Turkey/ Armenia: A Life Spent in Hiding

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKg_BWUA0sA

These Artists In War-Ravaged Damascus Have Broken A Guinness World Record

Using the scraps of war, six Syrian artists constructed the largest mural on record made from recycled material.

It took Syrian artist Moaffak Makhoul and his team six months to complete the mural in the upscale Al Mazzeh area of Damascus. Guinness announced the win onFacebook on March 26.

The team used scrap objects like broken mirrors, bicycle wheels, and aluminum cans to construct the mural, measuring 7,749.98 feet across.

“In the difficult conditions that the country is going through, we wanted to give a smile to the people, joy to the children, and show people that the Syrian people love life, love beauty, love creativity,” Makhoul told reporters, according to Reuters.

“I’ve been sad to see a lot of my colleagues, artists, all traveling abroad and leaving,” said Makhoul. “God be with them and give them luck - but the country also needs all of us.”The Syrian conflict has killed more than 140,000 and displaced 9 million people since 2011. Damascus has remained largely under government control and relatively shielded from the conflict, which has devastated infrastructure and economic activity.

“The mural gives us hope again,” Souheil Amayri, who helped with the project, told the Daily Star. “Damascus is wounded and sad… and creating something beautiful from rubbish means that we can rebuild despite the destruction.”

This is the story of my best friend's great-grandmother...

The extraordinary story of 100-year-old Yevnigue Salibian, one of the last people alive who can recall the horror of the Armenian genocide, Her life was saved by the reins of a horse as her family fled the brutality of Ottoman rule

She was a child of the Great War, born on a faraway killing field of which we know little, one of the very last witnesses to the last century’s first genocide, sitting in her wheelchair, smiling at us, talking of Jesus and the Armenian children whipped by the Turkish police whom she saw through the cracks in her wooden front door. It’s not every day you get to meet so finite an observer of human history, and soon, alas, we will not see her like again in our lifetime.

They took me to meet Yevnigue Salibian last week up in the Mission Hills of California, whose warm breezes and palm trees are not unlike the town of Aintab in which she was born more than a hundred years ago. She is an old lady now in a home for the elderly but with a still impeccable memory and an equally sharp and brutal scar on her thigh – which she displays without embarrassment – where a horse’s reins suspended her above a ravine until she almost bled to death in her final flight from her Armenian homeland. “Hushhhhhh,” she says. “That’s how the blood sounded when it poured out of me. “I still remember it: ‘hushhhhhh’, ‘hushhhhhh’.”

The facts of the Armenian Holocaust are as clear and real as those of the later Jewish Holocaust. But they must be repeated because the state of Turkey remains a holocaust denier, still insisting that the Ottoman government did not indulge in the genocide which destroyed a million and a half of its Armenian Christian population almost a century ago. The Armenians were axed and knifed and shot in their tens of thousands, the women and children sent on death marches into the deserts of northern Syria where they were starved and raped and slaughtered. The Turks used trains and a primitive gas chamber, a lesson the Germans learned well. Very soon, there will be no more Yevnigues to tell their story.

She was born on 14 January 1914, the daughter of Aposh Aposhian, an Aintab copper merchant who taught his five children the story of Jesus from a large Bible which he held on his lap as he sat with them on a carpet on the floor of their home. They were – like so many Armenians – a middle-class family, and Aposh had Turkish friends and, although Yevnigue does not say so, it appears he traded with the Ottoman army; which probably saved their lives. When the first deportations began, the Salibians were left in their home, but the genocide lasted till the very last months of the Great War – it had begun within weeks of the Allied landings at Gallipoli – and in 1917, the Turks were still emptying Aintab of its Armenians. That’s when the sound of crying led three-year-old Yevnigue to the front door of her home.

“It was an old wooden door and there were cracks in it and I looked through the cracks,” she says. “There were many children outside without shoes and the Turkish gendarmes were using whips to drive them down the street. A few had parents. We were forbidden to take food to them. The police were using whips on the children and big sticks to beat them with. The sounds of the children screaming on the deportation – still I hear them as I look through the cracked door.”

So many parents were killed in the first year of the Armenian genocide that the orphans – tens of thousands of feral children who swarmed through the land in their absence – were only later driven out by the Turks: these were tiny deportees whom Yevnigue saw. The Aposhians, however, were able to cling on until the French army arrived in eastern Turkey after the Ottoman surrender. But when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk launched a guerrilla war against the French occupiers of his land, the French retreated – and in 1921 the surviving Armenians fled with them to Syria, among them Yevnigue and her family, packed into two horse-drawn carts. She was among the very last Christians to leave her Armenian homeland.

“My family was divided between the two carts. I changed places with an old lady. It was at night and over a ravine, our horses panicked, and the cart overturned and an iron bar killed the old lady and I was thrown over the edge of a bridge and only the horse’s reins saved me when they got wrapped around my leg. Jesus saved me. I hung there and there was the ‘hushhhhhh’ sound of my blood pouring out of me.” Yevnigue shows the harsh scar on her leg. It has bitten deeply into the muscle. She was unconscious for two days, slowly recovering in Aleppo, and then Damascus and finally in the sanctuary of Beirut.

The remainder of her life – as she tells it – was given to God, her husband and the tragedy of losing one of her sons in a Lebanese road accident in 1953. A photograph taken on her arrival in Beirut shows Yevnigue to have been an extraordinarily pretty young woman and she had, she says, many suitors. She eventually chose a bald-headed Evangelical preacher, an older man called Vahran Salibian who had a big smile and whose name – Salibi – means crusader. “He had no hair on his head but he had Jesus in his heart,” Yevnigue announces to me. Vahran died in 1995 after 60 years of marriage and Yevnigue has lost count of her great grandchildren – there are at least 22 so far – but she is happy in her cheerful Armenian nursing home.

“It’s not a good thing to be away from your family – but I like this place. Here, it is my extended family.” She loves America, Yevnigue says. Her family fled there when the civil war began in Lebanon in 1976. “It is a free place. All people come from everywhere to America. But why is our President a Muslim?”

I try to convince her this is untrue. She reads the New Testament every day and she talks constantly of her love for Jesus – this is an old lady who will be happy to die, I think – and when I ask her how she feels today about the Turks who tried to destroy the Armenians, she replies immediately. “I pray for Turkey. I pray for the Turkish officials that they may see Jesus. All that is left of the Prophet Mohamed is dust. But Jesus is alive in heaven.”

And I am taken aback by this, until I suddenly realise that I am not hearing the voice of a hundred-year-old lady. I am listening to a three-year old Armenian girl whose father is reading the Bible on the floor of a house in Aintab and who is looking through the cracks of her wooden front door and witnessing her people’s persecution.

Winter to Spring in Armenia

36 Photos to Remind You of Syria's Beauty...

http://scoopempire.com/photos-remind-beautiful-syria/.UyltVfmSySo

Saudi Arabia's Brilliant Recipe for Dominating the Middle East

http://www.alternet.org/world/constantly-underestimated-misunderstood-house-saud?page=0%2C0

Syrian Christian Leaders Call On U.S. To End Support For Anti-Assad Rebels Read more: Syrian Christians Ask US Washington to End Support For Rebels

By Elizabeth Dias

The stories told by five top Syrian Christian leaders about the horrors their churches are experiencing at the hands of Islamist extremists are biblical in their brutality.

Bishop Elias Toumeh, representative of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, tells of the funeral he led ten days ago for the headless body of one of his parishioners in Marmarita. Rev. Adeeb Awad, vice moderator of the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon, explains how the rebels blew up his church and then pointed the finger at the regime. Bishop Armash Nalbandian, primate of the Armenian Church of Damascus, says he received word on Facebook from a fellow bishop in Aleppo that two congregants were traveling when opposition fighters stopped their bus, made them present their Armenian IDs, and then took them away. The fighters, Nalbandian recounts, returned to the fellow passengers a few hours later with a box, which they said were cakes. Inside were the two Armenian heads.

The bishops’ stories are difficult to independently verify, and the war’s death toll goes far beyond just Christian communities in Syria–more than 130,000 people have been killed since the fighting began, and at least two million others have fled the country. But they are emerging as part of a concerted push by Syrian Christians to get the U.S. to stop its support for rebel groups fighting Syrian president Bashar al Assad. “The US must change its politics and must choose the way of diplomacy and dialogue, not supporting rebels and calling them freedom fighters,” says Nalbandian.

The group is the first delegation of its kind to visit Washington since the crisis began three years ago, and its five members represent key different Christian communities in the country. Awad, Toumeh, and Nalbandian were joined by Rev. Riad Jarjour, Presbyterian pastor from Homs, and Bishop Dionysius Jean Kawak, Metropolitan of the Syrian Orthodox Church. The Westminster Institute and Barnabas Aid, two groups that focus on religious freedom and relief for threatened faith communities, sponsored their trip.

Given the United States’ increased support for non-terrorist rebel groups in the wake of the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons, the religious leaders’ mission is a long shot. The bishops are asking the United States to exert pressure on countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey to stop supporting and sending terrorist fighters to Syria. “The real problem is that the strong military opposition on the ground is a foreign opposition,” Awad explains, arguing that US support of opposition groups means support for foreign terrorist fighters. “They are the ones killing and attacking churches and clergy and nuns and burning houses and eating human livers and hearts and cutting heads,” Awad says.

The Syrian Christian churches are not publicly calling for outright support of the Assad regime. Doing so would further endanger their followers and hurt the moral component of their case, given the regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons against civilians. Instead, they’re meeting privately with law makers, diplomats and think tanks. Sunday evening, they spoke with Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) at St. John the Beloved Catholic church in nearby McLean. On Monday, they held court at the Heritage Foundation and Catholic University of America. On Tuesday, they met with Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA), Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), and then met with leaders of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Wednesday’s lineup included Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), State Department officials including Lawrence Silverman, Near East Affairs deputy acting aecretary, and Uzra Zeya, acting assistant secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, and then a final stop at the U.S. Institute for Peace.

It’s been a difficult issue to gain traction on, if for no other reasons than that support for Christians and endangered minorities can appear as support for Assad and that an entire country is being destroyed by war, not just Christian communities. President Obama only briefly mentioned Syria in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. “In Syria, we’ll support the opposition that rejects the agenda of terrorist networks,” he said. “American diplomacy, backed by the threat of force, is why Syria’s chemical weapons are being eliminated, and we will continue to work with the international community to usher in the future the Syrian people deserve—a future free of dictatorship, terror and fear.”

Traction in Congress has also been a challenge, but a handful of leaders are speaking out. The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation in September, authored by Wolf and Eshoo, to create a special religious minorities envoy at the State Department who would work for policy options to protect faith communities, but the bill has yet to move forward in the Senate. “Meeting with the delegation of Syrian Christian church leaders this week provided a constructive opportunity to raise awareness and to discuss concrete steps that can be taken to help protect Christians and other religious minorities in Syria,” says Eshoo. “Christians in the U.S. should be informed by their leaders about the atrocities taking place in Syria. The history of violence against religious minorities must not be allowed to repeat itself.”

Wolf has championed the cause during his congressional tenure, but he is retiring at the end of this term. Newer leaders like Aderholt see it as a time to take a stand. “Most Americans do not realize that Christians across the Middle East are in grave danger and have often been forced to leave their home countries due to persecution and threats from radicalized Muslims,” he says. “If we want a true democracy to emerge from this region, Christians and other religious minority voices must share in the decision-making process, and certainly not be persecuted and fear for their lives due to extremist elements that are pouring in to Syria.”

The bishops’ stories are similar to other grim instances of violence against Christians during the war. Christian schools in Damascus were shelled in November. The next month, a dozen Greek Orthodox nuns were taken from Mar Takla Monastery in Maaloula. Rebel groups abducted two bishops near Aleppo last April. Jesuit priest Paolo Dall’Oglio, whom TIME wrote about in 2012 when he visited the United States on a similar lobbying trip, has been missing and feared dead since July.