People around the world paused to commemorate Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day on Tuesday, a remembrance of the more than 1.5 million Armenians who were systematically exterminated between 1915 and 1923 under the Ottoman Empire.
Thousands of people marched in Los Angeles, home to one of America’s largest Armenian communities, to demand recognition of the genocide. Yet in his commemorative statement, Trump only went as far as describing the events as a “mass atrocity”:
Today we commemorate the Meds Yeghern, one of the worst mass atrocities of the 20th century, when one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. We recall the horrific events of 1915 and grieve for the lives lost and the many who suffered.
By international law, genocide is defined as an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Although Trump’s statement recognizes the tragedy that took place, it missed an important detail, widely recognized by scholars, historians, and other experts — that what took place was not indiscriminate massacres, but a planned act of genocide.
This refusal to describe the events as a genocide is based on the U.S’s fear of upsetting the Turkish government, which vehemently denies allegations of genocide. Yet the U.S. is not alone. As of 2018, just 29 countries worldwide have officially recognized what happened in those years as a “genocide.”
Their stance is in stark contrast to a country like Germany, which has made the utmost efforts to heal the wounds of the Holocaust through commemorations and reparations. Meanwhile, Turkey continues to deny many of its crimes and even persecutes those who demand its recognition.
When former President Barack Obama came to power in 2009, he promised the more than one million Armenians living in the United States that he would recognize the genocide, although, like many of his foreign policy promises, it never materialized.
Yet recognition of the genocide remains an important conservative issue. The Armenian genocide was the first Christian genocide of the twentieth century and led to the displacement of millions of people from their Biblical homelands.
To this day, Turkey controls vast swaths of Armenian territory, while many of its Armenian inhabitants have been forced to convert to Islam. Christians are systematically persecuted, particularly those living in Kurdish territories. One recent example is the continued detention of American evangelical pastor Andrew Brunson on what appear to be phony terror-related charges.
Trump has styled himself as a defender of persecuted Christians around the world, and recognition of the genocide would go a long way to reinforcing his image as a protector of Christians in the Middle East.
A failure to recognize the past also serves as a partial endorsement of Turkey’s denial, under an Islamist regime whose leader Recep Erdogan has shown increasing aggression towards America with the threat of an “Ottoman slap” against U.S. troops in Syria.
Danny Tarkanian, an Armenian American endorsed by Trump in his race in Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District, has urged Trump to “set an example for the rest of world by formally acknowledging what truly happened.”
“If we are to prevent the worst of human tragedies from occurring, the world must recognize genocide and call it what it is,” Tarkanian told Breitbart News. “Adolf Hitler used the Armenian Genocide as a justified precedent for his atrocities against millions when he said, ‘Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?‘”
Clearly defining past genocides is important to holding modern genocidal actors accountable. In 2016, former Secretary of State John Kerry rightly acknowledged that the Islamic State had committed acts of genocide against Assyrian Christians and Yazidis in Iraq and Syria. Yet why couldn’t the same recognition be given to Armenians?
Since coming to office last year, Trump has demonstrated considerable boldness with foreign policy issues ranging from North Korea to officially acknowledging Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Now, it is time for his administration to show further strength by acknowledging the tragic history of one of America’s most loyal immigrant communities.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on June 2, 2016
The Turks always shout and threaten when someone wants to acknowledge the facts of history: that one and a half million Armenian Christians were the victims of Turkish Ottoman genocide in 1915. But did Sultan Erdogan really think that Germany – of all nations – would choose to be a Holocaust denier?
Well, the German parliament has voted by a quite extraordinary majority to declare the Armenian genocide a genocide – which the whole world (except, of course, for the Turks) knows it to be. There were the usual menaces to Germany – a danger to cultural/trade/military “ties” – from the government in Ankara and flocks of vicious e-mails to German MPs, but the parliamentary resolution rubbed in the fact that Ottoman Turkey was an ally of Germany when it perpetrated the atrocities and that Germany itself did not do enough to stop the genocide.
Poor Angela Merkel – who still prays that Sultan Erdogan will stand by her Operation Bribery campaign and keep back the refugees from the EU for a whopping €3bn and an offer of visa free travel in the eurozone – chose to stay absent from the vote. So did her vice-chancellor and her sad foreign minister, who would not have voted for the motion anyway. The greatest irony – utterly ignored by all politicians and journalists – is that the refugees and migrants whom Europe is now so frightened of come, in many cases, from the very towns and deserts in which the Turks committed their acts of horror against the Armenians 101 years ago.
The skulls and bones of Armenians still lie in the sands south of the Turkish border which Isis now controls; and when al-Nusrah captured parts of Deir ez-Zor, they blew up the Armenian cathedral of the Syrian city, took the bones of genocide victims from the vaults and scattered them in the streets. Several German officials who witnessed the original genocide went on to use their ‘expertise’ during the Jewish Holocaust in the Nazi occupied Soviet Union. And Hitler, preparing to invade Poland in 1939, asked his generals: “Who…is today speaking of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Needless to say, we saw the usual weedy fence-sitting by the news agencies (especially by those with offices in Ankara and Istanbul) who emphasised the Turkish denial of the genocide and the “hotly disputed” nature of an international crime against humanity which – were those same agencies writing of the Jewish genocide – they would rightly never dare to ‘balance’ by quotations from deniers.
France and Russia and at least 18 other nations now accept the Armenian genocide as a fact of history, along with good old Pope Francis – the only major exception being the one whose name we would all guess: the US. An almost annual visit to Washington by a coterie of Turkish generals is usually enough to bring the White House to heel. Doesn’t America need those important air bases in south-eastern Turkey from which the US wages war against Isis (and from which, speak it not, Turkey now wages war against Kurds)?
But thank God, once more, for Germany. Here was one vote for which the country would be certain to snap obediently to attention.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on May 14, 2015
And he is the third member of the band “”, representing Armenia in the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest with “Don’t Deny.” Born and raised in Ethiopia, he will represent the continent of Africa in the project.
Vahe Tilbian is an Armenian-Ethiopian artist with an enthusiastic and bright character. He has a unique style: from rock to techno, from reggae to R&B, from Armenian to Ethiopian, and all that mixed with a lot of Latin music. This blend of cultures expresses Vahe’s personality and makes him stand out as an exclusive artist and a passionate dancer.
Genealogy will be uniting the new generation of Armenians spread through 5 continents (Europe, Asia, America, Africa, and Australia) around the world in the year of 1915. The group consists of 6 artists with Armenian origin – 6 destinies with 1 story.
An Armenian Artist from Africa
While Vahe was born and raised in Ethiopia both his parents are of Armenian origin. Vahe heard the call of the stage as a singer only after he graduated from University of British Columbia in Vancouver. After working in the business sector for over three years as a young college graduate, Vahe left his job in 2008 and started working in music full
He joined the band Z Beyaynetus and soon, Kenny Allen, performer and producer from DC residing in Ethiopia, heard him at one of the local bars and asked to sing backing vocals for his album release show with the 251 Band. Shortly afterwards Vahe decided to diversify his genre and repertoire joining a salsa band called Eshee Havana and worked on original remixes of Ethiopian songs into salsa music. In 2011 he reached the final auditions of Big Brother Africa.
Vahe wrote the lyrics to his first song called Life Or Something Like It in 2010. This gave him the enthusiasm and courage to write more songs. In November 2012 Vahe released his first album titled Mixology. In May of 2013 Vahe released Yene Tizita, a new rendition of the an old Ethiopian style of song.
A graduate of the Vancouver University, Canada, Vahe began demonstrating a serious interest in music upon obtaining his bachelor’s degrees in biology. He commenced as a senior tenor in the choir “The Motley Singers”.
The young singer’s first song, “Life or Something Like it”, was released in 2010. In 2012, his single “Don’t Stop” won the third place in the Armenian Pulse Music Award.
Later the same year, he completed the disc “Mixology” which was released for free.
In 2013, the singer released the song Yene Tizita (Nostalgia or Memories), which was a reproduced version of an old Ethiopian prototype. Its director and producer are Aramazd Kalajian and Mulugeta Amaru.
For the past two years, Vahe has been the soloist of Zemen Band. He has collaborated with singers Zeritu Kebede and Michael Belayneh, and the Nubian Arc Band. The ethnic Armenian singer has also been a back vocalist and first concert performer for Abby Lakew, Nhatty, Tsedenya Gebremarkos, Eyob Mekonnen and Shewandagn Hailu. He has performed concerts with Oliver Mtukudzi and Vee and Liz Ogumbo during tours in Ethiopia.
Vahe has been a correspondent for the Ethiopia-based Zoma Magazine; he can freely expresses his thoughts in Armenian, English, Amharic, Italian and French.
The young singer now intends to release two more discs, of which one will be completely Armenian, while the other will feature the Ethiopian musical culture, at the same time presenting a mix of equivalent elements.
The Eurovision 2016 semifinals are due on May 19 and 21. The final concert will take place on May 23.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on May 14, 2015
At the beginning of March, a Requiem was offered for my parents and for the Sevadjian clan, and it transported me back 40 years to when I had last been to a service in the magnificent church of my childhood: the St. George Armenian Apostolic Church in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The church and the cross on its dome stood out against a perfect blue sky. I went in and lit a candle. The altar curtain was pulled across as it was Lent. I looked up at the azure ceiling and the chandeliers. Light was streaming through the stained glass windows into the chorister’s gallery. It was a moving and beautiful experience. The sonorous tones of Vartkes Nalbandian and the clear soprano of Salpi Nalbandian made me very emotional. It was not possible to have a full Badarak as Vartkes is a deacon, and there is no longer an Armenian priest in residence in Ethiopia.
I stood and listened and prayed. I thought of all the Yetovbahayer who had prayed in that church, who had made up the richest and most vibrant foreign community in Ethiopia, their numbers now dwindled to less than 100 souls. Philanthropists, industrialists, businessmen, talented men and women, and most of all, artisans, artisans, and more artisans. What a great number of them there were!
Boghos Markarian, who arrived in 1866 and supplied goods and arms to the courts of Emperor Yohannes and later Emperor Menelik II, was one of the first Armenians to settle in Ethiopia in modern times. By the late 1960’s, the Armenians numbered some 1,200.
There had been Armenians in Ethiopia long, long before then, as early as the 13th century, but a real community with significant numbers was only established in the early 1900’s when many left their ancestral homes in the Ottoman Empire and found a safe haven in Christian Ethiopia. Another wave of Armenians arrived in the 1920’s. Thereafter the numbers increased as people married, invited cousins and other relatives to join them from wherever they had ended up—mostly Syria and Lebanon—after the genocide.
The Armenians who settled in Ethiopia before the 1920’s, and those who arrived after 1945, were mostly well educated; they were doctors, dentists, chemists, architects, engineers, lawyers, and accountants. Many of those who arrived in the 1920’s as a direct consequence of the genocide were artisans; they were tailors, watchmakers, cobblers, and carpet makers. Thus in almost every trade, profession, and industry, there were Armenians in Addis Ababa. They had come from a very wide area of the Ottoman Empire and brought with them the special expertise of their hometowns.
Addis Ababa boasted a large number of remarkably skilled jewelers. One of the first was Dikran Ebeyan, who had arrived from Constantinople. He had the distinction of making the coronation crowns of Emperors Yohannes in 1881 and Menelik II in 1889.
Should you visit any jewelry shop in Addis Ababa today, you will see filigree work in gold and silver. This skill was introduced and taught to Ethiopian artisans by Armenian craftsmen.
A visit to the Armenian cemetery gives an idea of the origins of the three major waves of Armenian immigrants, mirroring the tragedies that befell their homeland: First came those from Constantinople, Aintab, Arapkir, Kharpert; then Adana and Van; then Marash, Sparta, and Smyrna.
It is difficult to overestimate the contribution that Armenians made in their 100 years in Ethiopia. Armenians moved with Emperor Menelik II from Harar to Addis Ababa and helped build a modern capital city. There is not enough space here to describe all their important and lasting contributions, in trade, industry, and government, but a few must be mentioned as they are truly exceptional.
Firstly, there were two great philanthropists whose legacies live on today. One was Mihran Mouradian, a merchant, who built the church that was consecrated in 1935. The other was Matig Kevorkoff, who in 1923 built a modern school to unite the two schools that had previously divided the community. Kevorkoff was a French citizen who grew up in Egypt and moved to Djibouti at the age of 29 to pursue a highly successful career as a merchant of tobacco and other commodities. During the fascist occupation of Ethiopia (1936-41), because of his French nationality, all of his assets were confiscated by the Italians as “enemy property.” Kevorkoff died in penury in Marseille in the early 1950’s.
Among a number of amusing stories of the arbitrary ways Armenians ended up in Ethiopia is that of the Darakdjians. Stepan Darakdjian left Kharpert in 1912 and made his way to Egypt, hoping to immigrate to America. A requirement for a visa to America was an examination for trachoma. While waiting to be seen by the eye doctor, he went to an Armenian cafe, where he fell into conversation with a man named Hovhannes Assadourian, who had just returned from Ethiopia. Assadourian said, “You are a tanner. Why go to America? Go to Ethiopia where they need shoes!” So Stepan Darakdjian made his way to Harar and set up a tannery in partnership with another Armenian called Karikian. Later on, his son, Mardiros, moved to Addis Ababa where he founded a modern tannery in Akaki and a shoe factory called Darmar (Darakdjian Mardiros). Later still, he branched out into many other businesses and became very wealthy. The factory and shops still exist with the old sign of a lion (which looks very much like the Metro Goldwyn Mayer one), but the shops are now called Ambassa (lion).
Two of the earliest settlers, Hovsep Behesnilian and Sarkis Terzian, made their fortunes by supplying arms to Emperor Menelik II during his 1896 war against the invading Italians. The Behesnilian name lives on in perhaps the largest and most successful conglomerate in Ethiopia, HAGBES, founded by Hovsep’s nephew, Hagop Behesnilian, still privately owned, and employing some 1,000 people.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on April 13, 2015
“In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” George Orwell
Some notes on the below video:
The St. George (Sourp Kevork) Armenian Apostolic Holy Orthodox Church of Addis Abeba was built in 1935, replacing a chapel that existed since 1923. According to the book, “Old tracks In the New Flower, a historical guide Addis Ababa”, the Archbishop Asanian came from the Constantinople (the present Istanbul) in person in 1928 to set the first stone this church, the construction of which was funded by the Armenian Mouradian in memory of his father, George. The founding ceremony was also attended by Empress Menen under a gilt, fringed umbrella, with Ras Tafari in a red cloak, and by the Ethiopian Echegue.
Before the construction of this church, Armenians traditionally often made use Ethiopian Orthodox churches for their weddings and funerals.
Armenians had an active community. A large slice of the economy was in their hands, bringing wealth both to themselves and their host country. The Djerrians, Garrbedians, Hagapians, Avakians, Pareginas, and others were famous in the city as educated and cultured families who owned shoe factories and cinemas, eyeglass and watch repair business, as well as many of the oldest buildings in Piazza where their shops were located. As importers, electricians, goldsmiths and technicians, the Armenians were useful productive citizens.
Armenian goldsmiths, traders and architects were invited to settle in Ethiopia more than 150 years ago by Emperor Johannes IV. Buoyed by the ties between Ethiopian and Armenian Orthodoxy, the community thrived.
After the Armenian Genocide in 1915, Haile Selassie, Ethiopia’s regent who later became Emperor, opened his arms to the Armenian people even wider, adopting 40 orphans as wards of court. In return, the Ethio-Armenians proved fiercely loyal.
One trader used his European connections to buy arms for Ethiopia’s resistance movement against the Italian occupation during World War II. Others ran an underground newspaper. Several gave their lives in service of their adopted homeland.
Pope Francis described the 1915 mass killings of Armenians by Turks as the “first genocide of the 20th century” on Sunday, touching off a diplomatic furor with Turkey and entering into a tense historical debate with wider implications for the Vatican’s relations with Islam.
Turkey, which has long rejected the term genocide to describe the killings, swiftly called its ambassador to the Vatican back to Ankara for consultations after the pope’s remarks. Turkey’s foreign ministry also summoned the Vatican’s envoy to Ankara, informing him that the government was “disappointed and saddened” by the pontiff’s comments, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency.
The pope, speaking at a mass in St. Peter’s Basilica to mark the 100 years since the killings, addressed the massacres in the context of the contemporary persecution of Christians in the Muslim world. That subject has become an increasingly pressing theme for Pope Francis—who, before becoming pontiff, had close ties to Buenos Aires’s overwhelmingly Christian Armenian community.
Even as he has continued to call for better relations between Catholicism and Islam, the pope has urged Muslim leaders to denounce the actions of extremists and pushed Christians of different churches to stand together in the face of anti-Christian violence.
The pope’s statement is a boost for Armenia’s decadeslong campaign to define the killings as genocide, as well as a setback for Turkey’s efforts to fend off the accusations of systematic killing.
A number of countries officially recognize the killings as genocide. But Turkey contests Armenian claims about the scale of losses; it argues that hundreds of thousands actually died in warfare and famine, and that many Turks were also killed by Armenians. Turkey argues that the question of genocide should be left to historians rather than politicians.
Pope Francis said Sunday that “it is necessary, and indeed a duty,” to “recall the centenary of that tragic event, that immense and senseless slaughter whose cruelty your forbears had to endure…Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it.”
Turkey accused the Vatican of using history for political aims: by singling out Armenians and not mentioning all lost lives in Anatolia during World War I. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the comments were “not fitting of the Pope.”
“The Pope’s declaration, divorced from historical and legal facts, is unacceptable. Religious posts are not positions to stoke hatred and grudges on baseless claims,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in a message from his official Twitter account.
It wasn’t the first time a pope has called the 1915 deaths genocide. Pope Francis, in referring to “the first genocide of the 20th century,” was quoting a 2001 common declaration by Pope John Paul II and Catholicos Karekin II, head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, who was also present at Sunday’s Mass, along with Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan.
Pope Francis went further than the 2001 declaration, calling the killing of Armenians one of “three massive and unprecedented tragedies” in the 20th century. “The remaining two were perpetrated by Nazism and Stalinism,” he said. The latter reference was to the 1932-33 man-made famine in Ukraine, part of Joseph Stalin’s effort to collectivize Soviet agriculture, which killed as many as 7.5 million people.
The pope also spoke of the 1915 killings in connection to recent attacks on Christians, with an impassioned reference to “so many of our defenseless brothers and sisters who, on account of their faith in Christ or their ethnic origin, are publicly and ruthlessly put to death—decapitated, crucified, burned alive—or forced to leave their homeland.”
The pope has become increasingly vocal about the persecution of Christians around the world, especially in Muslim-majority countries. He has called on Muslim leaders to denounce the actions of Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq. At a Good Friday ceremony on April 3, he deplored the world’s “complicit silence” about such persecution, including the previous day’s killings of nearly 150—many of them Christians—by a Somali insurgent group in Kenya.
In a separate written message to Armenians released by the Vatican on Sunday, the pope appeared to suggest that other leaders should join him in adopting the language of genocide: “All who are heads of state and of international organizations are called to oppose such crimes with a firm sense of duty, without ceding to ambiguity or compromise.”
A group of 40 members of Congress introduced a resolution to formally recognize the Armenian genocide in March, a move likely to strain U.S.-Turkish relations. Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), lead sponsor of the resolution, praised the pope’s remarks, saying he hoped they would “inspire our President and Congress to demonstrate a like commitment to speaking the truth about the Armenian genocide and to renounce Turkey’s campaign of concealment and denial.”
President Barack Obama pledged during his 2008 campaign that he would formally recognize the genocide though he hasn’t followed through. In remarks last year, Mr. Obama called the killings “one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century” without referring to them as genocide.
“Obama and other leaders will now face significant pressure,” said Henri Barkey, a former State Department official who currently teaches international relations at Lehigh University. “Until now, Turkey always tried to prevent Western recognition. The pope’s sermon is a serious crack.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on March 5, 2013
My note: Our forefathers were confident enough to answer it with YES! But the question whether Pope Pius XI was defender of Ethiopia — historical sources indicitae the contrary, that Pope Pius XI recognised Italian sovereignity over Ethiopia
For centuries, historians have widely accepted the argument that Armenia was the first Christian nation. This important claim has become a source of national pride for Armenians and has remained virtually undisputed for centuries — until now.
Armenians will likely be up at arms when they learn that a new book — “Abyssinian Christianity: The First Christian Nation?” — is challenging their claim, presenting the possibility that Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea) was the first Christian nation.
The Acts of the Apostles describes the baptism of an Ethiopian eunuch shortly after the death of Christ. Eusebius of Caesaria, the first church historian, further tells of how the eunuch returned to his land to diffuse the Christian teachings.
And the earliest Ethiopian monastic tradition is linked to the account of the Holy Family visiting Ethiopia, centuries before the Christian monastic movement emerged. According to the legend, the Child Jesus and the Virgin Mary were transported from Egypt on a silver cloud. Their arrival symbolized the renewal of the Covenant, which began when Menelich brought the Ark from Jerusalem to Ethiopia.
