A SOLEMN ANNIVERSARY
By Jessica Scarpati / Daily News Correspondent
Daily News Tribune, MA
April 24, 2006
BOSTON- Shoushan Kalaydjian is left speechless by people who say
Turkish attacks against World War I-era Armenians do not constitute
genocide.
“My father’s side lost all six members of his family, including
his parents,” said Kalaydjian, 70, of Waltham. “There is no single
Armenian family you can talk to that hasn’t lost someone.”
After rumor spread that Germans would poison the soup in the Turkish
orphanage where her father lived, Kalaydjian said he fled to Iraq.
“He was 7 years old,” she said after a State House remembrance service
on Friday. “He slept on a carpet in a mosque in the middle of Baghdad
and one of the imams took care of him.”
Kalaydjian and her husband Ara, 68, attend the Beacon Hill ceremony
each year.
“What happened to the Armenian people and our ancestors shouldn’t
happen again,” said Kalaydjian, an Israeli native. “We don’t pray
for ourselves only. We pray for all.”
Over 300 Bay State Armenians, politicians and survivors gathered in
the House chamber to honor the 1.5 million lost 91 years ago and to
condemn attempts to deny the genocide took place.
“The denial of genocide . has allowed genocide actions to be
perpetrated decade after decade,” said Rep. Peter Koutoujian,
D-Waltham. “Keeping the memory alive is a method for protecting our
and others’ futures.”
Koutoujian said he would file a bill today (Monday) to forbid the
state from investing in countries where genocide occurs, such as Sudan.
“Even if this itself does not stop genocide, it is a way of making
our voice heard,” he said.
The state Board of Education, defended by attorney general and
gubernatorial candidate Tom Reilly, is locked in a federal lawsuit
against Turkish interest groups and a Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High
School student and teacher.
The coalition has accused Massachusetts schools of censoring statewide
history curriculum by only using “genocide” to define the Armenian
experience in the Ottoman Empire.
Lincoln-Sudbury High School senior Ted Griswold and history teacher
Bill Schechter joined plaintiffs this October in alleging that the
removal of dissenting views over the massacres from curricula violated
free speech.
The Legislature passed a law in 1998 requiring high schools to teach
genocide and human rights topics, specifically naming the Armenian
genocide.
“The case should be dismissed because the state has a right to
teach its students what it wants to, especially when that is the
truth,” Arnold Rosenfeld, a lawyer on the case, told a rally after
the ceremony.
U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said Nazi leader Adolf Hitler used
public ignorance of the Armenians’ strife to justify killing six
million Jews during World War II.
“There are those who will deny the Armenian genocide just as there
are those who will deny the Nazi Holocaust,” Markey said.
Gesturing to a group of three elderly women from Belmont and Andover
who huddled silently next to the podium during the two-hour service,
state Rep. Rachel Kaprielian, D-Watertown, struggled to keep her
voice steady.
The genocide survivors-Naomi Armen, Eva Loosigian and Alice
Shnorhokian-had fled to the Syrian desert as children under Turkish
persecution.
“Mrs. Loosigian apologized to me for not being able to focus because
she had lye poured into her eye by a Turkish soldier,” Kaprielian said,
her voice cracking.
The women, along with Areka DerKazarian of Watertown, who was not
present, were recognized by Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey.
“You stand as living proof of a dark chapter world history and you
cannot be denied,” Healey said, proclaiming April 24 as Armenian
Martyrs Day in Massachusetts.
Following the ceremony, coalition group “kNOw Genocide” announced
its mission to fight denial Armenian and other genocides.
“Whenever we read or hear that people deny our genocide, it is as
if we are being killed again, slowly,” said Jean Nganji, a Rwandan
refugee who lost his entire family to genocide in 1994.
State police moved three protestors who shouted, “Don’t forget the
Palestinians!” over televised speeches.
With his face obscured by sunglasses, a Red Sox baseball hat and a
bandana around his nose and mouth, one protestor waved a sign that
read, “Defend Sudan from Zionist UN.”
Interrupted by the heckling, Brookline rabbi Moshe Waldoks said the
world should “create a culture of life.”
“And precisely, there are people here who support the culture of
death,” said Waldoks, an author and board member of Jewish Community
Relations Council, as police moved protestors from the State House
steps.
“We’re not here to teach that we’re victims. We’re here to teach that
there should be no more victims,” Waldoks said.