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Armenia, 100 Years Later (Richard Hancock, USA, 04/02/16 6:03 am)

The April 2016 National Geographic has a melancholy article, "Ghost Lands: A century-old slaughter still haunts Turkey and Armenia," by Paul Salopek. This is part five of his series "Out of Eden Walk," a 21,000-mile trek through areas "where long-ago events are a source of present-day tensions." Salopek states that "500,000 to 1.5 million Armenians were killed or displaced out of Turkey, Syria, Azerbaijan, Russia, Georgia and Iraq."

Salopek speaks of walking past "derelict Armenian farm houses... Christian churches converted to mosques." All of this caused by the Ottoman Empire's 1915 effort to eliminate the Armenian population within its borders. The article includes a two-page picture of the abandoned Saint Garabed Church in eastern Turkey.

Salopek comments on the fact that the Armenia-Turkey border was sealed by Turkey in 1993 out of sympathy with Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh war. It remains totally sealed by the Russian Army as part of a mutual defense pact between Armenia and Russia. "This is how Moscow maintains influence in this strategic region." No transportation passes this border, which Salopek describes as the edge of "an immense gulf of loneliness."

I think that the most significant question in the article was, "When does a genocide officially end? At which point is the act of mass annihilation complete--finished, documented, resolved?"

JE comments: During the Centennial time of the first "modern" genocide, another significant question is: when will Turkey finally acknowledge its guilt?

Here's the link to Salopek's article.  And in typical NG fashion, the photos alone are worth a visit:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/04/armenia-massacre-turkey-kurds-history/

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