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Armenian Genocide Remembered

Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Albuquerque Journal
Copyright 2006 Albuquerque Journal

By Toby Smith

Many Americans of a certain age grew up hearing their parents issue
this dinnertime command to eat up: “Think of all the starving
Armenians!”

The curious expression was actually based on fact. Ninety years ago in
Armenia, starvation was a way of life. So was torture and mass
extermination, according to a new documentary.

On Thursday at 10 p.m., KNME-TV presents “The Armenian Genocide,” a
powerful film that details long-ago horrors.

Starting in 1915, and continuing for eight years, more than 1 million
Armenians died at the hands of Ottoman Turks in what has been, the
documentary reveals, “one of the greatest untold stories of the 20th
century.”

Andrew Goldberg wrote, directed and produced the hourlong
film. Narration is provided by a range of American actors.

Convinced that Turkish-Armenians, most of whom were Christian, were
the cause of problems within the sprawling, Muslim-dominated Ottoman
Empire, the Turks set out on insidious revenge.

There are approximately 150 Armenians in New Mexico and none has been
untouched by the genocide.

“My mother and sisters told me things,” says Vahram “Bill” Knadjian,
who is seated at his desk in the rug shop he opened on Albuquerque’s
Central Avenue more than a half-century ago.

Knadjian (pronounced Ka-nay-jun) is 92 years old, white-haired and
stooped. But his memory is clear enough to cause his eyes to moisten
when he talks of his youth in a ravished land.

“The first 10 years of my life were hell,” he says.

Though he was barely 2 when the Turks began to systematically erase
from the Ottoman Empire all Turkish-Armenians, Knadjian still carries
the horrors around him.

First to go in 1915 was his father, Soghomon Knadjian. The older man
was pulled from the family home in Urfa, Turkey, lined up against a
wall and shot by the Turkish Army.

Next, says Bill Knadjian, the Turks tied his brother, Yervant, 14, by
the ankles and beat the bottoms of his feet until they bled and
cracked.

“Then they poured saltwater into his wounds,” Knadjian says, “and
threatened to hang him each morning. His feet swelled. His feet
finally healed, but his brain never did. I wished they had killed
him.”

In 1916, the Turks sent Bill Knadjian, his mother and his two older
sisters and two younger ones on one of the genocide’s notorious “death
marches.”

The idea was to starve to death women and children by forcing them to
walk long distances without food.

Along the way Knadjian’s two older sisters, then teenagers, were raped
and murdered, he says, by Turkish soldiers.

The march took a year. “We ate every dog and every cat we could find,”
he says. When the family reached the Euphrates River in 1917, it was
red with blood and polluted with bodies, according to Knadjian. Typhus
fever plagued his mother, but somehow she survived.

The hatred Turks had for Armenians had been born years before, says
Knadjian.

“Massacres,” he says. “Constant massacres.”

In 1855, his great-grandfather, he learned, was killed by Turks. In
1895, his grandfather, a minister, was shot in front of his six
children.

The Turkish people almost universally believe that the Armenian
genocide didn’t happen. Wartime tragedies, Turks say. A few atrocities
perhaps, but no more. The term “genocide” or references to it appear
in no history books in Turkey.

On some public broadcasting stations, a half-hour, forumlike debate on
the issue will follow the documentary.

The documentary was to be shown on nearly 350 PBS stations, but almost
a third declined to show the debate.

KNME-TV won’t air the debate, which Chad Davis, the station’s director
of content, called “flawed.”

Emriye Ormaci, vice consul at the Turkish Consulate General in
Houston, agreed the panel wasn’t very strong, “but the documentary
only shows the Armenian side of the issue.”

In 1923, Bill Knadjian left the region for the United States. After a
while he settled in Los Angeles where he learned the rug business. In
1939, he became a U.S. citizen. Fifteen years later, he arrived in
Albuquerque. He still works every day in the showroom he built just
west of the University of New Mexico.

When asked if he has been back to Turkey or Armenia, Knadjian seems
genuinely surprised.

“You want me to go back there? That will never happen. America is my
home. It always will be.”

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress