded and supported by AKP, what does Jubhat Alnusra benefit from burning historical document regarding the Armenian genocide? they were asked by AKP to bomb the church....
Turks Died Too
The column of Armen Vartanian ’96 [“The Armenian Genocide,” April 27] is not historically accurate with regard to the sufferings of Armenians during the First World War or the historical research surrounding the issue. We would like to begin by outlining what happened in Anatolia during the years of 1915-1924.
The Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire that at its height spanned from the Danube River in Europe, to North Africa, to as far as the Caucasus and Iraq. In accordance with the laws of the Koran, the rights of all minorities were respected. The Ottomans were the most lenient of all empires concerning its religious minorities. The Ottomans expected the payment of taxes, but otherwise left the religion and cultures of its conquered territories intact. This was, in fact, what made it so easy for minority groups to succeed when the Ottomans became weak. Furthermore, many Christians and Jews achieved high government posts, and during the Spanish persecution of the Jews, the Ottoman Empire became a safe haven for them. Armenians and Turks have lived together peacefully for over 600 years. To quote Voltaire, “The great Turk is governing in peace twenty nations of different religions. Turks have taught to Christians how to be moderate in peace and gentle in victory.”
In the years leading up to World War I, however, the Ottoman Empire grew increasingly weak, and provinces began to secede. When World War I began, the Ottomans sided with the Germans, and the German defeat left the Ottomans in shambles. Under the Treaty of Sevres, the Allies conspired to use the nationalist tendencies within the Ottoman Empire to destroy it. Under Sevres, the Turkish people would have no nation, and Anatolia would be colonized by Europe. Thus, the Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire, including the Armenians, were encourage to rebel, and were given ample support to do so. Vartanian’s assertion that Armenians were unarmed is a joke.
Armenians joined with the Russian forces, and grouped into guerrilla bands. They began attacking the Turkish Army in the rear, and even before the Russo-Armenian forces arrived, they succeeded in capturing Van, massacred its entire Muslim population, and razed the entire city. They then proceeded to “soften up” the area, and in the process killed thousands of Turks and Kurds. There was a massive flow of refugees into Central Anatolia, who survived under extremely harsh conditions.
At this point, the Ottoman Government faced severe problems. The Army was being attacked by Russo-Armenian forces in the North and Armenian guerrillas in the South. On the other hand, there were the many Armenian communities who appeared uninvolved in the fighting, but in fact were providing food, shelter and new recruits to the guerrillas. The Muslim populations were beginning to react in kind, and the region was rapidly falling into full-fledged inter-communal warfare.
After much hesitation, the Ottomans decided to relocate the Armenian communities to Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, which at that time were still Ottoman provinces. Ottoman archives chronicling this decision show that this decision was not punitive, and that Ottoman soldiers were ordered to escort the Armenians and protect them from any vigilantes. As it turned out, though, this decree had tragic consequences, not just due to the warfare in the region, but due to disease, harsh weather, exposure and hunger. However, a few facts should be noted.
First, most Armenian casualties occurred in regions where Ottoman control was the weakest. Secondly, a great many Turks and other Muslims also died from the same causes.
When the Ottoman Army returned to the north, the onset of the Russian Revolution forced the retreat of the Russo-Armenian forces to what is currently Armenia. During this retreat, many atrocities were committed against Turks and Kurds, including the burning of mosques full of women, children, and old men, gouging eyes, and burying people alive.
At the close of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was no more. The Ottoman Sultan fled Istanbul on a British ship, and Turkish people were left to fend for themselves against the invasion of the British, French, Australian, Italian, Russian, Greek, and Armenian forces. The Turks fight for independence raged on for several years under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Many more Turkish people died in this struggle, not just from war, but from hunger and disease. There is not one single Turk alive today who did not lose relatives during the Independence War. The Independence War ended with the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, in which the modern day borders of Turkey were recognized, and the Allies abandoned all claims on Anatolia.
Thus, there was neither any planned execution of Armenians, nor such an intention.
Demographic studies by Professor Justin McCarthy show that roughly 600,000 Armenians died during the struggles as compared to almost 3 million Muslim deaths. Vartanian claims that 1.5 million Armenians were killed -- however, according to census figures of the British as well as the Ottomans, there were never more than 1.3 million Armenians in Anatolia. Additionally, Vartanian refers to U.S. Ambassador Morgenthau. It should be noted though that Morgenthau was a racist, who believed that Turks were an inferior race and openly printed that Turks had “inferior blood.” One cannot expect accurate reporting from such a biased man, yet it is his reports on which much of the Armenian accounts are based on. Vartanian also refers to a remark by Adolf Hitler, as though somehow the psychotic ravings of a man known for exterminating the Jews can be relied on for accurate history.
He also asserts that “claims against the Armenians are purely anecdotal.” I highly doubt that the mass of evidence can be referred to as anecdotal: there are eyewitness accounts of Russian soldiers, demographic evidence, reports from Allied soldiers, photographic evidence, as well as testimonies from the Turkish refugees. Seventy American scholars -- including Prof. McCarthy of the University of Louisville, Prof. Bernard Lewis of Princeton, and Prof. Sandford Shaw of the University of California at Los Angeles -- testified in 1988 in front of the House International Committee that there was no genocide of Armenians. The Clinton Administration continues to back the Turkish people on this issue, because it knows the truth: there was no Armenian genocide.
Turks Died Too - The Tech
Ofcourse you will be biased about this since your are supporting Assads genocide on muslims in Syria with more than 100'000 dead till now, more Turks died in WWI than Armenians, nobody asked them to revolt and burn Turkish/Kurdish villages.