Providence Journal , RI
April 25 2005

Armenians will never, ever forget

The common theme of the annual commemoration of the Armenian genocide
is that the world remembers what happened in 1915.

BY FELICE J. FREYER
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE — Julia Dadekian’s father was a toddler in 1915 when his
entire family was murdered by the Ottoman Turks in Mardin, Turkey. To
this day, Dadekian doesn’t know how many aunts and uncles she may
have had, nor what they endured.

Others have told of rape, mutilation, the killing of infants before
their parents’ eyes. Dadekian’s story has a happy ending. A woman who
ran an orphanage found her father wandering the streets alone, sick
and starving. She took him in, adopted him, and brought him to
America.

Still, Dadekian shed quiet tears at the annual commemoration of the
Armenian genocide, which started 90 years ago yesterday, thinking of
what her father, Samuel Boyajian, and his adoptive mother, Juhar
Boyajian, had gone through, about the relatives she never knew, about
all the losses. Some 1.5 million are said to have been killed.

“What is the proper note to strike? How ought we to remember events
of the past?” asked the Rev. Peter John in the invocation at the Sts.
Sahag and Mesrob Armenian Church.

His questions were answered in various ways by the speakers who
followed, including Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch, Providence
Mayor David N. Cicilline, Lt. Gov. Charles J. Fogarty, Secretary of
State Matthew A. Brown and leaders of the Armenian community. The
common theme: It’s imperative not to let the world forget.

When the former Ottoman empire turned on the Armenian minority living
within its borders, with the apparent goal of exterminating them, it
was the first genocide of the 20th century. The horrors of 1915, said
Arthur Ventrone, a member of the Armenian Martyrs’ Memorial
Committee, “opened new and dark alleys” for humanity.

Hitler is said to have remarked, when he began killing the Jews, that
no one remembers the Armenians. So there followed the Holocaust, the
killing fields of Cambodia, and the massacres in Rwanda and, today,
Sudan.

Aram Garabedian, president of the Cranston City Council, spoke of his
efforts to ensure that school curriculums teach about genocide.

“History matters,” said Adam Strom, director of research and
development of Facing History and Ourselves, a Brookline, Mass.,
organization. “It matters for Armenians. It matters for Turks.”

No Turks have faced an international tribunal for the crimes of 1915.
And modern-day Turkey denies that the genocide ever took place,
calling the deaths the result of war. This combination of impunity
and denial allows such atrocities to be repeated in the future, Strom
said.

“You teach about history so it doesn’t happen again,” Strom said.
“It’s a naive hope, but it’s our only hope.”

Cicilline identified another source of hope: the way Rhode Island’s
Armenian community of roughly 15,000, which he described as the
eighth largest in the country, has contributed to the state and the
country.

“The crimes against the people of Armenia failed completely,”
Cicilline said, “because the people of Armenia thrive today, in
Providence, in America and throughout the world.”

Julia Dadekian, who lives in Cranston, exemplifies what they were
talking about. Juhar Boyajian, the woman who saved her father from
starvation, married another Armenian in Indianapolis, where they ran
a bakery. Her father moved to Providence, working as carpet layer and
raising his family here.

Dadekian says that survivors of the Armenian genocide often didn’t
talk about it; the horror was too great. But she made sure to tell
her two sons what happened to their grandfather and his family. She
says she doesn’t want them to be angry — just to know the facts.