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Specter of Genocide
Five new books on Armenia reveal a country focused on its past and a
future yet to be decided.

By Kim Iskyan
Published: September 24, 2004

Reading about contemporary Armenian history is like bearing witness to a
dreadfully mismatched boxing match: Just watching the underdog as he gets
batted about the ring hurts.

For much of the past century or so, Armenia has been the scrawny, bloodied
white guy in the ring, suffering a pummeling at the hands of a range of
foes, from earthquakes to the Ottoman Turks. In the context of the litany of
death, turmoil and pain that has plagued Armenia, that the country is still
standing — as a nation, culture and society — is an impressive feat in
itself.

That, at least, is one of the messages of this impressively depressing
selection of books about contemporary Armenia. Whether Armenia will continue
to stand on its own is another issue altogether.

Any exploration of modern Armenia inevitably begins with the so-called
Armenian Question, as the fate of the Armenian Christian minority living in
19th-century Ottoman Turkey was termed. The solution was a series of mass
killings and massacres of Armenians in the 1890s, leading up to the Armenian
genocide, in which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians (compared with a
present-day population of roughly 2.5 million) were slaughtered by Ottoman
Turks between 1915 and 1923. One of the aims of Peter Balakian’s “The
Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response” is to showcase
another side to the story by describing the genocide as the first
international human rights cause in the United States.

Balakian’s narrative slips seamlessly from the Ottoman Empire to scenes of
outrage in the United States, primarily among groups of do-gooder northeast
American liberals who were appalled at the human capacity for violence as
displayed in Ottoman Turkey. Although his occasionally florid efforts to
evoke the breathless aura of the era grow a bit tiresome, Balakian does a
fine job of illustrating how the treatment of the Armenians — a small,
inconsequential people on the other side of the world (at a time when
distance mattered, and implied more than mere kilometers) with few links to
the New England upper crust — became a cause celebre.

The passion described by Balakian of the advocates for Armenia seems almost
quaint in the context of the cynicism and ignorance of American — or
European, or Russian, for that matter — society toward human rights
tragedies today. Few people outside of the country have any notion of
Armenia including, perhaps most of all, Russians, who view all of the
Caucasus through the same dark prism. (Even fewer care about, for example,
the ongoing genocide in Sudan.) Balakian’s United States — at least the
narrow slice of activists he addresses — cared about injustice in the world
enough to do something about it.

HarperCollins
The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response
By Peter Balakian
HarperCollins
496 Pages. $23.95

Given the highly emotive nature of the genocide for members of the Armenian
diaspora (of which Balakian is a prominent member), it’s not surprising that
the narrative seems a bit less sure-footed and evenhanded when it comes to
the Turkish side of the equation. One of the undercurrents of “Burning
Tigris” — as well as of Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s devastating “The
Daydreaming Boy,” a novel about, in essence, the impact of genocide on the
individual — is the continued denial by Turkey that any genocide took
place. To Turkey, the event that Armenians call genocide was the unfortunate
function of an environment of conflict in which Christians and Muslims alike
died. Modern-day Turkey would have to overcome generations of indoctrination
to concede officially that its forefathers were racist murderers. Moreover,
Turkish recognition of the genocide could expose the country to the risk of
massive financial (as well as land) reparation claims, similar to those
faced by Germany and German companies.

Balakian frequently equates the Armenian experience with the most undeniable
genocide of all: the Holocaust. The strategy of the Committee of Union and
Progress — the so-called Young Turks who rose to power in Ottoman Turkey in
1908 — was “not unlike the way the Nazi Party would take control”; the
Young Turks’ program of nationalist indoctrination is compared to Adolf
Hitler’s efforts for German youngsters; the cattle cars of the Anatolian and
Baghdad Railways were the predecessors of the mechanism by which the Nazis
deported the Jews. Then there is Hitler’s own comment in August 1939, in
support of his plans to exterminate the Jews (the veracity of which is also
fiercely debated in some quarters): “Who today, after all, speaks of the
annihilation of the Armenians?”

The description of the United States’ ultimate betrayal — opportunistic,
cynical and craven enough to make any reader holding a blue passport with an
eagle imprimatur cringe — of Armenia and the Armenians is taut and
well-paced. In a short epilogue, Balakian points out that U.S.
acknowledgment of the massacre is still held hostage to grubby, ugly
political realities: Despite years of promises (and pressure from the
powerful Armenian-American lobby), the U.S. government has yet to officially
recognize the Armenian genocide for fear of offending Turkey, a critical
NATO ally. In a transparent effort to pander to the Armenian-American lobby,
U.S. Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry has pledged that his
administration would officially recognize the genocide — then again, so did
George W. Bush, who later backed down in the face of Turkish pressure.
(Balakian, a professor at Colgate University in New York, was recently
instrumental in bringing about a change in the editorial policy of The New
York Times, which now refers to the “Armenian genocide” — rather than, say,
“the tragedy” or “Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1915.”)

Riverhead Books
The Daydreaming Boy
By Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Riverhead Books
212 Pages. $23.95

“Burning Tigris” is rigorously researched and annotated, and certainly more
fair and evenhanded than it could have been. But Balakian seems more at home
in “Black Dog of Fate,” his excellent 1997 book about a journey to
rediscover his Armenian roots. His passionate perspective on Armenia and the
genocide is more effective as personal history, a format in which he doesn’t
need to pull any punches.

Marcom’s “The Daydreaming Boy” uses fiction as a sledgehammer to hit home
the micro-level impact of the trauma of genocide. Vahe, a middle-aged member
of the Armenian community in Beirut in the 1960s, is comfortably going about
his business when bits of his thoroughly repressed past — being abandoned
by his mother during the genocide, a brutal childhood spent in an orphanage,
the other Turkish-Armenian boy who took his place as the orphanage’s
resident rag doll — leak into his consciousness like so much buried toxic
waste. Marcom wraps Vahe’s downward spiral in layers of sweeping metaphors
involving an ape at the local zoo, the peasant maid in the apartment below,
and the sea, all underscoring the extraordinary sense of emptiness and loss
that Vahe and, by association, all of Armenia, experienced. Vahe’s own
forgetting — or “unremembering” — is an apparent reference to genocide
denial, but “The Daydreaming Boy” is brilliant writing, with or without the
political context.

University of Virginia Press
“Starving Armenians”: America and the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1930 and After
By Merrill D. Peterson
University of Virginia Press
216 Pages. $24.95

Following in the footsteps of “Burning Tigris,” Merrill D. Peterson’s
“‘Starving Armenians’: America and the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1930 and
After” cites many of the same sources and uses some of the same quotations
as Balakian. Peterson’s book is a solid effort, particularly given that the
author is an academic focused on U.S. history of the 19th century. Peterson
went off to Yerevan (copy of Balakian’s “Black Dog” in hand, he reports) as
a Peace Corps volunteer in 1997, only to be sent home a month and a half
later due to poor health. From this experience, it appears, stems his
interest in Armenia.

Readers with little background in the Armenian genocide who are looking for
a more easily digestible account of American involvement with Armenia would
be well served by Peterson’s account. But there are some odd gaps, and
Peterson’s lack of background in Armenia sometimes shows through. His
description of the events of April 24, 1915, the date usually cited as the
beginning of the genocide, when several hundred prominent Armenians in
Constantinople were arrested and killed, is mystifyingly brief. A mention of
the Nagorny Karabakh conflict — the 1991-94 war between Azerbaijan and
Armenia over an enclave in western Azerbaijan — refers to warfare between
Armenians and the Tatars, which is at best an unusual term for Azeris. Some
transliterations into English from Armenian are a bit off. Niggling points
all, though together they raise questions about the accuracy of other
dimensions of the book.

University of California Press
Armenia: Portraits of Survival and Hope
By Donald E. Miller and Laura Touryan Miller
Univ. of California Press
248 Pages. $29.95

For “Armenia: Portraits of Survival and Hope,” Donald E. Miller — a
religion professor at the University of Southern California — and his wife,
Lorna Touryan Miller, who is of Armenian descent, interviewed 300 Armenians
in 1993 and 1994 to develop an oral history of the country in the late ’80s
and early ’90s. The four major chapters focus on survivors of the December
1988 earthquake, which killed upward of 25,000 people and destroyed 40
percent of the country’s industrial base; refugees from Azerbaijan who fled
the pogroms that were the precursors to the Nagorny Karabakh conflict; the
impact of the Nagorny Karabakh war; and the incredible deprivation of the
winters in the early 1990s, when Armenia had virtually no power and no heat.

The result is a compelling but overwhelmingly grim collection of anecdotes.
History tends to focus on the broad strokes, while paying short shrift to
the grinding agony of those who are involved in, caught in the crossfire of,
or — most often — innocent bystanders to conflict and tumultuous change.
The Millers’ book is populated with stories of rape and murder, war in all
its cruelty, and children who didn’t know the meaning of the word “meat”
because they had never eaten it.

Particularly depressing are the winters of extreme cold, which sound more
like the medieval world than a country that, just a few years prior, had
been part of the other global superpower. Armenia’s nuclear power plant —
situated not far from a fault line — was shut down in the wake of the 1988
earthquake due to fears of another quake causing a nuclear accident.
Meanwhile, an economic blockade by Turkey and Azerbaijan prevented other
sources of energy from entering the country. As a result, citizens stripped
trees bare in the search for anything that could be converted to heat, and
sometimes slept under — rather than on — mattresses in an effort to be
warm. Friends of mine in Armenia — people in their 20s and 30s, not ancient
babushkas retelling family lore — still speak in slightly hushed tones
about the period, and the Millers’ treatment of the topic makes it clear
why.

Many of the underlying messages of “Survival and Hope” are relevant
throughout the former Soviet Union. The evidence of so-called progress —
Pringles in every corner kiosk, construction cranes poking through the
skyline, BMWs competing with Ladas for road real estate — is cosmetic at
best. The tides of change have left behind huge swaths of the population as
a small number of well-connected opportunists grow wealthy at the expense of
everyone else.

For Armenia, in particular, the message is bleak. Roughly 20 percent of the
population (as usual, that segment with the highest levels of experience and
intellect) has emigrated since 1990. Roughly half — or closer to 43
percent, if the latest government figures are to be believed — of the
country labors under crushing poverty. The economic blockade of Armenia by
Turkey and Azerbaijan continues, and the country remains at the mercy of its
wobbly nuclear power plant.

New York University Press
Black Garden:

Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War
By Thomas de Waal
New York University Press
328 Pages. $20

On a more positive note, Armenia and Azerbaijan are not currently at war
over Nagorny Karabakh — the conflict that is the subject of Thomas de
Waal’s compelling and very readable “Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan
Through Peace and War.” Blending history, political science and travelogue,
de Waal meticulously sets the stage for the war, then leads the reader
through a compelling blow-by-blow account, all carefully put into context
and interwoven with fascinating insights and anecdotes.

It is virtually impossible to discuss the Armenian genocide without being
partisan, as the mere use of the word “genocide” immediately defines the
writer’s position. But de Waal proves that mention of the Nagorny Karabakh
conflict has yet to reach that level of shrillness, offering a discussion so
fair and finely balanced that even the most partisan of readers would find
little to criticize. That de Waal has no Armenian or Azeri blood connections
helps, although more to the point is his gift for smooth, engaging
narrative.

The crux of the struggle, de Waal writes, was “the economics and geography
of Azerbaijan on one side … against Armenian claims of demography and
historical continuity,” and that was enough to turn neighbor against
neighbor. One Azeri fighter speaks of his fear that one day he would catch
his childhood Armenian friends in the sights of his rifles. De Waal spends a
fascinating chapter trying to understand how neighbors could so suddenly
become enemies, and comes to the grim conclusion that “no one felt they
personally were to blame.”

Where next for Armenia, given its mosaic of misery over the past century,
its poor current prospects, and the simmering possibility that the Nagorny
Karabakh war flares up again? Part of the answer could be through what the
Millers call a “new type of charity, a new philanthropy” from the vast and
powerful Armenian diaspora, one that would “create jobs, rebuild the
economic infrastructure of the country, and nurture responsible democratic
institutions.” Indeed, today’s Armenian diaspora sends home remittances
equivalent to upward of 10 percent of GDP, secures Armenia developmental
funds, and provides critical expertise to and investment in the Armenian
economy.

But the priorities of the Armenians abroad — such as Turkish recognition of
the 1915 Armenian genocide and the funding of one-off infrastructure
development projects that do little to support long-term economic growth and
development — often conflict with the present-day realities and needs of
the country. The key reference point of the Armenian diaspora is still the
genocide. They are unwilling to forget, and won’t forget. “The past is
always unspoken heavy and ever-present like some invisible unfurled ribbon
and we entangled in it as we are in our own blood,” Marcom writes. But
unless Armenia stops focusing on its painful past, and concentrates more on
improving the prospects for its future, it may not survive many more rounds
in the ring.

Kim Iskyan was based as a freelance journalist in Yerevan, Armenia, from
2002 until earlier this year.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress