Armenia without Armenians

Who remembers this phrase nowadays, “Armenia without Armenians,” or “Hayasdan arantz hayeroo”?

That was Ottoman policy — whether through forced conversions to Islam and subsequent Kurdification or Turkification, outright massacres, kidnapping of boys and girls or the creation of unbearable economic burdens by over-taxing Armenians and pillaging the settled population.

There’s a whole book that cites example after example of the Kurdification and Turkification, and that’s just pre-Genocide. That process is ongoing as demonstrated during the first decade of this century when crypto-Armenians started “coming out” in “modern” Turkey!

The massacre category obviously needs no further explanation. Neither does the kidnapping one. It’s obvious what happens to a three-year-old when taken from one home and raised in another.

The most devilish technique for de-Armenianizing the Armenian Highlands was the economic one. With the Ottoman Empire decaying and in desperate need of funds, a tax farming system was put in place. Anyone who could assemble the funds to buy the right to tax a certain geographic area paid the central government and was free to extort whatever he could from that area’s peasantry — again, most often the Armenians. This led to impoverishment, and families sent sons to remote cities to work as laborers (who became known as “bantoukhd”) and save their ancestral property from the greedy tax collectors. Couple the taxation with the losses to nomads empowered to steal livestock, grain or other reserves, and you can imagine the desperate conditions our ancestors found themselves in. Between the sons’ departures and the loss of home and hearth, there was a slow but steady outflow of Armenians from our homeland — just what the Ottoman authorities wanted.

Here it’s appropriate to share a story from Roupen Der Minassian’s memoirs. If memory serves, the year was 1905. The persecution and repression of Armenians was at an all-time high where Roupen and Kevork Chavoush operated. Something had to be done, so they hatched a plot and started a rumor that spread like wildfire. The story went, the Russians had promised land to any Armenian who made it to the border. People believed it, packed up their belongings and headed for the Russo-Turkish border. While de-Armenianization was the Turkish authorities’ aim, they couldn’t afford it to occur instantaneously, because the local economy would collapse without Armenians as its backbone. The pressure on Armenians was reduced and a respite secured for the people.  

So far we’ve only covered Armenian extirpation from the western end of our country.

The process, or its attempts, were afoot on the eastern end, too. The 1905 Armeno-Tatar (as Azeris were called back then before the creation of the artifice now named Azerbaijan) clashes were an early indicator. Recall that some of the great pan-Turkists of the 19th and 20th centuries hailed from the territory now called Azerbaijan. In 1920, the Tatars committed the Shushi pogroms. With Sovietization and its attendant “brotherhood among peoples” came the extirpation of Armenians not only from the plains of Artsakh but also Nakhichevan. The Sumgait and Baku massacres of the 1980s-90s cleared the rest of the Azerbaijani SSR of Armenians. All that remained was towering Artsakh, and that thorn in Baku’s side was removed a little over a year ago.

Any fool can see the centuries-long de-Armenianization of our homeland at the hands of assorted Turkish (Azeris included) murderous leaders. International leaders must be called to account for overlooking and condoning this process.

But, more importantly, we must act. This is where the Roupen/Kevork example comes in. We need inspired, clever, powerful ideas for courses of action that can circumvent the power imbalance currently in place between Yerevan and the Diaspora on one side and Ankara and Baku on the other.

Do you have such an idea? Put it out for our nation to see.

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Garen Yegparian

Asbarez Columnist

Garen Yegparian is a fat, bald guy who has too much to say and do for his own good. So, you know he loves mouthing off weekly about anything he damn well pleases to write about that he can remotely tie in to things Armenian. He's got a checkered past: principal of an Armenian school, project manager on a housing development, ANC-WR Executive Director, AYF Field worker (again on the left coast), Operations Director for a telecom startup, and a City of LA employee most recently (in three different departments so far). Plus, he's got delusions of breaking into electoral politics, meanwhile participating in other aspects of it and making sure to stay in trouble. His is a weekly column that appears originally in Asbarez, but has been republished to the Armenian Weekly for many years.

Latest posts by Garen Yegparian (see all)

• O.E. + R.o.T. = Continuity - November 20, 2024
• Armenia without Armenians - November 12, 2024
• Two rays of hope - October 8, 2024