U.S. author heckled by people denying Armenian genocide
By James Barron
Thursday, May 3, 2007
NEW YORK: As a first-time author, Margaret Ajemian Ahnert hoped that her
appearance at a Barnes & Noble store here would draw attention to her new
book, "The Knock at the Door," which deals with the Armenian genocide.
Her reading and question-and-answer session Tuesday drew attention, to be
sure, but not the kind she expected.
A man in the audience was arrested after he and several other people
disrupted the reading by shouting and passing out leaflets denying that the
genocide occurred. Ahnert’s 209-page book tells, among other things, how her
mother survived the genocide as a teenager during World War I and eventually
came to the United States.
Ahnert said Wednesday that she did not mean "The Knock at the Door" to be a
political narrative.
"Here I was trying to tell the story of my mother, not making a political
statement," she said. "It’s a mother-daughter story, it’s how it affected my
life. It’s not just about the Armenian genocide, it’s about my mother
growing up, my life, and events in her life that affected me. It’s a
mother-daughter memoir. I’m not making any historical statements."
Many historians say that the Ottoman Empire was responsible for the death of
more than one million people around 1915 in a campaign intended to eliminate
the Armenian population throughout what is now Turkey.
Ahnert said the disruption came as she answered a question from the crowd.
Some of those who attended her talk were friends, including a former
governor, Hugh Carey, and the Manhattan district attorney, Robert
Morgenthau, whose grandfather, Henry Morgenthau, was ambassador to the
Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916.
"Someone in the middle of the back of the room stood up and said, ‘That’s
not so,’ " Ahnert said. "Five or six men started to pass out fliers of
denial. I thought, oh, my goodness sakes, it’s like Holocaust deniers. I was
completely taken aback."
Mary Occhino, who was in the audience, said some of the people were
shouting, "This is a lie, this is a lie, this never happened."
"I got up and said, ‘Enough,’ " said Occhino, the host of a call-in program
on Sirius satellite radio. "Her mother lived through the genocide – that’s
all she said. They said, ‘That’s a lie, that’s a lie, that never happened.’
But this story is not about genocide; it’s about a mother’s love for her
daughter."
The man who was arrested, identified by the police as Erdem Sahin, 41, of
Staten Island, was charged with resisting arrest, a misdemeanor punishable
by up to a year in jail, and faced lesser charges including disorderly
conduct.
At a hearing Wednesday in Manhattan Criminal Court, Judge Rita Mella
adjourned the charges in contemplation of dismissal. That means that the
case will be dropped in six months if Sahin is not arrested again.
Sahin said afterward that he and the other protesters were angry that France
had "made it illegal to say there was no genocide." The French National
Assembly approved the legislation last fall.
"We realize that if we don’t do something, we will soon have no rights," he
said. "We are fighting for freedom of speech."
When asked about his views on the Armenian genocide, he said, "Honestly, I’m
not a historian, but historians say there is no genocide."
The subject is largely taboo in Turkey, and in recent years, Turkish writers
who have referred to genocide have faced reprisal. A legal claim against the
novelist Elif Shafak was dropped last fall, but she cut short a six-city
U.S. tour promoting her sixth novel, "The Bastard of Istanbul," which
includes Armenian characters.
Orhan Pamuk, who won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, was also sued by a
nationalist group for referring to genocide in a Swiss interview, and in
January, Hrant Dink, a newspaper editor who had challenged the official
Turkish version of the genocide, was fatally shot as he left his office in
Istanbul.
A spokeswoman for the Barnes & Noble chain said that it was unusual for a
reading to be disrupted. Passing out pamphlets violated the company’s
no-solicitation policy, she said, adding: "They were asked to stop passing
out leaflets. They refused. They were jeering the author. They were asked to
sit down and they refused." That was when the police were called, she said.
Ahnert said she had appeared on college campuses and at a literary festival
in Florida without any problems. "This is something I hope I don’t have to
look forward to," she said.
International Herald Tribune Copyright © 2007 The International Herald
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