BOOK REVIEW: ARMENIAN GOLGOTHA BY GRIGORIS BALAKIAN

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April 20 2010

Given recent history, it would seem the term "ethnic cleansing" is
of late 20th Century origin. Armenian Golgotha, Grigoris Balakian’s
firsthand account of the Armenian genocide during World War I,
disabuses any such notion. Balakian, an Armenian priest, notes several
times that the Ottoman Empire embarked on an intentional campaign to
"cleanse" itself of Armenians.

Even though this coming weekend marks the 95th anniversary of the
beginning of this particular persecution of Armenians, whether to
call what happened genocide or something else continues to be debated
today. Given that Balakian relates the history from the perspective
of someone persecuted by the Turks during that war, his book likely
remains controversial today, more than 80 years after the first volume
of it was first published.

Balakian was one of some 250 Armenian intellectuals and leaders
arrested by government order in Constantinople on April 24, 1915,
the event commonly viewed as the beginning of the campaign against
Armenians in Turkey. Calling what ensued "cleansing" is perhaps the
least blunt description used in his memoir. Perhaps that is because
Balakian attributes its use to a police captain who escorted him
during part of his trip into exile. According to Balakian, "the
Turks always used this term, especially the government officials,
when referring to the massacre of Armenians."

Massacre is a term used far more often as Armenian Golgotha struggles
to describe both Balakian’s personal experiences and what was
happening overall. He frequently says the Ottoman Empire’s actions
were a deliberate plan to "annihilate" or "to completely exterminate
the Armenian race." First published in 1922, Armenian Golgotha was,
sadly, a preview of what the world would become all too familiar with
later in the 20th Century, whether the Holocaust in World War II or the
"ethnic cleansing" that occurred in Europe, Asia, and Africa later
in the century. Yet Balakian never uses the term genocide. There’s
good reason — it was not coined until 1943.

Balakian’s tale of survival combines both abject misery on the road of
exile and an escape and years-long evasion that could form the basis
of several adventure stories. But rather than being simply history or
memoir, Armenian Golgotha clearly was intended to bear witness to the
genocide, its victims, its villains, and its heroes. Thus, Balakian
frequently lists or comments on people whose memory he seeks to
preserve. That tendency, combined with an at times prolix and effusive
style, sets the book off from most modern works of history or memoirs.

In addition, there are lengthy quotations from conversations that
occurred several years before the book was first published. Still,
this doesn’t undercut the book’s aim.

Armenian Golgotha is actually a combination of two separate volumes
written by Balakian after the war. The first, called "The Life of
an Exile" in the book, was the work published in Armenian in 1922
and covers Balakian’s life from the beginning of the war through his
journey from Constantinople toward Der Zor, an outpost in today’s Syria
abutting a vast desert where thousands of Armenians died. The second
volume, "The Life of a Fugitive," details his escape and two years of
disguises, false identities, and struggles in an often harrowing effort
to return to Constantinople. It was not published until 1959, some
55 years after his death, when it was discovered among his sister’s
papers when she died. With the assistance of a variety of people,
American poet and author Peter Balakian began translating the work into
English in 1999, a process that culminated in the book’s publication
in the U.S. in 2009. The book was released in trade paper last month.

Balakian’s story relates the stories of massacre upon massacre on
the forced marches to exile, the road to the Armenian Golgotha
as he terms it. In addition to outright murder, thousands would
die along the way or in overcrowded, filthy camps whose conditions
Balakian says the Turks created in the hope of starting epidemics. The
numbers Armenian Golgotha propounds are horrendous. Of the more than
1.5 million Armenians deported during the summer and fall of 1915,
Balakian says some 800,000 were massacred on the way to Der Zor while
another 400,000 died of hunger and starvation. Of those who did reach
the deserts of Der Zor, some 250,000 died of starvation from August
1915 to August 1916. In the late summer of 1916, most of the remainder
were massacred, leaving roughly 5,000 survivors out of the deportees,
a number Balakian says disease and hunger reduced to only 400-500 by
the summer of 1918.

"In reality," Balakian writes, "deport was synonymous with murder." In
fact, "the life an Armenian was worth less than that of a chick
or chicken."

The effects of these events on individuals is seen even in Balakian.

Although he credits his survival to his faith, there are times
it appears even that comes into question. At one point, rather
than pointing to prayer, he observes that "believing that wishing
for something could make it happen, I used to repeat over and over
to those around me, ‘I have decided not to die.’" And the seemingly
endless horror and atrocities leads him to conclude later that "we’d
been abandoned by both God and mankind; our only salvation was the
grave, but we couldn’t even count on that."

Balakian’s perspective is unique in other respects. Fluent in
Armenian, Turkish and German, he was able to speak directly with
individuals who experienced or observed the events from a wide
variety of standpoints. In addition, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
the heir to Austria-Hungary throne, was assassinated in 1914 and
war was subsequently declared, Balakian was studying in Berlin and
provides firsthand accounts of events there. And on November 13, 1918,
he saw 44 warships of the Entente fleet steam past Constantinople
into the Bosphorus.

In addition to the extreme and excruciating events during the war,
Balakian also recognizes an outcome that, while not physically
painful or fatal, was at least as damaging and deadly for Armenians
as a whole. He repeatedly comments that the deaths of the Armenian
"martyrs" and one of the hopes that kept survivors going was that in
pursuit of an independent Armenian nation once the war was over. Yet
that dream was little more than false hope based on a belief
the Entente powers were fighting for "rights and justice" and on
misleading promises. "After the Armistice, all such promises would
soon be forgotten, as each victorious power aimed first to secure
the lion’s share of territory for itself," Balakian writes. "An oil
field would prove much more valuable than the fate of a small and weak
Christian people." Thus, although an independent Armenian republic
was proclaimed, in late 1920 it was invaded and subsumed by Turkey
and the Soviet Union, giving pause to whether the suffering of the
Armenians was meaningless.

Those who deny or dispute whether the Ottoman Empire embarked on a
genocidal campaign against the Armenians will, of course, find Armenian
Golgotha biased and one-sided. Others will find it an excruciating
firsthand account of ethnic torment. But the somewhat surprising fact
that the Armenian genocide continues to cause debate nearly a century
later doesn’t detract from the fact Balakian accomplished his main
goal — to commemorate the events of 1914-1918 and the people caught
up in them.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress