[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 113 (Thursday, July 13, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9936-S9937]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                         THE FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, recently, I was pleased to note an 
article in the magazine, the Jerusalem Report, a magazine whose quality 
of reporting I have come to appreciate. The article concerns the 
Armenian genocide.
  Titled ``The Forgotten Genocide,'' the article deals not only with 
the genocide but the delicate matter of relations between Israel and 
Turkey.
  It is a frank but sensitive discussion of the problems that have been 
faced by a people who, in many ways, had an experience similar to the 
Jewish experience.
  I am pleased The Jerusalem Report has published this article by Yossi 
Klein Halevi, and I hope it is the first of many steps to bring about a 
closer relationship between Israel and Armenia. I also add the strong 
hope that the relationship between Armenia and Turkey can improve 
because both countries can benefit from that improvement.
  I ask that the article be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:
                         The Forgotten Genocide

                        (By Yossi Klein Halevi)

       Every night at 10 o'clock, the massive iron doors of the 
     walled Armenian compound in Jerusalem's Old City are shut. 
     Any of the compound's 1,000 residents who plan to return home 
     from the outside world past that time must get permission 
     from the priest on duty. The nightly ritual of self-
     incarceration is in deference to the monastery, located in 
     the midst of the compound's maze of low arched passageways 
     and stone apartments with barred windows.
       Yet the seclusion is also symbolically appropriate: 
     Jerusalem's Armenians are consecrated to historical memory, 
     sealed off in a hidden wound. Every year, on April 24--the 
     date commemorating the systematic Turkish slaughter in 1915 
     of 1.5 million Armenians, over a third of the total Armenian 
     nation, many of them drowned, beheaded, or starved on desert 
     death marches--the trauma is publicly released, only to 
     disappear again behind the compound's iron doors.
       The genocide remains the emotional centerpoint of the 
     ``Armenian village,'' as residents call the compound. In its 
     combined elementary and high school hang photos of 1915: 
     Turkish soldiers posing beside severed heads, starving 
     children with swollen stomachs. On another wall are drawings 
     of ancient Armenian warriors slashing enemies, the 
     compensatory fantasies of a defeated people.
       While elders invoke the trauma with more visible passion, 
     young people seem no less possessed. ``There is a sadness 
     with me always,'' says George Kavorkian, a Hebrew University 
     economics student.
       In a large room with vaulted ceilings and walls stained by 
     dampness, 89-year-old Sarkis Vartanian assembles old-
     fashioned pieces of metal type, from which he prints 
     Armenian-language calendars on a hand press. Vartanian is one 
     of Jerusalem's last survivors of the genocide. Though the 
     community has a modern press, it continues to maintain his 
     archaic shop, so that he can remain productive.
       Vartanian tells his story without visible emotion. In 1915, 
     he was living in a Greek-sponsored orphanage in eastern 
     Turkey. Police would come every day and ask who among the 
     children wanted to go for a boat ride. Vartanian noticed that 
     none of those who'd gone ever returned. One day, strolling on 
     the beach, he saw bodies. He fled the country, and made his 
     way with a relative to Jerusalem, joining its centuries-old 
     Armenian community.
       When he finishes speaking of 1915, he relates some humorous 
     details of his life, a man seemingly at peace with his past. 
     But suddenly, without warning, he begins to sob. For minutes 
     he stands bent with grief. Then, just as abruptly, he turns 
     to the dusty boxes of black metal letters and carefully 
     assembles a line of type.
       Even more than grief, Armenians today are driven by 
     grievance: outrage at Turkey's refusal to admit its crime, 
     let alone offer compensation. Though there has been some 
     international recognition of the genocide, a vigorous Turkish 
     public-relations campaign claiming the genocide is a myth has 
     created doubts. The Turks insist that the numbers of Armenian 
     dead have been exaggerated, that no organized slaughter 
     occurred, and that those who did die perished from wartime 
     hardships--the very arguments used by Holocaust 
     ``revisionists,'' notes Dr. Ya'ir Oron, author of a just-
     published book tracing Israeli attitudes to the Armenian 
     genocide.
       Perhaps the most forceful rebuttal to Turkish denial came 
     from the former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, 
     an eyewitness to the massacres, who wrote in 1917: ``The 
     whole history of the human race contains no such horrible 
     episode as this.'' Despite the overwhelming number of similar 
     eyewitness testimonies, the Armenians must continually prove 
     that their mourning is justified.
       Many of Israel's 4,000 Armenians--who live in Haifa and 
     Jaffa as well as in parts of the Old City's Armenian Quarter 
     just outside the monastery compound--feel an almost pathetic 
     gratitude to those Jews who acknowledge them as fellow 
     sufferers. One afternoon, George Hintlian, an Armenian 
     cultural historian, took me to the obelisk memorial in Mt. 
     Zion's Armenian cemetery. I laid a small stone on the 
     memorial, the Jewish sign of respect for the dead. ``Thank 
     you,'' said Hintlian with emotion, as though I'd performed 
     some unusual act of kindess.
       While historians attribute the genocide to Turkish fears of 
     Armenian secession from the Ottoman empire, Armenians 
     themselves say the Turks were jealous of their commercial and 
     intellectual success. We're just like the Jews, they say. 
     Indeed, Armenians see the Jewish experience as a natural 
     context for their own self-understanding. They envy the 
     recognition our suffering has earned; they even envy us for 
     having been killed by Germans who, unlike Turks, have at 
     least admitted their crimes and offered compensation.
       Like the Jews, say Armenians, they too are a people whose 
     national identity is bound 

[[Page S 9937]]
     up with religion, whose members are scattered in a vast Diaspora and 
     whose homeland--politically independent since 1991 but 
     economically dependent on neighboring Turkey--is surrounded 
     by hostile Muslim states. And while some Armenians sympathize 
     with the Palestinians, others privately concede their fear of 
     Muslim fundamentalism.
       But for all their affinity with the Jews, Armenians are 
     deeply wounded by Israel's refusal to recognize the 
     genocide--a result, says Oron, of Turkish pressure. Israel 
     looks to Turkey as an ally against Muslim extremism, and owes 
     it a debt for allowing Syrian Jews to escape across its 
     territory in the 1980s. And so no government wreath has ever 
     been laid at the Mt. Zion memorial. And Israel TV has 
     repeatedly banned a documentary film about the Armenians, 
     ``Passage to Ararat.''
       Though there are cracks in the government's silence--on the 
     80th anniversary of the massacre this past April 24, for 
     example, Absorption Minister Yair Tsaban joined an Armenian 
     demonstration at the Prime Minister's Office--the ambivalence 
     persists. Last year, the Education Ministry commissioned Oron 
     to write a high school curriculum on the Armenian and Gypsy 
     genocides. But then, only two weeks before the curriculum was 
     to be experimentally implemented, the ministry abruptly 
     backtracked. A ministry-appointed commission of historians 
     (none of them Armenian experts) claimed that Oron's textbook 
     contained factual errors about the Gypsies and didn't present 
     the Turkish perspective on the Armenians. A spokesman for the 
     ministry says a new textbook will be commissioned.
       While Oron is careful to avoid accusing the ministry of 
     political motives. Armenians are far less reticent. Says 
     Hintlian: ``Obviously there is Turkish pressure. If the Turks 
     get away with their lie, it will strengthen the Holocaust 
     deniers, who will see that if you are persistent enough a 
     large part of humanity will believe you.''
       So long as the Turks claim the genocide never happened, the 
     Armenians will likely remain riveted to their trauma.
       Bishop Guregh Kapikian is principal of the Armenian school. 
     When he speaks of 1915 his head thrusts forward, voice 
     quivering. His cheeks are hollowed, his chin ends in a white-
     goateed point--a face gnawed by grief and sharpened by rage.
       Kapikian, born in Jerusalem, was 3 when his father, a 
     historian, died of pneumonia, having been weakened from the 
     death march he'd survived. Kapikian eventually become a 
     priest--``to be a soldier of the spirit of the Armenian 
     nation.''
       Are you concerned, I ask, that your students may learn to 
     hate Turks?
       ``The Turks have created hatred. Our enemy is the whole 
     Turkish people.''
       But didn't some Turks help Armenians?
       ``They weren't real Turks. Maybe they were originally 
     Christian, Armenian.''
       If Turkey should someday admit its crimes, could you 
     forgive them?
       ``They can't do that. They're not human. What can you 
     expect from wild beasts?''
       There are other Armenian voices.
       George Sandrouni, 31, runs a ceramics shop outside the 
     compound. He sells urns painted with clusters of grapes, 
     tiles with horsemen and peacocks, chess boards garlanded with 
     pale blue flowers.
       As a boy, he feared everyone he knew would disappear. The 
     son of a man who survived the genocide as an infant, 
     Sandrouni grew up with no close relatives, all of whom were 
     killed in 1915. He resolved that when he married he would 
     have 20 children, to fill the world with Armenians.
       Now expecting his first child, he has become ``more 
     realistic, less paranoid.'' He says: ``The Turks have to be 
     educated about the genocide. But we also have to learn how to 
     deal with our past. I won't teach my children about the 
     genocide as something abstract, like mathematics. I'll teach 
     them that other people suffer; that some Turks helped 
     Armenians; that evil is never with the majority. I'll try to 
     keep the horror from poisoning their souls.''
     

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