ACCORDS SIGNED ARE A MISTAKE, ALTOUNIAN
by Cristiana Missori

ANSAmed
13.WAM50199.html
Oct 23 2009
Italy

(ANSAmed) – ROME – "I have signed a petition against the
Turkish-Armenian protocols made in Zurich on October 10.

No treaty can be signed with a Turkey which even today denies that the
Armenian genocide occurred," said essayist Janine Altounian firmly –
daughter of deported Armenians who sought refugee status in France
after 1915 – in stressing the pointlessness of a normalisation of
diplomatic and economic relations with Turkey after over a century
of hostility and 16 years of total severance of ties.

"Despite my disappointment, however, I do not deny that – as some have
pointed out – these accords may lead to a change in the conscience of
Turkish civil society," Janine Altounian told ANSAmed on the fringes
of a presentation yesterday in Rome at the Casa Internazionale
delle Donne of ‘Memoires du Genocide Armenien’ (Puf, 2009), in
which we find the French translation of the diary that her father,
Vahram Altounian, wrote in 1921, immediately after his arrival in
France. "These memories – already published in Italy by Donzelli
(2007) – make use of the contribution of several psychoanalysts who
conducted in-depth studies on profound traumas linked to genocide
and the Holocaust," said the writer, who is today one of the most
important French scholars on the subject of psychoanalysis and who
has been translating Freud since 1970.

She said that "the work to which I have dedicated my life is that of
preventing what happened to about a million and a half people from
simply disappearing from history." It is a fear shared, she said,
by the vast majority of Armenians living outside their home country
and who opposed the protocol: from the 500,000 in France to the over
a million in the United States and two million in Russia, as well
as those living in Georgia, Lebanon and Iran. In all of these years,
Altounian said, "I have never considered moving back to Armenia.

Going home for me means going to Turkey, to Bursa, not to Armenia,
where I went for the first time last year. It is a land that for
too long was subjugated to the Soviet Union and that I am not very
interested in."

She is not alone in this feeling: many others with Armenian origins
do not recognise Armenia as their home. "Initially," she said, "for
the survivors of the massacre who chose to live in France it was a
very hard life. They were treated as ‘dirty foreigners’, and for a
long time forced to live in miserable conditions before managing to
integrate into French society."

Even today, she continued, there is much discrimination in the world
against those with Armenian origins. "The approximately two and a
half million Armenians living in Russia are not having an easy time
of it. They are still treated as ‘blacks’ – meaning those coming from
the Caucasus." She also harshly criticises the warm welcome Turkey
is receiving as part of the Season of Turkey in France, with 400
events between July 2009 and March 2010, and over the past few days
Janine Altounian, along with thousands of Armenians living in France,
has signed a letter to the mayor of Paris to prevent the Eiffel Tower
from being lit with Turkey’s national colours.

The scholar spoke of the hypocrisy of diplomatic relations, asking
"how can Bertrand Delanoe welcome both Turkish authorities and Orhan
Pamuk – who due to his writings on the Armenian genocide has received
death threats in Turkey – in the same week?". With a tone of regret,
she ended by saying that "words no longer mean anything at all."

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress