INLAND-AREA ARMENIANS SAY HOUSE DEBATE ON GENOCIDE RESOLUTION REKINDLES MEMORIES OF LOST ANCESTORS
By David Olson
Press-Enterprise, CA
ews_Local_D_armenian15.29502ad.html
Nov 15 2007
Video: Norma Cosby talks about how the Armenian massacres affected
her family
After six decades, Norma Cosby cannot erase from her mind the anguished
voice that first taught her about atrocities committed against her
Armenian ancestors.
On a vinyl record that her grandparents played over and over again when
Cosby was a teenager, a weeping Armenian man describes how Ottoman
Turk soldiers buried Armenians to their necks and then chopped off
their heads with swords. It tells of fetuses ripped from pregnant
women’s slashed stomachs.
The San Bernardino woman later found out that her great-grandmother
had been murdered by Turks during the World War I-era massacres,
and that her great-aunts had been enslaved.
For Cosby, 70, and other Inland residents of Armenian ancestry, the
continuing battle to convince Congress to call the killings of more
than 1 million Armenians genocide is personal. They want recognition
of what their forebears endured.
"I have to draw the analogy with the Jews," Cosby said. "They said,
‘Never forget.’ Well, Armenians don’t want the world to forget
something horrible happened to them, either."
The Rev. Stepanos Dingilian, pastor of the Armenian Apostolic
Church parishes in Riverside and Rancho Mirage, said he has never
met an Armenian-American who doesn’t have a story to tell about a
grandmother who was shot by the Ottoman Turks or a great-uncle who
died of starvation while on forced marches out of what is today Turkey.
The Turkish government contends that the deaths of the Armenians
were part of the tragedy of World War I, and not a concerted effort
to wipe out an entire people.
The United Nations defines genocide as an "intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."
Genocide-studies groups say the deaths clearly constituted genocide,
but even some historians who agree that genocide occurred oppose
the congressional resolution, saying that politicians shouldn’t make
historical conclusions.
A House committee approved the genocide resolution Oct. 10. But House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, postponed a vote on the measure
by the full House after intense lobbying by the Turkish government led
some sponsors to withdraw their support. The Bush administration and
some members of Congress from both parties warned of frayed relations
with the key U.S. ally if the resolution passed.
Armenian groups have been lobbying for passage of genocide resolutions
for more than three decades. The House approved a 1975 declaration
calling for a day of remembrance of the "genocide," but the Senate
did not vote on the measure.
Armenian-Americans in the Inland area and throughout the country
are writing and calling their congressional representatives to urge
support for the current resolution. The Armenian National Committee
of America plans to send hundreds of people to the U.S. Capitol
next month to lobby for the resolution, said Andrew Kzirian, western
regional executive director of the committee.
For Cosby and other Inland Armenians who remain scarred by the mass
killings, the resolution isn’t about politics. They say it’s about
justice for ancestors who were killed, raped and forced out of
their homes.
Memories of a Tragedy
Armenians lived in what is now central and eastern Turkey for 2,500
years.
Beginning in 1915, in the waning days of the Turkish-led Ottoman
Empire, Ottoman Turk soldiers began systematically killing Armenians
or expelling them from their ancestral homeland, said Gregory Stanton,
president of Genocide Watch and vice president of the International
Association of Genocide Scholars.
Turkey became a country in 1923.
Between 1 million and 1.5 million of the 2 million Armenians who
had lived in the area were either murdered or died of starvation or
disease in forced marches, said Stanton, a professor of human rights
at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia.
Today, eastern Turkey has virtually no Armenians.
Dingilian’s maternal ancestors had lived for centuries in Kharpert,
in what is now central Turkey.
One day in 1915, Ottoman Turk soldiers shot his grandparents to death,
he said.
His mother, Kohar Dingilian, was only 4 years old at the time, so
the details of what happened are sketchy. But Stepanos Dingilian said
his mother’s first memory was of her older sister taking her by the
hand and pointing at a group of Turkish soldiers on the balcony of
the family home.
"Those are the men who killed them, " the sister said, according to
the stories Stepanos Dingilian’s mother recounted to him.
Kohar Dingilian, who died in Corona in 1996, also recalled being
tied up with rope in a barn and seeing a Turkish soldier sharpening
a knife, presumably for her murder. Her sister freed her and sent her
by carriage to the Aegean Sea coast, where a ship took her and other
children to an American orphanage in Greece, Stepanos Dingilian said.
Other ships never made it out of port, he said.
"She saw ships burning and remembers kids screaming," Stepanos
Dingilian said. "That haunted her. She would cry when telling me
about that."
Kohar Dingilian’s sister and three brothers were forced with thousands
of others to walk about 200 miles to Syria, Stepanos Dingilian said.
Like many Armenians, Stepanos Dingilian will not allow himself and
his family to forget the massacres. He talks of it each year in his
homilies at his Riverside and Rancho Mirage parishes, to commemorate
the anniversary of the start of the killings, April 24, 1915.
The shelves in Stepanos Dingilian’s Irvine home are filled with books
on the Armenian massacres. A seventh-grade history project that his
daughter Kayane created last year is propped on an organ.
Photos in the white-cardboard display show decapitated heads, bodies
hanging by ropes at military forts and weary people in heavy coats
marching through a desolate landscape.
The project is titled "The Triumph of the Armenians Over the Tragedy
of the Genocide."
"We look at it as a source of hope at what humans can withstand,"
Dingilian said. "Even though they killed us physically, spiritually
we’re still around."
First-Person Accounts
Dingilian’s mother told him stories of the massacres hundreds of
times. She said she didn’t want the world to forget what happened to
the Armenians.
Cosby’s relatives were more reticent.
She heard her grandmother weep and pray, and her grandfather curse,
as they listened to stories of the massacres flow from their phonograph
speakers. Yet they told her nothing.
In 1965, when Cosby was 27, she visited her Great-Aunt Beatrice
Mardirossian in France.
Mardirossian had never mentioned her enslavement on a previous visit
to the United States, and Cosby believes she probably wouldn’t have
said anything about it in 1965 if Cosby hadn’t asked her how she
ended up in France.
Mardirossian and another great aunt, Elizabeth Hatzakortzian, had
fled to France after they escaped their enslavement.
More details came through other questions that had nothing to do with
Mardirossian’s subjugation.
"She said her hands hurt a great deal, and I said, ‘Why did your
hands hurt? Did you have arthritis?’ " Cosby said.
"She said, ‘I was a slave. I worked very hard cooking, cleaning,
cutting’ … She said she worked 17, 18 hours a day. She worked and
slept, worked and slept, worked and slept."
Unspoken was what else her great aunt was forced to do. Mardirossian
lived in a harem. Cosby assumes she was forced to have sex with
Turkish men.
"You don’t take a woman into a harem unless they’re used for
something," Cosby said.
Mardirossian also told her about Hatzakortzian. Her other great aunt
was forced to live with a Turkish man, bear two of his children and
keep his house.
Today, Cosby wishes she had asked more questions about the two to
three years her deceased great-aunts spent in slavery.
"But it was such a touchy subject," she said.
Even in the midst of the massacres and enslavement, stories seeped
out of the Ottoman Empire about what was happening to the Armenians.
Cosby keeps a folded copy of the Jan. 4, 1920, Boston Post in a
spare room.
An article tells of "Turkish masters" branding "Armenian captives"
with tattoos and forcing them to live on the brink of starvation.
On Cosby’s wall are other reminders of the massacres and repression.
One 1886 photograph shows Cosby’s great grandmother, Margaret
Arakelian. Cosby’s grandmother said Turkish soldiers killed her but
didn’t tell Cosby much else.
"Many Armenians will tell you that they didn’t talk about it a lot,
because it was so humiliating, and so painful," Cosby said.
History of Conflict
Even before the massacres that occurred between 1915 and 1923,
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were victims of mass killings.
About 30,000 Armenians died in a 1909 massacre in Adana, Stanton said.
Two of the victims were Lillie Merigian’s maternal grandfather and
great-uncle.
Merigian, 79, of Palm Springs, knows little more. Her grandmother
died in 1913, apparently of natural causes, orphaning her mother.
Merigian’s mother resisted speaking of her family’s tragedies.
"Every time I brought it up, she didn’t want to talk about it. ‘It’s
in the past, Lillie,’ " Merigian quoted her mother as saying as she
displayed colorful yarn balls that her late mother learned how to
make while in a Greek orphanage. "It was too hurtful. It was something
she didn’t want to remember."
Like many people with an Armenian background, Merigian does not know
what happened to many of her ancestors. Aunts, uncles, cousins and
other relatives disappeared from villages and cities after 1915 and
were never heard from again.
Merigian said she sometimes wonders whether they were murdered or
escaped, whether they suffered a slow death from starvation or lived
long lives haunted by memories of family members who didn’t survive.
BY THE NUMBERS
4,154
The number of people of Armenian ancestry living in Riverside and
San Bernardino counties.
204,631
The number of people of Armenian ancestry living in California.
Source: 2000 U.S. Census.
INLAND CONGRESSIONAL VIEWS
Five of the six Inland members of Congress are co-sponsors of the
congressional resolution to call the 1915-23 killings of the Armenians
a genocide. Here are their positions.
Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Corona (Co-sponsor): believes the killings
constituted genocide and will keep his name on the resolution,
said Calvert spokeswoman Rebecca Rudman. He would vote against the
resolution if it were to come for a vote now, she said. Calvert
worries passage of the resolution would harm U.S.-Turkish relations
at a time when the United States relies on using Turkey for supply
routes to troops in Iraq.
Rep. Mary Bono, R-Palm Springs (Co-sponsor): plans to remain a
co-sponsor; is unsure how she would vote on the measure, spokeswoman
Jennifer May said.
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista (Co-sponsor): said the fear of angering
Turkey is unwarranted, according to spokesman Frederick Hill.
Resolutions criticizing other countries have passed, without long-term
consequences, he said. "Congressman Issa believes a genocide occurred,
and he believes Congress should have the courage to say so …,"
Hill said.
Rep. Joe Baca, D-Rialto (Co-sponsor): plans to vote for it, spokesman
John Lowrey said.
Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Redlands (not a Co-sponsor): has not decided
whether to one day support the resolution, spokesman Jim Specht said.
But he is against bringing the measure up for a vote now, Specht said.
Rep. David Dreier, R-San Dimas (Co-sponsor): Jo Maney, a spokeswoman
for Dreier did not return phone calls for comment.