the other taboo of the Armenian genocide

PUBLIC SENATE – LCP AN – DOCUMENTARY – TUESDAY, MAY 25, 8:30 p.m.

His name was Mehmet Celal Bey (1863-1926). He earned a nickname: “the Turkish Schindler”. But it is to another “Righteous” that this high Ottoman official could be compared: Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, who saved thirty thousand people (of whom 10,000 were Jews) during the debacle in June 1940 Without referring to Lisbon, then neutral.

Celal Bey saved some 6,000 Armenians in 1915, when, governor of Konya – where he was transferred for disobedience – he refused to carry out the deportations ordered by Istanbul. “He said” I am the State and the State must protect the weak “, reports his great-grandson Kemal Ceyhan. And that is why throughout his life he tried to protect the weak, regardless of their background, class or religion. “

With his documentary The Righteous Turks, too long a silence, Romain Fleury, himself a descendant of Armenians who escaped the genocide of 1915, went with his co-director Laurence D’Hondt to meet these unjustly forgotten Righteous, high officials or common people who refused the orders of the Sublime Porte. At peril and often at the cost of their own lives. “Everything our family has gone through remains a trauma”, said in the documentary the descendant of one of them, whose life was saved by the rest of the family only to neighbors who “Sent to Istanbul on donkeys” to escape the executioners.

“An incitement not to hate”

The parallel with the fate of the Armenians is striking. However, in Armenia too, the taboo is difficult to break. Many families saved by the Turks relativize, even contest the humanity that the latter would have shown. So this Armenian barber, summoned by the mayor of his city to repair the damage done to his face by his Turkish barber, and who thanked him by having his house inscribed that the executors had to spare him – him and his wife, but not the neighbors and cousins ​​who came to take refuge there …

The passage through Turkey is the most striking part of the documentary. It shows the inanity of the denial erected as a dogma of this genocide which claimed 1.2 million to 1.5 million victims during the summer of 1915 – two thirds of the Armenian population under Ottoman sovereignty -, and whose only evocation may be worth jail time. “There can be no genocide without the Righteous”, said the calm voice of Romain Fleury. In the heart of Anatolia, where he carried his cameras, “The place names [“la tombe du sous-préfet”, “la vallée du massacre”, “la rivière des morts”…] speak louder than ideology and lies ”. Here the genocide “Remains like a ghost. Holocaust denial has shaped three generations, but no law will be able to prevent man from taking care of a grave, like a line he would draw against oblivion ”.

In Brussels, a Belgian descendant of Armenians saved by a Turk will discover during a conference in 2015, from the very mouth of a Turkish speaker who came to testify, the name of the one who saved his family, and who had it. paid with his life. “My biggest dream would be to meet her grandchildren, to kiss their hands”, said Andon Akkayan, upset to finally be able to put a name on the one who “Has accompanied us all our life”. Romain Fleury’s great-grandmother never spoke of what she had experienced with her family, contenting himself with saying to the director’s father: “ Jeannot, don’t forget that it was the Turks who saved us ”, before shutting himself in silence. “It was like an incitement not to hate”, says Jean-Pierre Fleury.

“Turkish Schindler”

Evacuate hatred, mission impossible? “We no longer want to live in the same bag as a dog, because one day or another it will bite us! “, replied with a sneer a hundred-year-old survivor, met in 2015 in Yerevan. But silence is no longer in order, because “Anyone can become an accomplice by omission of a crime against humanity”, warns the Belgian lawyer Grégoire Jakhian, who pleads for a “Essential demonization of the Turks on the Armenian side”.

In his memoirs, published in 1918, Celal Bey coldly summarized his situation in 1915:

“That of a man who stands at the edge of a river, without any means of saving those who are swept away by the current, innocent children, blameless old men, defenseless women … I have saved all those whom I was able to catch with my hands and my nails and the others are gone… forever. “

Today, younger generations of Armenians and Turks – such as German MP of Turkish origin Cem Özdemir, who was the first to talk about “Turkish Schindler” when the Bundestag recognized the genocide on June 2, 2016 – say they are ready to plunge their hands and fingernails into the icy waters of history in an attempt to move the lines. Without waiting for an improbable warming of the climate between Ankara and Yerevan.