A two-day conference, starting 20 April, organised by the ministry of Foreign Affairs, bringing together academics from many countries and specialists in various fields, heralded the start of the state-organised commemoration. The topic was genocides, with the sub-heading: “genocide, ultimate crime, ultimate challenge”.
At the stand, one of the most applauded contributions was without a doubt that of Taner Akçam, the only Turkish academic who not only recognises the Armenian genocide but has also devoted all his research to this subject, by demonstrating what he calls “the close link between crime, denial and Turkish nationalism”.

If the memory of the genocide still remains vivid, handed down from one generation to the next through the testimonies of witnesses and direct survivors, in Armenia, as well as within the diaspora, it’s because from the 1960s onwards, Armenians collectively engaged in asking for the recognition of what historians have identified as the first genocide of the twentieth century.
Armenians have been living since the 5th century BC between Anatolia and the Caucasus, a territory that has alternatively experienced great empires and kingdoms “from sea to sea” (from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean), as well as periods of foreign domination.
The fall of Byzantium, the setting up of the Ottoman Empire and the settling of ever more numerous Kurds in these parts radically transformed the setting for history’s first Christian people.
A minority protected in theory by the “Millet” status, the Armenians were subjected to heavy taxes in the rural zones of Anatolia where in 1914 in some provinces they made up the majority of the population. Although mainly rural and poor, Armenians in large cities such as Istanbul and Smyrna had also developed a small and prosperous class, appreciated by the authorities that often coopted them thanks to their talent for trade.
When Armenians first started to demand autonomy at the end of the 19th century, the first response by the Ottoman authorities was the series of massacres, which between 1894 and 1896 claimed between 150,000 and 200,000 victims. When Turkey entered the war in 1914 alongside Germany, the Armenians in Turkey, who had been divided between the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire in the Caucasus, opted for loyalty to the former.
But Ottoman nationalism remained active: the Empire had not ceased to yield ground in the Balkans. It became “The sick man of Europe”.
The reforms demanded by Europe for decades, particularly for Christian minorities, were never implemented. The Armenians became scapegoats for battles lost, some cases of fraternisation between Armenians on the Turkish-Russian front were documented.

Deportation as a means

On 24 April 1915, over 600 intellectuals, doctors and priests were arrested and deported. The men conscripted into the Ottoman army were relieved of their weapons, employed in excavation works, and progressively eliminated.
When Talaat Pacha sent to the provinces orders to deport from the Empire all the Armenians, including those who were very far from the front, there were only women, children and the elderly left to expulse.
Dispatches from ambassadors such as that of the American Morgenthau and the consul Leslie Davies, the latter being stationed at the heart of the death routes to Kharput, tell of the massacres of columns of these hungry and ragged deportees.
In fact, deportation was being used to eliminate systematically all the Armenians. The fictitious destination of the deportees was the Syrian Desert. Those that made it died in their hundreds in makeshift camps or were massacred on the spot.
The governments of countries opposed to Germany sent a text of condemnation to the Sublime Door, referring for the first time in history to “crimes against humanity”. Armin T.Wegner, a young German, ceaselessly photographed this extermination, despite the alliance between Turkey and Germany.
The protests were of no avail. The deportations and massacres continued. At the end of the First World War, only several tens of thousands of Armenians were left in Turkey, mainly in Istanbul, whereas they had numbered slightly over two million in 1914.

After the fall of the Empire, those responsible for the acts were tried, but the sentences, especially in the case of Talaat Pacha and two other members of the triumvirat that organised the genocide, were not strictly carried out and were often pronounced in absentia.
The Armenian territories were completely emptied of their Christian population: Assyro-Chaldeans, Syriacs and Yezidi Kurds (non-Muslims) often suffered the same fate although they were not direclty targeted by the deportation.
The planification of the massacres by the Special Organisation, Turkish military policemen escorting convoys to the « slaughter sites », as well as Kurdish tribes and hunger and disease destroyed two thirds of the Armenian people.
Kemal’s return to power struck down the 1920 Sèvres Treaty, which had provided for Armenian homelands on their historical territory. France, which exercised a mandate over Cilicia at the beginning of the 1920’s, withdrew, precipitating a new exodus and fresh massacres of the Armenian populations who had attmpted to resettle there.
From that moment onwards, the Armenians formed a diaspora. Some 300,000 survivors, swept up by the Russians during their retreat, found refuge in the small Armenian republic of the Caucasus, which rapidly became Sovietised. Several hundreds of thousands of other Armenians were dispersed between Greece and the Middle East, in makeshift camps, and after the war many of them left the Levant under French mandate, bound for France but also the United States and South America.
After the rise to power of Kemal, the Armenians in Istanbul, spared from deportation after 24 April and all those who had found shelter in the city occupied by the allies, also left Turkey.
Today, the diaspora numbers four to five million people. It is spread in all corners of the planet and Armenia has a population comprised between 2.5 and 3 million inhabitants. The large community in the Lebanon petered out during the civil war. The largest communities are now located in Los Angeles, Moscow and France, where they number 350,000 to 400,000 people.

A policy of denial by the State

In 1965, to the shouts of “our land, our land”, a major demonstration, which was firmly suppressed, marked the first public awakening of the Armenian consciousness in Soviet Armenia. In the years to follow, Moscow, which did not have good relations with a Turkey firmly tied to the West, would make one concession – the construction of the memorial to the genocide – after many committed intellectuals, such as Sylva Kapoutikian, made impassioned pleas to the authorities in Moscow.
In the diaspora, local communities took on the role of demanding recognition. An unprecedented diplomatic incident between Paris and Ankara occurred at the start of the 1970s when a stele was placed in the Armenian church of the Prado in Marseille. The stele honoured the 1.5 million victims of the Armenian genocide, perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire.
From that point on, Turkey, blocking any documents mentioning the genocide at the United Nations, was to continuously back itself up using a series of revisionist ideas on the part of the state. Whereas some Armenians engaged in terrorist acts against Turkish diplomats, lasting until the early 1980s, another extremist fringe gave their lives in even more violent attacks. One of the most terrible incidents was the indiscriminate attack in Orly, which marked the end of the wave of terrorism, and also the end of the popular support which the terrorists had engendered in the diaspora.
Shifting to political lobbying after that, Armenians in the diaspora managed to extract a series of statements of recognition. The European Parliament was the first to do so in 1987. The point that really made people stop and think was when France recognised the genocide, first in a vote in the National Assembly in 1998 and then when it was ratified in the Senate in 2001.
Even though it has not been included in the list of criteria for Turkey to meet in order to be able to negotiate entry to the European Union, the negation of the Armenian genocide weighs heavily on the government in Ankara.

The commemorations – between rebellion and reverence

Across the diaspora, numerous demonstrations were planned for 24 April. In Tehran, Paris and Los Angeles, processions wound their way towards Turkish consulates or embassies. In Yerevan, the mood is more one of reverence. Remembrance concerts were planned all over Yerevan and across the different regions.
On the actual day of the 24th, all Armenia turned out to march through the streets. A huge and never-ending crowd swarmed around the eternal flame of the memorial. This year, the diaspora came in their crowds to attend the commemorations and a French delegation, led by François Bayrou and François Rochebloine, the MP for the Loire, also took part in the mourning. François Bayrou is one of the most vociferous opponents to allowing Turkey entry to the EU.
It’s quite some time now since this silent genocide has been dragged out of a suppressed past. Now, the Armenians just need to persuade Ankara to recognise it. As Vartan Oskanian, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, reaffirmed at the close of the conference held last week, Armenia is not placing any preconditions on establishing diplomatic ties and good neighbourly relations with Turkey, not even recognition of the genocide. But, he highlighted, Turkey must one day acknowledge this, come to terms with the past, open up the border they share, which has been closed since 1993, and stop placing blockades on Armenia. These blockades are a show of Turkish support for Azerbaijan, from which Armenia regained the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh at the end of the bloody fighting period of1988-1994.
For the Armenians, the Turkish threat is still a reality, as they fear pan-Turkish projects that they see in the Turko-Azeri alliance. The recognition of the genocide remains a means in which everyone can suppress it.
It now remains to reverse the negative images that occupy both Turkish and Armenian memories, to pick up the threads of their shared past, without lies this time, and to hope for a reconciliation, finally. As the lies of the State have gone on for 90 years already, this process will surely take a long time.