The historical and political importance of what is called the Armenian genocide escapes the general public. Because it is considered as a massacre perpetrated against a small people in a very small geographical perimeter and because it happened in the chronologically distant context of the First World War. But on closer inspection, the fact that the new millennium began under the sign of the long wave of the 2001th century genocides, the first of which was the one against the Armenians, cannot be overlooked. The terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda against the twin towers in XNUMX, those perpetrated in Europe and the war of the Islamic State in the Middle East bear an anti-Christian and anti-Semitic mark. The shadow of the genocides of the twentieth century falls on the twenty-first century.
The anger of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Ergdogan against Emmanuel Macron when the French President decided two years ago to establish a memorial day for the Armenian genocide and that - in recent weeks - against US President Joe Biden for a similar reason, are not alone outbursts of anger at the fact that the myths of the Turkish nation and the work of its founding fathers are being denounced and questioned a hundred years ago. The reality is that the Armenian genocide was an integral and fundamental part of a broader project of ethnic-religious purification that had its peak a hundred years ago but which is experiencing a resurgence in recent decades. Erdogan's anger on the issue of the Armenian genocide is coupled with the recent appeal addressed to the Islamic world by the Turkish autocrat to unite against "Israel, a terrorist and iniquitous state that attacks Muslims", an appeal that brings water to the mill of those intends to cancel the Jewish presence from the Near East. While the Islamic State wants to brutally eliminate the presence of Christians from the Middle East, Erdogan is determined to become - by applying an ambiguous and oscillating policy made up of variable geometry alliances - the sultan of a new Ottoman Empire. What future is there for Christians and Jews in a Middle East put to death by Islamic terrorism and an acute war resurgence? The question is not rhetorical but pertinent. For decades Israel has been threatened in its very existence and in recent weeks the conflict in Palestine is experiencing a new military escalation. For decades, millions of Christians of the Middle East (cradle not only of Judaism but of apostolic Christianity and of the first councils) have been forced to flee their secular land because the coexistence between peoples of the three monotheistic religions lasted for centuries despite periods of more or less crisis profound appears to be increasingly compromised today.
The historical studies that have deepened the Armenian question throw a useful light to understand what is happening today before our eyes at the gates of Europe: in Syria, in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Turkey ... On the fact that the massacre of one million and half of Armenians was a genocide planned by the nationalist government of the Young Turks made clear already in 1918 the detailed Diary of the American ambassador to Constantinople Henry Morgenthau. “The Young Turks admired the Muslim conquerors who had brought down the Byzantine Empire in the XNUMXth century - notes Morgenthau -. But they thought that those great warriors had made a fatal mistake because, having the possibility of annihilating the Christian populations, they had not done so. A terrible mistake which could now be remedied. They would then have exterminated all Christians and mixed the blood of Armenian women with that of warriors and the Turkish population, which would have had a eugenic effect ”. It should be noted that Morgenthau already documents how the systematic persecutions and deportations did not affect only the Armenians but also "the Greeks of Pontus and Smyrna (Christians, like the Armenians)". And how the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II gave carte blanche and its useful advice to the Young Turks for the organization of the extermination. Recent studies by the Turkish historian Taner Akcam - sentenced in 1976 to ten years in prison by the Turkish government for insulting the state and fled to the USA - confirm unquestionably what Morgenthau had documented in his diary: namely that it was a planned genocide . Taner Akcam closes the deal with Turkish denial, proving definitively the authenticity of the telegrams of the leader of the Young Turks Talat Pasha ordering the cancellation of the Armenian people. But the Armenian genocide is not a single massacre but the pinnacle of a broader and more organized plan over decades. This is demonstrated by a weighty essay written by Israeli historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze'Evi, both professors at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev which has an emblematic title “The Thirty Years Genocide. The suppression of Christian minorities in Turkey ”. By systematically sifting through historical and diplomatic documents from 1894 to 1924, the two Israeli researchers reveal the hidden face of a design that was to lead to the creation of a new ethnically homogeneous and religiously Islamic Turkish nation state. The massacres perpetrated under different governments (from the Sultanate of Abdülhamid II, to the Young Turks up to Atatürk's rise to power) over several decades were linked together by an identical goal: that of eliminating the Christian component of the population present from centuries in the former empire of Constantinople and Trebizond as well as in Armenia. Over two million people – including Armenians, Greeks, Syriacs and Aramaics – were victims of this plan of ethnic purification, the two historians affirm, a plan that has never been dormant if one thinks of the pogroms against the Greeks in Istanbul in 1956.
As we can see, the Armenian genocide was not an isolated massacre perpetrated in the distant past - a massacre now without repercussions on our present -. Recognizing it and denouncing it as genocide, as the new President of the United States and in recent years many European countries have done (in Switzerland there has been recognition at the parliamentary but not the governmental level), has a relevant geopolitical significance for the international community, which it can help to act as a barrier to the return of new empires and new barbarities at the beginning of the millennium. A resurgence made up of terrorist attacks in Europe, conflicts and bloody wars in the Near East but also of systematic persecutions on an ethnic and religious basis in Africa and Asia (from Pakistan and India to Myanmar, to Chinese Xinjang).
