“The roads and the Euphrates are littered with corpses and those who survive are destined for certain death; it is a plan to exterminate the entire Armenian people”, he said in his pages The New York Times in August 1915. But the United States government only recognized the genocide in 2021.
In the previous year, the Azerbaijani autocrat Ilham Heydar oglu Aliyev had launched his army against Nagorno-Karabakh, regaining control of that Armenian territory through blood and fire. With the military support of the Turkish Islamist leader Recep Erdogan, the Azeris were able to break the resistance of the Republic of Artzakh, as the Armenians called the de facto independent state they had since the victory they won in the first Nagorno-Karabakh war.
The Western powers could question Vladimir Putin for not having done anything to stop the Turkish-Azeri offensive against the Armenian enclave. But they are not in a moral condition to reproach anything, because they had not lifted a finger either to stop or interrupt the massive attack that was carried out in 2020.
The world that could do something also reacted late when Nazi Germany industrialized murder to wipe out the Jews, despite the dark signs that predicted that genocide from previous centuries. Anathemas and stigmatization led to pogroms against Jews in all corners of the Ashkenazi world until, in the first half of the 20th century, Nazism industrialized murder in its concentration camps.
Those isolated but constant signals announced the mass crime that the Third Reich was going to commit.
The holocaust had an inspiring event: the Armenian genocide committed between 1915 and 1918. German observers had noted the annihilation operations against the Christian peoples of Anatolia, which involved massacres and deportations against ethnic Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians.
That process exterminated a million and a half Armenians. The monstrous crime against humanity committed by the Turkish state that commemorates anniversaries every April 24 so that the memory generates awareness in the whole world.
Like, later, the holocaust, the genocide of 1915 had begun with a trickle of slaughter at the end of the 19th century. History calls them “Hamidian massacres” because they were perpetrated on the orders of Sultan Abdul Hamid II.
In the last years of the 19th century, the protests of the Armenians of Mezifron and Kokat, who demanded reforms in the Ottoman Empire, were crushed with massacres. The massacres to suffocate Armenian reformism multiplied until they exceeded 300,000 victims.
This precedent must have set off alarms around the world when, on April 24, 1915, the Young Turk regime launched itself on the hunt for Armenian intellectuals, artists and activists in all corners of Anatolia. Ethnic contempt had spawned forced acculturation projects such as “panturanism”, which put Armenian culture on the spot.
The Armenians stood out for their rich culture and for their outstanding presence in the sciences and the intelligentsia, which increased the hatred of the Panturanists.
Nazism was a later reflection of what happened in Turkey. The Armenian genocide was perpetrated behind the screen of the First World War and the extermination of the Jews in Germany and Central Europe had the Second World War as a screen.
The Armenian genocide was committed by a Single Party regime, that of the Union and Progress Committee (the political organization of the so-called Young Turks) and that of the Jews was committed by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the organization of Hitler and the Nazis). ).
In Turkey, persecutions, arrests, lynchings and deportations were carried out by special units such as the Hamidiye and the Teshkilati Mahsusa; while in Germany it was the Shutzstaffel (SS).
Panturanism and Aryan supremacism had in common the exaltation of race and the contempt and demonization of minorities, who were considered impurities that had to be eliminated in order to achieve racial purification. And the Turkish ideologues of “purifying” extermination, like Talat Pasha, had their German version.
A crucial difference is that the Germany that rose from the rubble after World War II took on the Jewish Holocaust and the other crimes of Nazism, while the Turkey that rose from the rubble of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in World War I World never admitted the Armenian genocide. This was denied by Atatürk, the father of republican Turkey. The Ataturkist governments that succeeded each other throughout the 20th century denied it and the national-Islamist governments of Abdullah Gül and Erdogan remained in denial.
Only the scum left behind by Nazism in Germany and in the world commit the crime of denying the holocaust. On the other hand, the Turkish governments perpetuate the mass crime that Abdul Hamid II began in the 19th century and brought to its point of maximum extermination by the regime of the Union and Progress Committee in the second and third decades of the last century. And they used the strategic value of Turkey to impose denialism on the rest of the world.
For this reason, when in 2007 the North American Congress approved resolution 106 admitting that the mass massacres and deportations perpetrated against the Armenians constitute genocide, the then president, George W. Bush, strongly questioned the decision taken in the Capitol, arguing the importance of Turkey to deal with ultra-Islamist terrorism, with the influence of hostile regimes such as that of the Iranian ayatollahs, and with regimes allied with Moscow such as that of the Al Asad family in Syria.
At that time, the president of Turkey was the moderate Abdullah Gül and the government that had Erdogan as prime minister had not yet begun to damage NATO and the link with Europe and the United States.
Before the need for a good relationship with Turkey that generated ultra-Islamist terrorism, that need was generated by the Cold War. There was always a reason, which is not the same as a reason, to turn its back on the Armenian claim that the genocide be recognized.
Joe Biden did so shortly after taking office. The Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh had already been attacked without either Putin’s Russia or the Western powers doing anything to stop the aggression. But perhaps it serves to make it more difficult for Azerbaijan to cleanse those lands of Armenians with ethnic cleansing like the ones they emptied of Nakhichevan Armenians, opening the way for their handover to the Azeris along with Zanghezur and Karabakh.
