ARMENIAN GENOCIDE NOT FORGOTTEN

New Haven Register
April 5 2010
CT

THERE was a time when American mothers regularly ordered their children
to clean their plates by reminding them of the "starving Armenians."

So thoroughly inculcated in this admonition was I that when I first met
a person of Armenian descent, I blurted that he couldn’t be Armenian,
because he wasn’t starving.

The origin of this phrase was, of course, the elimination of an
estimated 1.5 million Armenians, half of that nation’s population,
by the Turks in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. Between 1915
and 1919, there were massacres and death marches and starvation.

It was a tragedy exceeded in modern history only by the Holocaust and
the murder of 2 million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge. It resulted in
the coining of the word "genocide" to describe such a horrific event.

The Republic of Turkey has refused to take any responsibility for
this policy of destruction or to acknowledge that it was genocidal in
nature, despite the fact that history and at least 20 other nations
have recognized it as such.

But, most Americans have little understanding of the phrase once used
to remind their grandmothers and grandfathers that the privilege of
eating is a precious thing that many do not have.

Many Armenians who survived the devastation made it to America and
became among this nation’s most prosperous and productive citizens.

Among them are author William Saroyan and the San Francisco financier,
philanthropist and restaurateur George Mardikian, whose biography,
"The Song of America," became a paean to his adopted country and a
bible of inspiration to tens and thousands of immigrants.

The resistance of the Turkish government to official recognition
of what the rest of the world knows is about to get a jolt from the
American descendents of those who expired nearly 100 years ago. It will
be in the form of a major new museum smack dab in the middle of one of
the most traveled corridors in the nation’s capital, 14th Street just
above Pennsylvania Avenue, where millions of American tourists will be
tastefully but firmly educated about man’s inhumanity to man. About
a half mile further down the street is the Holocaust Museum, where
millions have learned those lessons through the suffering of the
world’s Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany.

The Armenian Genocide Museum of America will be established in an
imposing limestone building that once housed the National Bank of
Washington. The building was erected in 1922, which coincidentally
fits the time frame of the events it will memorialize.

It has been vacant for a number of years. A modern "tower" addition
will be added without disturbing the architectural integrity of the old
building. Money and oversight of the project are under the guidance
of a committee of distinguished Armenian Americans and directed by
Rouben Adalian of the Armenian National Institute. A date for the
restoration and opening is still a ways off.

Those who may think this will be just another memorial and museum in a
city where there are already too many are missing the point. Coupled
in proximity with the Holocaust Memorial and in a location so close
to the White House and Capitol Hill, it will be one of the more
significant punctuations to the ideal of human rights for which this
country always has stood, if not always adhered to in its own dealings
with minorities.

As our mothers knew, it is often necessary to remind ourselves that
there are those less fortunate than we are and that survival is
tenuous, requiring perseverance reached only by digging deep into
the spirit and recognizing the lessons of sacrifice and refusing to
forget the tragedies of the past.

That is pretty heavy stuff, but my mother and millions of others,
even in those harshest days of the Great Depression, distilled it
into two words, "starving Armenians," that instantly reminded us of
our good fortune and warned us not to waste it.

Perhaps if the rest of the world had paid attention to the implications
of Armenia, later genocides would not have occurred. It’s time the
Turks owned up.

Dan K. Thomasson is former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service,
1090 Vermont Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005.