New York Times
Jan 5 2010
A Family Tree Uprooted by a 60-Year-Old Secret
ISTANBUL ‘ Fethiye Cetin recalled the day her identity shattered.
She was a young law student when her beloved grandmother Seher took
her aside and told her a secret she had hidden for 60 years: that she,
the grandmother, was born a Christian Armenian and had been saved from
a death march by a Turkish officer, who snatched her from her mother’s
arms in 1915 and raised her as Turkish and Muslim.
Her grandmother revealed to her that her real name was Heranus and
that her biological parents had escaped to New York. Heranus, Ms.
Cetin learned, was just one of thousands of Armenian children who were
kidnapped and adopted by Turkish families during the genocide of up to
1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1918. These
survivors were sometimes called `the leftovers of the sword.’
`I was in a state of shock for a long time ‘ I suddenly saw the world
through different eyes,’ said Ms. Cetin, now 60. `I had grown up
thinking of myself as a Turkish Muslim, not an Armenian. There had
been nothing in the history books about the massacre of a people which
had been erased from Turkey’s collective memory. Like my grandmother,
many had buried their identity ‘ and the horrors they had seen ‘ deep
inside of them.’
Now, however, Ms. Cetin, a prominent member of the estimated
50,000-strong Armenian-Turkish community here and one of the country’s
leading human rights lawyers, believes a seminal moment has arrived in
which Turkey and Armenia can finally confront the ghosts of history
and possibly even overcome one of the world’s most enduring and bitter
rivalries.
She already has confronted her divided self, which led her from
Istanbul to a 10th Street grocery store in New York, where her
Armenian relatives had rebuilt their broken lives after fleeing
Turkey. (Many of the Armenians who survive in Turkey today do so
because their ancestors lived in western provinces when the killings
occurred, mostly in the east.)
The latest tentative step toward healing generations of acrimony
between the two countries took place in October on a soccer field in
the northwestern Turkish city of Bursa, when President Serzh Sarkisian
became the first Armenian head of state to travel to Turkey to attend
a soccer game between the two countries’ national teams. In this
latest round of soccer diplomacy, Mr. Sarkisian was joined at the
match by President Abdullah Gul of Turkey, who had travelled to a
soccer match in Armenia the year before.
`We do not write history here,’ Mr Gul told his Armenian counterpart
in Bursa. `We are making history.’
The Bursa encounter came just days after Turkey and Armenia signed a
historic series of protocols to establish diplomatic relations and to
re-open the Turkish-Armenian border, which has been closed since 1993.
The agreement, strongly backed by the United States, the European
Union and Russia, has come under vociferous opposition from
nationalists in both Turkey and Armenia.
Armenia’s sizeable diaspora ‘ estimated at more than seven million ‘
in the United States, France and elsewhere is alarmed that the new
warmth will be misused as an excuse to forgive and forget in Turkey,
where even uttering the words `Armenian genocide’ can be grounds for
prosecution. Also threatening the deal is Armenia’s lingering fight
with Azerbaijan, its neighbor and a close ally of Turkey, over a
breakaway Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan.
The agreement ‘ which has yet to be ratified in the Turkish or
Armenian Parliaments ‘ could have broad consequences, helping to end
landlocked Armenia’s economic isolation, while lifting Turkey’s
chances for admission into the European Union, where the genocide
issue remains a key obstacle.
But Ms. Cetin argued that the most enduring consequence could be
helping to overcome mutual recriminations. She said Armenians have
been battling the collective amnesia of Turks, who contend that the
collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I was bloody and that
those Armenians who perished were victims of that chaos.
`Most people in Turkish society have no idea what happened in 1915 and
the Armenians they meet are introduced as monsters or villains or
enemies in their history books,’ she said. `Turkey has to confront the
past but before this confrontation can happen, people must know who
they are confronting. So we need the borders to come down in order to
have dialogue.’
Ms. Cetin, who was raised by her maternal grandmother, said the
borders in her own Muslim Turkish heart came down irrevocably when
that grandmother revealed her Armenian past.
Heranus, she said, was only a child in 1915 when Turkish soldiers
arrived in their ethnically Armenian Turkish village of Maden,
rounding up the men and sequestering women and girls in a church
courtyard with high walls. When they climbed on each others’
shoulders, Heranus told her, they saw men’s throats being cut and
bodies being thrown in the Tigris River, which ran red for days.
During the forced march toward exile that followed, Heranus said she
saw her own grandmother drown two of her grandchildren before she
herself jumped into the water and disappeared.
Heranus’s mother, Isguhi, survived the march, which ended in Aleppo,
Syria, and went to join her husband, Hovannes, who had left the
village for New York in 1913, opening a grocery store. They started a
new family.
`My grandmother was trembling as she told me her story,’ Ms. Cetin
said. `She would always say, `May those days vanish never to return.”
Ms. Cetin, a rebellious left-wing student activist at the time of her
grandmother’s revelation, recalled how confronting Armenian identity,
then as now, had been taboo. `The same people who spoke the loudest
about injustices and screamed that the world could be a better place
would only whisper when it came to the Armenian issue,’ she said. `It
really hurt me.’
Ms. Cetin, who was imprisoned for three years in the 1980s for
opposing the military regime in Turkey at the time, said her newfound
Armenian identity inspired her to become a human rights lawyer. When
Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, was
prosecuted in 2006 for insulting Turkishness by referring to the
genocide, she became his lawyer. On January 19, 2007, Mr. Dink was
assassinated outside his office by a young ultranationalist.
Ms. Cetin published a memoir about her grandmother in 2004. She says
she purposely omitted the word `genocide’ from her book because using
the word erected a roadblock to reconciliation. `I wanted to
concentrate on the human dimension. I wanted to question the silence
of people like my grandmother who kept their stories hidden for years,
while going through the pain.’
When Heranus died in 2000 at age 95, Ms. Cetin honored her last wish,
publishing a death notice in Agos, in the hope of tracking down her
long-lost Armenian family, including her grandmother’s sister
Margaret, whom she had never seen.
At her emotional reunion with her Armenian family in New York, several
months later, `Auntie Marge’ told Ms. Cetin that when her father had
died in 1965, she had found a piece of paper carefully folded in his
wallet that he had been keeping for years. It was a letter Heranus had
written to him shortly after he had left for America.
`We all keep hoping and praying that you are well,’ it said.
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.
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