,
6 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
In May 1911, the #Ottoman parliament debated the issue of Zionism in Palestine. One of the MPs, the Armenian deputy for Erzurum, Ohannes Varteks Efendi, made a speech calling for tolerance & forcefully arguing against sectarian violence. Heckled by other MPs as he spoke, he said: 
‘When we say things here [about the Jews], the ill-educated people out there, coming across a Jew, will say, “The Jews are traitors!” They used to say this about the Armenians.’
The people will learn by example from your words, he warned- a warning all too relevant today.
The people will learn by example from your words, he warned- a warning all too relevant today.
Varteks Efendi held memories of the 1890s massacres of Armenians, arguing that if there were violence in Palestine or elsewhere, Armenians too would be victims. But a fellow MP insisted that they were not capable of such barbarism, that such violence was part of a despotic past
Four years later, violence beyond imagination came for the Armenian community. One of its victims was Ohannes Varteks Efendi (Serengülian), who had argued for communal harmony and Ottoman unity. He was murdered just outside Urfa in July 1915 during the #ArmenianGenocide
Three years after that, a key document presented to the Ottoman Parliament in November 1918 by the MPs Emanuelidi and Tokinidis lists the atrocities, and describes Varteks and another Armenian MP, Krikor Zöhrap, as ‘ifna edilmişdir’, ‘having been annihilated’.
Most of my students arrive knowing nothing about the Ottoman Armenians or the Genocide, so providing them with sources like the records of the Ottoman Parliament is really important. And, interestingly, many of them choose to explore these topics in greater depth in their essays
