We disembarked from the clunky Soviet-era sleeper train at 7am, and found ourselves in the grand Yerevan station. I had heard that Armenians love coffee; it was frustrating, therefore, that the only offerings at that hour were from automatic vending machines on every street corner. We stuck our heads hopefully into a fast-food outlet busy with workers, but they said, paradoxically, that it was too early to serve coffee.
We walked slowly along the wide avenue, overtaken by battered old Ladas and gleaming Mercs, and came at last to Republic Square, an open space flanked by grand, Soviet-style buildings. A large group of schoolchildren in pressed uniforms posed for a photo, watched proudly by their parents. A small orchestra sat nearby. Unexpectedly, the Armenian national anthem blared out from temporary speakers in the almost empty square. The children became very still; nobody sang.
We sat with some stray dogs for a while in the sun, and then wandered slowly in search of breakfast, the music still on repeat behind us. Check-in wasn’t until 2pm; we had six hours and we felt fairly ponky after a night in the smelly carriage. In the first promising café we ordered lukewarm coffee and ham- and tomato-scrambled eggs. When we thanked our waitress clumsily - “Shnorhakalutjun” - she burst into bright laughter and quickly returned with some khachapuri, compliments of the house.
We felt we needed to learn more about Armenia and do justice to its complex history, so at the first opportunity we visited the Armenian Genocide Memorial and Museum on the outskirts of Yerevan. In town, we managed to hop on our first Armenian marshrutka - a public minibus - and with a little help from some young English-speaking boys, we descended at the correct stop. Feeling pleased that we’d managed to navigate our way successfully across town largely without a shared language or an intuitive transport system, we crossed through an underpass and reached the shallow steps. At the top was a large building, with cascades of blue water pooling gently down the hill to our feet.
Mount Ararat rose from the southerly plains; her two snowy peaks lying just outside Armenia’s south-western border in northern Turkey, sixty kilometres from Yerevan. The peak that Noah’s Ark is said to have grounded on, Ararat is Armenia’s holy mountain, their people's mythological birthplace and national symbol, depicted on the country’s coat-of-arms, in many brands, and in almost every Armenian household at home and abroad. After the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923, the mountain came to represent, for some, the annihilation of the population of Western Armenia (now Eastern Turkey), and the exile from Eastern Anatolia. Ararat rises beguilingly from the plains, visible from many households in Yerevan and beyond, and yet entirely inaccessible.
We gazed upon the biblical mount, framed by two rows of flag-poles; one full of colours blazing in the wind, the other bare. “These must be the countries who have recognised the genocide”, we said to each other solemnly. So few, I thought.
As we ascended the steps up to the top, a turquoise waterfall descended gently past us. A large dog wallowed happily in the pool, his owners laughing. Some small boys played by the fountains. As we climbed, I wondered if the vast pools were in memory of the Armenians who perished on the death marches into the Syrian desert. I rescued a loose plastic bag which was blowing in the wind, and then we reached the top and entered the shadowy building.
The lights were off. It appeared to be empty and closed. “I haven’t seen any signs for the memorial, have you?” said Gareth in a hushed voice. It was true; we hadn’t. We wandered the vast, empty hall until we found a very small woman behind a large desk. “Barev”, we greeted her in quiet, respectful tones. “We’re looking for the Genocide Memorial”. The woman smiled warmly. “Ah! This is the Yerevan Sports and Concerts Complex”, she explained brightly. "The memorial is that way, at the end of the park.”
Feeling mightily foolish for all our misread, sombre symbolism, we thanked her (“Shnorhakalutjun!”), she laughed happily, and we walked out into the hot sun. The Yerevan Sports and Concerts Complex looked rather pleasant now that we knew what it was. We proceeded on our way.
The memorial sits on the hill Tsitsernakaberd, above Yerevan, and was built in 1967. Beside it is an alley of evergreen fir trees of varying heights, each planted by visiting statespeople. A visit to the memorial is written into every state visit.
Before the First World War there were an estimated two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Between 1915 and 1923, one and a half million people were murdered in their homelands, or on forced death marches into the Syrian desert. The remainder were either forcibly islamized or exiled. Systematically planned and executed firstly by the Young Turk government, and finalised by the Kemalists, the genocide followed a clinical five-point plan, known as the Armenian Question. Here, the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute describes how events unfolded and why they must be termed genocide:
The number of murdered and displaced people is not widely disputed, but there is contention as to whether what happened to the Armenians should be termed a genocide. The museum clearly and succinctly curated indisputable evidence of genocide: the premeditation, the five-point plan, the photographic and written evidence, the mass graves, the research of the international press, the confessions of some of the perpetrators, the testimonies of the many eyewitnesses, and, most of all, of the survivors, whose descendants within the diaspora now vastly outnumber the homeland Armenian population. For me, the evidence was clear.
The term genocide was first coined and defined by the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, after every member of his family but his brother were murdered in the Holocaust. Lemkin himself has described what happened to the Armenians as genocide. Turkey denies it. The border between the two countries remains closed, the Armenians’ holy mountain inaccessible and yet, on a clear day, seemingly within touching distance.
Although France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and many other countries and states have recognised the genocide, England and the UK government have not. UK relations with Turkey and her invasive, nuclearly-inclined president-forever Erdoğan, it seems, are more highly valued than the truth.
Edited on 30th October 2019:
Yesterday the United States House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to pass a resolution to formally recognise the Armenian genocide and denounce it as a matter of foreign policy. This followed Trump's decision last week to withdraw US forces from Northern Syria, opening the way for what could potentially be a similar assault by Turkey on the stateless Kurdish people.
There is a frightening quote inscribed on the first wall of the information centre which lies beneath the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the centre of Berlin.
We walked slowly along the wide avenue, overtaken by battered old Ladas and gleaming Mercs, and came at last to Republic Square, an open space flanked by grand, Soviet-style buildings. A large group of schoolchildren in pressed uniforms posed for a photo, watched proudly by their parents. A small orchestra sat nearby. Unexpectedly, the Armenian national anthem blared out from temporary speakers in the almost empty square. The children became very still; nobody sang.
We sat with some stray dogs for a while in the sun, and then wandered slowly in search of breakfast, the music still on repeat behind us. Check-in wasn’t until 2pm; we had six hours and we felt fairly ponky after a night in the smelly carriage. In the first promising café we ordered lukewarm coffee and ham- and tomato-scrambled eggs. When we thanked our waitress clumsily - “Shnorhakalutjun” - she burst into bright laughter and quickly returned with some khachapuri, compliments of the house.
We felt we needed to learn more about Armenia and do justice to its complex history, so at the first opportunity we visited the Armenian Genocide Memorial and Museum on the outskirts of Yerevan. In town, we managed to hop on our first Armenian marshrutka - a public minibus - and with a little help from some young English-speaking boys, we descended at the correct stop. Feeling pleased that we’d managed to navigate our way successfully across town largely without a shared language or an intuitive transport system, we crossed through an underpass and reached the shallow steps. At the top was a large building, with cascades of blue water pooling gently down the hill to our feet.
Mount Ararat rose from the southerly plains; her two snowy peaks lying just outside Armenia’s south-western border in northern Turkey, sixty kilometres from Yerevan. The peak that Noah’s Ark is said to have grounded on, Ararat is Armenia’s holy mountain, their people's mythological birthplace and national symbol, depicted on the country’s coat-of-arms, in many brands, and in almost every Armenian household at home and abroad. After the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923, the mountain came to represent, for some, the annihilation of the population of Western Armenia (now Eastern Turkey), and the exile from Eastern Anatolia. Ararat rises beguilingly from the plains, visible from many households in Yerevan and beyond, and yet entirely inaccessible.
 |
| Waiting for flags |
We gazed upon the biblical mount, framed by two rows of flag-poles; one full of colours blazing in the wind, the other bare. “These must be the countries who have recognised the genocide”, we said to each other solemnly. So few, I thought.
As we ascended the steps up to the top, a turquoise waterfall descended gently past us. A large dog wallowed happily in the pool, his owners laughing. Some small boys played by the fountains. As we climbed, I wondered if the vast pools were in memory of the Armenians who perished on the death marches into the Syrian desert. I rescued a loose plastic bag which was blowing in the wind, and then we reached the top and entered the shadowy building.
 |
| Water and stone |
The lights were off. It appeared to be empty and closed. “I haven’t seen any signs for the memorial, have you?” said Gareth in a hushed voice. It was true; we hadn’t. We wandered the vast, empty hall until we found a very small woman behind a large desk. “Barev”, we greeted her in quiet, respectful tones. “We’re looking for the Genocide Memorial”. The woman smiled warmly. “Ah! This is the Yerevan Sports and Concerts Complex”, she explained brightly. "The memorial is that way, at the end of the park.”
Feeling mightily foolish for all our misread, sombre symbolism, we thanked her (“Shnorhakalutjun!”), she laughed happily, and we walked out into the hot sun. The Yerevan Sports and Concerts Complex looked rather pleasant now that we knew what it was. We proceeded on our way.
The memorial sits on the hill Tsitsernakaberd, above Yerevan, and was built in 1967. Beside it is an alley of evergreen fir trees of varying heights, each planted by visiting statespeople. A visit to the memorial is written into every state visit.
 |
| The memorial's eternal flame |
The mechanism of implementation
A genocide is the organized extermination of a nation aiming to put an end to their collective existence. Thus, the implementation of the genocide requires oriented programming and an internal mechanism, which makes genocide a state crime, as only a state possesses all the resources that can be used to carry out this policy.
The first phase of the Armenian Genocide was the conscription of about 60,000 Armenian men into the Ottoman army, their disarmament and murder by their Turkish fellow soldiers.
The second phase of the extermination of the Armenian population started on April 24, 1915 with the arrest of several hundred Armenian intellectuals and representatives of national elite (mainly in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople) and their subsequent elimination. Hereinafter, Armenians worldwide started to commemorate the Armenian genocide on April 24.
The third phase of the genocide is characterized with the exile of the massacres of women, children, elderly people to the desert of Syria. Hundreds of thousands of people were murdered by Turkish soldiers, police officers, Kurdish bandits during the deportation. The others died of epidemic diseases. Thousands of women and children were subjected to violence. Tens of thousands were forcibly islamized.
The fifth phase is the universal and absolute denial of the Turkish government of the mass deportations and genocide carried out against Armenians in their homeland. Despite the ongoing process of international condemnation of the Armenian Genocide, Turkey fights against recognition by all means, including distortion of history, means of propaganda, lobbying activities and other measures.
- The Armenian Genocide Museum-InstituteIn the aftermath of the First World War the main Ottoman perpetrators were court-martialled in Turkey and sentenced to death, but the sentence was not carried out. A year after the verdict they were instead released by the Kemalist government in exchange for 22 British POWs, and fled. The guilty men were later hunted down by Armenian revolutionaries under Operation Nemesis and their death sentence was completed. Soghomon Tehlirian, the Armenian revolutionary who assassinated Taalaat Pasha, the main orchestrator of the genocide, was released without charge after two days in court and is considered a national hero.
The number of murdered and displaced people is not widely disputed, but there is contention as to whether what happened to the Armenians should be termed a genocide. The museum clearly and succinctly curated indisputable evidence of genocide: the premeditation, the five-point plan, the photographic and written evidence, the mass graves, the research of the international press, the confessions of some of the perpetrators, the testimonies of the many eyewitnesses, and, most of all, of the survivors, whose descendants within the diaspora now vastly outnumber the homeland Armenian population. For me, the evidence was clear.
The term genocide was first coined and defined by the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, after every member of his family but his brother were murdered in the Holocaust. Lemkin himself has described what happened to the Armenians as genocide. Turkey denies it. The border between the two countries remains closed, the Armenians’ holy mountain inaccessible and yet, on a clear day, seemingly within touching distance.
Although France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and many other countries and states have recognised the genocide, England and the UK government have not. UK relations with Turkey and her invasive, nuclearly-inclined president-forever Erdoğan, it seems, are more highly valued than the truth.
 |
| Mount Ararat beyond Yerevan |
Edited on 30th October 2019:
Yesterday the United States House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to pass a resolution to formally recognise the Armenian genocide and denounce it as a matter of foreign policy. This followed Trump's decision last week to withdraw US forces from Northern Syria, opening the way for what could potentially be a similar assault by Turkey on the stateless Kurdish people.
There is a frightening quote inscribed on the first wall of the information centre which lies beneath the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the centre of Berlin.
“It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say.” - Primo Levi, Italian Holocaust survivor and authorAn equally chilling warning lies on the final wall of the Yerevan Armenian Genocide Memorial and Museum.
“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” - Adolf Hitler
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