Family tree tied to forgotten genocide
By Terri Jo Ryan Tribune-Herald staff writer
Sunday, April 24, 2005
The images are almost iconic:
Naked corpses piled high. Starving children with their skins hanging
on skeletal frames. Grinning executioners with grisly “trophies” of
human body parts.
But the photographic evidence of crimes against humanity are not from
the liberations of the Third Reich death camps – but from a much
lesser known mass murder called the Armenian Genocide.
The extermination attempt on the Armenian people – which was launched
90 years ago today with the slaughter of thousands in Constantinople –
is family history for Baylor University graduate student Art Tonoyan.
Tonoyan, 29, born in Soviet Armenia, is the grandson of two genocide
survivors. It was his late grandfather Grigor Tonoyan’s tales of the
terrors of 1915 that colored his decision to use his life studying
genocide in the hopes of preventing it.
Grigor was 8 years old in 1915 when Turkish soldiers burst into his
family’s home in an Armenian village. They slashed his father’s
throat, raped his mother and older sister in front of him before
killing them and an older brother. The assailants deliberately left
him alive, they told the young shell-shocked witness, “so you can see
what we are capable of.”
Others in the village were herded into a church and burned alive.
Missionaries found Grigor wandering a road and took him in, Tonoyan
said.
The woman who would become Art Tonoyan’s grandmother, Almast
Yeghiazarian, had no memory of the carnage that destroyed her family
because she was only 3 when it happened.
“She was too young to be scarred. All she could remember was growing
up in the orphanage,” Tonoyan said. “She was brought in with a sister,
and they somehow got separated for more than 40 years.”
Grigor and Almast grew to adulthood in an American-run orphanage.They
married and settled into what was then known as Soviet Armenia.
“Our family tree was obliterated by the genocide,” said Tonoyan.
“That’s where our family begins.”
– – Backdrop to tragedy – –
Armenia was the first nation-state to declare its state religion to be
Christianity, in 301 A.D. Its location at the nexus of the Anatolian
peninsula, bridging Europe, Asia and what is now called the Middle
East, meant it was overrun in ensuing centuries by a variety of
conquerors, eventually including the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
For several centuries, Armenians were a tolerated minority within the
empire, said Tonoyan, who is studying for his doctorate in religion,
politics and society. But the empire began to crumble in the early
19th century with many of its subjugated people – Albanians,
Bulgarians and Greeks – seeking independence.
Tonoyan, who came to Baylor in August after five years in America,
said that Ottoman Armenians weren’t seeking full independence, just
better treatment and more autonomy in their region. The area saw
recurring violence and turmoil throughout the 1800s.
Meanwhile, a Turkish intellectual movement began at the turn of the
20th century. A group calling itself the Committee of Union and
Progress, also known as The Young Turks, sought the “homogenization”
of the empire by cleansing it of religious and ethnic minorities. They
seized power in 1908 and deposed the last Sultan, Tonoyan said.
The declaration of World War I in August 1914 plunged Europe into
warfare, and provided cover for the systematic elimination of the
Armenian people, he said. First, the Armenian men and teenagers who
had been conscripted into the army were disarmed, placed into forced
labor camps and then worked to death or executed, he said.
On April 24, 1915, on orders of Talat Pasha, interior minister of the
Young Turks regime, some 300 Armenian leaders, writers, thinkers and
professionals in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) were arrested
and killed. Also on that day in Constantinople, about 3,000
defenseless Armenian citizens were killed on the streets or in their
homes.
Finally, the remaining Armenians – women, children and the elderly –
were rounded up, told they would be “removed from the theatre of war”
and then marched off to concentration camps in the Syrian desert,
where they eventually died of starvation or thirst. Along the way, the
army shot those who could not keep up and raped the women and girls.
“Kurdish brigands kidnapped children and the pretty women for their
harems” and the boys as slaves, Tonoyan said. Some 60,000 Armenians
were drowned in the Black Sea, on barges the authorities ordered
loaded and sunk.
The world took some notice. Humanitarian agencies and religious groups
raised $100 million (about $3 billion in today’s dollars) to rebuild
villages, resettle survivors, transport others into exile and help
raise the thousands of orphans created by the ethnic strife.
But it was the lack of lasting international repercussions against the
perpetrators that later gave a certain Austrian corporal with
delusions of grandeur the courage to target his own despised minority.
“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Adolph Hitler reportedly quipped to his military commanders a week
before his invasion of Poland that launched World War II.
Despite the horrific precedent it set for mass murders to come, George
Gawrych, a military historian and Middle East specialist at Baylor,
says “the Armenian case is a bit more complicated” than most genocide
scholars report. Gawrych, who taught for 20 years at the Combat
Studies Institute of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College
at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, studies the waning last century of the
Ottoman Empire.
He struggles with the term “genocide” (race-murder) to describe what
happened to the Armenians. He said he prefers “massacre,” which he
considers a more powerful term, to describe the conditions that
allowed for violence without repercussions.
“We need better terms,” Gawrych said. ” With ‘ethnic cleansing,’ you
don’t feel the human agony, do you?”
The Ottomans were fighting the growth of nationalistic fervor among
its peoples, not just the Armenians, said Gawrych.
An Armenian guerilla movement was fighting for statehood, and
massacres happened on both sides: Armenian insurgents killing soldiers
and wiping out Muslim villages, and soldiers killing Armenians and
wiping out their villages. Gawrych said it was hard to sift through
the carnage.
But was an extermination of Armenians ordered? Gawrych said the
official Ottoman position was that no such order existed, and that the
bloodshed was just a series of unfortunate massacres in reaction to
nationalistic fervor and ethnic tensions.
“But too many women and children died. Too many old people. There was
some government involvement,” he said, at least in creating the
atmosphere of lawlessness that allowed the worst to happen.
– – Ugly lessons unlearned – –
“Brutalization is a part of history,” Gawrych said. “If we believe we
are all created equal, or all made in the image of God, genocide would
be an unthinkable crime. A Holocaust is possible because there are
better means to accomplish systematic slaughter.”
The painful lesson about genocide is that the United States itself is
not immune from the kind of fear that grips a government or society
that feels threatened. A nation can start turning against its own
people and oppressing minorities when it thinks survival is at stake,
he said.
Americans “shouldn’t be smugly complacent that it can’t happen here”
because it has, Gawrych said, with the massacres and forced migrations
of Native Americans. “I don’t think humanity has learned much at all
about genocide; it keeps happening – often under the term ‘ethnic
cleansing’,” said Truett Seminary theology professor Roger E. Olson.
“The only effective means of stopping it would be an international
force trained and equipped to swoop into any country where it is
taking place and stop it immediately.”
However, this is unlikely as long as various countries continue to
undermine the United Nations, Olson added.
Baylor University religion department chairman Randall O’Brien shares
that harsh assessment.
“The cold, hard truth is that America has been fast with rhetoric, but
slow with real measures to stop genocide,” he said.
“American policy-makers will change American policies when we citizens
demand change, and not until then,” O’Brien said. The U.S., the
world’s only remaining superpower, cannot possibly police the entire
planet alone, he added.
“The United Nations, NATO, and others must work with us to combat
global evil. In the face of genocide, indifference and ‘neutrality’
are themselves forms of evil. Nor will rhetoric alone stop ethnic
cleansing. The eyes of the world must fall on the murderer,” he said.
Jerry Smith, a Baptist minister in Clifton, said the “human depravity”
of such mass murders has left scars on some survivors and their
offspring that breeds “a hatred that sometimes is unthinkable.” “On
any given day you can take your pick of places and peoples in the
world that need help,” Smith said. “Decisions have to be made to help
those that we can and hope and pray someone else helps those that we
can’t.”
– – A family begins – –
The boy left alive by Turkish soldiers in 1915, nurtured by
missionaries when his family was cut down, started the Tonoyan family
tree anew.
The genocide scholar now studying at Baylor was born in 1975 to
Grigor’s son and daughter-in-law in the Soviet Union. Art Tonoyan and
his wife, Lydia, have a 17-month-old daughter, Ani, born in the United
States.
But the endless sorrow of his family’s history still tugs at his
conscience, Tonoyan said.
“I will never forget my grandfather’s eyes,” he said. “He was a very
sad person. I rarely remember him smiling. He never got over seeing
his family murdered.”
The Armenian massacres, a stain on the world’s soul 60 years before he
was born, has colored Tonoyan’s entire life, he said. He hopes to work
for a think tank that detects genocidal situations and raises an
international alarm.
“I want people to see it and understand it as a lesson. If a full
account had been made and action taken when it happened,” he said,
“maybe Hitler would have thought twice before thinking he could get
away with the Holocaust.”
Like the boy left alive, the grandson “can see what we are capable of.”