Posted on Sun, Apr. 24, 2005
The Philadelphia Inquirer

For Armenians, scars of genocide remain visible

Joy E. Stocke
lives and writes in Stockton

Osman sits behind his desk in the tiny antique shop he owns tucked
into one of the labyrinthine streets of Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. “Yes,
it happened,” he says. “To my father and my grandparents near Erzincan
in what was then eastern Anatolia.”

Osman speaks slowly and clearly, a British inflection threading
through his perfect English. “My father was 6 and his brother was
4. When the soldiers came for my grandparents, two families of Alevi
Turks [who follow the tradition of Shia Islam] hid my father and his
brother. The soldiers gathered the people of the village and brought
them to the fields in the shadow of the mountains, and slit their
throats. For three years, the Alevis hid my father and his brother in
the chimneys of their baking hearths. To protect the boys, they
changed their Armenian Christian names to Muslim names.”

Osman’s son arrives with small cups of coffee, and then shuts the door
behind him. The air grows warm and stuffy, but Osman doesn’t seem to
notice. “When my father and his brother were freed, they became
separated. For the rest of his life, my father looked for him,
visiting every town no matter how small, hoping that his brother would
appear on the street or in a coffee house.

When I was 12, my father died of a broken heart, I’m sure. But there
is irony in my story, because the government had a special program for
orphaned boys.

They sent me to one of the best schools in Turkey.”

In that school, Osman met Nuri, who owns a carpet shop nearby. “All
these years, Osman and I have been friends,” says Nuri, “brothers
really, but we’ve never talked of this subject. He knows it happened;
I know it happened. Why make problems between us?”

Nuri and Osman spoke these words two weeks ago, well aware that today
– April 24 – many Western countries will mark Armenian Genocide
Remembrance Day, the 90th anniversary of the beginning of massacres
and deportation of Armenians from a land where they had lived for more
than 3,000 years.

Five years ago, most Turks wouldn’t speak openly about what they say
is a “so-called genocide,” but with Turkey’s bid to enter the European
Union, friends who once were afraid to voice their opinions about an
event deleted from their history books are beginning to talk.

The Turkish government, at odds with many of its citizens, denies that
systematic deportations and killings of Armenians occurred. Yet, if
you travel to the eastern border of Turkey, you will find abandoned
churches. And in travel posters and ads in most tourist offices, you
will see a lone red brick church sitting on an island called Akdamar
in the center of a lake called Van, named for a once-thriving
metropolis of Armenian farmers, craftsmen, businessmen, and traders.

You begin to wonder: If a well-photographed Armenian church sits on an
island – and in the nearby abandoned city of Ani sit hundreds more
churches – where did the Armenians go?

Until the 19th century, the Ottoman empire was known for tolerance of
its Christian minorities, but things changed when the Ottoman empire
went into decline. In July 1908, a group of Turkish nationalists known
as the Young Turks – junior officers in the Turkish Army – forced the
Sultan to allow a constitutional government guaranteeing basic rights
to Turkey’s citizens.

But in 1913, three leaders of the Young Turks seized control of the
government, planning to expand the borders of Turkey into Central
Asia, creating a new empire called Turan with one language and one
religion.

Armed roundups of Armenians – who, encouraged by the European powers
and Russia, had considered establishing their own state – began on the
evening of April 24, 1915. Three hundred Armenian political leaders,
educators, writers, and clergy in Istanbul were jailed, tortured, then
hanged or shot.

In the following three years, somewhere between 700,000 to more than 1
million Armenians were killed or died of starvation, thirst and
disease, and deported to camps in the Syrian desert.

Ninety years later, the Turkish Parliament has launched an offensive
saying that no genocide took place during what they claim was a war.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Armenians are lobbying for formal
recognition that the first genocide of the 20th century took place in
Turkey.

Osman finishes his coffee, gently setting the cup in its saucer. “You
ask me what to call the murders of my family?” he says. “What good is
a name if we can’t openly admit it happened?”