Mannig’s Own Testimony! – The Armenian Genocide 1915-1923
Harry Hagopian
Ekklesia
009article10.html
April 25, 2009
London
I was six years old when we were deported from our lovely home in
Adapazar, near Istanbul. I remember twirling in our parlour in my
favourite yellow dress while my mother played the violin. It all
ended when the Turkish police ordered us to leave town.
The massacre of my family, of the Armenians, took place during a
three-year trek of 600 kilometres across the Anatolian Plateau and
into the Mesopotamian Desert. I can’t wipe out the horrific images
of how my father and all the men in our foot caravan were shipped to
death. My cousin and all other males 12 years and older were shoved
off the cliffs into the raging Euphrates River. My grandmother and the
elderly were shot for slowing down the trekkers. Two of my siblings
died of starvation. My aunt died of disease, and my mother survived
the trek only to perish soon from an influenza epidemic.
Of my family, only my sister and I were still alive. The Turkish
soldiers forced us, along with 900 other starving children, into the
deepest part of the desert to perish in the scorching sun. Most did.
But God must have been watching over me. He placed me in the path of
the Bedouin Arabs who were on a search and rescue mission for Armenian
victims. They saved me. I lived under the Bedouin tents for several
months before they led me to an orphanage in Mosul. I was sad about
our separation, but the Bedouin assured me that the orphanage was
sponsored by good people.
To my delight, I was reunited with my sister at the orphanage. She,
too, was saved by the Bedouin Arabs. The happiest days in my life
were at the orphanage. We had soup and bread to eat every day and
were sheltered under white army tents donated by the British.
Above all, my sister and I were family again.
This is Mannig Dobajian-Kouyoumjian’s spine-tingling testimony of
her own experience as a survivor of the Armenian genocide. Last year,
she had asked her daughter Aida Kouyoumjian from Seattle to write her
story for the US Holocaust Centre. It is a moving witness, a powerful
declaration and a sobering story of the pain and humiliation of one
victim of this genocide-driven mass campaign. Yet, it is also a story
of how our faith helps us when we are coerced to drink from the bitter
cup, a reminder of how the tenacity of hope overcomes deep despair,
and evidence of how the compassionate Arab and Muslim worlds helped
Armenian victims and welcomed them into their families and hearths
across the whole Middle East.
The Armenian Genocide: as historians have asserted on the basis of
ample archival evidence, this first genocide of the 20th century
was perpetrated by the Ottoman Turkish government between 1915 and
1923 when it systematically and relentlessly targeted and killed
Armenians within its Empire. Ultimately, well over one million ethnic
Armenians, who incidentally were Ottoman and later Turkish citizens,
lost their lives.
As an Armenian born after this grisly period of our history,
I often wonder how our forbears managed to persevere in the face
of such immense suffering and adversity. Not only did they, their
families or friends undergo the most harrowing experiences, they
also managed to pick themselves up and rebound from the devastation
of their orphaned situations. It is their intrepid steadfastness and
their belief in their collective identity as Armenians, that we –
the younger generations – can now lead our lives more freely and with
more confidence.
But what does this say about modern-day Turkey on the day when
Armenians commemorate the 94th anniversary of the genocide? Equally
importantly, what does it say of those across the world who still
resist tooth and nail the idea of genocide – any acts of genocide,
be they the Armenian one or other subsequent ones – with denial, and
who debase human life and dignity for spurious political and economic
considerations? How can we possibly claim to defend a political order
based on human rights and common decency on the one hand only to
stifle it on the other? Do denialists not recall George Santayana,
a principal Afigure in classical American philosophy, asserting
that "those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
(in The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905).
As the American NPR broadcaster Scott Simon wrote in ‘Genocide’ is
a Matter of Opinion, there are times when one has to utter the word
‘genocide’ in order to be accurate about mass murder that tries to
extinguish a whole group. That is why the slaughter of a million
Tutsis in Rwanda is not called merely mass murder. This is also why
any politician who goes to Germany, for instance, and describes the
Holocaust of European Jews merely as ‘terrible killings’ would be
reviled without mercy and even prosecuted without appeal.
After all, did President Obama not also assume the high moral ground
during the US presidential primaries by stating clearly that the
Armenian people deserved "a leader who speaks truthfully about the
Armenian genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides"? Mind you,
despite the high expectations and an air of suspense in the USA, this
American president prevaricated in his Armenian Remembrance Day on
24th April when his written statement from the White House referred
twice to the Armenian genocide as medz yeghern – translated literally
as "great catastrophe" rather than "genocide" – and thereby joined
a host of former US presidents who have relented from20using the
‘g-word’. Is there a sad moral in this unfortunate recurrence? Is
it that in a showdown between realpolitik and the truth, in other
words between contemporary political expediency and the burden of
past atrocities, the former seems to win most times? And if so, does
this not sadly alert us – believers and humanists alike – how the
values of our global world today often obviate words such as truth,
conscience and honour?
24 April 2009: six years shy of a century and denial – no matter
whether individual, collective or institutional – still contaminates
the truth. Is it therefore not high time to put the record straight? Is
it not time for Turkish officials to put jingoism, let alone misplaced
pride or fear aside by recognising this unfortunate chapter of their
Ottoman history during WWI?
Is it not time for the Turkish judicial system today to stop invoking
Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code and charging reporters or
writers, including the Nobel laureate Orthan Pamuk, with the risible
crime of ‘insulting Turkish national identity’ simply because
they refer to the massacres of Armenians as genocide? Is it not
time also for Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdo?an to prove their EU-friendly credentials and
reformist integrity by mustering the political fortitude let alone
moral rectitude to acknowledge past aberrations? Moreover, is it not
time for the world community to embark upon a veritable phase of
genocide education by underlining the eight stages of genocide that
culminate with denial – as elaborated by Dr Gregory H Stanton in his
Eight Stages of Genocide in 1998 when he was president of Genocide
Watch? Or as the chartered clinical psychologist Aida Alayarian
elucidated in her book Consequences of Denial, does the denial of
the Armenian genocide not deprive its victims the opportunity to make
sense of their experience, as much as render Turkish society unable
to come to terms with its past, and therefore with itself?
Such recognition is not solely for the sake of Armenians. After all,
I consider this genocide a historically-recognised reality even if
some governments dither, equivocate and refuse to admit to it for
reasons that have more to do with political weakness than historical
truthfulness.
Rather, it is also for the memory of all those righteous Turks who
assisted, harboured and supported Armenians during this wounded
chapter of history.
But as a firm believer in forgiveness and reconciliation, it is
ultimately for the sake of both Armenians and Turks alike so they
can begin the painful but ineluctable journey toward a just closure
of this open sore.