LISTENING TO GRASSHOPPERS: GENOCIDE, DENIAL AND CELEBRATION
Arundhati Roy

Outlook
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Jan 25 2008
India

It’s an old human habit, genocide is. It’s a search for lebensraum,
project of Union and Progress.

I never met Hrant Dink, a misfortune that will be mine for time to
come. From what I know of him, of what he wrote, what he said and
did, how he lived his life, I know that had I been here in Istanbul a
year ago I would have been among the one hundred thousand people who
walked with his coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets of
this city, with banners saying, "We are all Armenians", "We are all
Hrant Dink". Perhaps I’d have carried the one that said, "One and
a half million plus one".* [*One-and-a-half million is the number
of Armenians who were systematically murdered by the Ottoman Empire
in the genocide in Anatolia in the spring of 1915. The Armenians,
the largest Christian minority living under Islamic Turkic rule in
the area, had lived in Anatolia for more than 2,500 years.]

*** In a way, my battle is like yours.

But while in Turkey there’s silence, in India, there is celebration.

***

I wonder what thoughts would have gone through my head as I walked
beside his coffin. Maybe I would have heard a reprise of the voice of
Araxie Barsamian, mother of my friend David Barsamian, telling the
story of what happened to her and her family. She was ten years old
in 1915. She remembered the swarms of grasshoppers that arrived in
her village, Dubne, which was north of the historic city Dikranagert,
now Diyarbakir. The village elders were alarmed, she said, because
they knew in their bones that the grasshoppers were a bad omen. They
were right; the end came in a few months, when the wheat in the fields
was ready for harvesting.

"When we left…(we were) 25 in the family," Araxie Barsamian says.

"They took all the men folks. They asked my father, ‘Where is your
ammunition?’ He says, ‘I sold it.’ So they says, ‘Go get it.’ So
he went to the Kurd town to get it, they beat him and took all his
clothes. When he came back there-this my mother tells me story-when
he came back there, naked body, he went in the jail, they cut his
arms…so he die in jail.

And they took all the mens in the field, they tied their hands,
and they shooted, killed every one of them."

Araxie and the other women in her family were deported. All of them
perished except Araxie. She was the lone survivor.

This is, of course, a single testimony that comes from a history that
is denied by the Turkish government, and many Turks as well.

I am not here to play the global intellectual, to lecture you, or to
fill the silence in this country that surrounds the memory (or the
forgetting) of the events that took place in Anatolia in 1915. That
is what Hrant Dink tried to do, and paid for with his life.

*** Most genocidal killing from the 15th century onwards has been
part of Europe’s search for lebensraum.

***

The day I arrived in Istanbul, I walked the streets for many hours,
and as I looked around, envying the people of Istanbul their beautiful,
mysterious, thrilling city, a friend pointed out to me young boys in
white caps who seemed to have suddenly appeared like a rash in the
city. He explained that they were expressing their solidarity with
the child-assassin who was wearing a white cap when he killed Hrant.

The battle with the cap-wearers of Istanbul, of Turkey, is not my
battle, it’s yours. I have my own battles to fight against other
kinds of cap-wearers and torchbearers in my country. In a way, the
battles are not all that different. There is one crucial difference,
though. While in Turkey there is silence, in India there’s celebration,
and I really don’t know which is worse.

In the state of Gujarat, there was a genocide against the Muslim
community in 2002.