ARMENIANS within the UK marked the 109th anniversary of the Armenian genocide last month with calls for its formal recognition and warnings about current threats to their country’s sovereignty.
To coincide with the anniversary, a bunch of church leaders wrote to the Prime Minister and urged the Government to recognise the Armenian genocide formally. The group was led by the Armenian Primate within the UK and Ireland, Bishop Hovakim Manukyan, and included the previous Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams.
They wrote: “An act of recognition wouldn’t only honour the memory of those that suffered and affirm justice but would also reaffirm the UK’s commitment to upholding human rights. Recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the UK would also send a transparent message to Turkey and Azerbaijan to stop their aggression against Armenia.”
The letter refers back to the recent military incursion into the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which forced the 120,000 ethnic Armenians who lived there to flee (News, 22 September 2023). During his recent visit to Armenia, Archbishop Welby met refugees from the realm, which is often known as Artsakh by Armenians (News, 13 October 2023).
Other signatories to the letter included the Bishop of Southwark, the Rt Revd Christopher Chessun; the Bishop of Manchester, Dr David Walker; and the Dean of Windsor, Dr Christopher Cocksworth, with the final secretaries of Churches Together in England, and Churches Together in Britain and Ireland.
Also to mark the anniversary, parliamentarians representing the predominant political parties joined Bishop Manukyan and the Armenian ambassador to the UK, Varuzhan Nersesyan, at a wreath-laying ceremony on the Cenotaph.
The chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Armenia, the Conservative MP Tim Loughton, made a speech reiterating his call on the Government to recognise the Armenian genocide formally. Mr Loughton is the sponsor of a Private Member’s Bill that will enshrine recognition of the genocide.
Andre Vartanian, a member of the Armenian National Committee of the UK, which organised the event, said that it was “undisputed” that as many as 1.5 million Armenians had been killed in a “premeditated and systematic” way by the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1918. It was, he said “inexplicable” that the UK still didn’t formally recognise the events as a genocide, which left it out of step France, the United States, and other countries.
On a visit to the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan last October (News, 13 October 2023), the Archbishop of Canterbury told the Church Times: “It’s a reminder of the extremes of human hatred and cruelty, and calls us to do not forget that, when hatred is allowed in any solution to grow, it flourishes easily in societies that appear civilised.”
“I DID not learn concerning the genocide from books; I learnt about it from my great-grandmother,” Bishop Manukyan said in his speech on the Cenotaph explaining how the genocide and its recognition had great personal, in addition to political, importance.
Annette Moskofian, who chairs the Armenian National Committee, said that, for so long as Turkey denied the genocide, Armenians would never have justice. Her grandmother had told her harrowing stories of the things that she witnessed while escaping the massacres. “We can only pay respect to their memories when there’s justice.”
The genocide of 1915, and persecution in earlier many years, meant that ethnic Armenians were scattered all over the world. Hrach Boghosian is now in his seventies, and got here to the UK from Iraq when he was 28. He was born in Iraq, a rustic to which his grandparents had escaped in the course of the genocide.
For Mr Boghosian and lots of other members of the Armenian diaspora, the Church plays a central part in community life. “The Church is just not only a worshipping place: the Church for us is a national community. We meet one another, we seek advice from one another . . . it’s a spot where we feel ourselves Armenian,” he said
Chris and Matthew, each of whom were born within the UK, but whose families come from Armenia, attend services on the Armenian churches in London, and spoke warmly of the part that churches play within the Armenian community.
“The Church is the one bastion of Armenianness that each one Armenians can come to and feel a connection to their homeland,” Chris said. The teenage Matthew agreed: “It’s the centre of the community.”
This applied even for individuals who weren’t particularly religious, Matthew said, although the cross around his neck, and the rosary between his fingers, suggested that he was not in that category.
Mr Vartanian put the connection in a historical context: “Christianity and Armenianness are inextricably linked: you can not separate them, and we now have suffered centuries of persecution precisely due to our Christian faith.”
Ancient churches and Christian burial grounds were under threat, especially in Nagorno-Karabakh, he said, which risked a “cultural genocide” within the twenty first century. “Within regions ‘cleansed’ of Armenians lie a few of the oldest Christian heritage on the planet,” he said, an assessment which may also apply to Jerusalem, where a part of the historic Armenian Quarter is currently the topic of competing legal claims (News, 12 April).
An Armenian man, Gegham, suggested that persecution for his or her Christian faith, in addition to the genocide, “unifies Armenians. Every person has someone of their family who’s connected to genocide.”
Sonik, one other Armenian, in her seventies, said: “It’s on our skin.”
LATER within the afternoon, the younger, louder voices of the Armenian community were in evidence in an indication outside the Turkish embassy in Belgravia.
Members of the Armenian Youth Federation — an affiliate of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, a political party — led the chanting and placard-waving across the road from the embassy, where 4 or five counter-protesters had gathered. One woman was draped within the Turkish flag, keeping her back to the Armenians in order that they’d a full view of the star and cresent moon on a blood-red background.
Araz, in her early twenties, and Alex, in his late teens, were each born within the UK into Armenian families, and are pleased with their identity.
Araz spoke passionately concerning the current situation in and around Armenia, including an ongoing campaign to reverse the federal government’s decision to cede a portion of land on the Azerbaijani border as a way to secure a peace deal.
The residents of the villages within the land being transferred are protesting against the move, and the Bishop of the region has been on the forefront of the campaign, strengthening the Church’s status for being within the vanguard for efforts to preserve historic Armenia.
“We’re scattered everywhere in the world, due to massacres,” Bishop Manukyan said on Wednesday, referring to the genocide, but in addition mentioning that those displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh last yr were also now displaced, mostly inside Armenia.
Soon, the occupants of the border villages could be the latest Armenians to be scattered, even though it is unlikely that any of them, within the short term a minimum of, will find yourself going so far as Mariana’s family, who were a part of the Armenian community in Argentina.
Growing up in Buenos Aires, Mariana said, her relationship together with her Armenian identity was not all the time easy. She recalled being frustrated at having to cross the town to attend an Armenian school reasonably than go to classes together with her friends from the neighbourhood.
One morning, overwhelmed by frustration, she shouted: “I don’t need to be Armenian any more!” in earshot of her grandfather, who had been orphaned within the genocide. “It was the one time I ever saw him cry.”
As with many within the Armenian diaspora, the land to which Mariana traces her ancestry is just not inside the borders of the modern-day state of Armenia, but in Turkey.
With two of her brothers, she travelled to where her grandmother had lived. A person whom they met by a well within the village took them to the ruins of the Armenian church that had once stood there.
“There were aubergines and tomatoes growing there within the churchyard, but we could make out the altar fabricated from marble, and the partitions.
“It was a very spiritual moment, pondering of all that my grandparents had lost. We felt that this was where we belonged — the smells, the noises, all reminded us of our grandparents.”
The Turkish man who had brought them to the location lamented the “war”, which had led to the departure of the Armenians: a characterisation of the genocide which stays the official version of events in Turkey.
He offered her a bit of stone from the church where her grandmother had been baptised. “I felt: ‘You’re giving it to me as if it belongs to you, but — bloody hell! — it doesn’t belong to you!’”
Recognition of the genocide was vital, Mariana said, because for a people’s trauma to go unrecognised not only denied the truth of the trauma, but of the individuals who suffered it. “We feel we don’t exist.”
Turkey’s denial of responsibility adds one other dimension to the pain: “Its like any person’s been raped, and never only are they not believed, but they’re accused of being a troublemaker.”
THE counter-protesters beside the door of the embassy left shortly before 7 p.m. As they walked away, several made a hand gesture — with index and little finger raised — related to the Grey Wolves, a far-Right political movement promoting Turkish ultranationalism.
The provocation was met with jeers from the Armenians, but soon after, on the scheduled time, they began to finish the demonstration. Araz made a defiant speech, before Fr Shnork Bagdasarian, the pastor at St Sarkis’s Armenian Church, in Kensington, led the group in prayers.
Everyone knew the words to the Lord’s Prayer in Armenian. Afterwards, they sang their country’s national anthem, a rousing hymn to liberty, not unlike “La Marseillaise”, and typically accompanied by cymbals. Sung a cappella on the roadside, with voices hoarse from hours of chanting, it took on a plaintive tone.
