2 million Turks, who have Armenian grandmother, keep denying Genocide – The Independent

March 2, 2018 By administrator

Turks, with Armenian Armenian grandmother

By Robert Fisk,

Only in Turkey is the identity of a citizen a matter of national security. That’s why the population registry in Ankara was until now a closed book, its details a state secret. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s definition of “Turkishness” was “anyone who is attached to the Turkish state as a citizen”. Turks came from a clear ethnic identity, untainted by racial minorities or doubtful lineage. That’s one reason why the Nazis lavished praise on Ataturk’s republic, their newspapers mourning his death in black-bordered front pages.

After all, as Hitler was to ask in several newspaper interviews – and to his generals before he invaded Poland – who now remembers the Armenians? Ataturk had supposedly inherited an Armenian-free Turkey, just as Hitler intended to present his followers with a Jew-free Europe.

The Armenian genocide of 1915 – denied by the Turkish government today – destroyed a million and a half Christian Ottoman citizens in the first industrial holocaust of the 20th century. Almost the entire Armenian community had been liquidated. Or had it?

For the stunned reaction of Turks to the sudden and unexpected opening of population registers on an online genealogy database three weeks ago was so immediate and so vast that the system crashed within hours. Rather a lot of Turks, it turned out, were actually Armenians – or part-Armenians – or even partly Greek or Jewish. And across the mountains of eastern Anatolia – and around the cities of Istanbul, Izmir, Erzurum, Van and Gaziantep and along the haunted death convoy routes to Syria, ancient ghosts climbed out of century-old graves to reassert their Armenian presence in Turkish history. For the registry proved that many of them – through their families – were still alive.

Until now, for at least two decades – at least before Sultan Erdogan’s post-coup autocracy – thousands of Turks spoke freely, albeit in private, about their ancestry. They knew that amid the mass slaughter and rape of the Armenians, many Christian families sought sanctuary in conversion to Islam, while tens of thousands of young Armenian women were given in marriage to Turkish or Kurdish Muslim men. Their children grew up as Muslims and regarded themselves as Turks but often knew that they were half-Armenian. Tens of thousands of Armenian orphans were placed in Muslim schools, forced to speak Turkish and change their names. One of the largest schools was in Beirut, organised for a time by one of Turkey’s leading feminists who wrote of her experience and was later to die in America.

The Armenian diaspora – the 11 million Armenians living outside Turkey or Armenia itself, and who trace their ancestry back to the survivors of the 1915 genocide – were the first to understand the significance of the newly-opened population registers, noting that some information dated back to the early 1800s. Up to four million Turkish citizens were reported to have sought access to their family tree within 48 hours – which is why the system crashed – and in the days since it was re-established, according to retired statistician and Armenian demographer George Aghjayan, eight million Turks have requested their pedigrees. That’s 10 per cent of the entire Turkish population.

The documents can be vague. And they are not complete. There are examples of known Armenian ancestors listed as Muslim without reference to their origin. The names shown for those known to have converted during the 1915 genocide are Muslim names – but the Christian names of their parents are also shown. There will always be discrepancies and unknown details. Many Ottoman registrars did not give accurate details of birthdays: Turkish officials might travel to a village once a month and simply list its newborn under the date of their visit. There are still centenarians alive in Lebanon and Syria, for example, who all possess the same birth date, whatever their origin.

So why has Turkey released these files now? Erdogan is quoted to have once complained that Turks were “accused of being Jews, Armenians or Greeks”. Tayfun Atay, a columnist for the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, wrote that he was “advised in a friendly matter not to admit that I am a Georgian…What about those who risk learning that they are of Armenian ancestry or a convert? Just think: you think you are a red-blooded Turk but turn out to be a pure-blood Armenian.”

Journalist Serdar Korucu told Al-Monitor that “if they had done this a few years ago when we were [becoming more tolerant], conspiracy theories would not have been as strong as today, when the state believes we are in a struggle for existence. This is how Turkey reinvigorates the spirit of the Independence War” – to inspire patriotism and pro-government thinking.

In 2003, the Armenian newspaper Agos, whose editor Hrant Dink was assassinated outside his office in 2007, reported that the Turkish government was secretly coding minorities in registers: Greeks were one, according to the paper. Armenians were two. Jews were three. Korucu recalled how the director of the Turkish Historical Society threatened minorities in 2007. “Don’t make me angry. I have a list of converts I can reveal down to their streets and homes.” The director later became a politician in the rightist Nationalist Action Party.

Ethnic Armenian columnist Hayko Bagdat placed this in a story he told the Al-Monitor website – including an individual family tale which might be humorous if it was not so charged with tragedy. “During the 1915 genocide, along with mass conversions, there were also thousands of children in exile…The society is not yet ready to deal with this reality.” Imagine, Bagdat said, that Lutfi Dogan, who had served as Turkey’s director of religious affairs, was the brother of someone who was the Armenian patriarch, Sinozk Kalustyan.

Armenian grandmother from border village: We’ll remain steadfast to the last

September 26, 2015 By administrator

Genya, 78, resident of Armenia’s border village Kayanavan, is used to shootings from the Azerbaijani side, but still considers the incident on September 24 as unprecedented.

The house of grandmother Genya is the closest to the border. “They began to fire at night, but neither I, nor my daughter and neighbors left our houses,” grandmother Genya says.

Despite her age, she is engaged in vine-growing and is worrying very much now, not being able to get the crops because of shootings. “About 2 tones of grapes remain in the orchards. And I had to economize to grow the grapes, provide them with fertilizers and treatment. All the local residents are outraged,” the grandmother says.

Source: news.am

Q&A with author who’ll speak at SMU on Armenian genocide

March 14, 2015 By administrator

By DIANNE SOLÍS

Peter Balakian, author of Black Dog of Fate, learned that his grandmother’s family was slain in one day in 1915. File/The New York Times

When Peter Balakian was a small boy, his grandmother filled him with stories seeped in magical realism, with mysterious yet baffling lines.

“A long time ago there was and there wasn’t,” she’d say.

Perhaps his tender grandmother was just nurturing a fellow poet and soon-to-be historian of one of the great epic traumas opening the 20th century. She was a survivor of the Armenian genocide 100 years ago in April 1915.

Her grandson would eventually become her scribe, portraying her in his award-winning memoir, Black Dog of Fate.

Balakian, now a Colgate University professor, has made the genocide a key part of his life’s work as an award-winning writer, poet and genocide expert. He will talk about his work at Southern Methodist University’s Dallas Hall at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at an event sponsored by St. Sarkis Church of Carrollton and SMU’s Embrey Human Rights Program.

He recently discussed his writing and more with The Dallas Morning News.

Tell us about your grandmother, Nafina Aroosian, and her role in shaping you as a writer and how you unraveled her story.

My grandmother had a penchant for telling folk tales in dreams. … They were wild tales that were almost magical realism tales. … The richness of her imagination was very important to my own imagination. … It turned out to be very important to me as a writer and a thinker of history, and the particular history of the Armenian genocide and how it came down to me.

Only recently, we have dug up out of the family papers, some of her writing. She was writing poems. … They are private poems and they are poems in which she is trying to deal with the losses of her life. Everyone in her family was murdered in the first week of April 1915, except for one half-brother, who was living in New Jersey at the time.

Tell us about Raphael Lemkin, the Holocaust survivor from Poland. Why is he important?

It was Lemkin who became the father of the U.N. genocide convention of 1948. That is the charter legal document that outlawed genocide as a crime. It was Lemkin who coined the phrase “Armenian genocide” in the 1940s. … As a graduate student he challenged his professor, “How can it be if one man kills another he is charged with murder, but if a nation-state kills more than a million people they are allowed to do it without any consequences?” and this moment ended up changing his career path.

Among Lemkin’s many layers of his understanding of genocide as a crime is the concept that the destruction of culture is also a vitally important aspect of the genocidal episode. At the core of group identity is also culture and the cultural institutions that codify group identity.

How many died and what did that represent as a percentage of the Armenian population?

The official number of dead in the Holocaust, according to the U.S. Holocaust Museum is 5.1 million. In the Armenian case, Lemkin put the death toll at 1.2 million. The epicenter of killing was in 1915 and 1916. About two-thirds of the Armenian population perished.

Do you see links between the massacre of the Armenian Christians a century ago and the ISIS massacre in Syria?

I hesitate to make any easy analogies. … The context in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 is not the same for the explosions going on in the Middle East right now.

But the role of religious ideology in the Turkish Armenian case was less important for the ruling political elite. … They were like the Nazis and didn’t care about religion. They did know how to manipulate the power of religion to motivate other segments of their population to do killing.

The ISIS people are extreme fundamentalists who are now militarized. That is a long way from the practice of 99 percent of Muslims. The last two genocides on record were committed by Christians: the Serbs in Srebrenica in 1994, and the Hutus, who are primarily Catholic and Christian, against the Tutsis in 1994 in Rwanda. … Any religious value system is capable of being mobilized by extreme regimes who are hell bent on mass killings.

With so many spasms of violence now, is the world growing desensitized?

It can be desensitizing, overwhelming, numbing, but it has also initiated more human rights activism, more human rights culture, more human rights priorities even in the seats of the State Department and government in our own country than ever before.

You have a new book coming out, Vise and Shadow, and your lyric prose is in full bloom. Do you use poetry to sweeten the ingestion of atrocity?

The poem is a very real confrontation with the harshness of these histories and their legacies. Some of my poems deal with traumatic memory and inherited traumatic memory and they are interested in reclaiming the more psychological issues of historical violence as they are transmitted across generations. I don’t think of my poems as very sweet, in any way, but I think of them as rich complex language that can engage readers in the complexity of history in ways that no other forms of writing can.