The three-storey primary school Yenikov rise overlooking the plateau of south-central Turkey. This is the only building that we can see for miles, the walls of yellow sweet corn.
But the swings and slides of the area adjoining games have the colors of the rainbow sky blue azure sky. The bright red of a fire truck. The orange to a traffic cone. Surrounding the recreation area, by cons, there is this black security gate wrought iron. Why? Because the school and the playground are near a ravine that is easily thirty meters deep. In this ravine is the crevice Dudan, a sheer dizzying plunges at least 100 meters higher. I went there twice in the last two years. But in 2013, the first time I went there, the school does not yet exist. Last August, she was out of the ground like a mushroom.
When, being returned the ravine I saw the school, anger came over me; anger justified, or the criticism that adult decision have to arrange a playground near a dangerous ravine, or the fact that this construction disfigures the natural landscape rider – even if this is true in both cases.
I was furious because the ravine is the final resting place for about 10,000 of my ancestors, Armenians Chunkush, a village near Yenikoy. In the summer of 1915, the Turkish gendarmes and Kurdish groups of killers led almost all Armenians living in the vicinity of the ravine. There they were shot in the gun or the bayonet and their bodies pushed into the crevasse. Finally, three-quarters of the Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were systematically destroyed by their own government during the First World War: 1.5 million people.
Turkey has a long tradition of denying the Armenian Genocide. But the numbers do not lie. Outside Istanbul, the nation has been the ethnic cleansing of its Armenian Christian minority. According to the census figures of the Armenian Patriarchate, there were 124,000 Armenians in the province of Diyarbakir where Yenikoy and Chunkush; by 1922, it had 000 3 It remains today a handful, all descendants of the survivors who lived in Muslim and that sometimes calls “hidden”.
There is no indication or any monument in Turkey commemorating the many sites of massacres (There are those in Syria, then the steps of the Empire, where many Armenians were killed); imagine Auschwitz without a sign; Buchenwald imagine without a plate. It is not easy to diaspora Armenians, including myself, to find these places, which were our country at the time.
But we’re getting there. There are many accounts of eyewitnesses.
Some of us make a pilgrimage to places like the Rift Dudan to honor the dead. We visited the ruins and the remains of the churches that were still receiving, there are only 99 years of active faithful, full of life and eager. We bow. We say a prayer. We collect the trash that washes the altars like moss.
When my friends and I have asked the Kurdish villagers what they said had happened near the crevice Dudan, their response was a reflection of nearly a century of denial and concealment. They sometimes say that people died here, but they do not know when and who they were. They sometimes pretend to know nothing. One day, two school-age girls have told a friend: “Some Armenians have fallen.”
The stone skeleton of a massive Armenian Church and the structure of a monastery are on the edge. If you ask people on the spot where did the 10,000 Armenians Chunkush some have will tell you without blinking that they settled in the United States. I do not know what guided the choice of the site for the construction of a primary school in Yenikoy. But I have some suspicions. I would not be surprised that next year when I come back, the crack has been filled: evidence of a crime seismic magnitude forever buried.
The irony, however, is this: it is no longer necessary to go through a complicated route or use GPS to find the 10,000 deaths Dudan, Suffice it to say to someone that you want to visit school Primary Dudan. See you around the playground. This is where the dead are.
Chris Bohjalian
Washington Post
September 5, 2014
Translation Gilbert Béguian
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/near-a-turkish-school-10000-dead-armenians-are-still-ignored/2014/09/05/f0b7baa2-346c-11e4-a723-fa3895a25d02_story.html
