DESTINED TO DISAPPEAR
by Sunanda K Datta-Ray
Daily Pioneer
sappear.html
March 9 2010
New Delhi, India
Turkey’s outburst of wrath against the United States takes me back to
my schooldays and the tragedy that some of my classmates personified
without anyone suspecting it. Those Armenian boys were members of
a diaspora of some eight million people, about 6,000 of whom still
live in Kolkata.
Our class prefect was a ruddy youth called Minos Ohan. Since
initials and not first names were used then, the geography mistress,
an Englishwoman, thought M Ohan was an Indian "Mohan". No one could
have looked less like Mohan than this stockily muscled boy with heavy
features and tightly curled reddish hair but how was anyone to know
his father or grandfather had abbreviated Ohanian to Ohan? They didn’t
insert an apostrophe between O and H but didn’t object if the name
was mistaken for an Irish-sounding O’Han.
Though their candlelit procession on All Soul’s Night hinted at a
distant identity, most Armenians tried to camouflage giveaway names.
Such are the complexes from which people without a land to call their
own suffer. There were the Mackertich (another Anglicised version)
brothers and the two unrelated Gaspers. Mr Sarkies taught Physics
and married Amy Avdall from the sister school. Our Chemistry master,
Mr Catchatoor, must have been, I now think, Kachaturian and may have
stuck to the original had the composer been famous then.
We thrived on the legend of Sir Paul Chater, a school dropout who
made a fortune in Hong Kong (where a Chater Street still exists though
Hong Kongers think of him as Parsi or Jewish) and left some of it to
La Martiniere. "We thank thee for Claude Martin our founder and for
Paul Chater our benefactor" we dutifully intoned in the school prayer.
Galstaun was probably Kolkata’s best known Armenian, builder of
palaces and mansions, owner of strings of race horses and a figure
in Rumer Godden’s novel, The Dark Horse. The British never knew how
to treat him.
Many years later a British journalist I knew in Tehran turned up
to write about the community and Armenian College. There was a
sizable number of Armenians in Iran and the Shah’s Government sent
some to study in Kolkata. I doubt if the ayatollahs continued that
non-denominational generosity.
Armenians hovered on the fringe. When I visited a Georgian magazine
editor in Tbilisi in 1990 with a Soviet diplomat of Armenian origin,
the editor burst out as soon as my companion had left the room, "He’s
not a loyal Soviet citizen. The only reason they stay is because
they know the Turks will massacre them the moment they leave the
Soviet Union!"
The Ottoman Turks did just that during World War I. However, when
Armenians set up an independent republic in 1918, it was annexed not
by Turkey but the Soviet Union. But it’s the Turkish killings the
Georgian had in mind. Argentina, Belgium, Canada, France, Georgia,
Italy, Russia and Uruguay are among the more than 20 countries that
recognise the bloodshed as genocide. So does the European Parliament
and the UN Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection
of Minorities. But Britain doesn’t. Neither does the US though sections
of American opinion come perilously close at times to doing so.
This is one of those times. The House of Representatives Foreign
Affairs Committee recently supported a resolution by 23 votes to 22
calling the death of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 genocide. Turkey saw
red and is at the time of writing going through a verbal equivalent of
sending a gunboat. It is threatening not to allow American troops use
of Turkey’s Incirlik air base as a staging post for Iraq, to withdraw
the Turkish contingent from Afghanistan and not to support the US over
stiffer sanctions against Iran at the Security Council where Turkey
is a member. Turkey might create a crisis for Nato by carrying out
its threats if the entire House of Representatives follows the FAC.
But though 215 out of 435 House members have publicly supported the
resolution, the US is bound to draw back from the brink, leaving
the Armenian National Committee of America gnashing its teeth. The
committee may have spent $ 750,000 on lobbying members but Turkey
has reportedly spent $ 1 million and there’s more where that came from.
The FAC adopted the same resolution in 2007 but the Bush
Administration’s intense lobbying killed it.
No great power can afford to let idealism run away with self-interest.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supported the Armenian cause while
on the stump. President Barack Obama did so even more resoundingly.
"The Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion
or a point of view," he thundered, "but rather a widely documented
fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence." But
visiting Istanbul last year, he downplayed the genocide — a word
that makes Turkish politicians reach for their revolvers — to "one
of the great atrocities of the 20th century."
Turkey might tacitly concede that. It says nothing about Armenians
being forcibly relocated and deported in 1915 but maintains there was
no systematic pogrom. About 300,000 Armenians may have perished but
they did so from disease and exposure and at the hands of Syrians and
Palestinians. In fact, Armenians killed a large number of Turks with
Tsarist Russian backing, according to Turkey.
Between 40,000 and 70,000 Armenians still remain in Turkey. Another
140,000 constitute the majority in the disputed province of
Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia itself has a population of about three
million. There are no diplomatic relations between Armenia and Turkey.
Under American pressure they signed a protocol in Geneva last October
but it has not been ratified. However, as the International Crisis
Group acknowledges, Armenia does not make normalisation of relations
conditional on Turkey’s admission of genocide.
Despite modest public relations campaigns in Paris and Washington, and
though an independent Armenia now exists, Armenians do not have the
international reach of Zionists or even Tibetans. Few in India have
heard of their plight and Kolkata’s once thriving Armenian community
is now vanishing. Galstaun’s residence is the desolate Nizam palace
congested with shoddy Government flats; Galstaun Mansions is Queen’s
Mansions. With canny prescience, Hitler asked when he was preparing
his anti-Jew campaign, "Who speaks today of the annihilation of
Armenians?" Ohanian’s transformation into Ohan and being mistaken for
Mohan confirms that the Armenian diaspora’s destiny is to disappear.
— sunandadr@yahoo.co.in
From: Baghdasarian