They stood together outside the old Istanbul prison where the first 250 Armenians \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009c intellectuals, lawyers, teachers, journalists \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009c were imprisoned by the Ottoman Turks exactly 100 years ago, and they travelled across the Bosphorus to sit next to each other outside the gaunt pseudo-Gothic hulk of what was once the Anatolia Station.<\/p>\n
From here, those 250 men were sent to their fate. Yesterday, the Turks and the Armenians held a sign in their hands and repeated one word in Turkish: \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093Soykirim\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d.\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0 It means \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093genocide\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d.<\/p>\n
How they humbled the great and the good of our Western world, as they commemorated together the planned slaughter of one and a half million Armenian men, women and children.<\/p>\n
For despite his first pre-election pledge to the contrary, Barack Obama once more refused to use the word \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093genocide\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d on Thursday. The Brits ducked the word again. The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, stubbornly maintaining his country\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7s ossified policy of denial \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009c once more both Armenians and Turks had to listen to the usual \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093fog of war\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d explanation for the 20th century\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7s first holocaust \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009c was sitting 180 miles away, next to Prince Charles, to honour the dead of the 1915 battle of Gallipoli.<\/p>\n
The professor\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7s scorn came from deep historical soil. \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093When my Armenian journalist friend Hrant Dink was assassinated by a Turkish nationalist outside his newspaper office in February 2007, I was shocked and deeply depressed,\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d he said.<\/p>\n \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093I promised myself that because of Hrant\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7s death, I would write about 1915. With a colleague of mine, we went through documents \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009c and we wrote about the Turkish bureaucrats who resisted the Armenian deportations. I read more and more and I started to use the word \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056d\u009cgenocide\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7. It was the truth.\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d<\/p>\n \u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0<\/span> These were the good Turks who tried to maintain their country\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7s honour in its hour of shame. The few hundred equally honourable Turks and Armenians who crossed the Bosphorus to the German-built railway station on Friday then sat down on the sunny steps and held up photographs of the 250 Armenians who were put aboard the cattle wagons inside.<\/p>\n There was Ardashes Harutunian, Dr Garabed Pasayian Han, Karekin Cakalian, Atom Yercanjian and Siamonto, the pen name of Atom Yarjanian, a landmark figure of Armenia\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7s golden age of poetry.<\/p>\n Siamonto\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7s great nephew had arrived from Paris for his first visit \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009c ever \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009c to the land in which his people were destroyed. \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093You must understand the significance of Gallipoli in all this,\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d Manouk Atomyan explained. \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093At first, the Turks didn\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7t kill them (the Armenians) \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009c because they thought the Allies would win at Gallipoli and rescue them all. But by July, it was obvious the Allies were losing. So the Turks set about the killing.\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d<\/p>\n Narin Kurumlu bears a Turkish name and is indeed a Turk, but she is also Armenian, one of the few people of her race whose family clung onto their land \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009c Turkish land \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009c amid their people\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7s persecution.<\/p>\n \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093I am a Turk but I call this a genocide,\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d she said.\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0 \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093It is the truth. I am a tour guide and I was trained by the Turkish tourist people. Yes, I go to Van and the old Armenian areas. I don\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7t go into details and when I\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7m asked about the genocide, I say the figures are disputed. I say that some think it was a million and a half Armenians killed, but that it was at least a million.\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d I ask her to write down her original Armenian family name. \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093I\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7d rather not,\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d she says. \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093There are good reasons for this\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u00bb they listen to my phone and they read my e-mails.\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d<\/p>\n These were perhaps the most deeply moving \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009c and distressing \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009c words uttered among the small crowd of truth-tellers outside the Anatolia station yesterday. All were escorted \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009c at a distance, of course \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009c by a small posse of Turkish state police, some in uniform. They were not there to threaten the brave Turks or the brave Armenians. They were present to ensure that no-one else threatened them, the sort of people, for instance, who murdered Hrant Dink eight years ago. For that would take the headlines away from another ceremony, wouldn\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7t it? And remind the world that the 130,000 Allied and Turkish dead of Gallipoli were outnumbered by one and a half million civilian dead whose genocide we must still obediently deny.<\/p>\n Saturday 25 April 2015<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As brave Turks dared to challenge the consensus to mark the anniversary of the Armenian genocide, the President chose to look the other way They were brave Turks and they were brave Armenians, the descendants […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16610,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kadence_starter_templates_imported_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16609"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"It](\"http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/incoming\/article10203105.ece\/alternates\/w460\/armenia-turkey-afp-getty.jpg\" "\\"It")
It is a century since the first 250 Armenians were killed (AFP\/Getty)<\/span> <\/span>
\nBut Professor Ayhan Aktar, a proud Turk whose family emigrated from the Balkans in 1912, understood the cynical history of the Gallipoli ceremony. For on 24 April, as the first Armenians were being rounded up, absolutely nothing happened at Gallipoli. The battle began the next day, when the Irish and the Lancashire soldiers landed on the peninsula. The Erdogan government in Ankara was using Gallipoli\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0 as a smoke screen. \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093We all know why Erdogan chose 24 April, and of course it was a genocide,\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d Ayhan Aktar said, his voice booming with indignation. \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093Ankara will NEVER use the word \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056d\u009cgenocide\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7.\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0 Sixty per cent of Turks will one day use the word \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009c and still Ankara will say \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056d\u009cno\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7. Yes, I have made enemies, but also some very interesting friends. It was all worth it.\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d<\/p>\n
\nAnd so two sets of names \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009c all dead \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009c dominated those few hundred courageous souls who, in what was once the capital of the Ottoman Empire, turned their back on the hypocrisy of those diplomats and prime ministers 200 miles away in Gallipoli. There was Faik Ali, Turkish governor of Kutahya in 1915 and his contemporary Mehmet Celal in Konya and there was Huseyin Nesimi, the deputy Turkish governor in Lice. \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093All fed the persecuted Armenians, all refused to kill them,\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d the professor said. \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093Faik Ali and Huseyin Nesimi were both dismissed. Nesimi was murdered on the orders of his senior governor, Dr Reshid.\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/incoming\/article10203114.ece\/alternates\/w460\/armenia-genocide.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
<\/span>
\nThe 250 men, the cream of Armenian Istanbul society, were put on a train which stopped before Ankara. The first carriages were sent on to Ankara, where most of the passengers were executed.\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0 Of the 250, 175 were killed, shot in the head beside prepared graves.<\/p>\n