The Truth about Arab Humanitarianism
Four minute commemorative speech by Sevag Arzoumanian delivered at:
The Evelyn Abdallah Menconi Memorial Cultural Series on
April 24, 2008 at Rabb Lecture Hall, Boston Public Library
My grandfather, Nazareth Arzoumanian, was 11 years old in the spring of 1915 when http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2827 soldiers knocked at the door. He hid in the attic and watched as his father was taken away. That was the last time he saw him.
The order soon came to deport all the Armenians in the village, and send them walking on a http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2469 neighbor agreed to hide my grandfather’s mother and younger brother, but there was no room for him and my grandfather was placed in an orphanage. He soon heard that Turkish soldiers were about to raid the orphanage, and he escaped, walking alone for days until he reached the port city of Adana. There, together with other fleeing refugees, he was taken to Lebanon on a French boat.
My grandfather was raised in an orphanage north of Beirut, and somehow managed to earn a living alone, until one day, years later, he saw his mother on the street – she was working on a construction site, cutting stones. She had miraculously survived the deportations.His mother heard that children from their village—now orphans—were being raised in an orphanage in the South of Lebanon. There she found a neighbor’s daughter, Lousaper, the sole survivor of her extended family and she brought her home.
This is how my grandfather Nazareth met my grandmother Lousaper. And this is how many Armenian families survived, while countless others did not.
***
Armenians around the world commemorate April 24 as the date of the unfolding of the Armenian Genocide.
On the night of April 24, 1915, the Young Turk Government arrested over 200 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople, the center of Armenian cultural and political life at the time. Most of these poets, teachers, artists, political activists, church and civic leaders, members of the Ottoman Parliament were executed soon after. Over the following weeks, this became the pattern in every city, town and village as Armenian leaders were arrested and murdered.
Soon after these arrests, orders were issued to deport the Armenian population to the Syrian Desert.
The adult and teenage males were separated from the deportation caravans and killed at the outset. The remaining deportees (now comprised mostly of women, children and the elderly) were driven for weeks over mountains and desert, deprived of food and water, and subjected to attack, rape and murder. They fell by the hundreds of thousands along the way to their eventual destination: the open air concentration camp of Deir el-Zor in the Syrian Desert.
By 1923, two-thirds of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire, or 1.5 million people, had been exterminated.
***
And if it wasn’t for the Arab and Muslim population in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, many Armenians would not have survived. In 1917 the Sharif of Mecca issued a decree or fatwa for the protection of Armenians. The fatwa read:
“What is requested of you is to protect and to take good care of everyone from the Jacobite Armenian community living in your territories and frontiers and among your tribes. To help them in all of their affairs and defend them as you would defend yourselves, your properties and children. And provide everything they might need whether they are settled or moving from place to place — because they are the Protected People of the Muslims — about whom the Prophet Muhammad said: “Whosoever takes from them even a rope, I will be his adversary on the day of Judgment.” This is among the most important things we require of you and expect you to accomplish.”
Al-Husayn Ibn ‘Ali, King of the Arab Lands and Sharif of Mecca
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Apart from the immense loss of life, the enduring legacy of the Armenian Genocide is the dispossession of a people and the continuing http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3222 of the crime by its perpetrator.
Within a matter of 18 months, a civilization and way of life came to an end. Armenians were uprooted from their ancestral homeland, and those who survived and their descendents were prevented from returning home.
And for the past 93 years, Armenians have been unable to tell their story and commemorate their loss without having to combat the aggressive and institutionalized denial of the Turkish government.
This is why many Armenians identify so closely with the plight of the Palestinian people, and the story of the Nakba—it’s because of this continued dispossession and the denial and minimization of their experience by the perpetrator.
***
I would like to conclude by thanking the organizers of this event for conceiving this joint commemoration, bringing together two dispossessed peoples who continue to struggle against the legacy of forced expulsion and persistent attempts to erase that history.
Thank You.
From a reader: The main ally of Turkey in the Middle East continues to be Israel, whose partisans also lead the fight to oppose recognition of the Armenian holocaust as a genocide. Luckily, the Armenian community is well organized, does not suffer from misplaced “guilt,” and is wealthy. A http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2484 has managed to beat back the ADL and similar Zionist groups who have long enjoyed a monopoly on claims to historical suffering.