Armenia, the first Christian nation in the
world, and the first genocide in the 20th century
Edited
by Julio
Severo
 |
| Armenia |
Armenia
was the first nation to become Christian during the Roman era.
According
to ancient tradition, Noah’s Ark rested on Mount Ararat in the Armenian
Mountain Range.
Armenia’s
Coat of Arms has Mount Ararat with Noah's Ark on top.
Armenian
historian Movses Khorenatsi (410-490 AD) recounted the tradition that Noah’s
son Japheth had a descendant named Hayk who shot an arrow in a battle near Lake
Van c.2,500 BC killing Nimrod, builder of the Tower of Babel who was the first
powerful tyrant of the ancient world.
Hayk
is the origin of “Hayastan,” the Armenian name for Armenia.
Ancient
Armenians may have had some relations with the Hittites and Hurrians, who
inhabited that area known as Anatolia in the 2nd millennium BC.
Armenia’s
major city of Yerevan, founded in 782 BC in the shadow of Mount Ararat, is one
of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.
Armenia
was first mentioned by name in 520 BC by Darius the Great of Persia.
Borders
reached their greatest extent under Armenia's King Tigrane the Great, 95-55 BC,
reaching from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, pushing back the
Parthians, Seleucids and the Roman Republic.
Armenia
was the first nation in the world to officially adopt Christianity as its state
religion around 301 AD, with the conversion of King Tiridates III.
Armenia’s
thousands of years of history include independence interspersed by occupations
of Greeks, Romans, Persians, Byzantines, Mongols, Arabs, Ottoman Turks, and Soviets.
Armenia’s
medieval capital of Ani was called “the city of a 1,001 churches,” with a
population of 200,000, rivaling Constantinople, Baghdad and Damascus.
In
1064, Sultan Alp Arslan and Muslim Turks invaded and destroyed the city of Ani.
Arab historian Sibt ibn al-Jawzi recorded:
“The army
entered the city, massacred its inhabitants, pillaged and burned it, leaving it
in ruins… Dead bodies were so many that they blocked the streets; one could not
go anywhere without stepping over them. And the number of prisoners was not
less than 50,000 souls… I was determined to enter city and see the destruction
with my own eyes. I tried to find a street in which I would not have to walk
over the corpses, but that was impossible.”
Muslim
Turks made conquered Christians, Jewish, and non-Muslim populations into
second-class citizens called “dhimmi” and required them to ransom their lives
once a year by paying an exorbitant “jizyah” tax.
Sultan
Murat I (1359-1389) began the practice of “devshirme” — taking boys from the
conquered Armenian and Greek families.
These
innocent Christian boys were systematically traumatized and indoctrinated into
becoming ferocious Muslim warriors called “Janissaries,” similar to Egypt’s
“Mamluk” slave soldiers.
Janissaries
were forced to call the Sultan their father and were forbidden to marry, giving
rise to depraved practices and the abhorrent pederasty of the Turks.
For
centuries Turks conquered throughout the Mediterranean, Middle East, Eastern
Europe, Spain and North Africa, carrying tens of thousands into slavery.
Beginning
in the early 1800s, the Turkish Ottoman Empire began to decline. Greece,
Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania won their independence.
When Armenia’s sentiments leaned
toward independence, Sultan Abdul Hamid put an end to it by massacring 100,000
Armenian Christians in the 1890s.
President
Grover Cleveland told Congress, December 2, 1895:
“Occurrences
in Turkey have continued to excite concern... Massacres of Christians in
Armenia and the development... of a spirit of fanatic hostility to Christian
influences...have lately shocked civilization.”
President
Grover Cleveland told Congress, December 7, 1896:
“Disturbed
condition in Asiatic Turkey... rage of mad bigotry and cruel fanaticism...
wanton destruction of homes and the bloody butchery of men, women, and
children, made martyrs to their profession of Christian faith… Outbreaks of
blind fury which lead to murder and pillage in Turkey occur suddenly and
without notice…”
President
Theodore Roosevelt described to Congress, December 6, 1904:
“…systematic
and long-extended cruelty and oppression...of which the Armenians have been the
victims, and which have won for them the indignant pity of the civilized
world.”
When Sultan
Abdul Hamid II was deposed in 1908, there was a brief euphoria, with citizens
naively hoping that Turkey would have a constitutional government.
The
government was taken over by the “Young Turks,” led by three leaders or
"pashas": Mehmed Talaat Pasha, Ismail Enver Pasha, and Ahmed Djemal
Pasha.
They appeared as if they were
planning to enact democratic reforms while they were clandestinely implementing
a genocidal plan to rid the land of all who were not Muslims Turks.
The
first step involved recruiting all the Armenian young men into the military.
Next they made them “non-combatant” soldiers and took away their weapons.
Finally,
they marched them into the woods and deserts where they were ambushed and
massacred.
With
the Armenian young men gone, Armenian cities and villages were defenseless.
Nearly 2 million old men, women and children were marched into the desert,
thrown off cliffs or burnt alive.
Entire
Armenian communities were deported to the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia
where hundreds of thousands were killed or starved to death.
Russia
came to Armenia’s aid against Turkey, because the Russian czar was the
protector of the Christian Armenians, but then the strength of the czar and his
armies was being depleted by Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution, which eventually
took over Russia and murdered the czar and his family. This is how a communist
revolution brought persecution to Russian Christians and hindered them from
helping Armenian Christians.
Theodore
Roosevelt wrote in Fear God and Take Your Own Part (1916):
“Armenians,
who for some centuries have sedulously avoided militarism and war… are so
suffering precisely and exactly because they have been pacifists whereas their
neighbors, the Turks, have… been… militarists… During the last year and a half…
Armenians have been subjected to wrongs far greater than any that have been
committed since the close of the Napoleonic Wars… Fearful atrocities… Serbia is
at this moment passing under the harrow of torture and mortal anguish…”
Theodore
Roosevelt continued:
“Armenians
have been butchered under circumstances of murder and torture and rape that
would have appealed to an old-time Apache Indian… Wholesale slaughter of the
Armenians… The crowning outrage has been committed by the Turks on the
Armenians… I trust that all Americans worthy of the name feel their deepest
indignation and keenest sympathy aroused by the dreadful Armenian atrocities.”
Historian
Arnold Toynbee wrote:
“The Turks
draft the criminals from their prisons into the Gendarmeri to exterminate the
Armenian race… In 1913 the Turkish Army was engaged in exterminating the
Albanians… Greeks and Slavs left in the territory… The same campaign of
extermination has been waged against the Nestorian Christians on the Persian
frontier… In Syria there is a reign of terror…”
Toynbee
continued:
“Turkish rule…
is… slaughtering or driving from their homes, the Christian population… Only a
third of the two million Armenians in Turkey have survived, and that at the
price of apostatizing to Islam or else of leaving all they had and fleeing
across the frontier…”
President
Woodrow Wilson, addressed Congress, May 24, 1920:
“The Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations has established the truth of the reported
massacres and other atrocities from which the Armenian people have suffered…
deplorable conditions of insecurity, starvation, and misery now prevalent in
Armenia… Sympathy for Armenia among our people has sprung from untainted
consciences, pure Christian faith and an earnest desire to see Christian people
everywhere succored in their time of suffering.”
Perhaps
the most astonishing testimony about the Armenian genocide was told by Demos
Shakarian (1913–1993), who was an American Christian businessman of Armenian
origin, based in Los Angeles, and who founded the Full Gospel Business Men’s
Fellowship International (FGBMFI), a Christian organization to bring the Gospel
to businessmen.
Demos
was named after his grandfather, who left Armenia for America due to the 1855
prophecy of the Russian “Boy Prophet,” Efim Gerasemovitch Klubniken, that an
unspeakable tragedy was to soon come upon Armenia. His grandfather and Efim
were part of a large group of Pentecostal Christian Armenians who moved to Los
Angeles years before the Azusa Street Revival.
Efim’s
family was Russian and they were the first Pentecostal Russians to move to
Armenia. From earliest childhood Efim had shown a gift for prayer, frequently
going on long fasts, praying around the clock.
In
the 1850s, when the illiterate Efim was eleven years old, he had heard the Lord
calling him again to one of his prayer vigils. This time he persisted for seven
days and nights, and during this time received a vision.
But
what Efim was able to do during those seven days was not so easy to explain.
Efim
could neither read nor write. Yet, as he sat in the little stone cottage, he
saw before him a vision of charts and a message in a beautiful handwriting.
Efim asked for pen and paper. And for seven days sitting at the rough
plank-table where the family ate, he laboriously copied down the form and shape
of letters and diagrams that passed before his eyes.
When he had finished, the
manuscript was taken to people in the village who could read. It turned out
that this illiterate child had written out in Russian characters a series of instructions
and warnings. At some unspecified time in the future, the boy wrote, every
Christian in Armenia would be in terrible danger. He foretold a time of
unspeakable tragedy for Armenia, when hundreds of thousands of men, women, and
children would be brutally murdered. The time would come, he warned, when
everyone in the region must flee. They must go to a land across the sea.
Although
he had never seen a geography book, the Boy Prophet drew a map showing exactly
where the fleeing Christians were to go. To the amazement of the adults, he
drew the Atlantic Ocean! There was no doubt about it, nor about the identity of
the land on the other side: the map plainly indicated the east coast of the
United States of America.
Many
Armenian Christians were not convinced that the prophetic message was not
genuine.
And
then, a little after the turn of the century, Efim announced that the time was
near for the fulfilment of the words he had written down nearly fifty years
before. He said, “We must flee to
America. All who remain here will perish.”
Armenian
Pentecostal families packed up and left the holdings that had been their
ancestral possessions time out of mind. Efim and his family were among the
first to go. As each group of Pentecostals left Armenia, they were jeered by
those who remained behind. Skeptical and disbelieving folk — including many
Christians — refused to believe that God could issue pinpoint instructions for
modern people in a modern age.
But the instructions proved
correct. In 1914 a period of unimaginable horror arrived for Armenia. With
remorseless efficiency the Turks began the bloody business of driving
two-thirds of the population out into the Mesopotamian desert. Over a million
men, women and children died in these death marches. Another half a million
were massacred in their villages, in a pogrom that was later to provide Hitler
his blueprint for the extermination of the Jews. “The world did not intervene
when Turkey wiped out the Armenians,” Hitler reminded his followers. “It will
not intervene now.”
The
few Armenians who managed to escape the besieged areas brought with them tales
of great heroism. They reported that the Turks sometimes gave Christians an
opportunity to deny their faith in exchange for their lives. The favorite
procedure was to lock a group of Christians in a barn and set it afire: “If you
are willing to accept Mohammed in place of Christ we’ll open the doors.” Time
and again, the Christians chose to die, chanting hymns of praise as the flames
engulfed them.
Yet,
those who had heeded the prophecy of the Russian boy headed to Los Angeles,
U.S. and were saved.
With information from American
Minute and The Happiest People on Earth, by Demos Shakarian.
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