TWO ALLEGIANCES, ONE TRUTH
By Lisa Haidostian
Michigan Daily
rage/paper851/news/2008/04/09/TheStatement/Two-All egiances.One.Truth-3312034.shtml
April 9 2008
MI
PrintEmail Article Tools Page 1 of 1 In ninth grade, my world studies
teacher was delivering a requisite "We are the melting pot of the
world" lecture when he said something that jarred me away from my
old-school Nokia cell phone game.
"I mean, if there was a war, most immigrants in this country would
fight for America’s army," he said, or something along those lines.
Not so fast, I thought. It can’t be that clear-cut.
As a third-generation Armenian, and ever since I spent my first summer
transitioning abruptly from country club tennis matches to singing
the Armenian anthem at culture camp, I’ve been playing some sort of
identity hopscotch game, never quite knowing on exactly which square
to land.
It’s no surprise that there’s a blurring of national loyalties for
someone who grew up, as I did, with steadfast ties to an ancestral
homeland, but who also waves the American flag, as I do, as high as
the rest on the Fourth of July.
But for many Armenians, there’s an especially strong devotion to our
ethnicity because of an unrecognized, unaddressed and often unknown
genocide that’s been stinging our people for more than 92 years.
While the passing of almost a century might seem to dim the catastrophe
for most, it only sharpens it for Armenians of my generation. The
survivors and witnesses to the systematic killings are all but
gone, and most countries still won’t go on the record to call it a
genocide. Many young Armenians feel it now falls to them to make sure
the atrocities aren’t blotted out of history forever.
By now, I hope you’ve heard. Between the years of 1915 and 1918,
the Ottoman Turks killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenians. Many
were either brutally murdered or died of starvation or exhaustion
while on forced marches to concentration camps in the Syrian Desert
that most never reached.
It concerns me that most students won’t read about the genocide in
textbooks. Despite the scholarly consensus, overwhelming evidence and
first-hand accounts of the atrocities, Turkey’s government claims
the mass killings were "ethnic conflicts" due to World War I. Only
22 countries to date have officially recognized the Armenian genocide.
It’s impossible for me not to relate the "Save Darfur" e-mails dotting
my inbox to my own country, which, almost a hundred years later,
still needs some saving of its own.
While President Bush has officially acknowledged the killings in
Darfur as genocide, the United States has yet to condemn the Armenian
killings as such.
In October, the U.S. got sort of close when the House of
Representatives nearly brought to a vote a resolution condemning the
Ottoman Turks’ actions against Armenians as genocide.
But for me, the resolution represented both a step toward the
fulfillment of a longtime hope and a personal identity crisis.
Immediately after the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs passed
the resolution, there was backlash from President Bush, prominent
politicians and others who insisted that, while what happened was
regrettable, relations with Turkey were too crucial to be harmed. And
relations with Turkey were what mattered.
This isn’t the right time, they insisted. Not when Turkey is an ally
in an ongoing war, they decreed.
At the risk of making the Armenian community’s collective jaw drop,
I found myself a bit conflicted while sifting through the many news
articles and columns on the issue. I’d been grappling with the genocide
since I was five years old, ever since my Sunday school teacher
explained it as I crafted a cross out of dry macaroni noodles. I’d
written the letters to my congressmen. I’d held my candle during the
vigils on the Diag.
But I’m an American, too, I thought. As government official after
government official warned of violence and a ricochet of consequences
felt round the world, I wondered whether it would be best if we waited
just a few more years. Maybe this isn’t the right time. What if the
resolution was adopted and the next day, Turkish syndicates launched
an attack on the U.S.? I felt un-Armenian and un-American at the same
time, and suddenly I wasn’t even on the hopscotch board at all.
But soon I understood that I was in such a state of flux because I
wasn’t looking at the situation properly. I realized that it does more
harm than good for the U.S. to continue denying that the massacres
were genocide and to condoning the millions of dollars the Turkish
government spends trying to convince people it never happened. Sitting
center stage in the global arena, the U.S. can send a message to the
world that there are actual consequences for committing genocide. It
doesn’t matter that ours was in the past.
Genocide is still happening today.
I also realized that it’s OK to have two homes and sport both an
American flag and an Armenian key chain. There’s no need to pick
between countries, and if there was, I’d fight for whichever needed
me most.
-Lisa Haidostian is an associate news editor for The Michigan Daily