Turkey can deny Genocide but it can’t conceal the cemetery of Armenian children

November 11, 2010 - 16:40 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - There is a cemetery of Armenian orphans in the territory nearby the French St. Joseph Antoura French College in Lebanon.

5 years ago researcher Maurice Missak Kelechian discovered the location of the College and the cemetery.

“During WWI it was a Turkish orphanage under the direction of Jemal Pasha and Halide Edib as the director, where about 1000 Armenian and 200 Kurdish children were forcefully turkified,” Kelechian told a PanARMNEIAN.Net reporter.

“My journey of love started in 2005 with a single photo in Stanley Kerr’s book, “Lions of Marach” that showed a group picture of Jemal Pasha with a footnote that read: “ Jemal Pasha commander of the Turkish Fourth Army together with Halide Edib, on the steps of French College at Antoura, Lebanon,” he said.

The college was established by the Jesuits brotherhood in 1656. Lazarist priesthood took over the college in 1834 and when the WWI broke out, the Ottoman Turks confiscated the college, dismissed all the priests and converted the building into a Turkish orphanage. Between1915-1918, 1200 young orphans were kept in Antoura of whom 1000 were Armenians and the remaining 200 consisted of Turks and Kurds.

In 1916, Jamal Pasha visited Antoura together with 40 elite Turkish teachers, headed by Halide Edib, the new director of the college; prepared to teach the orphans the “Ottoman Turkish culture.”

The young orphans were going through a systematic Turkification executed through most heinous tactics; changing the Armenian names of the orphans into Turkish names, luring the orphans into believing that the Turkish culture is a better culture than the Armenian, and, gradually, if the orphans spoke, prayed or sung in Armenian, punishing them by Falakha (Hitting of the soles of the feet with iron rods). “The sessions of Falakha usually ended up with bleeding kids sent to the infirmary to be treated for fractured bones.”

On March 7, 2010, together with Mr. Robert Fisk, the internationally renowned Middle East Correspondent for “The Independent” newspaper in London, Kelechian revisited the Antoura mass grave. He then went on to write and publish a powerful article under the title of “Living Proof of the Armenian Genocide” that covered the story of my heroes which was translated into several languages and replicated by the thousands on web pages all over the world.

To pay the respect due to the orphans, KOHAR Symphony Orchestra & Choir generously funded the creation of the Khatchkar by Zaven Koshtoyan, a symbol of the Armenian culture, as well as the bronze sculpture of a young boy holding the globe by Raffi Tokatlian, symbolizing the young ambassador to the world to raise awareness to protect and treat orphans around the world with passion, compassion and utter respect.