BOOKS: ‘Children of Armenia’
The Washington Times
Sunday, December 27, 2009
CHILDREN OF ARMENIA: A FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE AND THE CENTURY-LONG
STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE
By Michael Bobelian
Simon & Schuster, $26, 308 pages
REVIEWED BY ARAM BAKSHIAN
Holocausts will always have their deniers. But try to imagine a world
in which every post-Nazi German government for the last six decades
refused to assume any national responsibility for war crimes committed
against the Jews, arguing that "lives were lost on both sides,"
denying that there had been a policy of genocide in the first place
and even prosecuting and jailing German historians who wrote about it.
Also try to imagine a world in which western apologists for such a
patently dishonest and immoral stance would argue that Germany’s value
as a strategic NATO ally outweighed any claims of historic justice.
Absurd? Of course … yet for close to a century now, an earlier
holocaust has been denied by another NATO member, with similar excuses
made by its apologists.
First the facts.
In 1915, after having entered World War I on the side of Germany and
Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman government, dominated by militant Young
Turk nationalists, engaged in a systematic program of extermination.
The target was Turkey’s Christian Armenian minority, members of a race
that had inhabited parts of the Ottoman Empire for centuries – in some
cases, thousands of years – before the arrival of the first Turkic
invaders from the Asian steppes. Around 2 million Armenians were
rounded up by the authorities and driven from their ancestral homes
without compensation, allowed only to take what they could carry on
their backs. Many of the men and boys were butchered by Turkish
soldiers and gendarmes at the outset. The rest were set off on death
marches.
In 1915 alone, the New York Times ran more than 100 articles on the
subject, including eyewitness accounts; a typical headline was
"Wholesale Massacres of Armenians by Turks." In all, between 1 million
and 1.5 million Armenians died. The survivors, many of them widows and
orphans, would have to begin life over as penniless exiles. I know,
because my paternal grandmother Yevkine Bakshian, was one of the local
Washington leaders of Near East Relief, an American charity that held
clothe and feed thousands of the survivors.
Although war crime trials were held in Istanbul immediately after
World War I, and despite the fact that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder
of the modern Turkish republic, referred to the state-organized
slaughter of the Armenians as a "shameful act," the Turkish government
still refuses to acknowledge the historic facts. You can even be tried
and jailed for writing about them, as nearly happened to Turkish Nobel
Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk.
When justice is denied, revenge fills the vacuum. Over the years, a
handful of expatriate Armenians – some of them holocaust survivors –
engaged in wanton acts of murder against innocent Turkish diplomats.
Predictably, these isolated and reprehensible acts only hardened
official Turkish attitudes while offering no comfort to victims of the
holocaust. Symbolic of this historic deadlock was a 49-49 vote in the
U.S. Senate in 1990 that stopped the U.S. government from officially
recognizing the Armenian Genocide.