IntroductionThe CROSS and the CRESCENT extends far beyond the factual account of a twenty-four-year-old Armenian executioner who emptied his Mauser into the body of the man who authored the Genocide of the Armenians. Although my account begins with a fatal shooting of a fugitive Turkish leader, my intentions were to express history as a scholarly historian of old portrayed the facts: with emotional purity and intensity.
The CROSS and the CRESCENT, in essence, is intended to transcend the unremarkable, as Jesus transcended Barabbas. It reaches far beyond the single but important incident of an executioner of a Turkish war criminal. It is the story of Armageddon prematurely bestowed upon the people of the first nation to adopt Christianity, in 301 A.D. It is a panoramic view of an Armenia in its former splendor thrust into its death throes by 20th century barbarians, militarists who exploited the deep religious feelings of their own citizens—Turks—through a diabolic plan of fear and hatred, distorting religious differences.
The history of Armenia is an important one. These ancient people, blessed with the wealth of territory beneath Mt. Ararat, unselfishly contributed to the development of a civilized world. Emerging from the birth canal of the Indo-Europeans, they were the pioneers of Alchemy, presented the “Queen Translation” of the Holy Bible, and numerous other important developments which historians have failed to document. They have been in the forefront in defending the Christian faith since the months following the Ascension of Jesus to the heavens, to take His Place beside His Father, God. A scripture borrowed by the late U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy expresses the reason why the Armenians, and the Jewish people, have suffered—not as victims—but as the chosen and selected peoples. Kennedy said, in effect, “To those God has given much, much is expected of them.”
The overall view of the Armenians, from ancient times to the present, is history written in blood. Unlike a sacrifice without reason, the Armenians defended the Cross; rather than surrender their faith, they chose to stand boldly against insurmountable odds to defend the faith; devoted stewards of the Dominion. A Dominion which was bestowed upon them at the Upper Room where Jesus directed Saint Bartholomew and Saint Thaddeus to travel to Armenia to introduce Christianity to the peoples whose sacred mountain lovingly held Noah’s Ark years before. Their first century ministry led to the inception of the Christian faith into that ancient nation. To this date, it remains the essence of the Armenian worldwide, the mainspring of close ties which permeate the family, an inner radiation which I refer to as the Armenian Spirit. It is a spirit that reaches beyond the nationality referred to as Armenian; rather, it is a blood-tie, a deep Christian love the ancient Greeks called “Agape.”
The story of the young Armenian patriot and executioner Soghomon Tehlirian, fascinating as it is, has deeper implications than the guilt or innocence of one lone man on trial for a fatal shooting. Here are the Crusades brought to the 20th century; the never-ending war of the spiritually right and the morally wrong. This was a life and death struggle, not between personalities, but between irreconcilable concepts of morality. Soghomon Tehlirian was symbolic of the Cross. Talaat Pasha, the murderer of a million-and-a-half innocent Christian men, women and children, represented the Turkish Islamic Crescent. It is difficult to realize that, in this the 20th century, the Turkish Ittihad Terraki Regime—the Young Turks—exploited the Turkish Moslems, and with unparalleled bestiality, attempted to annihilate the Christian Armenians in the Turkish Empire—within their own, ancient homeland of 4,000 years—and nearly succeeded before the eyes of the civilized world.
When the holocaust was over, 80 per cent of the Armenians within the Empire were dead (1,500,000); the 350,000 survivors driven from their homeland and that nation erased from the face of the earth, as though some catastrophic earthquake had suddenly devoured the men, women and children in their homes, villages and towns. Some 45 billion dollars of property was destroyed, 2,050 Armenian Apostolic churches, 203 monasteries, 127 Armenian Catholic priests, several hundred Armenian Gregorian (Apostolic) priests, and 57 nuns were lost; as well as countless Protestant churches and ministers were victimized. Only one prelate escaped the frenzied Turks; the others were killed in cold blood. Yet not only has Turkey, to this date, failed to right that wrong, she continues to deny her monumental crime.
Turkey’s former premier, Suat Urguplu (Inonu’s successor), while ambassador to the United States in 1963, called the 1915 Genocide “alleged massacres.” Ismet Inonu, who left the post of premier in February 1965, and who was responsible for the mass-murder of 250,000 Armenians, Greeks and many Jews, in 1919 and 1922, was a candidate for the 1965 Nobel Peace Prize. It is a shame that Turkey is the only country in history not to accept guilt for such a mass-criminal act; yet she was one of the first in the United Nations to sign the act outlawing Genocide. To date, despite mounds of documentation internationally, Turkey continues to deny the Genocide.
Twenty miles south of Madera, California, my birthplace, lies the city of Fresno and its environs, with its sunny vineyards, orchards and farms, which support a population of many ethnic groups. The Americans of Armenia vintage among them number some 40,000, making it one of the largest communities of this warm-hearted, industrious people in the United States.
Avak Zakar Avakian, my father, was a fearless man of vision, with an acute sense of the heritage and destiny of his people. He held a deep love and respect for an America that had given him and his fellow Armenians refuge. He was a proud American. He was a dedicated father, husband and community leader. But he had a burning love within that fueled his dedication for a lifetime for the re-establishment of a free, democratic nation of Armenia. It was natural, therefore, that his circle of friends and associates would be worldwide, including most organizations and prominent individuals who shared his beliefs and aspirations.
Inevitably his path crossed that of Soghomon Tehlirian, and in the course of their years of corresponding and the time they spent together, their friendship grew and ripened to warm intimacy. My recollections are deeply etched with the inspiring memory of countless discussions with or about Tehlirian, held in the old-fashioned parlor of our home at 422 South Fulton Street in Fresno by representatives of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation and my father, who was a founding officer of the Pacific Coast Council of the A.R.F., and instrumental in forming regional offices throughout the United States, and a key official in the International Congress.
As the years unfolded I learned the facts behind the importance of Armenia in history, shared with me by my father, mother, grandparents, brothers, sisters, political leaders, military leaders, and officials, including members of the clergy that frequented our home. Eventually I came to know and revere the man who was referred to as “The Avenger”—the man who executed Talaat Pasha, the Turkish author of Genocide who, in 1915, boasted, “I shall strike the Armenians such a blow that it will take them fifty years to recover—if they ever do.”
April 24, 1989 marks the 74th Memorial of the 1915 Turkish Genocide, the loss of one-and-a-half million men, women and children, and subsequent loss of their homeland; victims of Talaat’s reign of terror. Although the term “Genocide” was not coined until 1944, its grim meaning was known to the Armenians at the turn of the century.
From the wealth of innumerable anecdotes, captured Turkish, German and Soviet documents and communications, interviews with eyewitnesses, and first hand knowledge, this book has been painstakingly written.
Here is the story of Armenia, the cradle of civilization, where existed the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Ark upon Armenia’s sacred Mt. Ararat; bludgeoned to death at the hands of the modern barbarians, the Turks, as told through the eyes of Soghomon Tehlirian. Although the vivid contents of this true story may prove embarrassing to the Turks, its true purpose is to show how, in this the 20th century, the first Christian nation was made extinct by the century’s first act of Genocide. Carried out by a plan so diabolical that it not only destroyed the most productive citizens of the Empire but victimized the average Turk by robbing them of the wealth of their Armenian neighbors. If the world had tried and punished the Turkish war criminals for their crimes against Humanity, would there have been a second Genocide in Hitler’s Germany and throughout Europe?
It is this author’s wish that this “carefully forgotten” story takes its proper place in history and contributes to a world that is free from such heinous criminal acts. And perhaps, in some way, reach the modern Turkish people, especially the young, many who fought along me in Korea, and influence positively the need to accept their nation’s past error, as have the modern Germans with the Jewish Holocaust, and break the yoke of guilt visited upon the sons and daughters, and grandsons and granddaughters of the perpetrators of the 1915 Genocide. Inasmuch, putting to an end to the vicious cycle of misinformation and guilt that must breed itself in modern Turkey under those circumstances. It is then—and only then—that we, as human beings, can rise above the nature of the beast and evolve into a world that God has blessed; a world that places emphasis on caring, and sharing, for the benefit of all—a truly civilized planet, despite differences in ideology and religious beliefs.
