Thomas de Waal > Quotes

“It was eventually named “the sub-commission on the historical dimension to implement a dialogue with the aim to restore mutual confidence between the two nations, including an impartial scientific examination of the historical records and archives to define existing problems and formulate recommendations.”
― Thomas de Waal, Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide

“But the Dashnak Hairenik Weekly was merciless. Quoting the accounts of a few escapees, it depicted Soviet Armenian as a locus not just of economic misery, but moral degradation:     Godlessness, Atheism, Immorality, Robbery and perpetual spying on one another! There is not a trace of our family sanctities left there. Having repudiated the idea of the existence of a God, the Bolshevik ignores every conception of family standards, every moral principle, every social order. Aram’s wife or watch equally can belong to Hagop, Ali, or Stalin. There is no conception of nationality. A Kurd, a Caucasian, a Georgian, or a Turk have the right to become your son-in-law when they wish it. They have the right to divorce the very next day.26”
― Thomas de Waal, Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide

“On a visit to a mosque that had been formerly been an Armenian church in the town of Antep (now Gaziantep), the current custodian, the imam, happened to be inside. The imam suggested to the bishop that this holy space belonged to both of them and they prayed together. If politicians in Ankara warned that the ordinary population of Eastern Anatolia was still hostile toward Armenians, this was not the impression our group received. On the contrary, many people not only remembered Armenians but seemed to think that their return was a good omen.”
― Thomas de Waal, Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide

“On the previous day, four Armenian witnesses told the Congressmen how the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Armenian First Republic in 1920. All of them were affiliated with the ARF, and two, Reuben Darbinian and General Dro Kanayan, had served in the government of the First Republic. The Armenian testimonies also appear to have been choreographed with the aim of throwing all possible blame on the Bolsheviks and suppressing the role of other culprits in the fate of the Armenians—in this case, the Turks. So Beglar Navassardian, executive secretary of the still-extant American Committee for the Independence of Armenia (and son of the ARF leader in Egypt), gave a brief excursion through the history of Armenia that surely would have caused apoplexy in his predecessors in that committee in the 1920s.     Navassardian barely mentioned the 1915 Genocide in his testimony. He managed only to say, “Finally during the First World War, the Armenian people made the final and supreme sacrifice. They firmly and squarely sided with the Allies, gave volunteer forces under the Allied Command in the Middle East, on the eastern front and elsewhere. For a people whose numbers had been decimated to less than 4 million, they gave a participation of 250,000, fighting against the Axis Powers.”34     General Dro spoke through an interpreter. The awkward issue of his wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany was not mentioned. The general reminisced about a luncheon in 1921 hosted for him by Stalin, whom he described as an old comrade from the revolution of 1905, at which promises were made and then broken. Dro, a veteran of the Russian-Ottoman war, also conspicuously failed to mention Turkey or 1915. He only spoke about atrocities committed by the Bolsheviks, who, he said, “took over Armenia with a brutality and persecution characteristic of the Middle Ages.”35     A certain kind of Armenia—one that had lost its independence, bravely fighting Soviet Russia—was required by the Cold War American political imagination. Concluding the hearings, the chairman, Representative Michael Feighan, praised General Dro, saying, “Our committee appreciates very much this first-hand testimony from you who have fought so vigorously for the freedom and independence of Armenia.”36”
― Thomas de Waal, Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide

“The next day, 13 January, murderous anti-Armenian violence overwhelmed Baku. A vast crowd filled Lenin Square for a rally, and by early evening men had broken away from it to attack Armenians. As in Sumgait, the savagery was appalling and the center of the city around the Armenian quarter became a killing ground. People were thrown to their deaths from the balconies of upper-story apartments. Crowds set upon and beat Armenians to death. Thousands of terrified Armenians took shelter in police stations or in the vast Shafag Cinema, under the protection of troops. From there they were taken to the cold and windy quayside, put on ferries, and transported across the Caspian Sea. Over the next few days, the port of Krasnovodsk in Turkmenistan received thousands of beaten and frightened refugees. Airplanes were on hand to fly them to Yerevan.”
― Thomas de Waal, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

“The AKP government in Turkey, in power since 2002, while not officially abandoning its predecessors’ denialist approach to the issue, has taken a more permissive attitude, allowing alternative histories to be written and read in Turkey itself. This means that, first, the Turkish nationalist (or “denialist”) version of the Armenian Genocide that took root in the 1950s has crumbled in the face of the new scholarship: None of these Turkish nationalist historians has managed to write a full-length book that sets out a coherent “Turkish version” of what happened to the Armenians.”
― Thomas de Waal, Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide

“Many of those who survived stressed that they did so due to Muslim families like these, or else to the bravery of ordinary “good Turks,” and also Kurds, who protected Armenians. For example, a survivor from Adana said, “We were like brothers. Our Turks said later, ‘Whoever was the cause of this genocide, may God blind his eyes.’ They did not wish our death. In fact if it weren’t for these good Turks, we would all have been killed, too. All the orders came from Istanbul.”38”
― Thomas de Waal, Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide

“The tour of the South Caucasus in 2018 ends where the book began, in the mountains. The extraordinary natural features of the Caucasus cross all political boundaries, and its extraordinary landscape and outstanding biodiversity are its often-hidden glory. Foreign visitors are awestruck by these landscapes, still far less developed than the alpine zones of western Europe. The World Wildlife Fund has named the wider Caucasus region—stretching into Russia and Turkey—one of thirty-five “biodiversity hotspots” on the planet, with over 1,650 indigenous plants and animals in nine climate zones. To name but three examples of this biodiversity: the mountains of Georgia and Azerbaijan contain more species of oak than western Europe, as they survived the last Ice Age; a few mountain leopards still prowl the highlands of Armenia; and less than 200 “goitered gazelles” are to be found on the borders of Azerbaijan and Georgia. Some natural spectacles draw visitors from all over the world. From late August to early October, birdwatchers come to the Black Sea coast of Georgia to see the annual migration southwards of millions of birds of prey through a 10-kilometer-wide corridor between the sea and the Lesser Caucasus Mountains known as the “Batumi bottleneck.” On October 2, 2014, after days of rain kept the gates of the corridor closed, an astonishing 271,000 birds were counted flying through and darkening the skies.”
― Thomas de Waal, The Caucasus: An Introduction

“At the heart of each of these mass atrocities, he argues, was a state-building project in which traitorous inconvenient minorities were perceived as a threat and ultimately were destroyed.”
― Thomas de Waal, Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide

“On all the roads we traversed between Yozgat and Kayseri, about 80 per cent of the Muslims we encountered (there were no Christians left in these parts) were wearing European clothes, bearing on their persons proof of the crimes they had committed. Indeed, it was an absurd sight: overcoats, frock coats, jackets—various men’s and women’s European garments of the finest materials—on villagers who were also wearing sandals and traditional baggy pants [shalvars]. Barefoot Turkish peasant boys wore formal clothes; men sported gold chains and watches. It was reported that the women had confiscated many pieces of diamond jewelry, but [as they were sequestered] we had no way of encountering them.34”
― Thomas de Waal, Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide