I. Introduction

Kéram Kévonian

The Armenian genocide was an immense crime, committed against a people, a nation and a country fraught with history; a crime targeted at a fraction of our shared humanity, and from which we all still suffer, as we do each time a fraction of mankind is caught up in the hatred of their fellow humans, who are suddenly no longer recognizable. For gradually and progressively subverted by the tyranny of a psychotic and totalitarian thinking, they themselves have ceased to be humans endowed with feeling and intelligence, with reason, and capable of love and compassion. If the executioners have invariably sought to dehumanize their victims the better to eliminate them, had they not already dehumanized themselves when in their hearts they began to harbor criminal intentions, had they not already begun the process of moral death that irresistibly led them to wish a spiteful death on others.

Beauty is hateful to crime, just as humanity is hateful to those who turn from their own humanity. The aspiration to life and dignity cherished by those who are delivered up to abuse, served up to death has no meaning for those who have recast themselves in the disgraceful and obstinate denial of moral laws. If any crime against humanity is undeniably a crime twice over, does this not necessarily imply twofold reparation: to render survivors and their descendants the justice due them, and then to rehabilitate in their humanity those who fashioned their inheritance from the profits of the crime. Time will not obliterate the deeds it has recorded, and memory will not relegate them to some dark corner. Armenians are an old people and accustomed to relive History; so will they shoulder this task, aware of both the redeeming character and the universal scope of their action. The crime of genocide is by nature imprescriptible, and that of the Armenians is no exception; the only possible response, beyond reprobation and disgust, is justice and reparation. In publishing the present dossier, the Collectif 2015: Réparation, wants to affirm with force this obvious and inescapable truth.

Contemporary historiography has clearly shown the mechanisms, the succession of acts on the part of the government and the combination of socio-political and religious ideologies that led to the preparation, methodical execution and completion of the extermination of the Armenians of Ottoman Turkey. Between the archaic character of a State system that only arbitrarily recognized the existence of populations whose religion marked them as inferior and their programed elimination in a vision of racial discrimination and appropriation of the territory, the so-called era of Reforms, with all their extensions, was, in the last two thirds of the 19^th century and until the Great War, no more than a passing mirage. In the provinces, the purported equality of all peoples, religions and denominations in the Empire was less successful in bringing about a fragile new balance than in spurring on the violence of refractory beys or of the military leaders converted to the idea of Turkism. The Armenian National Constitution, also known as the Regulations of 1863, which organized around the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople the life of the Armenian community in a State promised to reform, was itself confronted with the absolutism and the bloody persecutions that marked the reign of Abdul-Hamid II.

Brutality, massacre and spoliation were the daily fare, but even these were episodically exacerbated. Between 1894 and 1896, the great Hamidian massacres devastated entire regions, causing over two hundred thousand deaths and forced conversions to Islam, and driving numerous survivors into exile. Having come to power in 1908, the Young Turks on the Committee for Union and Progress proceeded to carry out massacres in Cilicia as of 1909. Their arrival had sparked great hopes that the transformation of the Ottoman Empire into a multinational and multidenominational State would finally guarantee internal peace and prosperity based on the equality of all peoples. But this was not to be. And the Union and Progress Party, soon won over to the twofold doctrine of Pan-Turkism and Islamism, became master of the Empire following the 1913 coup d’État, and would organize and carry out a State-sponsored crime: the extermination by massacre and deportation of all Armenians in the Empire that became the genocide of 1915–1919.

Nothing has been done to repair or even to attenuate the consequences of this act, which was clearly the culmination of earlier crimes, inscribed uniquely and with mathematical precision in their intention – a mere twenty years separate the Hamidian massacres from the final solution applied by the Young Turks. The Kemalist dictatorship consolidated the confiscation of a country wrested from its inhabitants, designated to become the repository of the mythic birth of a nation that could only be born at the cost of another’s death. The traces of a civilization envied and hated in equal measure were destroyed; they collapsed like the tall façades of bombarded cities. Struggling against History, Turkey plunged into the impasse of negationism and allowed itself be perverted by a pernicious solidarity with the authors of those barbarous acts, clutching at their acquisitions, incapable of uprooting an ideology whose survival today is the primary obstacle to the flourishing of freedom and democracy.

The nature of the facts and the vital issue they point to were perceived early in the day. In 1908 Pierre Quillard, President of the Human Rights League, described the massacres of 1894–1896 as “one of the most frightful catastrophes ever to befall a people”. But he went on to add that, since that time, the “systematic destruction of the Armenian people, the slow extermination by less brutal but just as effective methods” has continued.[1] The unexpected horror of the 1909 massacres in Cilicia, in which the responsibility of the Young Turks was brutally revealed – and yet some had ingenuously fraternized – led the publicist Agnuni to qualify this new occurrence as a Great Crime (Medz Eghern).[2] Arrested on 24 April 1915 and deported with hundreds of other intellectuals, Aguni was most certainly assassinated; but the term he had coined survived him and took root: Armenians transposed it to the mass crime of 1915–1916. These are the terms in which the unspeakable came to be spoken of, in an awareness of the underlying relationship between these two crimes against humanity, orchestrated and carried out by the same hands.

The semantic necessity that the Great Crime, if the term designated that which, passing all understanding, had been perpetrated and suffered, should in one way or another be integrated, was constantly felt by survivors confronted with the problem of explaining the inexpressible. Mardiros Sarian was one such survivor. In 1919, reporting a discussion he had secretly witnessed in February 1916 in Konya, between a Unionist emissary from Constantinople and some Ottoman army officers on their way back from Aleppo, he put in the mouth of their spokesman, a high-ranking Albanian officer revolted by what he had seen in the Syrian desert, the following words: “In what century, in what country, in what legendary history have we ever seen such a genocide (tseghasbanutiun), and one carried out by such barbaric means?”[3] In the same years, Rafaël Lemkin saw the Armenian case shelved. He was shocked – that was the word he used – by the impunity accorded the authors of this mass crime by the victors as well as by the international community. Although in 1933 he was unsuccessful in getting the League of Nations to approve an agreement on the repression of barbaric acts and vandalism, the Armenian case became an example. During the Second World War, in a famous work, he defined the concept of genocide, which would soon serve as the basis for the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations on 9 December 1948.[4] In the interval, in 1945, the journalist Shavarsh Missakian translated the term into Armenian, recomposing the word tseghasbanutiun in his own language.[5] When he discovered Lemkin, he was unaware of Sarian’s reflection, though the path followed by Sarian was similar to that of the great jurist. The same questions in the face of the unthinkable, the same dismay before a universal failure of the law led both to seek a concept, a new term to designate an “old practice in its modern form”, as Lemkin so aptly put it, by which he meant “the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group”.

Although the Armenian genocide is today recognized by the entire scientific community, the historical episode is still not closed. This gigantic crime is an outstanding challenge, still alive in the absence of an act of reparation that would efface the consequences, or at last extinguish the legacy of suffering. It is for this reason that the Collectif 2015: Réparation, determined to speak out against the obscuring of the moral and material obligations resulting from the Armenian genocide, has recalled in its founding declaration published on 25 November 2004 in Paris, the two realities without which no assuaging of the Armenian question can be expected nor can there be any progress in Turkey which might free it of an infamous legitimacy and deliver it from the nationalist myth in which its peoples remain imprisoned. The first of these realities is that the survivors of this genocide were driven out of a country that had always been their home; the second is that the Turkish State owes the Armenians reparation, reparation that can only be defined by the harm done.

While this reparation must first of all address the value of the human lives that were lost – nearly one and a half million killed – it also concerns the twofold injury resulting from the suspension of the organic Regulations of the Armenian Nation and from the measures for the denationalization and expulsion of the survivors, from the moral harm suffered by the survivors and their descendants; it concerns the restitution of confiscated national assets and the salvage of the monuments, compensation for spoliated private assets, in particular movable and immovable assets, and restitution of banking assets and investments. If it is certain that no reparation can exceed the damage it is designed to repair, in other words cannot go beyond a statu quo ante, it is no less certain that no indemnity, no measure of reparation, however great, will ever equal in value the losses and damages inflicted by such a significant crime. Reparation is therefore all the more necessary; for not only will it always be cruelly insufficient, but the process is complicated by measures designed to circumvent it: confusion of place names, destruction or reallocation of assets, closure of land registry archives.

In the Armenian case, reparation will necessarily take place on site. Indeed, the specificity of this genocide – which carried out a program of classifying, remodeling and redistributing peoples – is that it aimed ultimately to deprive the Armenian people of their homeland. Because reparation is a matter of justice, it has meaning only if it challenges the aim of the crime, it has an impact only if it counterbalances the fruits of the crime. This can be made possible only by repairing – no other word is more relevant – a country whose geography as well as its history have been deeply scarred; only by giving it back a future befitting its true complexity, in accordance with the civilizations that have enriched it. Reparation is thus a broad concept; it involves to a significant extent an internal process, but one which demands that the Armenian Nation of Turkey be restored in its rights; this must be done with a strictly political resolve and without pre-empting the solutions that will be found to Turkey’s internal problems, in particular the Alevis and Kurds.

Armenians are an ancient people; they were already present in Asia Minor in the first millennium before our era, in a territory that, until the 6^th century BCE, was known as the Kingdom of Urartu. Between the 6^th and the 1^st centuries BCE, three states emerged in this territory: Lesser Armenia (P‘ok‘r Hayk‘) west of the western branch of the Euphrates, the Kingdom of Sophene (Dzop‘k‘) at the junction of the two branches of the Euphrates, and Greater Armenia (Medzn Hayk‘) to the east. The second of these kingdoms was absorbed by Greater Armenia at the time of Tigranes II, known as the Great (Medzn Dikran), at the turn of the 1^st century BCE. Lesser Armenia would ultimately be annexed by Rome in the 2^nd century CE. The Kingdom of Greater Armenia, sandwiched between the Roman Empire to the west and the Parthian then the Persian Empire under the Sassanides to the southeast, lasted until 428, when King Artaxias IV (Ardashes) was deposed. The official conversion to Christianity of Armenia, where tradition sites the apostleship of the saints Bartholomew and Thaddeus, occurred at the beginning of the 4^th century, under King Tiridates IV (Dertad) with the predication of Saint Gregory the Illuminator (Krikor Loussavoritch). This decisive event was followed, at the beginning of the 5^th century, by the invention of the national alphabet, by Saint Mesrob. These two circumstances have left a powerful stamp on Armenian identity that persists to the present day, an identity cemented by the definitive independence of the Armenian Church, won in the 6^th century.

The scene of clashes between Persia, then the Caliphate and Byzantium, Armenia crystalized into the vision recorded in the 7^th century of a Greater Armenia of fifteen provinces, a territory that acquired a deeply sacred character over the course of various episodes in its Christianization and its struggle to defend the Faith. Implantation of the local dynastes in this high mountainous plateau enabled a multitude of principalities and Armenian kingdoms to emerge between the 9^th and the 15^th centuries – or later to reconstitute themselves in new spaces – in Greater Armenia and Euphratensis as well as in Cilicia, at the far northeast end of the Mediterranean. The best known of these States were the Bagratid Kingdom of Ani, the Ardzrunid Kingdom of Vasbouragan, organized around Lake Van, and finally the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, which fell in 1375 to the Egyptian Mamluks. The eastward redeployment of Byzantium from the second half of the 10^th century, the invasions of the Seljuk Turks and the Mongols in the 11^th and 13^th centuries, and the expansion of Egypt are intertwined in the same chronology.

The appearance of several Turkmen states was followed by the Ottoman conquest of Armenia, Mesopotamia and Syria at the beginning of the 16^th century, which in turn led to the division of the East between the Ottoman Empire and Safafid Persia along a line that did not stabilize until the 17^th century. Armenian society was henceforth entirely organized around the Church, which was governed by three co-existing Catholicossal sees. Edchmiadzin was established at Vagharshabad in what was first Persian territory and then Russian from 1828; this was the supreme see today located within the borders of the Republic of Armenia. The see of Aghtamar, established on the island of the same name in Lake Van, was abolished in 1915. The see of Sis, in Cilicia, is today in exile in Antelias, in Lebanon. In the context of this far-flung network of churches and monasteries that blanketed their country from the high Middle Ages, the spiritual and intellectual life of Armenians flourished, bolstered by the great forward-looking urban centers which were relayed throughout the world by a parallel network of commercial colonies, printing houses and scholarly communities. Capital of an empire, before the Great War Constantinople was the greatest Armenian city in the world, the headquarters of an Armenian Patriarchate for over three centuries that had civil authority over all Armenians in the Empire and which enjoyed prerogatives that had been set out and strengthened by the Regulations of 1863. In 1910 the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, with the exception of Egypt, was distributed among 67 dioceses, 46 of which were directly attached to the Patriarchate of Constantinople; four others were under the jurisdiction of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem, founded in the Holy City in the 7^th century; 15 answered to Sis and two to Aghtamar.[6] Several thousand churches, monasteries and schools were also in operation.[7]

The destruction of the Armenians, which included that of countless testimonials to a civilization that endured in the face of adversities, is in truth not so much evidence of the turmoil and excesses of an empire on the decline as it that of a project designed to transform and to supplant it. There is a clear ideological continuum between Ottoman Turkey and the Republic that followed, based on the orientations and goals that were transmitted in ever-clearer terms, and which the circumstances of war as well as the political upheavals that preceded or followed helped realize beyond all expectations. If the eugenic ideology of the Committee for Union and Progress took its cue from the large-scale massacres orchestrated by the Hamidian regime, mining the fertile vein of Islamism, it soon constituted the substance of the Kemalist doctrine, to which countless participants in the Great Crime would subscribe, assured as they were of acting with impunity. Today there are no longer any Christians to speak of in Turkey, where they once made up nearly a third of the population. But others have replaced them on the list of identities to subject or combat in a headlong rush that must soon be interrupted so that all may come back to the crossroads and at last sit down and reflect together. This other dimension inevitably requires reparation for the genocide: it is a necessity for everyone involved, as much as it is a necessity for the Armenian people.

Our program stresses a crucial aspect of this issue: that of the Armenian national assets and architectural heritage. These are the assets that, in virtue of the laws in force both before and after the reform of 1912 concerning Ottoman charitable institutions, belong by definition to a nation insofar as they are recognized as being used by the community: monasteries, churches, chapels, prelacies, schools, hospitals, cemeteries, but also land, and movables and immovables attached to the preceding.[8] Many of these assets are present ab antiquo: in other words, their existence predates the establishment of an Ottoman, or even Turkmen, administration; others were confirmed or established by firman. These are distinct from private assets but, like the latter, they were confiscated by a series of legislative measures that were part of the arsenal of genocide. Full restitution of Armenian national assets is the object of the Request for Reparation and Restitution that ends this dossier. It implies strengthening the prerogatives and the status of the institutions authorized to receive them, compensating third parties, repairing damage and destruction. It is moreover patent that the confiscation of Armenian assets was put in place well before the genocide and, associated with even greater violence, it was one of the means adopted by the State to fragment the Armenian community and bring about the economic ruin of the elements targeted. This is the subject of the first chapter of our volume, devoted to spoliation and destruction. The second chapter puts the question of the relationship between the crime – and the resulting harm – and an unavoidably global vision of reparation. For, to state it bluntly, it is impossible, when addressing the issue of reparation, to invoke constraints of a legal nature that might diminish either its meaning or its scope without deliberately ignoring that no constraint of this nature has ever been valid or effective when it comes to the commission of the crime and the consolidation of its profits. What good is the law if it does not produce justice?

Even aside from the organic and legitimate attachment a society feels for the works it has created and in which it has constantly renewed its genius, civilizations are the common good of all the world’s nations. Armenian civilization, founded on architecture and the written word, developed and perpetuated itself in the twofold reality of an ongoing history and the construction of an identity to which it owes its survival. This heritage, which the guilty ambition and totalitarian determination of the perpetrators of a genocide reduced to ruins, which continues to deteriorate every day, either because it is destroyed, or alienated, or because, having been left empty it remains at the mercy of an inclement environment or at that of an administration of planners or looters, will leave humanity incomplete. Composed largely of Armenian national assets, but including numerous monuments and remains outside this category, this is an undeniably rich cultural and historical heritage, to which the present volume devotes an third, long chapter. One hundred monuments are presented, each of which is described and illustrated by contemporary or more recent photographs dating from the second half of the 20^th century and from the years between 2000 and 2015. Whenever possible, site plans and cross-sections have been included. If it is true that these notes only piece together fragments of a deliberately obscured history, they clearly show that, in harming the Armenian people, Turkey has also deliberately damaged a universal heritage. Today, it is the inescapable duty of Turkey to return these assets to the people from whom they were taken and at the same time to save them, in the same way as it is the duty, in the sense of an ethical necessity, for the community of nations of which Turkey is a member one hundred years after a crime that is still in progress and not yet repaired.

Generations come and go, but no fatality obliges them to continue to shoulder the burden of a grievous crime, to share the fruits in tacit implication, and even less to be glad of it. Slowly, perhaps, but surely, they will become more reasonable, will discern truth from fiction and lies, shake off dogmas that stratify humanity in the name of some imaginary and unsubstantiated transcendence. Curiously time does not lessen the weight of such deeds, which their pernicious nature, because it is irreducible, gradually reveals. The same legitimacy demands that the ones ward off a crime that the conscience forbids accepting and the others rise up against continuance of the injustice suffered. That is why voices have been raised the world over, even in Turkey, to demand that the truth be looked in the face, to call for reconciliation and fraternity – “a fraternity that is always possible” as the Collectif 2015: Réparation wrote some years ago in its first declaration. But this comes with a price. Fraternity cannot be practiced with disregard for the other, ignoring the other’s deeply justified state of expectation and desire, to which if nothing changes, he will remain attached whatever may come. Long sentenced to listening to the world’s silence, the survivors of 1915–1916 have made themselves heard to us. There must be reparation: that is the message of this text! Repair the evil done; repair a society absurdly burdened with a deplorable legacy; repair the time, needlessly wasted without providing the possibility to work together and on site to do what should have been done. Turkey – what can one call it? – is also the Armenians’ country: it was their country five hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, two thousand and well before that. That some are still clutching at the shadowy doctrines that disqualified and darkened the 20^th century matters little to us: they will be disavowed. Yet we would lend them the courage to become themselves once more, we would share with them the task of an immense reconstruction, so that a land which has seen such repeated violence, where discrimination and exclusion have extended their brown fields, may be become, not by miracle but through responsible commitment, this “land of humanity” that great thinkers of our time have sought to celebrate.