Krikor Sahagian was born in Jerusalem and repatriated to Armenia when he was 21 years old. This is the first article for his new column in the Armenian Weekly titled “In Pursuit of Home.” His column will center on people and life in Armenia, repatriation and his continuing discovery of self and where he belongs.

It is only when you grow older that you realize that figuring out the right thing to do is often harder than actually doing it. Socrates was right—with age, we begin to understand that life is infinitely more complex than we initially thought. Its complexity forces us to admit that we know less about the world today than we knew yesterday. 

What would have been the right course of action for us Armenians living in Yerevan, as Aliyev killed our compatriots and completely destroyed our nation’s proudest achievement? More importantly, what could we have done here in Yerevan, as we witnessed the Republic of Artsakh turn the last page of its epic story and rage into the dying of the light? Of the millions of Armenians across the globe, we in Armenia, naturally, felt a stronger responsibility to do something and help change the course of our nation’s history. 

It was an uneventful, ordinary Tuesday in Armenia, the streets visibly emptied of their hustle and bustle as the tourist season drew to a close. The weather was so beautiful that it made a September Tuesday bearable. The sun was bright but mild. The sky was blue, and a gentle breeze reminded all of us of our perennial bond with the Earth. It was a day that would have made anyone fall ever more deeply in love with this incomprehensible, at times infuriating, but mostly sublime country. 

Then, in the afternoon, the news began to trickle in. Artsakh was at war – and this time around, entertaining the chances of victory was simply wishful thinking. Yet, as the saying goes, hope is the last to die – and while rationality urged us to expect defeat, the human spirit in us all pushed us to believe in the improbable, in the nonsensical, in the heroic, in the romantic and in the beautiful. However, this also made sense. Isn’t history written by the triumphs of foolish people embarking on struggles that were deemed foolish to begin with? Isn’t great achievement defined by improbable odds?

When I was young, my Protestant American teachers told my entire class and me that we were all to be future leaders. Even then, as a young child infatuated with Disney movies, I knew that was hardly true. It did not make sense by definition. However, whenever a crisis unfolds around me and I feel like I am expected to act, I think about whether they truly believed that, and if so, on what did they base their conclusion? Was it something they told everyone they met? Was it part of their missionary mantra? Or did God, by demonstrating uncommon and exceptional divine instruction, tell them that my classmates and I were truly the rare and unlikely group of young people that was completely composed of future leaders?

On the afternoon of September 19, people in Armenia were in search of leaders and guidance. Nobody wanted to stand idly by while a part of their world was collapsing and a tragedy of historic proportions unfolded around them. I assume and hope that all of us were consumed by the thought of needing and wanting to do something–to help save lives, to defend that which we believe we love, and, perhaps selfishly, to live up to a defining moment. Were we to be hypocrites for demanding for years that we all fight a fight that we quickly deserted, or were we to valiantly heed the battle cry of generations? 

“We Are Our Mountains” monument, Artsakh (Photo: Araz Boghossian)

Yet, like so many of us, I was paralyzed and lost – not knowing how we could mobilize our resources and talents to protect the survival of a part of our shrinking home. I am feeling even more devastated and guilty for recognizing that such a dire scenario was possible, even probable, but I never prepared a contingency plan. Since I did not plan ahead, at the start of the war I aimlessly ran through my options, knowing full well that history has demonstrated that my hesitant, careful and doubtful soul will only come to a decision when it’s already too late. 

Many of my friends quickly joined VOMA (civilian paramilitary organization) to go through basic training. However, considering the urgency of the situation, this did not make much sense to me. Artsakh was not the size of Russia or Canada, and the fight there would probably be over by the time they were called up to their first training session. One of them, being from America, maybe did not entirely grasp how quickly the enemy force could overrun our country. Or maybe, despite war still raging on and blood being shed, this friend of mine had already accepted the loss of Artsakh and was preparing for the next fight that was to come ever closer to him. Two years ago, he believed that repatriating from the richest and most prosperous country on the planet to a fledgling nation that had just lost a devastating war was to be his greatest contribution to ensuring the survival of his people. By the mere fact of repatriating, he was to be an exemplary figure among our wandering timid nation. Yet he was then slapped in the face with a new, more daunting reality. Moving to Armenia was hardly enough to defend her. Armenia was calling upon him to demonstrate true courage and devotion and to defend her in the most primal of ways – with his physical body in the trenches of Syunik, under the rain and snow, with his shivering hands and feet clinging to a worn out Soviet submachine gun. This is what it would take to defend the dream of building a life in a free Armenia. 

Less than an hour after the fighting began, many slowly made their way to Republic Square. It was not immediately clear what the purpose of this gathering was. Many stood in front of the government building, convinced that the government, with its inaction, was responsible for this crisis in the first place, and thus demanded that it resign. Others, many of whom were students and citizens from Artsakh, alternatively demanded that the government assist our compatriots in Artsakh or get involved somehow in order to stop the bloodshed and save the lives of their families. Granted, nobody knew exactly what the nature of involvement they demanded would look like. 

Never in my life had I seen such scenes of helplessness and agonizing stress. The limited information that was coming out of Artsakh, understandably, caused people to expect the worst. After all, Azerbaijan, in the 21st century, for more than nine months had attempted to starve their families and friends under siege. To expect anything less than complete ruthlessness by this regime during this round of fighting would be ill-founded. Of the hundreds that amassed in Republic Square, women and men alike were weeping and sobbing – worried and frightened about what was happening to the people and country they loved. Personally, I have this irrational tendency to expect the worst when a WhatsApp text message doesn’t immediately get delivered to a family member. I cannot imagine how I would cope if I had been in their stead. 

I happen to believe that I love this country. I have been to Artsakh more than a dozen times. I loved how I felt there. Stepanakert, to me, is the most charming Armenian city in the world. My heart ached as I felt Artsakh permanently slip away. But, needless to say, my pain was incomparable to those who grew up in Artsakh, to those who had homes and livelihoods in Artsakh, to those who had loved ones in Artsakh whose lives were in danger, to those who considered Artsakh simply their home and not a symbol of a struggle. They were realizing that everything they had done had amounted to nothing – all those lives lost, all those deprivations and sacrifices that they had endured for decades. 

Imagine all the Artsakhtsis who were told that it is honorable that they miss out on opportunities in order to dedicate their lives to the land, which many of us only saw through our computer screens. Imagine suddenly fearing that your life is being robbed of its meaning. Imagine realizing that you will never find comfort or relative stability in your life anymore, because you were adamant about not abandoning your homeland and missed out on learning new skills that would have equipped you with the knowledge to navigate a life in unknown places. In this new existence, younger people would undoubtedly cope better. However, those of a more advanced age, who, after a long life full of accomplishment and creation, looked forward to finally slowing down to enjoy a peaceful life spent cultivating their gardens and taking pride in their children and grandchildren, would be the most heartbroken of them all.

I wanted to help these people. I wanted to give them solace. But who was I to do that? At a moment when I was required to, first and foremost, be brave, I was justifying inaction by dismissing all my potential solutions as crazy. In pursuit of common sense and sound logic, my mind was persuading me to do nothing, rather than do the wrong thing. Indeed, as I pondered our options to save the crumbling republic, I froze. All of us did. On a personal level, these moments are difficult to bear, as they strip us naked and expose us as the people we truly are, and not the people we would have loved to have been. Destiny was calling us to greatness, but at that moment, we realized we are not the heroes we thought we were. Although this is a tough thing to accept, it profoundly changes the way we view and appreciate our true heroes and leaders.

A day later, in our indecision, Artsakh fell completely, probably permanently. Suddenly, we found ourselves in a completely new reality, a reality that seemed remote just a few hours prior. The dust was yet to settle. The shock was yet to be felt. The magnitude of the loss was yet to be understood. But, as is embarrassingly typical of us, we quickly shifted gears and attempted to try to minimize the impact of yet another defeat. We thought that we could make up for our humiliation by taking the moral high ground and helping all those refugees who were directly impacted by our failure. This way, at least we had a clear conscience and were victors in the eyes of God. Helping our compatriots required no politics, no difficult decisions, no courage, no unique conviction. Everyone was on board, not necessarily because they were nationalists, but because, rather selfishly and quite naturally, people are in constant search for something meaningful to do.

As cynical as I usually am, I do appreciate that though this plan did not require much daring or fortitude, it was no less important or admirable. Armenians, mostly from Armenia, but also from across the world, went to Syunik to welcome those who were forcibly displaced from their homes. There is no alternative to being here physically with our kin, to offer support, human warmth and elemental kindness, to hug and embrace them, to assist them with finding a new place to live, to give them a lift, to simply be there so that they do not feel alone as they go through this excruciatingly dark time in their lives. There is no alternative to showing the displaced that we are ready to help them rebuild their lives in the very country that many of us have vowed to live in until our dying breath, to demonstrate that our support was not limited to sending money by pushing a few buttons on our phones. 

However, we should not fool ourselves. This won’t make up for when we abandoned a part of our home. We all failed Artsakh and its beautiful people. There will be no redemption for the mistakes we made that led to this. No one will forgive us for having been unwise and weak. No amount of aid will mend the wounds that we inflicted upon her and, ultimately, ourselves. This all happened, because, at least for now, we are not the heroes and heroines we thought we were. 

This past Sunday, October 29, was a day of grand celebration for the Turkish nation. It was the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic, established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk after the “war of independence.” Kemal had served in the Ottoman army in both eastern and western campaigns. He skillfully took advantage of the victorious allies’ confusion and duplicity to drive the “foreigners” out, eventually establishing the new Turkish Republic. Kemal was revered for his introduction of “democracy” to Turkey and the transition to secular institutions, in sharp contrast to his Ottoman predecessors. Pictures of Kemal adorned nearly every building and home in Turkey in reverence to the man they called “father of the Turks.” The West eventually warmed to the western-leaning Turkish nation, particularly during the post-World War II period, and Turkey joined NATO in 1952. Turkey also joined the U.N. coalition in the Korean War and enjoyed the support of the western alliance, which transformed Turkey’s military into a modern fighting unit. Turkey has earned deep friendships in the Pentagon and State Department, as it has received investments from the military industrial complex for serving as a buffer to the Soviet Union for decades. Despite its questionable loyalty to NATO under current President Recep Erdogan and its obstructionist role in Syria against United States interests, Turkey has been forgiven countless times, as it charts its own regional hegemony. Turkey has played both sides in the Ukraine war by circumventing western sanctions against Russia and attempting to serve as a self-serving broker between both sides.

Turkey has succeeded in winning powerful friends, but not everyone has been allured by its veneer. The truth of the founding of the Turkish Republic is quite different from the romantic notion of a people fighting for their independence that Turkey has projected. The reality is that Ottoman Turkey was a defeated nation as a result of World War I and committed at least three genocides (Armenian, Assyrian and Greek) to further its warped vision. Once the allies (primarily French and British) secured their mandate in the Middle East, they had no appetite to fight the Turks, who were allowed to brutally expel the western Greeks. The allies were apparently satisfied with their bounty and withdrew from Turkish territory. The Armenians are all too familiar with the treacherous French abandonment of Cilicia after using the Armenian Legion to secure the region and encouraging Genocide survivors to return. The Ataturk that the Armenians know committed atrocities in the villages of Cilicia, purging the region of its last Armenian inhabitants. A similar cleansing took place in the postwar period in the northern Pontus region, home to an indigenous Greek nation. Ataturk went about the business of completing what the Committee of Union and Progress, or Young Turks, had not finished. Troops under his command attacked the western borders of the young Armenian republic in 1920, forcing the capitulation of independence and the loss of Kars, Ardahan and Ararat. His murderous campaigns killed thousands of Greeks and Armenians as Smyrna (Izmir) burned.

The truth is that the Turkish Republic of 1923 was founded on the blood and wealth of millions of Christians native to Asia Minor and Anatolia. Turkish independence was far less about a people seeking freedom and more about purging the nation of non-Turks. In those decades, non-Turks were defined as Christians who were of the Armenian, Greek, Assyrian and Chaldean faiths. By the end of the first decade of the Turkish Republic, these centuries-old native communities were depopulated. What remained of the Armenian community slowly centered around the neighborhoods of Istanbul. The Armenian highlands were eerily silenced by the absence of an ancient indigenous culture. The completion of the Christian purge occurred on the watch of the “revered” Ataturk. Ataturk’s brutal methods against the innocent should never be confused with freedom fighting and civilized leadership. The Kurds, who were a prominent ethnic grouping in the east, particularly in the southeast, were subjected to overt attempts at cultural assimilation as they were officially referred to as “mountain Turks.” When these attempts failed, the Kurds were subjected to atrocities such as the Dersim massacres in the 1930s, which was covered up for decades by the Republic officials. 

Perhaps the most destructive legacy of the Turkish Republic, aside from the atrocities that led to its formation, is the institutional deception created by Ataturk and continued to this day. The Ittihads were the authors of genocide, and Kemal Ataturk continued their work by designing the coverup. In the post-genocide period, billions of dollars of the property and other forms of wealth of Armenians who had been murdered or deported were confiscated under the “abandonment” laws created by Kemal and redistributed for the resettlement of Turks, providing a financial foundation for the republic. Ataturk and his Republican colleagues were not only allowed to murder hundreds of thousands of Christians, but he also completed the robbery of their earthly possessions. 

Greek refugees mourning victims of the Smyrna massacres

The western world, having little interest in this unpunished act of barbarism and exhausted by war, moved on to a postwar environment. The United States, still in the infancy of becoming a world power, entered a period of isolationism by rejecting a U.S. mandate over Armenia, the Wilsonian mandate, and limiting its activity in these former war zones. Ataturk, under the cover of his westernization of Turkey into a secular “democracy,” commanded a virtual dictatorship that used pseudo-democratic institutions to legitimize his activities. The Armenian Genocide was a taboo topic in the Turkish Republic, and Armenians were portrayed as disloyal traitors to the Turkish nation. Turks would openly comment that the Genocide was justified based on Armenian behavior. These attitudes were embedded overtly and subtly by the educational system, creating an atmosphere of institutional discrimination manifested to this day. For example, although the Treaty of Lausanne guarantees the minorities in Turkey the freedom of religion, Turkey has closed for 50 years the only Armenian seminary and openly meddles in the affairs and the election of the Patriarch. In street vernacular, the word Armenian (Ermenie) is considered an insult. During a political campaign several years ago, former President Abdullah Gul was accused of having an Armenian mother. It was a “scandalous” tactic to put him on the defensive and discredit his career. This is the legacy of the Turkish Republic. We are all familiar with how Erdogan has been working to destroy not only any semblance of democracy but to push Turkey closer to an Islamic state. This would be a reversal of one of Ataturk’s legacies and has created significant division within Turkish society. His pan-Turkic fanaticism is displayed through his “one nation two states” platform with rogue Azerbaijan while promoting racism against Armenians. 

The criminal legacy of the Turkish Republic goes beyond genocide, confiscation and coverup. Children in Turkey learn a revisionist, distorted view of history that supports their denial. I came across a small but significant example this week. My wife and I are in Washington, D.C. attending a family wedding. Our plan was to stay a few extra days and enjoy the sights with my cousin and his wife from California. On Sunday, which happened to be Turkish Independence Day, we decided to have dinner at an Italian restaurant. Our waitress was a very pleasant young woman. She had a heavy accent that seemed Middle Eastern, so we asked where she was born. She replied that she was Turkish. After our meal, I wanted to engage in further dialogue with her. I asked where she was from, and she replied, “Izmir.” I asked her if she was familiar with its past as Smyrna. She politely replied that it was a long time ago when there were “rebels” in the area. I mentioned that many innocent people died, and she was puzzled and said the campaign was part of their independence war that they were celebrating on that day. I showed her a map on my phone and said my grandfather was from Sivas, and grandmother, from Adana. She seemed pleased, probably thinking we had something in common. At that point I asked her a question. “Why do you think we know so much about Turkey and its history? I can tell you we are not Turks or Greeks.” She didn’t respond, and I told her we are “Ermenie.” Her tone changed as her “education” kicked in. She told me that during that time there was a major problem with “disloyalty” and people left. She added that if we are interested in that era there is an “Ottoman restaurant” nearby. My wife, who was seething at this point, said we would not go there. Thus, we ended our Turkish Independence Day encounter. This young woman, a native of Izmir, is a 21st-century product of the corrupt Turkish education system as it relates to World War I and Armenians that continues teaching children lies and creates discriminatory attitudes. It started in Ataturk’s time and has continued in order to prevent the truth from enabling justice. The Azerbaijanis, who have stolen everything in their creation, have learned this propaganda technique from their cousins to the west. They openly teach hatred of Armenians to their young, copying the institutional discrimination policies that have existed in Turkey for a century.

If Turkey is truly ready – and I highly doubt it – to open a new beginning with Armenia, then it should start by peeling back the layers of lies. It will be challenging, because the layers have been professionally designed for decades. There can be little hope for a “normalization” as long as the educational system characterizes Armenians as “disloyal” or “rebellious” people not worthy of respect, or as long as Erdogan describes Armenians as “remnants of the sword,” or states that Turkey will finish what our “grandfathers started.” Signing a treaty with Turkey must be accompanied by systemic change to dismantle discriminatory policies and behavior. There is nothing “normal” about establishing relations with a country that has worked to diminish your presence on this earth and has designed an educational system to perpetuate the crime. In the meantime, their 100th anniversary will be celebrated with congratulatory rhetoric, but we know the truth. We will not be silenced.