Aspen Daily News
April 24 2010

Valley’s Armenians call for recognition of genocide

by David Frey, Aspen Daily News Correspondent
Saturday, April 24, 2010

Stephan Isberian doesn’t know what happened to his grandparents. Like
many who died when Turkey turned its guns on ethnic Armenians in 1915,
their stories, like their lives, were lost, among an estimated 1.5
million people.

His father, just 9 years old at the time, escaped thanks to orphanages
and the kindness of strangers, but he remained plagued by nightmares
that kept him awake at night for the rest of his life, Isberian said.

`There’s absolutely no family in the diaspora anywhere all over the
world that was not directly affected by the genocide,’ said Isberian,
owner of Isberian Rugs, whose family is one of about 20 Armenian
families in the Roaring Fork Valley that pushes each year to remember
the atrocity and calls on the United States to name it genocide.

For more than two decades, Isberian has penned letters to the editor
or helped fund ads in local newspapers reminding the community of the
massacre of Armenian Christians and calling on the federal government
to address it.

`End Turkey’s Gag Rule,’ said the latest ad, published in advance of
today’s 95th anniversary of the beginning of the atrocity. The ad
included an image of the Statute of Liberty’s mouth gagged by the
Turkish flag.

Whether or not the U.S. should call it genocide is a delicate
political matter. When a House committee voted in March to approve a
nonbinding resolution calling the killings genocide, Turkey removed
its ambassador for a month. The vote came despite last-minute efforts
by President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to
quash the bill. President George W. Bush made a similar effort when an
earlier version of the bill passed in 2007.

As senators, both Obama and Clinton had called the killings genocide.

Many lawmakers have been reluctant to vote for the resolution out of
fear of alienating Turkey, a U.S. ally in the Muslim world.

Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., released a statement on Friday
`commemorating the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.’

`After the events of 1915, we said `never again,” Udall said. `We
haven’t kept faith with those words in the years since ‘ but we must
keep faith with them now.’

Turkey, which lobbied against the resolution, has maintained that the
killings were a planned genocide. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan released a statement that condemned the bill, which he said
`denounces the Turkish nation of a crime that it has not committed.’

The Armenian National Committee of America has pressed for the
Armenian Genocide Resolution to honor what it calls Turkey’s
`systematic and deliberate massacres and deportations of Armenians
between 1915 and 1923.’

Historians estimate as many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed amid
the collapsing Ottoman Empire, what some say was the first genocide of
the 20th century.

`We were the first,’ said Isberian, who criticized Turkey for failing
to acknowledge the killings as a genocide.

His father lost his parents in the killings, he said. His mother’s
parents each lost their spouses and children. They remarried to each
other after fleeing Turkey. His mother was born on a boat bound for
Ellis Island, he said.

`They found each other and started a new family,’ he said.

Isberian has passed on his passion for preserving the memory of the
tragedy to his children. He found other Armenian families in the
Roaring Fork Valley that shared similar stories about previous
generations fleeing the bloodshed. Some fled to Iran or Lebanon or
Egypt. Some escaped bullets by hiding as children amid corpses.

Isberian said he wants those stories remembered by the United States.

`I’m just a proud American,’ he said. `We’d like America to do the
right thing.’

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