WNN – Women News Network
Oct 20 2012
100 years later Armenian women continue to be haunted by genocide
Lys Anzia – WNN Features
(WNN) LONDON, U.K.: In a searing, impact-filled letter written to
Swiss Armenian woman filmmaker Suzanne Khardalian, human rights
activist Odette Bazil reached out to reveal her insights to the hidden
depth and true story of countless Armenian women who faced atrocity
during years of cultural genocide. It revealed the same suffering
described in Khardalian’s 2011 debut film `Grandma’s Tattoos.’
With her work as a British advocate for Armenian women and their
families, Iran-born Bazil is also the Co-Founder and Executive
Secretary for BAAPPG – British-Armenian All-Party Parliamentary Group
who has worked tirelessly to bring the issue of human rights and the
suffering of Armenians to the attention of Britain’s Parliament.
`Film has the potential to urge the viewer to confront a past moment –
one that has been lived, but never internalized, and thus never
understood…,’ outlined Khardalian as she asked viewers to decide for
themselves what her film means to them in a statement made as the film
premiered. `Is there anything at all to learn from genocide?’ she
added.
Described by BBC news as `…one of the worst crimes in our age,’ the
widespread `slaughter’ of Armenians during the years of genocide,
continues to hold secrets and trauma that have yet to be completely
revealed. The true impact on the lives of generations of Armenian
women who were born after the genocide is still unfolding say
advocates.
`The story of those who didn’t die – the story of young women who
survived and stayed behind – has never been told,’ said Nanore
Barsoumian, assistant editor of the Armenian Weekly in December 2011.
`Men write down history. So it is with Genocide. There is no room for
the women. They were impure, tainted, and despised,’ continued
Barsoumian. `Yet they were the ones who suffered most. They were the
ones who paid a terrible price. They had to carry the heaviest burden
of all: they had to regenerate life.’
Today the evidence of the violence has expanded its reach, brought
forward through advocates and past efforts by global governments and
agencies, including the United States House of Representatives.
`The Armenian Genocide and these domestic judicial failures are
documented with overwhelming evidence in the national archives of
Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Russia, the United States,
the Vatican and many other countries…,’ said a 2007 session by the
U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Relations Committee that found
wide support in 2009. `…and this vast body of evidence attests to the
same facts, the same events, and the same consequences,’ continued the
report.
With documentation covering `crimes against humanity’ the issue of
belief in the Armenian genocide, and its proof, has now brought a
growing acceptance to the very definition of genocide. But even as
recent as 2009, some scholars and historians continue to dispute that
the crimes against the Armenians during the conflict were all part of
a what many claim were not a targeted genocide against `Christian
Armenians.’
Today the tide against the belief in genocide is shifting toward the
believers, even as some opposition still exists, as more and more
evidence of targeted atrocity has been brought through photos, old
newspaper articles and documents to the public.
In its earliest days, dating back to the year 1299, the Ottoman Empire
grew to span a gigantic region in what is today over 40 separate
countries. From 1915 to 1923 it is now believed that over 1.5 million
Armenians met their `untimely’ deaths. This number, in spite of the
inability of making a true count, is over half of the 2.5 million
Armenians who then called the region home.
The impact for survivors was `more than devastating’ say human rights
advocates, especially for Armenian women who were trapped in a war
zone where protection for themselves and their families had all but
completely vanished.
`…[m]utilation, violation, torture, and death have left their haunting
memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in
that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal
crime of all the ages,’ said United States General James Harbord in a
testimony given before the U.S. Congress in 1920 while the genocide
was still in process.
____________________
In a one-on-one interview with Lys Anzia from WNN, Odette Bazil
reveals the root hatred that fueled the Armenian genocide and the
effect it had on Armenian women during the turn of the 20th century as
well as today’s generation of Armenian women.
Lys Anzia/WNN: Why was the suffering of the women during the Armenian
genocide kept such a secret inside Armenian families for generations?
Odette Bazil: The suffering of Armenian women from the rape and
force-tattooing of the Turkish-Muslim flag to their faces and hands
during the Armenian genocide in 1915 has been kept silent and secret
inside Armenian families because of the agonizing SHAME that these
women have felt for having been raped , violated , exposed and sullied
.
The bestial actions of the perpetrators did not attack these women
only physically but usurped, degraded and violated the very dignity
and sanctity of their privacy which is the secret sanctuary and
ultimate possession of any woman.
With a sad conviction, Armenian women came to realise that if the
crime would become common knowledge it would bring shame not only to
the woman herself but more specifically to her husband, her father,
all the male members of her entire family and to all her relatives.
Rape and violation is not about sex . It is to stamp and confirm the
violator’s will upon its victim. Force-tattooing a national-religious
emblem on a woman’s face is to show possession of that woman; to show
removal of her own identity and faith; and to show denigration and
insult of her own religion. In most cultures, and not only in [the]
Armenian, if a woman is raped by the enemy and tattooed with the
enemy’s national and religious flag then she does not belong to
herself anymore, nor to her family. She becomes the possession of the
mind and will of the violator, of his religion and of his nation.
In the mind of that woman – and that of the society around her – she
does not exist anymore as an Armenian, nor as a Christian. She looses
her self-worth and self-respect, her honour, her faith, her very
existence as an Armenian and a Christian human being and becomes a
nothing and a nobody – a non entity.
In all families – and specifically in Armenian families – the honour
of a wife, daughter or mother is the most proud and valued possession
of that family. And if lost, the female becomes a subject of shame,
degradation and extreme anger for her husband or father. [And] of
rejection, curse and humiliation for her siblings and of complete
social annihilation from the society where she lives and where she
becomes a `paria.’
In all cultures, rape has always been and will always remain a taboo
subject because when exposed the shame connected with it must be
exposed too. Suzanne Khardalian has shown immense courage in exposing
the crimes committed against her Gran’ma. She deserves our admiration
and our gratitude.
The rape of Armenian women and the force-tattooing of the
Turkish-Muslim flag to their faces and hands – the ultimate crime
committed against any woman – gave them such low self-esteem and
feelings of being dirty, unworthy, dishonored and diseased that they
refused any intimate contact with the members of their family – even
with their own children. Unable to find the reasons for the crimes
committed against them, …in their own minds and in the silence of
their isolation they even saw themselves as the criminals and not the
victims .
Rape and Shame. Rape and Guilt. Hatred for the branding on their
faces. Life-lasting agony. All this had to and will be kept secret and
hidden for many more generations unless more courageous individuals
like Suzanne Khardalian expose the vile and barbaric actions of an
entire nation who was engaged in a frenzy of crime and aberrations.
To see more of this important story with video and special reports
LINK TO PAGE 2 below > > >
http://womennewsnetwork.net/2012/10/19/armenian-women-genocide/