EARTH, FIRE, WATER
Atlantic Online
Oct 18 2007
In the following excerpt from Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the
Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus (Random House, 2000),
I offer one perspective on the historical experience of the Armenians.
Yet while I am sympathetic to the Armenian worldview and support
some form of commemoration of what they have suffered, I believe
that given the specific circumstances of the moment, with our troops
risking their lives for a better Iraq, and the Turks contemplating an
invasion of northern Iraq, now is the worst possible moment to anger
the Turks with a Congressional resolution recognizing the Armenian
genocide. Alas, justice will yet again have to wait.
The Armenian capital of Yerevan sits under the spell of Mount Ararat,
soaring 16,874 feet over the surrounding plain; a giant smoky-blue
pyramid capped by a craggy head of silvery-white snow. On many days,
the summit emerges from a platform of clouds halfway up the sky, like
a new universe in formation. The name Ararat is from the Armenian root
for "life" and "creation," ara. Mount Ararat is Armenia’s national
symbol, appearing on maps and banners and in paintings.
Ararat is where Noah’s Ark is supposed to have come to rest. In nearby
Echmiadzin, the Armenian Vatican, where sits the "Catholicos of All
Armenians," a shard of stone said to be petrified wood from the Ark
is embedded in a silver-plated icon. Armenians choose to think they
are the first people who settled the earth after the Deluge.
>From the unfinished cement balcony of my hotel room, Mount Ararat
looks close enough to touch-a pure and dreamlike vision of heaven that
humbles the ramshackle iron roofs and barracks-style apartment blocks
of Yerevan. But Ararat is unreachable. It lies beyond the border
with Armenia’s historic enemy, Turkey. The border between the two
countries is sealed with barbed wire. In the words of an Armenian poem:
We have already seen the other side of the moon.
But when will we see the other side of Ararat?
Ararat’s power as a mythic symbol is intensified by its location
in Turkey. Ararat calls forth the forbidden land-the lost part of
historic Armenia encompassing much of present-day Turkey and the
site of the 1915 genocide, when a crumbling Turkish regime starved,
exiled, and killed over a million Armenians. Whenever they look
toward the southwestern horizon at the awe-inspiring mountain,
the inhabitants Yerevan are reminded of ancient and medieval glory,
and of twentieth-century mass murder.
Armenia is the quintessential Near Eastern nation: conquered,
territorially mutilated, yet existing in one form or another in the
Near Eastern heartland for 2,600 years, mentioned in ancient Persian
inscriptions and in the accounts of Herodotus and Strabo. Armenians
trace their roots to Hayk, son of Torgom, the great-grandson of
Japheth, a son of Noah himself. While their rivals the Medes
and Hittites disappeared, the Armenians remained intact as an
Indo-European people with their own language, akin to Persian. In the
first century B.C., under Tigran the Great, Hayastan (what Armenians
call Annenia) stretched from the Caspian Sea in the east to central
Turkey in the west incorporating much of the Caucasus, part of Iran,
and all of Syria. In A.D. 301, Armenians became the first people to
embrace Christianity as a state religion; today, Orthodox Armenia
represents the southeastern edge of Christendom in Eurasia. In 405,
the scholar Mesrop Mashtots invented the Armenian alphabet, still in
use today. (When I remarked to a friend in Yerevan that the Armenian
alphabet looked vaguely similar to the Georgian one, she shrieked:
"Nonsense. There is a joke that when the Georgians needed an alphabet,
they asked Mashtots, who took the macaroni he was eating and threw it
against the wall. The patterns it made became the Georgian alphabet.")
Armenia soon became engulfed by the Roman and Byzantine empires. But
when the Arab caliphate fell into decline in the ninth tenth centuries,
Armenia rose again as a great independent kingdom under the Bagratid
dynasty, with its capital at Ani, in present-day Turkey.
In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turk chieftain Alp Arsla1 overran
Ani, Kars, and the other Armenian fortresses, destroying over ten
thousand illuminated manuscripts, copied and painted at Armenia
monasteries. Independent Armenia survived in the form of baronies
but eventually fell under the rule of Turks, Persians, and, later,
the Russian czars and commissars. It is the Russian part which forms
today’s independent state.
Now squeezed between Turkey to the west, Iran to the south, Azerbaijan
to the east, and Georgia to the north-with its lost, far-flung
territories lying in all directions-this newly independent former
Soviet republic straddles the Caucasus and the Near Eastern desert to
the south. Like Israel, Armenia is a small country-its population is
only 3.5 million-surrounded on three sides by historical enemies (the
Anatolian Turks, the Azeri Turks, and the Georgians), but it boasts a
dynamic merchant tradition and a wealthy diaspora. Beirut, Damascus,
Aleppo, Jerusalem, Teheran, and Istanbul all have influential Armenian
communities. Jews and Armenians also share the legacy of genocide. The
Nazis’ World War II slaughter of the Jews was inspired partly by that
of the Armenians in World War I.
"Who today remembers the extermination of the Armenians?" Hitler
remarked in 1939.
I had come to Armenia because I wanted to see the other side.
Throughout Turkey, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, I had heard people crudely,
matter-of-factly curse the Armenians. The Armenians have been despised
in these countries the way the Israelis and Jews have been in much of
the Arab world, compared with "lice" and "fleas" sucking the blood
from native peoples. I had come to Armenia to look again at the
issue of national character, for here was a distinctly identifiable
people and a country that was more ethnically homogeneous than most
others in the region: While Jews comprise 83 percent of Israel’s
population, Armenians make up 93 percent of Armenia’s. (Armenia
used to be multiethnic, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union,
hundreds of thousands of ethnic Azeris fled to Azerbaijan and abroad,
while a similar number of ethnic Armenians fled Azerbaijan.)
Finally, I had come here to end my journey where it began: in the
Balkans. Of course, Armenia is not exactly in the Balkans, situated
as it is at the opposite end of Turkey from Bulgaria and Greece.
However, along with Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Serbia, Armenia
was central to the tangle of nationality problems arising from the
death of the Ottoman empire, a headache that bedeviled European
statesmen at the turn of the twentieth century and that collectively
was known as the "Eastern question." It was the national movements
of the late, nineteenth-century Balkans that had inspired Armenian
revolutionaries seeking freedom from both the Turkish sultans and
the Russian czars.
But there was a crucial difference between the revolt of the Greeks and
the Slavs against the Turks in the Balkans and the Armenian revolt:
against the Turks in eastern Anatolia. The Balkans lay within the
Ottoman empire but outside Turkey itself, so only imperial control was
at issue; while in eastern Anatolia, Turkish and Armenian communities
fought over the same soil. That is partly why-in the shadow of Mount
Ararat-traditional ethnic killing first acquired a comprehensive and
bureaucratic dimension…
The Armenian Genocide Memorial stands on a plateau overlooking
Yerevan, in the same splendid isolation as the Yad Vashem Holocaust
Memorial outside Jerusalem. It consists of a forty-four-meter-high
dark-granite needle and twelve inward-leaning basalt slabs forming an
open tent over an eternal flame, with a museum and offices located
underground. The Armenian Genocide, like the Jewish Holocaust, was
an event that grew-rather than diminished-in significance over the
decades, to the point where it became a collective memory of mythic
proportions. The Jews created an identity for the Holocaust, as the
Armenians did for the massacres at the hands of the Turks, as blacks
did for slavery. Partly because the Armenian Genocide was harder than
the Holocaust to isolate from the other violence of a world war, the
term genocide is relatively new, applied retrospectively decades later.
Because the genocide occurred in the Turkish part of Armenia rather
than in the Russian part, where the current Armenian state is located,
its memory has always resonated more in the diaspora with its
communities of survivors than in Yerevan itself –especially since
any discussion of the genocide in Soviet Armenia was discouraged by
Moscow, fearful as it was of a nationalist revival.
Nevertheless, in 1965, there was a major demonstration here on the
fiftieth anniversary of the massacres. This prompted Leonid Brezhnev to
make a canny decision. He recognized that a sharpening of hostilities
between NATO-member Turkey and a Soviet republic on Turkey’s eastern
border would benefit the Kremlin at a time when enthusiasm for the
Cold War was waning; it would also allow the local population in
a strategic and relatively prosperous Soviet republic to express
its rage. This is why Brezhnev ordered the construction of the
Genocide Monument in Yerevan. Completed by two Armenian architects
in 1967, it is a Soviet-style edifice of brutish socialist realism,
indistinguishable from many of the war memorials I had seen throughout
the former Warsaw Pact nations, with weeds growing between the cracks
of poorly laid stones.
Recognizing the genocide was one thing; actively encouraging its
memory was another. "The Soviets used the genocide as a political
weapon against Turkey but did not teach it in Armenian schools,"
Laurenti Barsegian, the Genocide Museum director, told me over
glasses of cognac and "Armenian coffee" at ten in the morning. What
had really ignited the collective memory of the genocide was the
terrorist campaign against Turkish diplomats in the 1980s, organized
by Beirut-based Armenians. "Killing Turkish diplomats was wrong,
for they are just as human as we are," the museum director declared,
"but, ironically, it worked. The genocide became more widely known."
Then came Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost, and, with it, the explosion
of ethnic nationalism in Nagorno-Karabakh and the rest of the
Caucasus. "The enemy in Karabakh was not the Azeri Turks but our own
past," Mikayel Hambardzumyan, a young local reformer, explained to
me. "The genocide had given Armenians a nationalism built on defeat
and masochism, like the Serbs and Shi’ites," he said, "but now the
victory in Karabakh has changed that. It has made our nationalism
healthier." I noticed that some Armenian war dead from Karabakh were
buried at the Genocide Monument, merging formally the crime committed
against the Armenian nation at the beginning of the twentieth century
with the ugly revenge exacted at its end.
Because the memory of the genocide had always burned deeper in the
diaspora, Karabakh became the diaspora’s war as much as Yerevan’s,
with money and volunteers coming from Armenian communities around
the world. "Karabakh-much more than independence from the Soviet
Union-unified Armenia with the diaspora," Aris Khazian, a geographer
and intellectual, told me.
>From the office of the director, I entered the museum, commissioned
by post-Soviet Armenia’s first president, Levon Ter-Petrosian, and
opened in April 1995, on the eightieth anniversary of the genocide,
completing the memorial complex begun by the Soviets on the fiftieth
anniversary. The official anniversary of the genocide is April 24,
the night in 1915 when the Turkish authorities arrested the political,
intellectual, and religious leaders of the Armenian community in
Istanbul and deported them to the Anatolian interior, where all were
savagely murdered.
In the museum’s somber basalt interior, I faced a wall-size map, made
of stone, showing all the Armenian settlements of eastern Anatolia:
Trabzon, Van, Erzurum, Diyarbekir, Bitlis, Sivas, and so on: 2,133,190
Armenian inhabitants, 1,996 Armenian schools, and 2,925 churches. I
had traveled often through these now Turkish cities, where, except
for the occasional ruin of a church turned into a pigsty that I had
seen outside Trabzon, every trace of Armenian civilization has been
erased. Nor do the Turkish authorities acknowledge that Armenians
once lived on their soil. The Germans could concede their crime
against the Jews because postwar Germany was forced to adopt the
values and institutions of the Western allies and because the Jews
had been a minority with no territorial claim-unlike the Armenians,
whose very existence threatens Turkey’s right to sovereignty over
eastern Anatolia. In the Near East, where states built on a single
tribal identity occupy formerly mixed areas, to acknowledge crimes
against a whole people is to put your own dominion in doubt.
Passing through the dimly lit hallway, seeing grainy old photos of
beheaded Armenians that the Turks had lined up on shelves, naked bodies
stacked on hillsides and in trenches, and corpses swinging a few inches
off the ground from makeshift gallows, I reflected on the trail of
events that sparked such barbarism. I realized then that the Turkish
atrocities against the Armenians-more than the Nazi Holocaust-are
the appropriate analogy for recent events in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda,
and East Timor, among other places. Hitler had no territorial motive
for his industrialized racial killing. Indeed, the focus on killing
the Jews may have distracted his war machine from fighting his real
strategic enemy, the Russians. But eastern Anatolia in 1915-like
Bosnia, Kosovo, and Rwanda-was a battlefield upon which two peoples
fought over the same soil, with one in a strong enough position
to destroy the other. The Armenian Genocide-like the humanitarian
disasters of the 1990s-was mass slaughter arising from ethnic conflict
over territory. Thus, what happened in eastern Anatolia is politically
and morally a more complicated event than the Holocaust. Because the
early twenty-first century may see more such humanitarian emergencies,
the Armenian Genocide will grow in significance.
The Armenian Genocide occurred during World War I, when Ottoman
Turkey was allied with Germany against czarist Russia and the Western
allies. While an Allied fleet was bombarding the Dardanelles in
western Turkey, eastern Turkey was open to Russian attack. At the
same time, Armenians in eastern Turkey (Anatolia) were deserting the
Moslem Turkish army and joining their fellow Orthodox Christians on
the Russian side, and Armenians farther to the east in the Caucasus
were organizing anti-Turkish militias. A brutal competition for land
in eastern Anatolia made relations among the Turkish, Armenian, and
Kurdish inhabitants even worse, with Armenian villagers refusing
to pay taxes to the Kurdish tribesmen who controlled the area on
behalf of the Ottoman Turkish authorities. The Turks, in effect,
subcontracted the slaughter of the Armenians to the Kurds, whose
irregulars, the Hamidieh, murdered the Armenians. In many Anatolian
villages, the absence of Turkish authority was worse than its presence.
According to Ronald Grigor Suny, the Alex Manoogian Professor
of Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan:
"Political disorder … led to chaos…. A state of war existed
between the Muslims and the Armenians as the government abdicated
its responsibilities." Nevertheless, the various local massacres
suggested a deliberate policy crafted in Istanbul. The museum displays
a document issued by Talaat Pasha, a leading Turkish official,
ordering the elimination-by whatever means necessary-of Armenians from
Ottoman lands. Thus, 600,000 to 1.5 million people were murdered and
exiled-people who had inhabited Anatolia for a thousand years before
the Turks arrived. "In my apartment I have the key to my grandfather’s
house in Erzurum, in western Armenia, a house I can never enter
because it is now in Turkey," an Armenian friend in Yerevan told me.
While specific individuals in the highest reaches of the Turkish
government ordered the killings, it is also true that imperial
authority was disintegrating, causing mayhem in distant reaches of the
empire given over to ethnic hatred-a hatred aggravated by competition
for scarce land and other resources. The Armenian Genocide was one
aspect of an unwieldy, multiethnic empire’s re-formation into smaller,
uniethnic states. The same ingredients have been at work in our own
time: in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Indonesian archipelago, and
other places where large-scale human rights abuses have occurred. The
collapse of empires and the desire for ethnic self-determination and
regional independence are a messy, bloody business.
Excerpt from Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle
East, and the Caucasus, by Robert D. Kaplan (Random House, 2000)
an-armenia
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
