ARMENIANS RACE AGAINST TIME FOR STORIES OF THEIR DEVASTATION
By Russell Ben-Ali
Star-Ledger Staff
Newark Star Ledger, NJ
April 20 2007
Hagop Bahtiarian recalls the frantic grab he made for his father’s
coat: a terrified 5-year-old clutching his dad during an arrest by
police of the Ottoman Empire 92 years ago.
The elder Bahtiarian was jailed in 1915 and later killed, in the early
days of a period that would prove devastating for Bahtiarian’s family
and other Armenians. As a people, they were rousted from their homes
and expelled from Ottoman territory now part of Turkey.
Between 1915 and 1923, an estimated 1.5million Armenians were killed
or died of starvation and illness while in detention or in forced
marches into the Syrian desert during a campaign many historians call
the Armenian Genocide.
"These are things that are so hard for a kid to take," said Bahtiarian,
97, a retired watchmaker who settled in Bergen County and now lives
in the Armenian Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Emerson. "But
it hurts so much that it’s impossible to forget it. My father never
came back. How can you not remember?"
Historians are counting on vivid memories of survivors like Bahtiarian
as they try to document the oral histories of the Armenian calamity
while there is still time.
"If they’re going to remember anything, they’ve got to be close to 100
years old," said Samuel Azadian of Hamburg, New Jersey, who founded
the Armenian Genocide Commemoration in 1985.
BELATED REGRETS
The Armenian community has struggled for decades to promote broader
recognition of its losses, with the Turkish government strongly
resistant to the notion that ethnic cleansing was at work. This Sunday
in Times Square, thousands of Armenians are expected to rally at 2 p.m.
"Unfortunately, our community did not do the things that the Jewish
community has done in chronicling the Holocaust," said Azadian, a
former deputy commissioner for New York City highways. "Remember,
there was not the technological methods available that there are
today. Who even had tape recorders back in 1920?"
The killings were well chronicled by publications including the New
York Times. In the years since, some relatives have attempted to
record and videotape personal histories of survivors.
Azadian, 80, said he wishes he had done more to document his own
family history through his mother, who during the genocide lost four
children before he was born.
"I regret to this day that I didn’t sit down with a tape recorder and
interview my mother," Azadian said. "Her memories just kept haunting
her and haunting her."
The memories are troubling for Anahid Boghosian, 98, who also lives
in the Armenian nursing home. "Annie" was a child forced into exile;
her travels took her to Syria, Cuba, Revere, Mass., and then Cliffside
Park in Bergen County.
"My father had gone to Istanbul to look for work," said Boghosian,
hands trembling as she tried to recall the events during an interview
at the nursing home. "He was never heard from again."
‘WHAT’S THE USE?’
The stories she once told her daughters, Thelma Sarajian and Helen
Kenajian of Cliffside Park, are difficult to recall these days,
even with their aid and encouragement.
Sitting in a wheelchair in a nursing home conference room with her
daughters and the reporter interviewing her, she struggled with her
emotions. "Why do you people wait so late?" she asked. "It’s all in
the ashes. What’s the use? What’s the use?"
Around the world, Armenians generally remember the start of the
killings with a commemoration on April 24, the date in 1915 when
Armenian political, intellectual and other leaders were rounded up
and eliminated.
On Sunday, advocates will call on the U.S. government to recognize
the Armenian genocide, as some Western countries have. They also will
remember Hrant Dink, the prominent Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor
who was gunned down outside his Istanbul office in January. Dink
often chronicled the Turkish government’s treatment of the Armenian
minority in his weekly.
They also will push for the passage of House Resolution 160, introduced
in January by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) to recognize the Armenian
Genocide.
Although the resolution is largely symbolic, it is strongly opposed by
the Turkish government. It is also opposed by the Bush administration,
which recognizes the Armenian deaths as a historic tragedy but declines
to call it genocide or accuse Turkey, its NATO ally, of participating.
POSTWAR BEDLAM
The Republic of Turkey, founded in 1923, has long denied initiating
a campaign to eliminate or expel from the Ottoman Empire the
Armenian people, who represent one of the world’s oldest Christian
communities. In the past, Turkey has attributed the Armenian deaths
to the bedlam surrounding World War I, as the old Ottoman Empire
unraveled and collapsed.
The government contends many Turks were casualties of this period,
too, killed by Armenians who aligned themselves with Russian troops
and might have had plans to take over land in the eastern part of
the Ottoman Empire.
Those contentions have inspired Armenian-Americans to work harder to
interview survivors.
"Their stories touch our hearts," said Dennis R. Papazian of Woodcliff
Lake in Bergen County, who is the founding director of the Armenian
Research Center at the University of Michigan at Dearborn.
Beginning in the 1970s, some 55 years after the genocide began,
Papazian began amassing hundreds of oral, and, later, video recordings
of survivor stories.
Such work is vital, Azadian said, to thwarting future acts of genocide.
"It’s a horrible blot on mankind — Darfur, Rwanda, Cambodia," he
said of genocide. "That’s why we do what we do."