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By Ricardo Ruiz de la Serna 
From El Imparcial

On the night of April 24, 1915, in Constantinople, the Ottoman authorities led Bedri Bey, chief of police of the city, 250 Armenian intellectuals arrested on orders of the Interior Minister Talaat Pasha. Among those arrested were doctors, lawyers, journalists, teachers and, finally, the cream of the Armenian intelligence time. The wave of arrests continued in the following days and reached the 2,435 people. Most were taken to detention centers and killed. One of the few survivors of the horror that ensued from that moment was the famous and brilliant musician Comitas, who went mad and died in 1935 without regaining trial.

That night is taken as the start of the Armenian genocide, the Great Crime, which lasted until 1917. Some historians extend to the burning of Smyrna in 1922. Dates in any case, they are indicative of the dreadful fate of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. Nor all began in 1915. Already in the late nineteenth century had perpetrated massacres of Armenians under the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, nicknamed "Red." Perhaps the slaughter of Saun in 1894 was the first step towards genocide commit two decades later. Perhaps the Adana massacre of 1909 was the second. One does not know exactly where the irreversible path leading to the extermination of a people begins. The Committee Union and Progress came to power in 1908 continued along the path he had already drawn the Sultan. Talaat Pasha, Minister of the Interior; Enver Pasha, Minister of War; and Kemal Pasha, Minister of the Navy, not the Armenian massacres began the Empire but planned and executed the settlement of this town. Already in 1913, he had created an elite paramilitary unit controlled by the Interior Ministry called the Special Organization. In late March 1915, in Istanbul, the Union and Progress Committee decided to implement mass civilian Armenian population. The Armenian soldiers of the Ottoman army were disarmed and killed. The civilians were mass deportations, on foot or by train; internment camps, hunger, disease. There were groups of Armenians were burned alive or drowned. Eitan Belkind, an infiltrator serving the British in the barracks of Kemal Pasha, claims to have seen a group of more than five thousand people burned alive. Many of these atrocities were committed by Kurds.

It is impossible to imagine in the abstract and a half million deaths in the extermination figure. Some studies say put at 600,000 and one million eight hundred thousand victims of genocide. There comes a point where it is almost obscene discuss figures as if either gravity añadiese restase or terror. We must use the details that tell U.S. diplomats, German physicians, Swedish or Danish missionaries. We must conceive-if possible-the crucified women, men buried alive, the elderly and children who died of starvation, disease and thirst in the deserts strenuous marches of the Empire. The Armenians of Cilicia and the six eastern provinces of Van, Bitlis, Erzerum, Biyarbakir, Kharput and Sivas missing and without them were empty their churches, their homes, their cemeteries, their printers, their schools ... Those who were not killed in the peoples or died during the deportations, never able to return to their homes. In late 1916, only survived-depleted, terrified, under-the Armenian communities of Constantinople and Smyrna.

One would think that the Armenians were allowed to exterminate. Not so. Instead, where they could resist, fight all men, women, children, elderly, priests and laity. No. The Armenians did not let his executioners kill or surrendered. Franz Werfel evoked Armenian resistance in "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" which he wrote as a Jew from identification with the suffering of these people who, as he told me one afternoon a priest in Yerevan, has "a very special relationship with Cruz because he has been crucified in history. " Some Armenians survived and told what was happening. In the United States, it was shooting a film in 1919 which told the story of young survivor Aurora Mardiganian. Across the country, committees of solidarity with the slain, those killed, deported but not enough to stop the genocide were created.

Nor were the same all Turks, all Kurds or all Muslims. For example, as mentioned in the German medical Armin T. Wegner Mission, there were Turkish officials in the provinces who refused to obey orders to execute or deport the Armenians. Some helped to escape their neighbors or protected in their homes. Some that disobedience cost them their lives. The Arab Al-Husayn Ibn'Ali, Sharif of the holy city of Mecca issued a decree ordering Muslims of the places they passed through the columns of Armenian deportees protect "as I protegeríais yourselves, to your properties and your children."

Memory must be projected into the future. From a position of intellectuals like Elie Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer to Orham Pamuk trial, recognition and memory of the Armenian genocide has been gaining importance in public debate in Western societies. The Assassination of Hrant Dink on 19 January 2007 noted the price you can pay for the truth and memory. Now, on impunity and denial of history is impossible to build reconciliation and the future. The larger towns are able to look face to face their past.

Each April 24, thousands of Armenians from all over the country and the diaspora, bring flowers to Tsitsernakaberd, the Museum and the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan. Want to be with my friends this year - with the great director Harutyun Khachatrian, with the deacon and the Rev. Gevorg Mkrtich with Nvard with Tatevik, Arthur, with Ripa, with Suzi, with Armine, with Gerard, with so many Eleadah ... others, and raise with them my prayers and my voice.

There is something in this crucified people and returned today to life in Armenia and the Diaspora, which deeply touches my heart and guts. I feel like there's something in my life that pain and oozing when they evoke the pain and celebrate hope. I would like to go with them and hug them hard because still alive and preserve the memory without giving in to hatred or rancor but not forgotten. So I write these lines. Because today, writing is my way of being with them.

So this column today commemorating the Armenian genocide.