A SMALL COUNTRY BUT A BIG NATION: HOW GENOCIDE SHAPED THE ARMENIA OF TODAY
As Armenians mark the beginning of violence that left 1.5 million
dead, Turkey’s lack of contrition leaves descendants struggling to
reconcile loss and renewal
Mount Ararat, in neighbouring Turkey, reminds the population of the
Armenian capital, Yerevan, of the proximity of lands abandoned during
the genocide. Photograph: Maxim Shipenkov/EPA
Ian Black in Yerevan
@ian_black
Wednesday 22 April 2015 11.13 BST Last modified on Wednesday 22 April
2015 11.53 BST
In the beginning you hardly notice them: little lapel buttons in
purple, yellow and black to mourn the dead and a lost homeland. But
then there are the posters, T-shirts, umbrellas, bumper stickers,
even cakes, all bearing the same forget-me-not flower designed to
commemorate the tragedy of a nation.
It is the symbol of the centenary of the Armenian genocide of 1915,
being marked this week in solemn ceremonies in Yerevan and wherever in
the world this ancient people fled in the wake of the mass atrocities
suffered in the dying days of the Ottoman empire.
This newly invented tradition, a poppy-like throwback to the
killing fields of eastern Anatolia, has triggered complaints about
commercialisation. But it has caught on. Across Armenia, in schools
and homes, and as far away as the diaspora community of Glendale,
California, children have picked up crayons and scissors to make their
own paper flowers or have planted the real thing in remembrance of
the horrors that beset their forebears.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Artwork by pupils from the Rose & Alex
Pilibos Armenian school in Los Angeles commemorating the 100th
anniversary of the Armenian genocide.
Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images
Rosa and Tamara, Yerevan sisters of 10 and six, wrote a name on the
back of their homemade forget-me-nots: Raphael Lemkin, the Polish
-Jewish scholar who coined the word genocide in 1944 – and cited the
Armenians as a seminal example.
Analysis The Armenian genocide – the Guardian briefing
Turkey has never accepted the term genocide, even though historians
have demolished its denial of responsibility for up to 1.5 million
deaths
The centenary on 24 April provides a rare opportunity to focus global
attention on killings that were once notorious, then faded from view,
were fought over in a vicious propaganda war, and are now widely seen
as a crime on a monumental scale – and a grim precursor to the Nazi
Holocaust. In their different ways, the pope and the reality TV star
Kim Kardashian both highlighted the issue last week, much to the fury
of Turks who continue to dispute the Armenian version of events.
Final preparations for Friday’s commemoration are under way
at Armenia’s genocide memorial on the Tsitsernakaberd plateau,
overlooking Yerevan. It features a bunker-like museum and a tapering
grey stele pointing skywards like an accusing finger. To the south,
on the Turkish side of the long-closed border, Mount Ararat beckons
through spring clouds, snow-covered and majestic.
The big names on the day will include Vladimir Putin and Francois
Hollande, leaders of the largest of the 20 countries to have formally
recognised the genocide. But western governments that have not,
including Britain, are sending low-profile officials to Yerevan, and
far more senior representatives to Turkey to mark the centenary of
the Gallipoli landings, the date deliberately and cynically chosen
by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – so furious Armenians believe –
in order to sabotage their own ceremony.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Armenian genocide memorial complex at
Tsitsenakaberd hill.
Photograph: Sasha Mordovets/Getty
“I am proud to be here and I understand why I am here,” said Milena
Avetisyan, 16, looking formal in black suit, white blouse and sensible
pumps, standing with an honour guard of her classmates outside the
memorial’s cone of basalt slabs, an eternal flame burning at its
centre. “It is a call to the world to recognise the Armenian genocide.
It is to show that we remember and demand.”
The slogan lies at the heart of the campaign for the Turkish state
to recognise that its Ottoman predecessor annihilated up to 1.5
million Armenian citizens, starting on 24 April 1915 with the arrest
of intellectuals in Constantinople and continuing with a centralised
programme of deportations, murder, pillage and rape until 1922. The
shadowy Teskilat e-Mahsusa (“special organisation”) drew up plans
and sent coded, euphemistic telegrams to provincial officials and
dispatched its victims on railway journeys to oblivion in the deserts
of Iraq and Syria. Henry Morgenthau, the US ambassador, described
the Turks as giving “a death warrant to a whole race”.
On 23 April, at Etchmiadzin, seat of the Armenian Apostolic church, the
martyrs will be canonised collectively – renewing a tradition dating
back 1,700 years. “We have to liberate our own people from hostility
and hatred,” explained Bishop Bagrat Galstanyan. “And we have to
liberate the Turks, to cleanse themselves from the pain of genocide.”
It was at Etchmiadzin in 1965 – the 50th anniversary of the slaughter,
a key moment of Armenian national awakening, and when many witnesses
were still alive – that the bleached bones of the dead were brought
from Deir ez-Zor in Syria for reburial.
Numerous centenary events, such as conferences, exhibitions and
concerts, underline how closely this country’s identity and future
are bound up with the bloody past. Raw emotion, competing narratives
and an ongoing diplomatic crisis make for a difficult combination.
“International recognition is fine but, if Turkey doesn’t do it, then
we won’t have the security we need,” said Tevan Poghosyan, an MP for
the nationalist Heritage party. “It is a security issue because the
genocide happened to us. It is our nation that lost its homeland and
was scattered around the world. It is not just a historical issue.”
History does cast a long shadow. Modern Armenia won its independence
in 1918, but was taken over by the Soviet Union two years later and
only regained its freedom in 1991. Landlocked and poor, its 3 million
people include many descendants of the survivors of the genocide,
though far more of them live in the diaspora of 7 million to 10
million, concentrated in Russia, the US and France – a split that has
had a powerful effect on the politics of commemoration and the closely
linked question of the troubled relations between Yerevan and Ankara.
Scholars say denial is the last stage of the crime of genocide
Vigen Sargsyan, Armenian presidential adviser
Turkey’s behaviour is seen as consistent with its traditional animosity
towards the Armenians. The border has remained shut since 1993, part
of the continuing stand-off over Nagorno-Karabakh, the ethnic Armenian
region of neighbouring Azerbaijan, in which Ankara supports Baku. That
“frozen conflict” has heated up into a shooting war in the past year so
the issue is live and dangerous. People and goods do get through from
Turkey by air and by land via Georgia but the blockade is damaging to
an already fragile economy and ties it uncomfortably closely to Russia.
“Turkey has engaged in a proactive policy of denial, and scholars
say denial is the last stage of the crime of genocide,” said Vigen
Sargsyan, the presidential adviser in charge of centennial events.
“Genocide is based on xenophobia and it has a tendency to affect the
current policy of the state that denies it. Turkey has an anti-Armenian
policy. The burden of proof is with them to show that it does not.”
Independent Armenian voices readily acknowledge the changes that have
taken place in Turkey, where liberal intellectuals, civil society and
Kurdish groups accept that genocide occurred. Thousands signed the
“We Apologise” petition in the spirit of the Armenian-Turkish writer
Hrant Dink, who was murdered in 2007. Memorial ceremonies will be
held in Istanbul and elsewhere, and Turkish delegations will be in
Yerevan on 24 April. Last year Erdogan referred to the victims as
“Ottoman citizens” and sent “condolences” to their descendants.
But his Gallipoli manoeuvre has been a crude reminder of the refusal
of the Turkish state to go any further than what many in Yerevan
dismiss as “repackaged denial”.
The cultivation of memory is presented as a national duty. There is
a striking parallel with Israel, where the Nazi holocaust is seen
as part of the state’s raison d’etre. Like Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem,
Yerevan’s genocide memorial is invariably the first stop for visiting
foreign VIPs – many of their names inscribed on plaques under the
trees in its “alley of memory”.
New interactive exhibits are being installed so that an Armenian child
of today can connect to one of his or her own age in those times of
savagery and terror. “We try to avoid the most horrible photographs of
human remains,” said Suren Manukyan, the museum’s deputy director, “or
at least to use them on touch screens rather than on public display.”
It is not only the atrocities that are remembered
Individual memories do not need to be curated by the state. It is
common to hear stories of a grandmother fleeing to the screams of
men burning alive; of orphans blinded and girls abducted.
But it is not only the atrocities that are remembered. In Nerkin
Sasnashen, a village of simple stone houses, unpaved roads and a
ruined 7th-century monastery, locals talk animatedly about their
roots in Sasun, a mountainous region of what is now Turkey’s Batman
province and a stronghold of Armenian resistance to Turks and Kurds –
who carried out a notorious massacre in 1894. The second word of the
village’s name means “built by people from Sasun”.
Handfuls of earth from Sasun are thrown into graves and at one recent
baptism the proud parents gave the priest consecrated oil brought
from there. “We even name our children after the towns and villages
of western Armenia,” said Andranik Shamoyan – his own first name
recalling the most celebrated of his people’s national heroes.
Arayan Hendrik, a leathery-faced 72-year-old sitting back after a
festive lunch of kebab, lavash bread and vodka toasts, sang movingly
of the beauty of Sasun in the dialect spoken there in 1915. “Our
children dance the same dances as their great-grandparents did,”
he said. “They are part of our history that we want to hand down to
the next generations. They are a connection between us and the lands
we left.”
Many have travelled to Turkey to seek their roots but say they find
it an unsettling, emotionally wrenching experience. Others refuse to
visit their homeland as tourists. If the border were open, it would be
just a 90-minute drive from Yerevan to Ararat. As it is, the journey
there, via Georgia, takes 14 hours. Unlike Palestinians, few Armenians
articulate a “right of return” to their lost patrimony. “It is not
that people don’t dream about their land,” suggested Poghosyan. “But
they do have a state now and they need to build it.”
We live in a small territory but we are a big nation
Hranush Hakobyan, Armenia’s minister for the diaspora
Armenian government policy does not include demands for territory
or reparations, as organisations in the more militantly nationalist
diaspora would like. Yerevan seeks normalisation of relations with
Ankara, starting with the crucial reopening of the border, to promote
reconciliation that it hopes will eventually bring genocide recognition
– even if that takes decades.
Optimism peaked in 2009, when protocols brokered by the Swiss and
endorsed by the US and EU were signed in Zurich, crucially with no
mention of the horrors of 1915. But they were never ratified – because
the Turks insisted on linking them to progress on Nagorno-Karabakh. It
has been downhill ever since, relations now frozen in an atmosphere
of deep mistrust. The vacuum is being filled by strident, anti-Turkish
voices from the diaspora, and attitudes are hardening at home as well.
Talk of greater unity is rife. “We live in a small territory but we
are a big nation,” said Hranush Hakobyan, minister for the diaspora.
“Anyone who deals with us is dealing with 12 million Armenians.” The
country’s entry to this year’s Eurovision song contest will be sung
by a six-strong band – one singer each from the five continents of
the diaspora and one from the republic. The title of the song is
Don’t Deny.
“Nationalist tendencies are gaining the upper hand,” warned Vahram
Ter-Matevosyan, a highly regarded historian of Turkey. “People feel
that we tried to help the Turks to come to terms but they failed,
so why should we trust them again?”
No one expects much to change after 24 April, even if Erdogan comes up
with another expression of qualified contrition that avoids the totemic
G-word. There are signs, however, of a debate about the style of the
genocide commemoration, dominated by the ubiquitous forget-me-not.
The forget-me-not flower designed to commemorate the centenary of
the Armenian genocide. Photograph: PR
“I was a bit critical of this campaign at first but it is the
first time Armenians have associated themselves with a symbol,” said
Ter-Matevosyan. “This is about modernising genocide discourse, a sort
of rebranding. Now it is the fifth generation since the genocide so
you do need to reach out to young people with a different message.”
But Tigran Matosyan, a sociologist, warned of “a ritual without
reflection” that was not relevant to the country’s needs. “Armenia
has lots of problems and I wish the centennial could be used as
an opportunity to reflect on them,” he said. “Armenia wants to be a
democracy, but it’s not. There’s huge social injustice as well. That’s
not becoming for a people who suffered genocide.”
Isabella Sargsyan, who promotes Armenian-Turkish reconciliation,
remembers her first meeting as a teenager with a Turk from Kars,
her family’s ancestral home, and bursting into tears, lost for words.
“It’s not that I am not sorry for the genocide,” she said. “I am. But
I don’t like the way it is dealt with publicly. And it is also not the
only thing that shapes my identity. The old diaspora is focused on the
genocide. It’s an identity issue for them. We are citizens. The fact
that we have this tiny piece of land is a miracle. The primary goal
for the Republic of Armenia is to be a decent place for the people
who live here.”
Still, time alone, it seems, cannot heal the open wounds of a century
ago. Remembering is the easy part. Fulfilling the demand that goes
with it is far harder. “Other genocides have been recognised, but
ours has not been,” said Andranik Shamoyan. “It will be part of our
lives always. You cannot just turn this page.”
From: A. Papazian