Mr. Speaker, I commend the member for having moved the motion.
The 20th century was the bloodiest in human history, characterized by the mass slaughter of innocents based solely on their race, religion or ethnicity on an unprecedented scale. What Pope John Paul II has called the century of tears saw the deaths of millions of Ukrainians at the hands of Stalin, the Shoah in which six million European Jews were exterminated by Hitler, the killing fields of Cambodia, and more recent tragedies in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
The first modern genocide was the attempted mass extermination of Armenians in the former Ottoman empire, which began in April 1915. The Armenian genocide was very much a modern 20th century genocide made possible by the ideology of nationalism and the technology of mass warfare. The Ottoman empire had seen coexistence between different ethnic and religious minorities for many centuries but it was also an absolutist empire which became in the 19th century a cauldron of nationalist discontents.
In 1908 the young Turks movement seized power and transformed the Ottoman empire into a constitutional state. At first this change was welcomed by the empire's ethnic minorities, but their attempts to achieve autonomy led to nationalists on the Committee on Unity and Progress seizing power in 1912.
Turkish nationalists saw the presence of Armenians as a challenge to their desire to build an ethnically pure Turkish state on the Anatolian peninsula and to pursue a pan-Turkish empire in Central Asia. The loss of Ottoman territories in the Balkans to the Russians made the young Turks even more nationalist in their orientation.
Furthermore the young Turks led the Ottoman empire into an alliance with Germany against Russia in the first world war. The presence of over two million Christian Armenians between Muslim Turkey and Orthodox Christian Russia seemed like a potential internal threat.
With the outbreak of war, the young Turks decided to take action to solve what they called the Armenian question once and for all by a systematic policy of deportations and ultimately, mass slaughter; in a word, by genocide.
Young Armenian men like those in the rest of the empire were conscripted en masse into the Turkish army. Through the fall and winter of 1914 Armenians fought bravely on the front, even while at home anti-Armenian pogroms were being carried out by the young Turks' secret service and irregular units called chetes .
Starting in February 1915 Armenian troops were segregated into unarmed labour battalions to end the possibility of armed resistance. That same month Talaat Pasha, the interior minister, told the German ambassador that Turkey intended to use the cover of war to settle the Armenian question once and for all.
In March 1915 mass deportation of Armenians from the town of Zeitun to the deserts of central Turkey and Syria began. Local Armenians supported the Russian army taking a particular town, which then gave the government the pretext to begin mass deportations and slaughter on an unprecedented scale in history.
On April 24 and April 25 in Constantinople and elsewhere, some 650 Armenian religious leaders, intellectuals, politicians and businesspeople, in other words the entire leadership of the Armenian community, were arrested, were deported or were murdered in the following months. Meanwhile ordinary Armenians in Constantinople were butchered in the streets and in their homes. Orders went out by telegraph to begin mass deportations of Armenians on a precise and scheduled timetable co-ordinated by the secret service.
The massacres followed a common pattern. The Armenians in a community were rounded up. It was announced that they would be deported. By the hundreds and thousands they were then marched, often barefoot and without food, into the deserts. Many died on the long marches. Finally they were herded into concentration camps, where they starved or died of thirst in the burning sun. On the Black Sea Armenians were often loaded onto barges and drowned. Over the next year and in further massacres after the war in 1922, some 1.5 million Armenians were killed.
There is no question that this was genocide, the first true genocide of the 20th century. Indeed the United Nations War Crimes Commission in 1948 said that the Armenian genocide was “precisely one of the types of acts which the modern term crimes against humanity is intended to cover as a precedent for the Nuremberg tribunals”.
The International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide passed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 stated that acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such constitute genocide. The legal scholar who coined the term genocide, Rafael Lemkin, said that it applied to what the Turks did to the Armenians and the Germans did to the Jews.
It is hard to grasp the systematic slaughter of one million people, so let me focus on one tragedy: the slaughter of Armenian Catholics in the town of Mardin in June 1915. Their bishop, Ignatius Maloyan, was beatified by Pope John Paul II last October at a ceremony that I was privileged to attend in Rome.
On April 30, 1915 Turkish soldiers surrounded the Armenian catholic church in Mardin, falsely accusing the church of hiding arms. On June 3 Turkish soldiers dragged Bishop Maloyan in chains to court with 27 of his colleagues. A kangaroo court was held on charges of arms smuggling. During the trial the chief of police asked the bishop to convert to Islam. He said he would never betray his faith. The chief hit him on the head with the rear of his pistol and ordered him put in jail. The bishop was beaten savagely by soldiers crying out “Lord have mercy on me” with each blow. After they had finished beating him, the soldiers extracted his toenails.
On June 10 the soldiers gathered the bishop along with 446 other Armenian prisoners and marched them into the desert in a convoy. The bishop encouraged his parishioners to remain firm in their faith. They prayed together and the bishop celebrated the Eucharist with a single piece of bread.
After a two hour walk, hungry, naked and chained, the soldiers attacked the prisoners and killed them before the bishop's eyes. Finally they came for him. The police chief asked Maloyan again to convert to Islam. The bishop answered “I have told you I shall live and die for the sake of my faith and religion. I take pride in the Cross of my God and Lord”. The chief drew his pistol and shot Maloyan.
I relate this story for two reasons, to put a human face on the tragedy and to remind the House that the Armenian people are one of the oldest Christian peoples in the world having converted to Christianity in 300 A.D. and mainly through the Orthodox tradition have maintained it against tremendous challenges, the greatest of which was the genocide of 1915.
Consider these words of some of the contemporary witnesses to these events. The U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman empire, Henry Morgenthau, said:
When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversation with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact.... I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.
More devastating perhaps is the statement from Count Wolff-Metternich, German ambassador to the Ottoman empire in a July 1916 cable to his chancellor:
In its attempt to carry out its purpose to resolve the Armenian question by the destruction of the Armenian race, the Turkish government has refused to be deterred neither by our representations, nor by those of the American embassy, nor by the delegate of the Pope, nor by the threats of the allied powers, nor in deference to the public opinion of the west representing one-half of the world.
These massacres were not happening secretly: the world knew about these terrible events at the time.
Some will question how useful it is to dig up such long buried memories and suggest that supporting this motion would only complicate our relationship with the Turks, our allies within NATO.
In fact, we must honour modern Turkey. It has proven to be a loyal friend of Canada, the United States and Western Europe. It is a democracy that is quickly moving toward an aggressive market economy. It has been able to resist threats from both Muslim fundamentalism and military dictatorship.
But it is precisely because Turkey is a democracy and an ally that wants to have an even closer relationship with Canada and the rest of the western world that we must respectfully ask it to take responsibility for this sad chapter of its history.
Germany spent hundreds of millions of dollars compensating individuals for the Holocaust and two generations educating its children about the horrible genocide against European Jews. It is now Turkey's turn to own up to its past.
Furthermore, the world has a responsibility to remember the horrific events of the Armenian genocide as we remember the six million Jews killed by the national socialists, the 100 million killed by the communist regimes of Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot and others. The 20th century brought a terrible new reality to human history, the reality of genocide. What we saw in the killing fields of Cambodia, the jungles of Rwanda and the mountains of Kosovo had its origins in the Armenian towns and villages of eastern Turkey in 1915. Hitler himself remarked to his SS officers in Poland to continue their massacres of Jews because, after all “who today speaks of the Armenians?”
Let me close by saying that to better understand the past century and to guarantee that its wars and genocide are not repeated, historians need to reintroduce the Armenian genocide into historical consciousness and demonstrate the historical similarities between the genocide and the Holocaust. Any less would deny future generations the knowledge they need to make sure that the horrors of the past are not repeated.
Let us hope the government will accept this motion and that Canada can join many other civilized countries in commemorating this terrible beginning to the tragedies of the 20th century.