BY GAREN YEGPARIAN
Who remembers this phrase nowadays, “Armenia without Armenians”, “Hayasdan arants hayeroo”?
That was Ottoman policy. Whether through forced conversions to Islam and subsequent Kurdification./Turkification, outright massacres, kidnapping of the best looking boys and girls, or the creation of unbearable economic burdens (though over-taxation and giving free reign to pillage the settled population, i.e. the Armenians).
There’s a whole book that cites example after example of the Kurdification/Turkification, and that’s just pre-Genocide. That process is ongoing as demonstrated by what happened when crypto-Armenians starting “coming out” during the first decade of this century in “modern” Turkey!
The massacre category obviously needs no further explanation. Neither does the kidnapping one. It’s obvious what happens to a three-year-old when taken from one home to another and raised in the latter’s environment.
The most devilish technique for de-Armenianizing the Armenian Highlands was the economic one. With the Ottoman Empire decaying and in desperate need of funds, a tax farming system was in place. Anyone who could assemble the funds to buy the right to tax a certain geographic area paid the central government, then was free to extort whatever he could from that area’s peasantry, again, most often the Armenians. This led to impoverishment and the need to send sons to remote cities to work as laborers (who became known as “bantoukhd”) to send money home to save the family’s ancestral property from the greedy tax collector. Couple the taxation with the losses to nomads empowered to steal the family’s livestock, grain, or other reserves, and you can imagine the desperate conditions our ancestors found themselves in. Between the sons leaving and the loss of home and hearth, there was a slow but steady outflow of Armenians from our homeland, just what the Ottoman authorities wanted.
Here, it’s appropriate to share a story from Roupen Der Minassian’s memoirs. If memory serves, the year was 1905. The persecution and repression of Armenians was at all-time highs where Roupen and Kevork Chavoush operated. Something had to be done. So, they hatched a plot. They started a rumor that spread like wildfire. People believed it, packed up their belongings, and started out for the Russo-Turkish border because, the story went, the Russians had promised land to any Armenian who made it to the border. Despite the fact that de-Armenianization was the Turkish authorities’ aim, they couldn’t afford it to occur instantaneously because the local economy would collapse since Armenians were its backbone. The pressure on Armenians was reduced and a respite secured for the people. We’ll come back to the relevance of this incident later.
But so far, we’ve only covered Armenian extirpation from the western end of our country.
The process, or its attempts, were afoot on the eastern end, too. The 1905 Armeno-Tatar (as Azeris were called back then before the creation of the artifice now named Azerbaijan) clashes were an early indicator. Recall, in all this, that some of the great Pan-Turkists of the 19th and 20th century hailed from the territory now called Azerbaijan. In 1920, the Shoushi pogroms were committed by the Tatars/Azeris. With Sovietization and its attendant “brotherhood among peoples” came the extirpation of Armenians not only from the plains of Artzakh, but also Nakhichevan. The Sumgait, Baku, etc. massacres of the 1980s/90s cleared the rest of the Azerbaijani SSR of Armenians. All that remained was towering Artzakh, and that thorn in Baku’s side was removed a little over a year ago.
Any fool can see the decades-, centuries-, long de-Armenianization of our homeland at the hands of assorted Turkish (“Azeris” included) murderous leaders. International leaders must be called to account for overlooking and condoning this process,
But, more importantly, we must act. This is where the Roupen/Kevork example cited comes in. We need inspired, clever, powerful ideas for courses of action that can circumvent the power imbalance currently in place between Yerevan/Diaspora on one side and Ankara/Baku on the other.
Do you have such an idea? Put it out for our nation to see.
