Chris Bohjalian Archives

Naming the Armenian genocide for what it is – Chris Bohjalian

April 24, 2017 By administrator

Re-published from the Boston Globe

Adolf Hitler kept a bust of Ataturk in his office. Heinrich Himmler considered moving to Turkey in the early 1920s. And Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, admitted in his memoirs (penned while awaiting his execution) that he first killed while serving in the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. Make no mistake: The Young Nazis were serious fanboys of the Young Turks.

The term “Young Turk” today, of course, has come to mean a hard-charging young executive, a bullish entrepreneur who takes no prisoners. A century ago, however, the Young Turks — Talaat Pasha, Djemal Pasha, and Enver Pasha — were the leaders of the Ottoman Empire and the architects of the Armenian genocide: the systematic annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians during the First World War. Three out of every four Armenians living under Ottoman rule were killed by their own government; the nation, outside of Istanbul, was ethnically cleansed of its Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek minorities.
And the Germans, the Ottoman Empire’s ally, were there. They saw it all. The cables from the German diplomats from Aleppo to Erzurum that chronicled the slaughter are as clear as the photographs that German medic Armin Wegner took of starving children and dying women. And while some of those Germans were aghast at what they were witnessing, others clearly were inspired.
After the war, Mustafa Kemal — Ataturk — finished the work of the Young Turks, turning his armies on the Armenians and the Greeks, forcing them out and creating what he hoped would be a homogenous Turkic nation. No minorities to muddy the agenda. Then, with Stalin-like fanaticism, his government began to rewrite history, denying the carnage. Armenians went from victims to traitors; the true story was erased. It’s why Turkey today continues to deny the genocide with pathologic obsession. The last thing they want is for Mustafa Kemel and the Young Turks to be saddled with the moniker “war criminal,” or their nation to risk the sort of reparations that accompany the term “genocide.”
Today is April 24, the day when Armenians around the world commemorate the start of the Armenian genocide: It was that night in 1915 when the Ottoman authorities rounded up the Armenian political, intellectual, and religious leaders of Constantinople and executed almost all of them.
To commemorate this devastating anniversary, the president of the United States will likely find yet another euphemism for the word “genocide,” because heaven forbid America should risk antagonizing Turkey by describing accurately what happened and assigning the blame where it belongs. Trust me, some poor White House speechwriter’s thesaurus is looking pretty dogeared right about now.
Congress has not formally recognized the Armenian genocide either, and I’m not expecting this one to put moral spine before realpolitik.
But, fittingly, Germany has. Last year the German Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of calling the massacres a genocide.
Historians often note how the last stage in genocide is denial, and that denial becomes the first stage in the next one. As a character in one of my novels remarks, “There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?”
The Holocaust might have occurred even without the precedent of the Armenian genocide. But as historian Stefan Ihrig proves in his book “Justifying Genocide,” the Young Nazis were there when the Young Turks were at work. They saw how easy it was to blame the problems of the nation on one small ethnic minority, and then rationalize their murder. They grew bold. As Hitler said to his Wehrmacht commanders on August 22, 1939, a week and a half before unleashing his Panzers on Poland, “I have placed my death-head formation in readiness with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
That is precisely why today America must stop mincing words when it comes to the Armenian genocide.

My proud pilgrimage to my homeland: Chris Bohjalian writes about his journey to Karabakh in The New York Times

December 7, 2016 By administrator

An Armenian artillery position in Martakert Nagano Karabakh, in April, Some trenches throughout small unrecognized Armenian Republic are reminiscent of World War 1,

Renowned Armenian-American novelist and the author of 18 novels, including the bestsellers Midwives and The Sandcastle Girls, has come up with an opinion piece in the New York Times about his journey to the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, entitled “My proud pilgrimage to my homeland”. The novelist has visited Talish village in North of Karabakh, the trenches separating the Karabakh armed forces from Azerbaijani troops, drawing parallels with the reminiscent of World War I.

The author reminds, that Nagorno-Karabakh got war earlier this year, when Azerbaijan attacked across the eastern border in the small hours of April 2, breaking a cease-fire that had largely held since 1994.

“Here in Talish, the 400-person village was so badly shelled that today it has been abandoned and the residents resettled in other parts of the country,” Bohjalian writes, adding: “I went there this summer for the same reason that I return every year to Armenia and the remnants of Armenian civilization that are scattered across eastern Turkey: This earth is in my blood, and my visits are a pilgrimage. I am an Armenian-American, but only at midlife did I understand the draw of this ancient land for me”.

The story goes on reading that after Azerbaijan attacked Nagorno-Karabakh in April, the two sides battled four days before agreeing to a cease-fire. It was a brief, violent conflict involving tanks, artillery and drones that left hundreds of soldiers dead.

“In the fighting in Talish, Azeri soldiers executed and mutilated an elderly Armenian civilian couple and beheaded a captured Armenian soldier, leading a United States representative, Brad Sherman, Democrat of California and a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, to call for an investigation into Azeri war crimes,” says the author.

The author rejects claims considering Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to be ‘an occupying force’. “But I don’t side with Nagorno-Karabakh simply because of my DNA. I believe that history is on the Armenians’ side,” adds the novelist.

Giving a brief historical overview of the region, its independence proclamation in 1991 after years-long Azerbaijani rule during the Soviet period, Bohjalian describes the current day republic as “a fledgling democracy of 140,000 people, facing off against an oil-rich dictatorship with a population of 9.5 million. Its only ally is Armenia, which is often the small republic’s lifeline”.

“After spending time with people in Nagorno-Karabakh, it’s clear to me that the only way the nation will ever again be a part of Azerbaijan is if Azerbaijan conquers it. And despite Azerbaijan’s being vastly larger, I can’t imagine that ever will happen. Armenians had lived on this land for centuries before it was incorporated into Azerbaijan,” the author insists, adding the only dog Azerbaijan has in this fight is pride. It has the oil; Nagorno-Karabakh has scrub brush and pomegranates.

“But for the Armenians it is a fight for survival. It is the retention of a part of our homeland. Yes, we were ethnically cleansed from Van and Anatolia and Cilicia — virtually all of Turkey but Istanbul — during the Armenian Genocide. Three out of every four of us there were systematically annihilated during World War I. And so Nagorno-Karabakh is our line in the sand. It is why Anton Abkarian rushed to the front and Gegham Grigoryan traded his suit for a uniform. It is why this small country, as tiny as it is, always has enough soldiers for the trenches,” concludes the author.

Murder cannot be hid long, the truth will out: Chris Bohjalian on a trip to Western Armenia

June 12, 2015 By administrator

Chris Bohjalian
The Huffington Post

In March I spent three days at “Responsibility 2015,” the conference on the Armenian Genocide sponsored by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation held in Manhattan. At the end of the final day, I was at once invigorated and exhausted. I was inspired by the passion of the artists and activists and intellectuals, and I was emotionally wrung out by the realities of imagining for three days the genocide that a century ago this month was commencing.

It was impossible not to contemplate my visits to Western Armenia, and what I have seen there. I was brought back to Van and Kharpert and Diyarbakir. I was brought back to Chunkush and the Dudan Crevasse. And I was brought back to Digor.

Digor isn’t on a lot of the maps that we Armenian pilgrims follow on our journeys back into the world that was ours once. It’s a town of about 2,500 people, mostly Kurds. But it’s not far from Ani. It’s no more than 20 miles from the Armenian border. The editor of this newspaper, Nanore Barsoumian, has been there. So has her predecessor, Khatchig Mouradian.

At some point in the 1950’s, a small Turkish military contingent drove to a rocky plateau west of Digor and placed dynamite inside the five medieval stone churches that comprised the isolated Armenian monastery of Khdzgonk. And then they blew them up.

Most of them, anyway. I had heard that one proud section of the largest of the five churches, St. Sargis, was still standing.

We all know the appalling lengths to which Turkey will go to deny the genocide. We know the government is pathologic; we know that it approaches the culpability of the Ottoman regime with a despicable, Stalin-like determination to rewrite history via lies and bluster and threats.

But if you want to see firsthand the lengths to which the government has gone to deny the historical reality of the Armenian presence on the Anatolian plains, visit St. Sargis. I journeyed there last summer with my family.

St. Sargis is not easy to find. The monastery compound is only eight miles as the crow flies from Digor, but it sits hidden on a ledge halfway down a steep ravine. We only found it because we were traveling with Khatchig, who knew the mayor of Digor, who, in turn, offered us a guide from the village to lead us there.

But we hiked through the desert-like hills to the edge of a plateau, looked down and there it was: St. Sargis. The center of the church and the iconic Armenian dome, despite great gaping holes in the walls, had survived the blast.

I remember wondering when I was climbing several hundred feet down the vertigo-inducing ridge into the sheltered ravine, did the Turkish soldiers lower their dynamite over the side of the cliff with pulleys and ropes, or did they carry it in their packs? Clearly they’d needed a lot: I’d seen black and white photographs of the five-church compound. The churches had been constructed between the 11th and 13th centuries, and they had been built to last.

I’ve visited a lot of Armenian ruins across Historic Armenia — perhaps as many as 30 or 40 different monasteries and churches in places that most North Americans outside of our community couldn’t find on a map. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of visiting a castle keep in Scotland or the ancient city in Rome. The soul wonders at the past and we are left wistful by the ephemerality of our lives.

But here is how it is different: Often these ruins — while as old as some Roman temples or the remnants of a tower in the Scottish highlands — were the homes to vital, vibrant and active congregations or monasteries a mere hundred years ago. When Babe Ruth was playing baseball. When Scott Fitzgerald was honing his craft. When Alexander Graham Bell in New York was ringing a fellow named Watson in California.

By the 1950’s, when the locals who live in Digor recall the Turkish soldiers blowing up the 5 churches, the monastery had been sitting empty for less than 40 years.

Today much of the rubble has disappeared back into the earth. Scrub brush and dirt have slowly buried the shattered stonework, as well as the walls of the chapels that were blown out and into the nearby crevasse.

The last stage in any genocide is denial. My sense is that’s why decades after evicting the monks, the Turks tried to blow up the site — one of perhaps dozens of churches they would destroy in the 1950’s.

It wasn’t enough to ethnically cleanse the Armenians from the country; it was important to scour away any trace that once upon a time we had lived there, too — even in a ravine in the absolute middle of nowhere. My wife and I speculated that the only reason St. Sargis remains is because the soldiers ran out of dynamite and it was too much work to bother coming back to finish the job.

But, as Shakespeare observed, the truth will out.

The full quote is even more meaningful here: “Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long…at the length truth will out.”

Indeed: Murder cannot be hid long.

As drained as I was at the end of “Responsibility 2015,” I was also confident that we — Armenians — are winning. We really are. While so many of our ancestors’ voices were stilled, their descendants are speaking more passionately and powerfully than ever. “Long” is a relevant term. A century is but a blink in geologic terms.

You can blow up a monastery. But you can’t bulldoze the truth.