Author: Garnik Zakarian

FRESNO—The San Joaquin Valley community will once again gather on the steps of Fresno City Hall to raise the flags of the United States and Armenia in commemoration of the victims and survivors of the Armenian Genocide. The event will take place on Wednesday, April 24 from 10 a.m. to noon in front of City Hall.

The keynote speaker for this year’s program is Alice Petrossian, current chairperson of the Education Committee of the Armenian National Committee of America–Western Region (ANCA–WR) and former president of the Los Angeles County Commission for Women. She has also served as Chief Academic Officer of the Pasadena Unified School District and occupied various administrative positions for the Glendale Unified School District.

Also participating will be Fresno Mayor Lee Brand and Fowler City Councilmember Karnig Kazarian, who will serve as master of ceremonies.

The invocation will be given by the local clergy, including: Fr. Dajad Ashekian of Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Church, Fr. Yessai Bedros of St. Paul Armenian Church, Fr. Yeghia Hairabedian of St. Gregory Armenian Apostolic Church, Rev. Greg Haroutunian of First Armenian Presbyterian Church, and Nerses Balabanian of Pilgrim Armenian Congregational Church.

This year’s musical program will feature Hygo Ohannessian and Asdghig Ajamian, who will sing the national anthems of United States and Republic of Armenia, and students of the Charlie Keyan Armenian Community School performing traditional and contemporary selections. Members of the Sassoon Chapter of the Homenetmen Scouts and the local JROTC will serve as the color guard, accompanied by the Association Of The United States Army “Sounds Of Freedom” Military Concert Band.

Throughout her 44 year career, Petrossian has been an educational leader and advocate for all students. As an immigrant who at the time of her arrival did not speak a word of English, she is most passionate when working for and with disenfranchised, minority and limited English speaking students. Her awards include, among many others, the prestigious Ellis Island Medal of Honor and multiple Woman of the Year proclamations by Assemblyman James Rogan (1998), Assemblyman Paul Krekorian (2008), and Senator Carol Liu (2013). Petrossian remains connected to Armenia through her yearly volunteer work and lectures at American University of Armenia.

The ANCA – Central California has organized the commemoration since 2004 when the flag of Armenia was first raised over Fresno City Hall in memory of 1.5 million martyrs of the Armenian Genocide.

The ANCA-WR is a grassroots public affairs organization devoted to advancing issues of concern to the Armenian American community. For nearly a century, the ANCA-WR has served to educate, motivate and activate the Armenian American community in the Western United States on a wide range of issues.

The Center for Advanced Genocide Studies and the Institute of Armenian Studies at the University of Southern California are sponsoring a noontime program on Thursday, March 5, featuring Professor Richard Hovannisian and his Armenian Genocide Oral History Collection.

During his more than fifty years of teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, Hovannisian created a course in the 1970s on Armenian Oral History, in which he trained students to interview survivors of the Armenian Genocide.

Over the years, some 1,000 interviews have been conducted, becoming the largest collection of its kind in existence. In 2018, the Richard Hovannisian Collection was entrusted to the Shoah Foundation at USC for preservation and academic and scholarly research.

In the March 5 program, Hovannisian will discuss the origins and development of his course at UCLA, as well the uses and potential misuses of oral testimony. His former students Lorna Tourian Miller, Tamar Mashigian and Salpi Ghazarian will share their own impressions and experiences in adding to the collection.

“Preserving History: Armenian Voices from the Classroom to the Archive,” featuring Prof. Hovannisian will take place at noon on Tuesday, March 5 at USC’s Doheny Memorial Library , Room 240, 3550 Trousdale Pkwy, Los Angeles.

BY GAREN YEGPARIAN

I’ve wanted to write this piece for a long time, but there’s a set of information that would make it more complete which I have not been able to find (more on this later). So, after putting it off for more than a year, I decided to give it a go anyway.

To start, I played a game with myself by listing how many different nationalities living in Turkey today I could name. I came up with this list: Albanians (Arnawoot), Alevis, Arabs, Armenians, Assyrians, Azerbaijanis, Bosnians (Boshnaks/Bosniaks), Bulgarians, Circassians (Adyghe and Kabardian as I sybsequently learned), Greeks (including Pontic Greeks), Jews, Kurds, Laz, Macedonians, Turkmens, Zaza (Kurds), and miscellaneous Eastern European stock converted to Islam by the Ottomans who settled in post-Ottoman Turkey, often in the homes left vacant by Armenians who were murdered or exiled. I’m not even including the more ancient peoples who dwelt as Armenians’ neighbors to the west and have since disappeared, nor the various nations represented by their business-based diasporas.

Of course, I missed some: Abazins, Abkhazians, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Gagauzes, Georgians, Ossetians, Pomaks, Romani/Roma/Gypsy, Karakalpaks, Tahtaci, and one source described “minorities of West European … the Levantines (or Levanter, mostly of French, Genoese and Venetian descent) … present in the country (particularly in Istanbul and İzmir) since the medieval period”. These two lists, together, are what I could find, in what I can only describe as a “stingy” environment. There are probably many more. Obviously, Ankara wants the world to believe that everyone living in Turkey is a Turk. This is a very clever bit of wordplay, since the Republic of Turkey’s constitution defines the country’s residents in that way. Ankara certainly doesn’t want awareness, neither worldwide nor among its own citizens, of the large number of nationalities that pan-Turkist and Ataturkist policies aim to subsume and render “Turkish” over time. In fact, the last census they gathered information about aomething as simple as languages spoken, not national identity, was in 1965.

The CIA seems hell bent on assisting Ankara. Its “The World Factbook” gives these statistics for Turkey’s demographic diversity: “Turkish 70-75%, Kurdish 19%, other minorities 7-12% (2016 est.)” That is not only terse, but extremely misleading. Even so, it tells us that roughly one-third of the population is NOT Turkish. Let’s proceed from here, assuming that that two-thirds is, indeed Turkish. This is where the demographic time bomb that terrifies Ankara is ticking away in plain view.

There are many articles out there about how Turkey’s population, like much of the rest of the world, is getting older. They also address the brain drain of the country’s most talented youth departing for Europe or America, especially since the abortive 2016 coup that enabled Erdoğan to consolidate his power to the point of “choking” the young generation, further prompting them to leave. But this is NOT the biggest fear of Turkey’s current leaders.

Take a look at the accompanying map of Turkey and its provinces. The red, yellow, and light green colors indicate where net fertility (basically, birth rates) are highest. You’ll notice they are in the predominantly Kurdish-populated parts of the country. The more heavily “Turkish” parts of the country have lower birthrates, often BELOW replacement levels. “Replacement level” is defined as the average number of children that must be born to a woman to maintain a constant population. In developed countries, this figure is 2.1. But it can be as high as 3.4 in some developing countries because of higher mortality rates. So let’s say for Turkey it is somewhere in between, 2.7. You can see the western and northern parts of the country are well below this level. What this means is that in a few generations, “Turks” could well become a minority population in Turkey.

But even the “Turkishness” of today’s Turks is really suspect, ambiguous, and ultimately meaningless. Really, how many Turks arrived from the Altai Mountains and Central Asia into Anatolia and the Armenian Highlands? This is the information I lack referenced above. I have not been able to find or compile a table that indicates years of arrival of successive waves of Turkic invaders, how many they were, and what the population of the territories concerned was in that year. With those numbers, we could really tell what proportion of the overall number of Turks today can really be seen as Turks. The rest would be Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and everyone else who lived there before the invaders came.

Ask your “Turkish” contacts. What are they REALLY when it comes to their roots? It might trigger some reflection, soul-searching, and reassessment of their identity. Or, in the case of the large number of racists to be found among Turks, it will give you the mischievous pleasure of driving them to great irritation.