The Washington Post
November 1, 2009 Sunday
Bulldog Edition

HISTORY
Children of Armenia
A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-Long Struggle for Justice
By Michael Bobelian
Simon & Schuster. 308 pp. $26

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 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 — should pose questions relevant to
today’s ethnic cleansings. Otherwise, who will remember the Sudanese?

— Justin Moyer moyerj@washpost.com