Coronavirus Provided Opportunity To Pursue the Armenian Cause Online
The coronavirus pandemic disrupted the traditional plans of Armenians around the world to commemorate the 105th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide on April 24. However, very quickly Armenians discovered new ways to commemorate the Genocide by changing the street protests and large gatherings to online marches and internet programs. In the future, when this pandemic is over, Armenians can use some of the new internet and video methods on April 24 in addition to the public events.
This year, Armenians in various countries carried out virtual programs on April 24 instead of the traditional street protests and indoor commemorative events. Today I will focus on one of these programs, the HyeID virtual march.
HyeID is a Glendale, California-based non-profit organization that was formed three years ago to plan the future Diaspora Armenian Parliament. This year, the HyeID group organized a virtual commemoration during the week of April 24, starting on April 22. Within a few days, over 341,000 Armenians and some non-Armenians from around the world endorsed the following message on the April24.Hyeid.org website: “We have to stay home this April 24, but we join the Online March. We demand justice for Turkey’s Genocide of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915.”
Within a few hours of making this website public, it came under persistent and massive attack from Azerbaijan and Turkey trying to hack the site. Fortunately, HyeID board member Aram Ter Martirosyan, a software engineer, and his team, reacted quickly by blocking the hacking efforts. Such an organized hacking attack could have only come from the governments of Azerbaijan and Turkey. This is called “Denial-of-service attacks” which Wikipedia describes as “a cyber attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to the internet. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.” By working around the clock for two nights, Ter-Martirosyan’s staff was able to block the flood of attacks on the April 24 link.
Another unfortunate disruptive act was caused by Google, which blocked on Google Play the HyeID app created by Aram Ter-Martirosyan and his staff. The Turkish and Azeri hackers, having failed in their disruptive efforts, probably complained to Google to remove the app that powered the April 24 program. Google’s negative action limited significantly the number of online march participants.
Google sent the following offensive message to Aram: “We don’t allow apps that lack reasonable sensitivity towards or capitalize on a natural disaster, atrocity, conflict, death, or other tragic event.” Google also blocked the Google account of Aram’s company, ConnectTo Communications, Inc., disrupting and causing damage to his business.
Aram immediately filed an appeal with Google, advising that the State of California, where Google is headquartered, and the United States had recognized the Armenian Genocide. Google has not responded to Aram’s appeal. I suggest that HyeID or Aram file a lawsuit against Google to revoke its wrongful decision on the app.
The HyeID group also posted its April 24 link on Facebook, generating a large number of responses. This virtual march generated over 341,000 participants—which included 310,000 Armenians and 41,000 non-Armenians—from 198 countries and territories. A major achievement was that Apple Store ranked the April 24 app among the top 10 downloaded apps in the world for iPhones and iPads.
Besides publicizing the Armenian Genocide to 41,000 non-Armenians around the world, a by product of this effort was that for the first time we discovered that there are Armenians in 198 countries and territories.
The HyeID group was ecstatic that such a large number of Armenians and non-Armenians participated in the April 24 virtual march. Even though this figure is far below the approximately 10 million Armenians worldwide, the HyeID group was surprised to find out that Armenians were dispersed in close to 200 countries. Here is the number of participants in some of the countries/territories:
Russia: 121,415 Armenians; 10,677 non-Armenians.
Armenia: 54,065 Armenians; 3,760 non-Armenians.
United States: 50,390 Armenians; 4,071 non-Armenians.
France: 13,476 Armenians; 1,797 non-Armenians.
Georgia: 9,917 Armenians; 1,049 non-Armenians.
Lebanon: 6,016 Armenians; 828 non-Armenians.
Canada: 5,598 Armenians; 373 non-Armenians.
Belgium: 4,565 Armenians; 313 non-Armenians.
Iran: 4,440 Armenians; 441 non-Armenians.
Germany: 3,748 Armenians; 522 non-Armenians.
Argentina: 3,547 Armenians; 966 non-Armenians.
Netherlands: 2,962 Armenians; 230 non-Armenians.
Ukraine: 2,885 Armenians; 416 non-Armenians.
Spain: 2,473 Armenians; 291 non-Armenians.
Greece: 1,747 Armenians; 187 non-Armenians.
United Kingdom: 1,664 Armenians; 266 non-Armenians.
Austria: 1,223 Armenians; 51 non-Armenians.
United Arab Emirates: 1,174 Armenians; 205 non-Armenians.
Australia: 1,012 Armenians; 61 non-Armenians.
Syria: 1,010 Armenians; 83 non-Armenians.
Artsakh: 961 Armenians; 177 non-Armenians.
Cyprus: 872 Armenians; 77 non-Armenians.
Turkey: 795 Armenians; 410 non-Armenians.
Poland: 651 Armenians; 475 non-Armenians.
Switzerland: 611 Armenians; 156 non-Armenians.
Egypt: 425 Armenians; 85 non-Armenians.
Azerbaijan: 201 Armenians; 99 non-Armenians.
Nakhichevan: 100 Armenians; 33 non-Armenians.
Interestingly, there are a handful of Armenian participants in such unexpected places as: Mongolia, Northern Mariana Islands, Wake Island, Indonesia, Wallis and Futuna, American Samoa, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji, Antarctica, Libya, Algeria, Mali, Madagascar, Mauritius, Chad, Tanzania, Congo, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania, South Africa, Central African Republic, Maldives, Iceland, and Greenland.
To find out the results of the online march in your own country and city, please go to the interactive report: www.HyeID.org. You can also learn the number of participants near you by selecting the distance from your area. As the saying goes, “amen degh Hye ga” [Armenians are everywhere].
Qestions for Armenians .They can not give answers but at least they can read
Why was every single Ottoman official, incarcerated for war crimes during the nearly two-and-a-half years of the Malta Tribunals, finally acquitted?
THIS IS THE QUESTION THAT WOULD PUT AN END TO THE “ARMENIAN GENOCIDE” MATTER, TO ANY LOGICAL MIND. I HAVE NOT SEEN THE MALTA TRIBUNALS REFERRED TO IN ANY OF THE ARMENIAN WEB SITES.
2) The “Sick Man of Europe” was on her knees, financially broke and depleted of manpower (thanks to German-directed military mobilization) and needed resources. Why would the empire choose this most inopportune time to target the Armenians, who made the financial wheels turn and were clearly a vital resource to the country?
3) The “Sick Man of Europe” was on her knees, financially broke. Why would she spend a fortune on resettling the Armenians?
If the idea was to wipe them out, why didn’t they massacre them on the spot, as the Armenians did with the Turks?
4) Could the Ottoman Turks have the TECHNOLOGICAL capacity to carry out a government-sponsored genocide on such a grand scale?
5) If the idea of the resettlement program was to subject the Armenians to a slow, genocidal death, why did so many Armenians survive?
If there was a true government sponsored policy of extermination, why leave the barely-living starved alive? In short, it all boils down to: how could the great majority…one million out of less than one and a half million… have survived?
6) Why then, would the Turks fool around by going through the musical chairs of separating the men (remember, the Armenians claim the men were largely unarmed)?
Also, why were there supposedly so many orphans?
If a government has in mind to wipe out a race, why leave so many children alive?
The Armenians didn’t intend to leave the Turkish children alive.
7) Hitler began by targeting the Jews in Berlin. Why were the Armenians in Istanbul and other cities of the West such as Izmir, left alone for the most part?
The Armenians say this was because these cities were under too much foreign observation. However, the Ottomans were aware, after generations of being subjected to capitulations, that foreign posts were set up even in the distant corners of the empire… as readily under foreign observation.(American consuls of these out-of-the-way distant provinces, such as Leslie Davis [the genocide-proving “big gun” highlighted in the PBS pro-Armenian programs covered at this site], were among them. In addition, the missionaries were everywhere.)
8) As a related point, “Talat Pasa allowed the American missionaries to do relief work among the Armenians, in spite of the fact that Turkey and the United States were on the opposing camps during the war.
How many examples are there in history of a combatant country permitting the citizens of another country fighting in the other camp to stay, feed, cloth and educate the people it is accused of exterminating?
9) The Armenian perspective never fails to offer the convictions Turkish courts laid out to their own officials immediately after the war, and the Sevres Treaty, which partly proclaimed a large chunk of Eastern Turkey to be part of Armenia.
For a better proof of judging whether a genocide occurred, one must look at the Treaty of Leninakan (Gümrü) signed (December 3, 1920) by the Armenians and Turks, which closed the book on past ills, foregoing the issue of reparations.
If the Armenians were truly outraged over the Turks’ Nazi-like evil campaign to exterminate them, how could they have agreed to such terms?
“If the Ottoman Empire really did commit the crime of genocide from 1915-1919, as Armenians allege, then why would the newly established Armenia turn to the Ottoman Empire for help in 1918, 1919, or 1920?
10) As yet another follow-up, why didn’t Armenian delegate to the Paris Peace Conference, Boghos Nubar Pasha, mention the “genocide” in his January 30, 1919 letter to The Times of London?
Oguz Tolga Istanbul
You idiot. The word genocide didn’t exist in 1919!