ArmenPress
July 23 2004

I HATE DOGS

YEREVAN, JULY 23, ARMENPRESS: A documentary shot by Pea Holmquist,
an independent Sweden filmmaker and Suzanne Khardalin, a Lebanon-born
Armenian journalists, called I Hate Dogs is about the 1915 Armenian
Genocide, planned and carried out mercilessly by the government of
the Ottoman Turkey. The main character is a 98 year-old Armenian,
Garbis, a survivor of the genocide.
Garbis tells his devastating story-about how he survived the
genocide. He lost his entire family when he was only 9. One morning
the Turks seized his village; the men were separated from the women.
Garbis did not realize the gravity of the situation and took leave of
his mother- a last hug and a last kiss, as it was to be, from his
weeping mother.
Together with his father and several thousand other Armenians,
Garbis was forced to go on a death march, all the way to the Syrian
desert. He was in the company of his elder brother and a cousin but
en route both of them died of hunger and exhaustion and several days
after died his father. He was only nine years old and some people
helped him carry the body away and bury it.
Later in the evening Garbis wanted to see his father’s grave.
“Then I saw several stray dogs feeding on my father’s flesh. They
were tearing his thighs apart. I grabbed some stones and threw them
at the dogs to frighten them off, but the dogs had become wild-they
started growling and ran towards me. I was terrified, so I ran away.
That picture has haunted me all my life. I see the dogs, right in
front of me, just ten meters away.”
Garbis started his first business at the age of 15 in Mosul, Iraq,
then he moved to France where he settled down. His son Serge, has
taken up his business of a textile factory. “It took my dad 40 years
before he felt able to tell me the story. He just could not tell it
to me,” Serge, a very distinguished gentlemen, living in a
fashionable apartment in Paris, says.
Turkey has not recognized the genocide so far, but is eager to
join the EU. “I am planning to live at least 100 years. There are so
few of us left and for God’s sake, I am not ready to take my story
with me to the grave,” Garbis says.
Holmquist, a film school professor in documentaries and Suzanne
Khardalian, have shot other films about the Armenian genocide and
Armenians-Back to Ararat and Her Armenian Prince.