ARMENIAN - Erevangala500

The Armenian myth of vietimhood stands or falls on two legs: the date
April 24, 1915, and Franz Werfel's literary masterpiece, "The Forty Days
of Musa Dagh".
It is a striking fact that neither in Turkish literature on the
subject - nor, naturally enough, in Armenian literature - is
there a thorough account o f what happened on "April 23,
1915". From the point o f view o f Yerevan or Boston this
is quite logical, as neither the Republic o f Hayastan nor
the diaspora Armenians have any interest in the real facts
being made known - on the contrary, on both sides o f the
Atlantic, the practice is to maintain a specious picture o f
"genocide" by celebrating an anniversary, and thus giving
an apparence o f historical relevance to the events in question.
After all, the priority is to perpetuate a memorable
and easily grasped myth from which not only the
Armenians o f the motherland but also Armenian minorities
all over the world can nourish their aggressive raison
d'etre.
Excerpt from the Hamburger Abendblatt, 22 April 2005
The Turks wanted to exterm inate them
Genocide: Even 90 years after the planned extermination
of the Armenians, fear and suppression o f the facts dominate
Ankara's dealings on the matter.
(•••)
by Thomas Frankenfeld and Stefan Fuhr
Hamburg/Frankfurt am Main - "Who ever gives a thought
to the extermination o f the Armenians today?" The small
moustachioed man who tossed out this sarcastic question
on August 22, 1939 for the benefit o f an assembly ol
high-ranking Wehrmacht officers and commanders o f SS
special units was sure that he would be proved right. He
was convinced that just as the extermination o f the
Armenians had long been forgotten, in decades to come
nobody would give a thought to the genocide perpetrated
on the Jews by the Nazis.
April 24, 1915, saw the begining o f the genocide: the execution
o f the entire Armenian leadership cadre - 2,350
men - in Constantinople. In the months that followed,
almost all the Armenians in Ottoman Turkey were
forcibly taken to concentration camps by Turkish gendarmes
and soldiers in units specially created for the pur-
30se.
Artificial limb No. 1: April 23, 1915
But what exactly did happen on April 23 and 24, 1915?
And why? There is no questioning the fact that in those
dramatic hours, 235 leading personalities from the
Armenian community in Istanbul were arrested and taken
to the centre o f the land, mostly to Cankiri and Ayvas,
north o f Ankara, where they then presented no immediate
danger.
Many commentators in our own day, including a pair o f
journalists writing in the Hamburger Abendblatt, have no
scruples about multiplying the number arrested by 10 and
writing 2,350 - what's in a 0? - instead o f 235, or simply
fantasizing about "thousands", as another writer did in the
Neue Ziircher Nachrichten. Sheer manipulation.
It is clear that in the prevailing circumstances the
Ottoman authorities could not have organized a wave o f
arrests over a wide area in the capital Constantinople, let
alone actually have carried it out. The planning took at
least ten days and the fact that most able-bodied men
were on active service on one o f the many fronts o f war
meant that the Ottoman authorities had to act with the
greatest caution if the Armenians they were to arrest were
only to be the militant leaders who in previous years had
repeatedly been the perpetrators o f evil deeds.
Map o f Constantinople.
The Armenian quarters are marked around KUM KAPI.
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