Ottawa Citizen
April 15, 2005 Friday
Final Edition

Hitler was wrong — Armenian genocide is not forgotten: Ninety years
later, the descendants of those who suffered the atrocities of mass
murder and expulsion are still haunted by their heritage of memory,
Patricia Sherlock reports.

by Patricia Sherlock, The Ottawa Citizen

Nearly a century after his grandmother’s death, Tony Boghossian is
plagued by a gruesome image. The day after his father and aunt, both
then children of seven and nine, buried the body, they returned to
the site only to find coyotes had dug it up.

For Mr. Boghossian, that’s not the kind of experience any child
should ever endure. But it was exactly that kind of experience that
millions of Armenians did endure. In September of 1915, newspapers
around the world ran headlines proclaiming “The Death of Armenia” and
“Terrible Tales of Turkish Atrocities.” Historians estimate massacres
and forced dislocations — the Armenian genocides, as it is now
called — resulted in the deaths more than one million Armenians.

Those deaths will be remembered today at 7:30 p.m. in Notre Dame
Cathedral in a multi-faith service commemorating the 90th anniversary
of the genocide of all but 200,000 of the Armenian population. The
Most Rev. Bagrat Galstanian, the primate of Canada’s Armenian Holy
Apostolic Church, says both Canadian houses of Parliament have
described the 1915 events as genocide, but the Canadian cabinet has
refused to do so. Bishop Galstanian calls it “a cause for concern
that the Canadian government will not change its policy accordingly.”

Turkey maintains Armenians lost their lives as a consequence of their
attempt to get more land from a collapsing Ottoman Empire, and the
Turks had to fight back.

Among those who survived were Mr. Boghossian’s father and aunt,
Movses and Yeghart Boghossian. The two children lost their mother
during the forced dislocation of their Black Sea village. She
probably died of hunger and disease, says Tony Boghossian. Their
father was also likely a victim of Turkish authorities. His father,
he said, remembered his own father leaving home in a soldier’s
uniform, never to be seen again.

Mr. Boghossian believes his grandfather was one of about 10,000
Armenians conscripted into the Turkish army and placed in labour
battalions to work on Turkish railway and construction projects. Many
died of the harsh conditions and others were murdered.

The journey of Yeghart and Movses lasted for about three years during
which they were moved from one place to another, sometimes staying
six or seven months before being forced to move again, never knowing
where they were going.

Along the way, they sometimes received help from ordinary Turks. Mr.
Boghossian remembers his father telling him as an old man of his
great joy when a Turkish police officer gave him coupons to buy
bread.

At some point, says Mr. Boghossian, Movses and Yeghart went back to
their village, but everything had been destroyed. Even the window
frames and doors had been removed for firewood. Relatives were unable
to care for them and placed them in orphanages in Istanbul.

Moses went through a series of orphanages moving from Istanbul to
Corfu, then Cyprus, and finally, at 18, to Beirut. As a young man he
moved to Aleppo, Syria, where he joined an existing Armenian
community, as well as Armenian survivors who had been forced to march
across the Syrian desert without food or water. His sister, who had
been at a girl’s orphanage in Istanbul, went to Bulgaria and he never
saw her again.

Mr. Boghossian’s father came to Canada under a foreign affairs
mandate that required entrants to be healthy young people. He didn’t
talk about the loss of his parents and homeland until he reached old
age.

Today, the Armenian community in Ottawa, and around the world, will
mark the 90th anniversary of the execution of Armenian leaders and
intellectuals in Istanbul, which they consider to be the beginning of
the genocide.

Ottawa-Centre MP Ed Broadbent will deliver the keynote speech and 25
spiritual leaders from the Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim and
Hindu faiths will participate. “We (will be) joined with friends and
interfaith groups, and we want to show our solidarity against any
atrocities to anybody and to pray for the souls of the departed,”
said Primate Galstanian. The Armenian genocide set a precedent for
other genocides that followed in the 20th century, he said, recalling
a statement made by Nazi Germany’s dictator, Adolf Hitler, that no
one remembers the Armenians.

Roman Catholic Archbishop Marcel Gervais describes the Armenian
genocide as “ethnic cleansing at its worst.” He emphasized the
importance of remembering the atrocities, to prevent it from
“happening to anyone, anywhere.”

Today, according to Mr. Boghossian, the Turkish people are okay, and
even his father said nothing against them. But he does want the
Turkish government to stop denying the genocide and admit that what
happened under the Ottoman Empire was the systematic killing of
Armenians.