Hidden History: The 1915 Armenian Genocide

1915 Aghet: The Armenian Genocide

NDT (2010)

Film Review

Aghet is a documentary based on eyewitness accounts from German, Danish, French and Swedish diplomatic and military archives about the Armenian genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire between 1915-1923.

Turkey and US Refuse to Acknowledge Armenian Genocide

Although most of Europe acknowledges that Turkish authorities killed 1.5 million Armenians during this period, the current Turkish government denies the genocide ever occurred – in fact it’s currently illegal under Turkish law to mention the Armenian genocide in public.

The US government also refuses to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. Presumably this relates to Turkey’s threats to suspend diplomatic relations and close US bases there.

Most of the archival evidence examined in the film comes from Germany, Turkey’s World War I ally. As Germany provided Turkey’s weaponry and military training Turkey during World War I, they were in the best position to know that Armenians were being arbitrarily detained for extermination. Yet they did nothing to stop it. Most of the photos and film footage features in this documentary was smuggled out of Turkey by German soldiers.

At the start of World War I, the global Armenian population was approximately 5 million, divided between Persia (Iran), Russia and Turkey. Turkey’s two million Armenians had a history of discrimination in education housing and employment. As Christians in a Muslim nation, they were required to pay a special tax. In 1895, 250,000 were killed in a pogrom.

Ethnic Purity and Turkey for Turks

Turkey’s 1908 revolution brought a new government to power that heavily emphasized ethnic purity and “Turkey for Turks.” However the immediate justification for rounding up and expelling Armenian Turks was their alleged collaboration with Russian invaders.

While a small number of Armenians were either imprisoned and tortured or beaten to death, the majority were condemned to a bizarre forced march into the Syrian desert (at the time Syria was part of the Ottoman Empire). As the Turkish soldiers who accompanied them gave them nothing to eat or drink, most died of hunger, thirst or disease long before they reached Syria. Amazingly, with the help of Christian missionaries, around 500,000 out of 2 million survived.

Turkish Government Tries to Collect on Armenian Life Insurance Policies

Over time both Turkey’s and Germany’s attitude towards the Armenian genocide have been extremely schizophrenic. The German ambassador flatly refused to contact New York Life insurance company to assist the Turkish government to collect on the life insurance policies of Armenian victims. However the German government had no problem smuggling the three Turkish leaders responsible for the genocide into Europe. At the end of the war, Turkish courts tried and convicted them for crimes against humanity.

In 1919, an Armenian refugee Salomon Teilirian assassinated one of them in Berlin. His acquittal – based on evidence he presented documenting the Armenian genocide – is credited for bringing this atrocity to world attention.

World War I through Arab Eyes

Essential history I should have learned in high school but didn’t. I must have been absent that day. This documentary gives me a new understanding of how European colonial powers totally wrecked the Arab world – a process that continues to the current day.

World War I through Arab Eyes

Al Jazeera (2014)

Film Review

This is a three part documentary in which Tunisian journalist Malke Triki interviews European, Turkish and Arab journalists and surviving families about the role of Arab forces – on both sides – in World War I.

Part 1 concerns the forcible conscription of Muslim troops by both the Ottoman Empire and the Allies. Two-thirds of the soldiers who defeated England, Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli weren’t Turkish, but Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, Iraqi and Palestinian. As these countries were still part of the Ottoman Empire, they were subject to a mandatory draft.

I was unaware that England and France, who had occupied large swathes of North Africa since the end of the 19th century, also forcibly conscripted Muslim troops. England forced more than 1.2 million Egyptians to fight for the Allied cause, while France forcibly drafted 100,000 Algerians, 80,000 Tunisians and 45,000 Moroccans.

The French were widely accused of using these colonial forces as cannon fodder to protect French soldiers.

Many colonial troops rebelled against being compelled to kill fellow Muslims. This, as well as their abominable treatment by Europeans, was the spark that inflamed the North African independence movements that arose after World War I.

Part 2 tells the story of the decline of the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century and the Ottoman-German relationship which led to their Treaty of Alliance in August 1914.

In 1830 the Ottoman Empire stretched from Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) to the Red Sea and encompassed most of North Africa and the Balkans. It was under continual attack by European colonial powers. In the late 1800s, the British military seized Egypt and the French military Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. In 1912, Italy seized Libya. In the 1912-13 Balkan Wars, the Empire lost its European territories.

This episode also describes the Ottoman leadership’s brutal suppression of Arab nationalism in the Middle East, particularly in Syria/Lebanon. In 1915, one third of the Lebanese population died of starvation and another third were permanently displaced when their villages were decimated.

It also provides important background on the Armenian genocide carried out by the Ottoman leadership in 1915-17.

Part 3 covers the secret Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France and the way the two imperial powers carved up the former Ottoman Empire between them, regardless of promises made to nationalist movements across the Arab world.

Despite the Egyptian Revolution and the Iraq Uprising, Arab subservience to Ottoman rule was replaced by a series of mandates across the region in which Britain and France seized control of the areas they prized most – to satisfy their own ambitions, interests and ultimately to gain access to region’s valuable oil resources.

World War I gave birth to the Turkish nationalist movement, which led to the founding of the modern Turkish state; and to Zionism, aided greatly by the Balfour Declaration of 1917.