100 YEARS OF GENOCIDE, OR WHY MY GRANDFATHER DIDN’T WANT TO BE ARMENIAN
By MassisPost
Updated: February 3, 2015
By Pierce Nahigyan
If my grandfather had it his way, he never would have been born
Armenian.
A Bostonian to the bone, and a fish monger at that, he once spent
an afternoon telling me about all the work he lost on account of his
race. “To hell with it,” he said. “It’s not worth it.”
He was descended from Soo-ren Nahigian, an atheist Bible salesman who
changed the “i” in his last name to “y” on the hope that it would
get folks to stop pronouncing the “g” like a “j.” In the 100 years
or so of Nahigyan family history, it has yet to do the trick.
Soo-ren came to America for his education, but when it was time to
return to Armenia his father wrote to him saying don’t come back. My
great-great grandfather was Kashador – or maybe Kachador – Nahigian,
and he died with the rest of the Armenian Nahigians in 1915.
My great-grandfather Soo-ren didn’t talk about Armenia with my
grandfather. My grandfather resented being Armenian to my father,
and my father, second-generation and with a Bostonian accent thicker
than his father’s, was just a very hairy American. Because of this
tumultuous family history, and because my father died when I was seven,
and because my mother is as white as a loaf of Wonder, I didn’t learn
about the Armenian Genocide until I came upon a very disconcerting
paragraph in my sixth grade History textbook.
It is a quote by Adolf Hitler that is now inscribed on a wall in
Washington, D.C.’s Holocaust Memorial Museum. The quote is from a
speech he gave a week before the German invasion of Poland in 1939
[emphasis added]:
“I have issued the command – and I’ll have anybody who utters but one
word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does
not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction
of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations
in readiness…with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and
without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and
language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need. Who,
after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
No one in my life.
I stared at the page and tried to fathom what exactly der fuhrer was
talking about. Below the quote was another disconcerting paragraph
mentioning that somewhere in the neighborhood of a million Armenians
had been killed earlier that century. In my century. My life has
been predicated, I suddenly realized, by a million, dead, unknown
Armenians. Chief among them had always been my father, but behind him,
I now knew, were the shades of not just ancestors but their neighbors,
and their neighbors’ wives and their children, and the villages where
they lived in the twentieth century. Until they suddenly didn’t,
anymore.
It was a very big thought for a very small paragraph, and for a very
long time that day I didn’t know what to think – because I kept asking
myself why no one had mentioned this to me before. Because it is,
still, a very big thought.
“A single death is a tragedy,” Josef Stalin is supposed to have said.
“A million is a statistic.”
This April will mark the 100th year since the beginning of the
Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Genocide. Its historic roots stretch back
roughly 3,000 years and if I had that many pages to describe them I
would still not have a decent explanation for you, because there are
no decent explanations for killing a person, let alone 1.5 million.
I can say that the killings began in 1915 and continued through 1923.
Turkish soldiers and mercenaries took Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks
into the Anatolian and Syrian deserts and made them march until they
died. Some were shot, some were roped together and thrown in rivers,
some were thrown off cliffs or burned alive, and some were crucified.
There is evidence of these murders for anyone who goes looking
for it, be it in photographs or around the hill of Margada in the
eastern Syrian desert. Bones can still be found there buried in the
shallow dirt.
Children below a certain age were taken from their parents and, if
not shot and buried in shared graves, given to Turkish families to
be converted to Islam and raised Turkish. This offends me far less
than more zealous Armenians, because, after all, the children did
survive – even as their mothers, fathers and elder siblings were
slaughtered and their homes given over to the Turks. What disturbs
me more are the thousands of women who would go on to raise children
born from the mass rapes of this era, and the decades of agony that
follow these families unto the present day.
The Western Front According to journalist Robert Fisk in his article,
“The First Holocaust,” U.S. diplomats were among the first to record
the Armenian genocide. Leslie Davis was the American consul in Harput
at the time and wrote an account of seeing “the remains of not less
than ten thousand Armenians” around Lake Goeljuk. Germans, too, who
had been dispatched to Turkey to help organize the Ottoman military,
reported mass slaughters and even more abominable acts. In the United
States itself, The New York Times first began reporting of Armenian
rapes and exterminations as early as November 1914. British diplomats
across the Middle East, Fisk writes, received first-hand dispatches of
the systematic slaughter. Private diaries of Europeans living in the
region at the time exist and contain grisly and despairing passages
of the event.
The West has known about this from the beginning. There is no disputing
the fact that Armenians and other ethnic groups were massacred in
Turkey in the early twentieth century.
In Turkey, however, it is effectively illegal to admit this. Today,
Article 301 of the Turkish penal code prohibits citizens from insulting
the Turkish nation or government. Even suggesting that the Turks of
100 years ago pursued an agenda of ethnic cleansing can be rewarded
with death.
Journalists have been killed for writing about the genocide. In truth,
writing anything in Turkey can be hazardous to one’s health. It ranks
154th in the World Press Freedom Index (out of 179 listed countries),
and is currently “the world’s biggest prison for journalists.”
And because Turkey refuses to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide as
a genocide, the United States, too, has remained mute on the subject.
>From a legal standpoint, recognizing a genocide brings with it a host
of complicated issues for a country – all of which perhaps pales in
comparison to simply accepting blame for the planet’s most heinous
criminal act. Turkey is a rare international ally for America –
a Middle Eastern state that retains a non-violent relationship with
Israel. For that reason, the United States has refused to officially
recognize the Armenian Genocide. Doing so would be politically
impolite.
This socio-political problem has transcended administrations and
party lines. A resolution to recognize the Armenian Genocide was
introduced by the 110th Congress in 2007, but then-President George
Bush II publicly opposed it. Before succeeding the office, Barack Obama
pledged that he would do what Bush could not. In 2006, Senator Obama
criticized Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for firing John Evans,
the Armenian Ambassador at the time, “after he properly used the term
‘genocide’ to describe Turkey’s slaughter of thousands of Armenians
starting in 1915.” Those are Obama’s own words.
“I shared with Secretary Rice my firmly held conviction that the
Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point
of view,” he added, “but rather a widely documented fact supported
by an overwhelming body of historical evidence.”
In 2008, Obama reiterated his stance: “America deserves a leader who
speaks truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully
to all genocides. I intend to be that President.”
In the six years since taking office, Obama has not been that
President. He has refused to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide
even once.
With Justice for All I was not raised to hate Turks. As my mother
would have it, I was not raised to hate anyone. But as I have grown up
and learned more about the world and pursued my career in journalism,
there is one prejudice that has been impossible to fight. I hate lies.
I hate any form of enforced ignorance that claims “2 + 2 = 5” and
strikes down the indomitable voices that scream “4” until they’re
silenced. By denying genocide, by denying the forced marches of
Assyrians, of Greeks and of Armenians, by denying the tortures and
the rapes, by denying the crucifixions and persecutions, Turkey is
denying a final peace for so many. And they have been doing so for
far too long.
My grandfather doesn’t think of himself as Armenian. He is a Bostonian
first and a New Englander second, an American third and a businessman
fourth. This fight for recognition is not his fight. This is not to
say he bears no love for his father’s country; it is simply that time
has moved on, America is now his home, its pledge the only allegiance
he knows. The stories and the prayers of Kashador – or Kachador – and
the traditions of the dead Nahigians are now a century extinguished.
What I’ve learned about Armenia has come from books, from fellow
Armenians who have reached out, and from a diaspora that refuses to
let the wax of its own dying candles cool. It wants what any culture
wants, what any human deserves – and that is the truth.
My grandfather never wanted to be Armenian. But I am. And one hundred
years later, I know how much that means.
Pierce Nahigyan is the editor-in-chief of Planet Experts
().
His articles have appeared in several publications, including Foreign
Policy Journal, Intrepid Report, the Los Angeles Post-Examiner,
New Internationalist and SHK Magazine.