Politicians and Children Hope To Provide Popular Wisdom
November 15, 2007

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

Carefully groomed, well fed and well dressed diplomats of many nations can convene at the United Nations (UN), or in other international forums, and debate what is and is not genocide—even as mass murder of civilians by the governments of several nations continues.

Other terms are used, including ethnic cleansing, as other nations too often stand by—somehow reluctant to intrude on the sovereignty of a criminal regime—and watch the latest example of mass murder by government. The UN’s sending of so-called peacekeeping forces who have no authority to actually prevent or stop the mass slaughter is little more than press agentry. It happened throughout the 20th century and continues into the 21st.

The roots of such governmental brutality are usually linked to ages-old tribal rivalries and feuds, to religious and racial differences, and to the sharing of wealth and power. Greed, of course, is the major causation, as it was in US government campaigns against Native Americans. No matter the causes, however, the pure horror and waste human life is enormous.

As has been frequently noted by others, the precursor to most genocidal campaign is the systematic disarmament of the targeted population. That was true under Hitler in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe, under Stalin in Russia, under Idi Amin in Uganda, under Pol Pot in Cambodia, and anywhere else rogue governments slaughtered their citizens. In Rwanda, because the targets were totally disarmed, the government could do the job with machetes and didn’t need to waste money on ammunition.

Denial
While governments and scholars can debate what constitutes genocide, some like the current leader of Iran deny that such genocides even occurred. And still other governments bury their own participation in such mass murders.

That is what happened recently when the US Congress was considering a resolution condemning the mass murder of Armenians in the early 1900s by the Ottoman Empire of Turkey. The Turkish diplomats immediately denied that any genocide had ever taken place. Others commented that what happened almost 100 years ago was no longer relevant.

Fortunately, there are scholars and writers who do remember, like David Kopel, research director for the Independence Institute, and Drs. Paul Gallant and Joanne D. Eisen, New Yorkers who are senior fellows at the Independence Institute.

Kopel, Gallant and Eisen, published an article of historic significance in the National Review Online on Oct. 16 that reminds the world that the possession of arms saved many of the Armenians who were marked for government extermination. Because I believe everyone should read their article, I reprint it in its entirety below. For many Armenians, guns provided an opportunity to survive mass murder by government.

NRO Article
Whatever may be said about the US House of Representatives committee vote concerning the use of the term “genocide” in reference to Turkey’s atrocities against the Armenians during World War I, two facts are indisputable: It was gun confiscation that made the atrocities possible. And it was the possession of firearms that saved many Armenians.

Under the Ottoman Empire, Armenians, who are mostly Christian, had not been allowed to own firearms. This was standard practice for Christians and Jews throughout the Empire, under sharia (Koran-based Islamic) law for the “Dhimmi”—Christians and Jews (and sometimes other faiths) who were allowed to retain their religion, provided that they lived in subordination.

One feature of dhimmitude is a ban on the possession of any weapons, and a prohibition from striking a Muslim, even in an act of self-defense. Unsurprisingly, the Dhimmi were easy prey for thugs and extortionists. For example, Armenian Christians in the 19th century had to pay the Kurds not to attack their villages and pillage their monasteries.

Military necessity led to a change in the Ottoman policy in 1908. Armenian Christian soldiers would be permitted to train with weapons, and by 1915, a significant number of Armenian men had done so. After the Balkan War of 1912, many Armenian civilians bought firearms from returning Turkish soldiers. Weapons and ammunition were secreted in the walls of homes.

During World War I, in 1915, the Ottoman government decided to launch a massive persecution of the Armenians. The current Turkish government, along with some scholars, denies that genocide was the intention, although there is no doubt that many hundreds of thousands died.

US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau reported that the Ottoman Turks faced an obstacle: “Before Armenia could be slaughtered, Armenia must be made defenseless.” Armenians were reluctant to disarm, given their distrust of the Turks.

As a first step, Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army were stripped of their weapons. Beaten and clubbed, placed on short rations, and sometimes murdered, they were used to dig fortifications and latrines for the Turks. Soldiers fled and returned home, bringing stories of the destruction of Armenian villages and towns, murders of priests, and rapes of women.

Disarmament orders were sent to Armenian towns; however, Armenian leaders would collect broken and useless weapons, and, with a bribe, deliver them to Turkish leaders—while keeping the functioning weapons for themselves.

As the persecution intensified, contemporaneous Armenian writings lamented that if civilians (had) taken a more pro-active approach sooner, more Armenians would have survived. But initially, the Armenians had felt their best chance for survival lay in keeping a low profile and remaining passive. It was only after a long pattern of murders by the Turks that they began to actively defend themselves.

The 5,000 townspeople of Shabin Karahissar, including 600 poorly armed Armenian men, retreated to a nearby fort when 10,000 regular and irregular Turkish army troops approached. The Armenians’ guns allowed them to keep the enemy at bay for 26 days. Although they had sufficient water, they lacked adequate planning and eventually starved. One survivor, Aram Haigaz, wrote: “Of the more than 5,000 who ascended the Fort, only 47 survived….”

Armed Resistance
Armed resistance movements also sprang up in Ourfa, in Shadakh, and in the Pesan Valley. At Van, a group of 1,500 men with only 300 rifles fought off an army of 5,000 Turkish soldiers, and diverted the attention of Turkish troops away from the Russian enemy. The defenders at Van successfully held out for five weeks until they were rescued by the Russian army. But shortly after, the Russian army made an unexpected retreat, allowing the Turks to swoop in by surprise and kill the 55,000 people of Van.

The best-known and most successful of resistance movements was memorialized in the 1934 historical novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. People from several villages retreated to the mountain whose English name is “Moses Mountain.” Provisioned with weapons and supplies, the villagers held out on Musa Dagh for 53 days.

Pastor Tigran Andreasian listed the Armenian population of his native region as 6,311. Of them, 4,231 persons chose to fight on the mountain, while 2,080 people obeyed the deportation order of the Turks. When the fighters were eventually rescued by the Allies, an amazing 4,200 survivors were taken to Port Said, Egypt.

As for those who accepted deportation, according to Vahram Shemmassian, a scholar and descendant of one of the fighters, “the exact count of casualties may never be determined, many families lost several members and others perished completely.”

Hitler reminded his generals that “nobody remembers the Armenians,” and he worked assiduously to disarm his own genocide victims more thoroughly than the Turks had done. When we do remember the Armenians, let us remember that the difference between life and death was often the possession of arms to resist mass murder by government.
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