THOMASSON: ‘STARVING ARMENIANS’ WILL NOT BE FORGOTTEN
By DAN K. THOMASSON, Scripps Howard News Service
Scripps News – Scripps Howard News Service
March 25 2010
WASHINGTON – There was a time in this country when mothers regularly
ordered their children to clean their plates by reminding them of the
"poor starving Armenians." So thoroughly inculcated in my recollection
was this admonition 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 was of course the elimination of an estimated
1.5 million Armenians, or half of that nation’s population, by the
Turks in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and
1919 by massacre, death marches and starvation. It was a tragedy
only exceeded in modern history by the Holocaust and the murder of 2
million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge and 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. And most Americans have little understanding
of the phrase once used to remind their grandmothers and grandfathers
that food and the privilege of eating it 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.
The noted 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, are among them.
So 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 Washington in one of the most traveled corridors in the nation’s
capitol, 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 operated by the United Mine Workers of America. 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 Dr. 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 us 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.
(E-mail Dan K. Thomasson, former editor of the Scripps Howard News
Service, at thomassondan(at)aol.com.)
http://www.scrippsnews. com/node/52497