April 16--"Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it."
-- Pope Francis, speaking to Armenians at the Vatican
Amid World War I's carnage but far from Europe's trenches, Turkish leaders of the crumbling Ottoman Empire turned their fear and fury on a minority population of Armenians, targeting them for expulsion and extermination.
Historians are clear on the facts, even if the perpetrators tried to limit the paper trail: 100 years ago this month, in the midst of the Great War, the Ottoman Turk government began a systematic effort to rid the nation of Armenians.
By various estimates, 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians perished.
This was the Armenian genocide, a crime against humanity never forgotten but relegated to a place too deep in the shadows of history. Its overlooked status is partly due to context: The ghastly war a century ago killed 20 million soldiers and civilians and set up Europe for a second confrontation.
To this day, Turkey insists there was no genocide, there was a war with many victims, including, the Turkish government notes, at least 4.5 million Muslims who were killed during the decades-long collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
Indeed, it was an era of war and political chaos.
And what happened to the Armenians can properly be called genocide.
Pope Francis, during a Mass on Sunday at the Vatican commemorating Armenian suffering, was more direct. He wasn't setting precedent for the Vatican, though. He quoted a 2001 statement from Pope John Paul II and the Armenian Apostolic Church's leader, Catholicos Karekin II, which said the Armenian tragedy is "generally referred to as the first genocide of the 20th century."
"It seems that humanity is incapable of putting a halt to the shedding of innocent blood," Pope Francis said, speaking to an audience that included Armenia's president.
The Turkish government responded by recalling its ambassador to the Vatican. Its foreign minister used Twitter to deny the "baseless allegations."
It's time for Turkey to take a page from modern Germany, where the government and citizens have confronted the truth about the Holocaust and expressed profound remorse. As Germany has proved, accepting the stain of the past allows for a new beginning.
The historical record concerning the Armenians and Turks says this:
In the late 19th century, Armenians in Turkey were persecuted Christians in Muslim territory. When the Great War came and Ottoman Turk leaders sided with Germany against Russia and the West, the Armenians were viewed as potentially disloyal subjects because some were rooting for the West. To the nationalist Ottomans, Armenians became the enemy within.
The extermination began in April 1915 and continued past the end of the Great War. Thousands of Armenian men with military ties were rounded up and shot. As many as 2 million men, women and children were driven from their homes and forcibly marched toward the deserts of what is now Iraq and Syria. Many died of starvation or disease. Many were massacred by Turkish troops, police, armed gangs and others.
Says Yale University's Genocide Studies Program: "There is more than enough evidence to suggest that the mass murder of the Armenians was a case of genocide, as that crime was subsequently defined in the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948. Surviving perpetrators of the Armenian genocide could certainly have been held to account in an international criminal court."
Historian Eugene Rogan, in "The Fall of the Ottomans," wrote that Turkish leaders pursued a two-track strategy to destroy the Armenians: open deportation and secret annihilation. Rogan references one death march survivor, an Armenian priest named Grigoris Balakian, who managed to strike up a relationship with a Turkish military officer. The officer claimed responsibility for killing 42,000 Armenians:
"Where have all these human bones along this road come from?" Balakian asked the officer.
"These are the bones of Armenians who were killed in August and September. The order had come from Constantinople. Even though the minister of the interior had huge ditches dug for the corpses, the winter floods washed the dirt away, and now the bones are everywhere, as you see."
Another witness was Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador, who cabled Washington about the "race" murders (the word genocide had not yet been coined). Later, in a memoir, Morgenthau wrote about the "murder of a nation," saying the act of driving the Armenians into the desert was a death sentence. The Turks "knew that the great majority would never reach their destinations and that those who did would either die of thirst and starvation, or be murdered."
The 100th anniversary is a powerful moment, and it marks a period of history long ago enough that no one would confuse the fading Ottoman Empire with today's Turkey. It's time for the Turkish government to accept and acknowledge what happened. It would stand as a noble acceptance of one of the darkest moments in world history.
