Los Angeles Times
April 20 2005
Marchers Remind World of 1915 Armenian Genocide
A grandmother is among those walking 215 miles to the Capitol to
honor 1.5 million people killed by the Turkish government.
By Mark Arax, Times Staff Writer
LOCKEFORD, Calif. – They had marched for 14 days and 175 miles through
the farm fields of California’s middle when they reached this quaint
little town on a bend of a river.
They passed through Lockeford on Friday the same way they had
passed through other towns along the way: a single line of 14 young
Armenians and one sturdy grandmother, walking in silence and carrying
a big, yellow banner that drew mostly puzzled looks from farmers and
field hands alike: “Turkey tell the Truth. Acknowledge the Armenian
Genocide.”
Their trek from Fresno to Sacramento to honor the 1.5 million Armenians
killed by Ottoman Turkey 90 years ago had reached the last stretch
of road that would take them to the steps of the state Capitol on
Thursday.
There, hundreds of Armenians from throughout California are scheduled
to gather with state leaders to commemorate the victims of what is
widely considered the 20th century’s first genocide.
Caspar Jivalagian, an 18-year-old from Pasadena, said he was marching
to expose a lie.
Unlike Germany and the Holocaust, he said, modern-day Turkey
continues to conduct a vigorous campaign of denial. And the U.S.
government, despite its own voluminous records of a planned and
systematic extermination of Armenians, has tried not to offend its
strategic ally, refusing to publicly call the massacres “genocide.”
“Turkey and my own government are telling me that everything I have
heard is a lie,” Jivalagian said.
His march – 19 days and 215 miles long – in no way re-creates the
march his great-grandparents took in the summer of 1915. They were
herded from their homes in what is now eastern Turkey and forced to
walk hundreds of miles without food or water to death camps in Syria.
That march, he said, drove the world’s oldest Christian nation
from its homeland of 2,500 years. That march, in the words of Henry
Morgenthau, U.S. ambassador to Turkey at the time, became a pretext
for a “cold-blooded, calculating” slaughter of a nation.
And yet each day of the trek, Jivalagian said, he has tried to imagine
the footsteps of his forebears.
“After you’ve been walking all day, you tend to zone out and forget
where you are,” he said. “You concentrate on the footsteps of the
person in front of you, and pretty soon you can almost feel like
you’re walking in the shoes of your ancestors.”
For Sanan Shirinian, a 16-year-old from La Crescenta, every tie to
that brutal past is gone. A snippet of story passed down from her
great-grandmother, who died three years ago, is all she has as a
memory. But to be young and Armenian, she said, is to grow up sensing
a deep cultural wound that has never been allowed to heal.
“The genocide is why I am even in America. It changed everything
about our lives,” she said. “So I can’t just sit back and watch denial
happen. I won’t say it has made us bitter, but it has caused an anger
in us that won’t go away.”
Each spring, the Armenian American community – an estimated 300,000
strong in Southern California – struggles to find a way to remind the
world of a crime that Holocaust scholars consider a precursor to the
annihilation of the Jews.
On the eve of invading Poland, scholars point out, Adolf Hitler told
his commanding officers not to worry about any backlash from world
opinion. The memory of such crimes didn’t even last 20 years. “Who,
after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Hitler
is quoted as saying.
Today’s Turkish government, fearing Armenian claims for land and money,
argues that any atrocities were the unfortunate miscalculations of
World War I, not genocide.
But in recent months, as Turkey has continued to make its case for
membership in the European Union, some leading Turks have called on
their country to come clean about the past. Turkey’s most celebrated
novelist, Orhan Pamuk, told a Swiss audience last month that the
massacres of Armenians were, indeed, a historical fact.
This spring, owing to the symbolism of a 90th anniversary, the
Armenian American community has stepped up its fight for recognition,
leaders say.
Armenian groups are lobbying even harder than usual to persuade a
reluctant U.S. Congress to pass a resolution commemorating April 24
as a day of remembrance for the Armenian genocide. The Armenia Tree
Project is raising money to plant 90,000 trees in Armenia, a tiny,
mountainous country that represents but a sliver of the old homeland.
In Los Angeles, where Armenians protesting the genocide have
frequently staged demonstrations outside the Turkish consulate,
students at Armenian schools are wearing the same T-shirts the entire
month. They read “90 Years of Denial” on the front and “Remember the
Armenian Genocide” on the back.
And then there are the marchers who decided to unplug from their
computers, if not their cellphones, and take a walk up the Central
Valley.
For 18 days, through rain and sun, past alfalfa fields, dairy farms
and walnut groves, they have marched with blisters and sore ankles.
After logging 12 to 15 miles a day, they have found sleep in homes,
churches and community centers opened to them by strangers.
Whenever they thought of quitting, the 14 young men and women from
Los Angeles and Fresno simply looked to 63-year-old Zabel Ekmekjian,
who was marching right behind them.
She had come to the U.S. from Syria in 1978 with her husband and
four children.
She said her father was just a child when the Turks came to his village
and killed his parents and dozens of other family members. He survived
the march only to see one brother shot and two sisters stolen by a
Turkish family and converted to Islam.
“I am walking for recognition and for justice,” she said. “The kids
say I motivate them, but it is the other way around. I will go all
the way because of them.”
At times, the Armenian marchers have looked out of place. Some
townsfolk along the way have wondered: “Who were the Armenians?” “Why
would Turkey kill more than 1 million of them in 1915?” “Why did it
still matter?”
When they hit the town of Galt on the 16th day, a man and his son in
a red pickup met them at the side of the road.
“He reached out of the window with something in his hand,” said lead
marcher Serouj Aprahamian, 23, a graduate of Cal Poly Pomona. “It
was the Armenian flag. I asked him, ‘Are you Armenian?’ and he said,
‘No.’ And then he handed it over to me.
“It was such an unbelievable gesture, and I didn’t know what to say.
I said thanks and gave him one of our black beanies trimmed in the
red, blue and orange of the Armenian flag. I said, ‘This is a gift
from us to you.’ And he drove off.”
Three days shy of their destination, they kept walking.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress