15 years ago i was the editor-in-chief of a small college magazine called logos and i wrote a story about the armenian genocide. i had an armenian friend whose family had escaped the genocide to lebanon, eventually coming to america shortly after her birth in the 1970s. when my friend told me of these horrific events, it was the first i had heard of the armenian genocide.
it was a wake up call in many ways. i suppose i was late blooming, growing up and awaking to many truths in 1994, which had been formerly hidden to me.
for my article i approached this genocide as a fact-finding mission. i interviewed several armenian-americans including: larry zarian, (former mayor of glendale, california, a city with the 2nd largest concentration of armenian people in the world,) and dr. avedis k. sanjian, ucla professor of near eastern studies, who sadly died within a year of of my interview at the age of 74.
the people i interviewed for that story were remarkably generous. one person, a music teacher at usc, played the armenian oud for me, (a small guitar,) and treated me to the works of the great armenian poets as well as some of the foods of the culture.
another person i interviewed, a survivor of this holocaust who was then in her 90s, hayastan terzian, of pasadena, invited me into her home and told me chilling stories of seeing bodies on the banks of a river which seemed to be covered in a sort of grease and which smelled so distinctly horrible she said she could never forget that odor and in fact, any faint resemblance to that odor conjured memories of death and terror for her.
i did try to get the opposing view of the events by contacting the turkish consulate in los angeles. within two days i received three books, essentially propaganda downplaying the idea of any preconceived or planned genocide on the part of the ottoman empire. i was also contacted by a man named david erbas-white, who had married a turkish woman and become something of a spokesman for turkey on the subject of this genocide the turks continue to deny to this day.
the primary argument the turks, (and erbas-white,) presented was to suggest that one of the young turk leaders of the day, a pasha named talaat, had somehow been misquoted. he is reported to have said he had a solution to the armenian question, after which he sent boxcars filled with armenians into the desert to die, and invited the invading russians to kill the armenians who he used as a buffer between the russian and ottoman troops. could talaat pasha have been misquoted or misunderstood? perhaps but it always seemed like revisionist history to me.
the story i wrote was not well written. i did good research but i was a novice to say the least and my aim was to write something like what i might have seen in time magazine. i wanted it to be an authoritative expose on events 75-80 years bygone. instead the piece was meandering and my position was unclear. still, school is about learning and for a student writer to be able to choose such an expansive topic and to be able to get interviews with notable subjects and to have the freedom to explore and to collate and to write as i would, was of my greatest learning experiences ever.
recently this topic of the armenian genocide, specifically the united states' acknowledgement of these events as genocide, has received congressional consideration. in october of '07 the bill was essentially killed at the last minute as pressure from turkey was stepped up through the implication that turkey's cooperation with our military efforts in iraq could be jeopardized. a century after the fact, the descendants of the young turks who ruled the ottoman empire fiercely oppose being characterized as the descendants of the perpetrators of the murder of up to 1.5 million armenians.
by contrast, armenians and armenian-americans seem to covet the world's acknowledgement of their plight. serj tankian of the rock band 'system of a down,' has been one of the most vocal proponents of u.s. recognition of this genocide. (www.axisofjustice.com, an activist website founded by tankian and tom morello has also supported the cause of u.s. recognition.)
i remember hayastan terzian wiping tears from her eyes that were not there. she felt those tears and she reached up to blot them but at 95-years-old, it was as if her body could not cry anymore. i remember sitting in the office of a 40-year-old real estate agent who shared stories of how the subject of the genocide would come up at home when he was a kid and the entire house would go quiet, after which arguments would ensue over the most trivial matters then later he would hear his parents crying together in their bedroom over recollections of their lost parents and relatives. his tears made up for hayastan, (which happens to mean "armenia," in the armenian language,) terzian's lost tears as they rolled down his face and knocked his spectacles right off it.
at a famous cathedral in yerevan today armenians remember. here in southern california at a monument in a park in montebello, armenians remember. the armenians have a saying which is, "wherever two armenians or more gather, there is armenia." a saying like this makes perfect sense coming from a people who have survived a diaspora, a people who were swallowed whole by the soviet union, a people who lived isolated as the only christians in a muslim part of the world, not to mention the enclaves of armenians who lived in iran, iraq, lebanon, russia, france, canada or the united states.
i will never forget these things, these people, this story, but i seem to remember them all more clearly every year on april 24th; armenian remembrance day.
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