LETTING GO OF HATRED A STEP TOWARD HEALING
By Kay Mouradian
San Gabriel Valley Tribune, CA
April 23 2007
MY mother was a survivor of the Armenian genocide.
In my youth she told me stories about her childhood in Turkey, but
those stories went in one ear and right out the other. At the time
I was not interested and didn’t care to understand what had happened
to the Armenians living in Turkey in 1915 during World War I.
Then at age 83 my mother’s physical and mental capacity began to
fail. She was not expected to survive her congestive heart failure,
but she returned from the edge of death. She lived for another five
years, but in that time she had three more near-death experiences,
and each time she became more alert than before, as if her brain
cells had been revitalized. Interestingly, she also became more
loving. Everyone around her felt it.
That’s when I decided to write about her childhood and the genocide
that had changed her life and had broken her heart. I spent more than
10 years researching and writing a novel based on my mother’s tragic
young life in Turkey.
In my mind’s eye, as I sat in front of my computer in my comfortable
home, I was there walking in the march with my mother and her family
as they, along with 2 million Turkish Armenians, were forced from
their homes and herded toward the barren deserts of Syria.
It was an emotionally painful experience for me as this wholesale
deportation of a people became a death march. More than a million
Armenians perished through disease, starvation and exhaustion. It
was much easier for those who were murdered wholesale for they did
not endure the daily suffering of struggling through each day not
knowing when they or their children would fall to their deaths by
the side of the road.
Turkey to this day denies that this historical event was genocide.
The U.S. government has supported Turkey in its denial and instead
prefers to use words such as mass killings, massacres, atrocities,
and annihilation, even as 39 of our 50 states recognize the Armenian
events of 1915-1917 as genocide.
With bipartisan support of 183 co-sponsors in the House of
Representatives, the Armenian Genocide Resolution (House Resolution
106) will present an opportunity for the United States to join those 19
countries that already recognize the Armenian catastrophe as genocide.
April 24, 1915, is marked as the beginning of the Armenian genocide
and tomorrow is a day of remembrance throughout the world.
My own research drew from the works of journalists, diplomats and
missionaries who lived in Turkey’s Ottoman Empire during that horrific
period. Many at that time stated that the Armenian deportations were
an attempt to exterminate the race.
Henry Morgenthau Sr., the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from
1913-1916, in his memoir, referred to this tragedy as the murder of a
nation. Dictionaries define genocide as the deliberate and systematic
destruction of a racial, political or cultural group. That simple
definition alone implies that genocide did occur against the Armenian
population in Turkey in 1915.
The word genocide did not become part of the world’s vocabulary until
World War II when a Polish lawyer, Raphael Lempkin coined the word to
bring attention to Adolf Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the European
Jews. As with all genocides, the intellectuals – the doctors, teachers,
lawyers, opposing politicians and those creative souls whose art and
writings inspire their people – are the first to be eliminated.
Those few Armenians who survived in the Syrian desert with practically
no sustenance, no shelter and wearing the same clothes they wore when
they were deported three years earlier, had only one concern at the end
of the war: to restore their bodies and find lost family. None had the
ability or wherewithal to think about rebuilding their culture. Now,
after the passing of a long 90years, Armenian creativity is beginning
to flower anew, especially here in America.
The protagonist in my novel is based on my mother and her family and
their trials during the Armenian genocide. As a victim my mother
held onto that hurt and its partner, hatred, for all of her life,
but during her last five years she let go of that hatred. Those five
years were both magic and mystical, and she is an example of what
can happen when a victim lets go of deep hurt.
How much better the world would be if perpetrators exhibited that kind
of humanness and took full responsibility for their actions. If the
Turks and the Armenians, whose hatred of one another is well known
throughout the world, can sit together and have a conversation about
the possibility of reconciliation, they could become role models for
those whose long-standing and encrusted tribal attitudes have caused
horrific pain to those who are not as they.
Then healing for both the perpetrator and the victim becomes a
possibility.
Kay Mouradian is a professor emeritus of health and physical
education for the Los Angeles Community Colleges. She lives in South
Pasadena. Her book "A Gift in the Sunlight: An Armenian Story" has
been out for a year.