Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day 24 April

As we approach ANZAC Day, we should therefore take a moment to think of tomorrow, April 24 being, Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. It is officially a day of remembrance in NSW and SA but should be nationally as it is in France and many other countries.

It is held annually to commemorate the victims of the Armenian Genocide of 1915-23.During that time the Caliphate massacred and starved over 1.5 million Armenians and later butchered tens of thousands of Greeks [ The Greek/Pontic Genocide the systematic killing of the Christian Ottoman Greek population carried out in Anatolia during World War I and its aftermath (1914–1922)].

Australia's history and that of Turkey are interwoven in blood and sacrifice.

Our ANZACs were in Turkey/the Caliphate at around that time of World War One and its aftermath and was used by Hitler as an example of how to brutalize people in WW II. Over the period 1915-1923 millions of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrian (Syrian) Christians were forcibly removed from their homes and faced confiscation of their property, forced marches, assault, rape, torture and murder from the local populations and militias all because they were a despised minority.

At the time the mass killings and deportations, was a crime without a name because it was so shocking to have a whole group of civilians systematically brutalized and murdered en masse just because of their religion (Christian). Over a million Armenians were the victims of a crime against humanity.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/24-april-armenian-genocide-remembrance-day-peter-janssen/

The term "Genocide" came from the Caliphate's mass murder of Greeks and Armenians. In August 1946 the New York Times reported:

"Genocide is no new phenomenon, nor has it been utterly ignored in the past. ... The massacres of Greeks and Armenians by the Turks prompted diplomatic action without punishment. If Professor Lemkin has his way genocide will be established as an international crime."

The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948 and came into force in January 1951. It defines genocide in legal terms. Before creation of the word "genocide", the destruction of the Ottoman Greeks was known by Greeks as "the Massacre".

Although Turkey came a long way to civilization under its great leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who abolished the Caliphate and built modern Turkey, the Turks to this day deny it ever happened and indeed; its a crime in Turkey to mention it.

In previous years (20175) The Armenian Genocide Centenary Committee of Australia (AGCC) invited leading international jurist and a former UN War Crimes judge, Geoffrey Robertson QC, who delivered the keynote address.

I commend to all (but especially my legal colleagues) a book by : Robertson " An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Now Remembers the Armenians?" published Random House Australia and available online (Amazon).

In the book Robertson presents a compelling argument based on fact, evidence and his knowledge and expertise of international law, proving beyond reasonable doubt that the horrific events that occurred from 1915 to 1923 do indeed constitute genocide.

Last year the guest speaker at the 104th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in Sydney was the NSW Premier GLADYS BEREJIKLIAN. Gladys is the grandchild of Armenian Genocide survivors and became the first female to be popularly elected as the Premier of NSW. She is an outstanding leader.

Gladys Berejiklian shares her personal story of family tragedy and great ambition

"My family were victims of the Armenian genocide of 1915," Ms Berejiklian will say. "All four of my grandparents were orphaned and witnessed untold atrocities.

"More than 40 of my relatives were among the 1.5 million Armenians killed.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-03/the-premier-opens-up-and-tells-her-personal-story/9720704

Other speakers included Vice President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Dr. Melanie O’Brien who is the second Vice-President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), Dr. O'Brien co-convened the 2017 IAGS conference at University of Queensland, serving on the Editorial Board of Genocide Studies and Prevention 2013-2017. Dr. O’Brien is a Senior Lecturer of International Law at the University of Western Australia, teaching International Humanitarian Law, Public International Law, and Research units. Dr. O’Brien’s keynote address at the National Armenian Genocide Commemoration Evening is titled “Social Death: The Armenian Genocide and Cultural Destruction,” where she will be speaking on photographs she has taken of specific sites of Armenian heritage. She chose sites that were destroyed in order to prove that targeting religion and culture is as much a tactic of genocide as physical destruction. In that sense too we in Australia can learn of how important cultural identity is to minorities within our own country like the aboriginal people whose cultural identity must be preserved and celebrated.

Tomorrow night Friday 24 April 2020 at 7:30 PM there will be a Live Stream Event premiered live on Facebook to ensure Armenian-Australians can remain compliant to coronavirus (COVID-19) restrictions while still honouring the 105th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. The livestream event will feature a film about the ANZAC releif efforts to the Christian Armenians, Greeks and Syrians being brutalized and systematically murdered by the Ottoman Caliphate. The film is called FROM RUINS TO RELIEF documenting ANZAC eyewitness testimonies and Australia's first major international relief effort during the Armenian Genocide.

https://www.facebook.com/events/521275568777208/

See video preview: https://www.facebook.com/ancaustralia/videos/517091758982575/?t=14

https://massispost.com/2020/03/australian-commemoration-of-the-armenian-genocide-to-be-a-live-stream-event-on-april-24/

We must pause and remember this and other horrors like The Holocaust because mad dictators wanting to be hegemon (take over the world megalomaniacs) like Adolf Hitler used the Ottoman cruelty to these civilians as an example of what he wanted to do with the Polish, Russian and Jewish people of Europe he was conquering. Hitler in 1939 on the eve of his invasion of Poland that caused WW II in a speech to the Wehrmacht commanders at Obersalzberg said :

 Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter – with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command – and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?

It was clear that even before the war started, he had in mind a plan to exterminate the Poles, Jews (The Final Solution) and Slavs of Europe as part of his wars of conquest and building an empire he called the Third Reich and used as his inspiration what the The Mongols and later the Caliphate did to their minorities to ethnically cleanse them from the lands they conquered. To stop madmen we must remember what they did and learn from history or we will be forced to repeat these horrors.

Later this week on Saturday 25 April, we Aussies commemorate ANZAC Day to remember the sacrifices our soldiers made at Gallipoli in Turkey.

Take a moment tomorrow Friday 24 April to remember and reflect on mans' inhumanity to man when civilians, not soldiers, were killed in such horrific circumstances on the same soil just miles away from where our ANZAC's fell.

See BBC Documentary: Armenian Genocide - 'The Betrayed'

In 1916 the British Parliament published The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire a “Blue Book” that identified the events of 1915–16 as a systematic effort to exterminate the Armenian people. The Blue Book has been one of the most solid and influential sources on the Armenian Genocide. A critical, uncensored edition, edited and with an introduction by Ara Sarafian, has now been published by the Gomidas Institute. Viscount James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee were commissioned to prepare the Blue Book, which is formally known as The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916. Toynbee carefully compiled and verified dozens of eyewitness accounts from different parts of the Ottoman Empire. These accounts provided the basis for Bryce’s brilliant thesis on the Genocide, published while the crime was still in progress.

The book includes eyewitness accounts from United States consular and missionary sources, as well as the testimony of German, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Greek, Kurdish, and Armenian witnesses.

See my article from 2019 that has more details:

See Generally many videos and speeches in the archives of the Armenian Media Facebook Page.