By Pierce Nahigyan
If my grandfather had it his way, he never would have
been born Armenian.A Bostonian to the bone, and a fish monger at that, he
once spent an afternoon telling me about all the work he lost on account of his
race. “To hell with it,” he said. “It's not worth it.” He was descended from Soo-ren Nahigian, an atheist Bible
salesman who changed the “i” in his last name to “y” on the hope that it would
get folks to stop pronouncing the “g” like a “j.” In the 100 years or so of
Nahigyan family history, it has yet to do the trick.
Soo-ren came to America for his education, but when it
was time to return to Armenia his father wrote to him saying don't come back.
My great-great grandfather was Kashador - or maybe Kachador - Nahigian, and he
died with the rest of the Armenian Nahigians in 1915.
My great-grandfather Soo-ren didn't talk about Armenia
with my grandfather. My grandfather resented being Armenian to my father, and
my father, second-generation and with a Bostonian accent thicker than his
father's, was just a very hairy American. Because of this tumultuous family
history, and because my father died when I was
seven, and because my mother is as white as a loaf of
Wonder, I didn't learn about the Armenian Genocide until I came upon a very
disconcerting paragraph in my sixth grade History textbook.
It is a quote by Adolf Hitler that is now inscribed on a
wall in Washington, D.C.'s Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The quote is from a speech he gave a week before the
German invasion of Poland in 1939 [emphasis added]: “I have issued the command
- and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a
firing squad - that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but
in the physical destruction of the enemy.
Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in
readiness...with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without
compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only
thus shall we
gain the living space which we need. Who, after all,
speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
No one in my life I stared at the page and tried to
fathom what exactly der führer was talking about. Below the quote was another
disconcerting paragraph mentioning that somewhere in the neighborhood of a
million Armenians had been killed earlier that century. In my century. My life
has been predicated, I suddenly realized, by a million, dead, unknown Armenians.
Chief among them had always been my father, but behind him, I now knew, were
the shades of not just ancestors but their neighbors, and their neighbors'
wives and their children, and the villages where they lived in the
twentieth century. Until they suddenly didn't, anymore.
It was a very big thought for a very small paragraph, and
for a very long time that day I didn't know what to think - because I kept
asking myself why no one had mentioned this to me before. Because it is, still,
a very big thought.
“A single death is a tragedy,” Josef Stalin is supposed
to have said. “A million is a statistic.”
This April will mark the 100th year since the beginning
of the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Genocide. Its historic roots stretch back
roughly 3,000 years and if I had that many pages to describe them I would still
not have a decent explanation for you, because there are no decent explanations
for killing a person, let alone 1.5 million.
I can say that the killings began in 1915 and continued
through 1923. Turkish soldiers and mercenaries took Armenians, Assyrians and
Greeks into the Anatolian and Syrian deserts and made them march until they
died.
Some were shot, some were roped together and thrown in
rivers, some were thrown off cliffs or burned alive, and some were crucified.
There is evidence of these murders for anyone who goes looking for it, be it in
photographs or around the hill of Margada in the eastern Syrian desert. Bones
can still be found there buried in the shallow dirt.
Children below a certain age were taken from their
parents and, if not shot and buried in shared graves, given to Turkish families
to be converted to Islam and raised Turkish. This offends me far less than more
zealous Armenians, because, after all, the children did survive - even as their
mothers, fathers and elder siblings were slaughtered and their homes given over
to the Turks. What disturbs me more are the thousands of women who would go on
to raise children born from the mass rapes of this era, and the decades of agony
that follow these families unto the present
day.
The Western Front
According to journalist Robert Fisk in his article, “The
First Holocaust,” U.S. diplomats were among the first to record the Armenian
genocide. Leslie Davis was the American consul in Harput at the time and wrote
an account of seeing “the remains of not less than ten thousand Armenians”
around Lake Goeljuk. Germans, too, who had been dispatched to Turkey to help
organize the Ottoman military, reported mass slaughters and even more abominable
acts. In the United States itself, The New York Times first began reporting of
Armenian rapes and exterminations as
early as November 1914. British diplomats across the
Middle East, Fisk writes, received first-hand dispatches of the systematic
slaughter. Private diaries of Europeans living in the region at the time exist
and contain grisly and despairing
passages of the event.
The West has known about this from the beginning. There
is no disputing the fact that Armenians and other ethnic groups were massacred
in Turkey in the early twentieth century.
In Turkey, however, it is effectively illegal to admit
this. Today, Article 301 of the Turkish penal code prohibits citizens from
insulting the Turkish nation or government. Even suggesting that the Turks of
100 years ago pursued an agenda of ethnic cleansing can be rewarded with death.
Journalists have been killed for writing about the
genocide. In truth, writing anything in Turkey can be hazardous to one’s
health. It ranks 154th in the World Press Freedom Index (out of 179 listed
countries), and is currently “the world’s biggest prison for journalists.”
And because Turkey refuses to acknowledge the Armenian
Genocide as a genocide, the United States, too, has remained mute on the
subject.
From a legal standpoint, recognizing a genocide brings
with it a host of complicated issues for a country – all of which perhaps pales
in comparison to simply accepting blame for the planet’s most heinous criminal
act. Turkey is a rare international ally for America - a Middle Eastern state
that retains a non-violent relationship with Israel.
For that reason, the United States has refused to
officially recognize the Armenian Genocide. Doing so would be politically
impolite.
This socio-political problem has transcended administrations
and party lines. A resolution to recognize the Armenian Genocide was introduced
by the 110th Congress in 2007, but then-President George Bush II publicly
opposed it. Before succeeding the office, Barack Obama pledged that he would do
what Bush could not. In 2006,
Senator Obama criticized Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice for firing John Evans, the Armenian Ambassador at the time, “after he
properly used the term ‘genocide’ to describe Turkey’s slaughter of thousands
of Armenians starting in 1915.” Those are Obama’s own words.
“I shared with Secretary Rice my firmly held conviction
that the Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point
of view,” he added, “but rather a widely documented fact supported by an
overwhelming body of historical evidence.”
In 2008, Obama reiterated his stance: “America deserves a
leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds
forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that President.”
In the six years since taking office, Obama has not been
that President. He has refused to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide even once.
With justice for all I was not raised to hate Turks. As
my mother would have it, I was not raised to hate anyone. But as I have grown
up and learned more about the world and pursued my career in journalism, there
is one prejudice that has been impossible to fight. I hate lies.
I hate any form of enforced ignorance that claims “2 + 2
= 5” and strikes down the indomitable voices that scream “4” until they’re
silenced. By denying genocide, by denying the forced marches of Assyrians, of
Greeks and of Armenians, by denying the tortures and the rapes, by denying the
crucifixions and persecutions, Turkey is denying
a final peace for so many. And they have been doing so
for far too long.
My grandfather doesn’t think of himself as Armenian. He
is a Bostonian first and a New Englander second, an American third and a
businessman fourth. This fight for recognition is not his fight. This is not to
say he bears no love for his father’s country; it is simply that time has moved
on, America is now his home, its pledge the only allegiance he knows. The
stories and the prayers of Kashador - or Kachador - and the traditions of the
dead Nahigians are now a century extinguished.
What I’ve learned about Armenia has come from books, from
fellow Armenians who have reached out, and from a diaspora that refuses to let
the wax of its own dying candles cool. It wants what any culture wants, what
any human deserves - and that is the truth.
My grandfather never wanted to be Armenian. But I am. And
one hundred years later, I know how much that means.
Pierce Nahigyan is the editor-in-chief of Planet Experts
(http://www.planetexperts.com/author/piercen/).
His articles have appeared in several publications,
including Foreign Policy Journal, Intrepid Report, the Los Angeles
Post-Examiner, New Internationalist and SHK Magazine.
LOUSSAPATZ-1066-2015-02-07
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder
Not: Yalnızca bu blogun üyesi yorum gönderebilir.