Children of Armenia

News from Armenia – NEWS.am
11:52 / 10/31/2009

`Children of Armenia’ by Michael Bobelian has been just published by
Simon & Schuster. Over 300-page long edition brings forward the yet
unresolved problem of Armenian Genocide.
`Like Native Americans, European Jews and Rwandan Tutsis, Turkish
Armenians seem to have been in the wrong place at the wrong
time. `Children of Armenia,’ Michael Bobelian’s first book, describes
the Ottoman Empire’s 1915 mass extermination of this Christian
minority without getting bogged down in `G-word’ histrionics,’ The
Washington Post reads Oct. 31.
`The purpose of this book is neither to prove the existence nor affirm
the veracity of the Genocide,’ Bobelian writes: The Armenian
holocaust is a historical fact.
`Children of Armenia’ focuses on the Turkish nationalism, world war
weariness, survivor psychology and Cold War squabbling that let the
world forget the unforgettable. Some will flinch at Bobelian’s
lionization of Gourgen Yanikian, an Armenian who shot two Turks in a
revenge plot hatched in the 1970s, but the author stumbles only when
he strays into Armenian exceptionalism, the idea that `no other people
have suffered such a warped fate – a trivialization of their suffering
and a prolonged assault on the authenticity of their experience.’
Bobelian should know that if every culture insists on the supremacy of
its own suffering,
the world will only grow more jaded about stopping current
horrors. Instead, any book about Armenia – no, any exploration of any
genocide =80′ should pose questions relevant to today’s ethnic
cleansings. Otherwise, who will remember the Sudanese? – reads The
Washington Post.