At the Cannes film festival this year, "Ararat" has won all sorts of praise. The film by Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter) tells the story of the Armenian holocaust in 1922. I suspect Ararat will become to the Armenians what Schindlers List has become to the Jews. Since Turkey is apparently vowing to fight its distribution (New York Times, Arts, 6/7/02) it remains to be seen whether the film will make it to the states.
Seeing the movie makes you want to buy an arsenal.....
More important than the number of Armenians subjected to the Ottoman Empire was the status and conditions under which they lived. The Ottoman Turks ruled by means of the millet system, which recognized the rights of non-Muslims to practice their religion, use their language, and preserve their culture, but which also stratified society along confessional lines. All Christians were second-class citizens, inferior in status, discriminated against, and deprived of critical rights, especially the right to bear arms even for the purpose of self-defense. While those barriers could be crossed, the price of acceptance into the legitimate fold was the shedding of one's former identifications.
The possibility of inclusion presented a serious dilemma to those who would not join the Muslim community. By continuing to adhere to their institutions, to their culture, language, and religion, the Armenians, who lived more interspersed among the Muslims than other Christian peoples in the Ottoman Empire, became the object of a specific type of contempt. By choosing to maintain their separate identity, in the eyes of the Turks the Armenians appeared to refuse normative conformity with the dominant class. They were thought of as rejectionists whose presence was an affront to the legitimate social order.
The inferiority of the Armenians was further underlined by their exposure to another brand of stigmatization. The Armenians had been absorbed into the Ottoman Empire as a subservient people. They had waged no war of resistance and had made no attempt to defend themselves from further conquest. As a stateless people, they had not even earned for themselves the badge of defeat in the eyes of the Ottomans. No one would entertain striking a bargain with them. In the hierarchy of the Ottoman system, where the Turks concentrated all power into their hands, the Armenians could never be awarded a function other than servility. Moreover, in a society governed by military might, the servility of the Armenians was regarded as irredeemable.