Commemoration of Armenian genocide reveals horrors endured

Friday, April 24, 1998

Commemoration of Armenian genocide reveals horrors endured

HISTORY: Gruesome past must be made known, remembered, noted

By Ardashes Kassakhian

A man offers a soldier his entire life savings, asking only to
be shot instead of being hung. Another man is severely beaten and
raped by soldiers in the presence of his family and, shattered by
shame, hangs himself rather than face his family. These two
examples are true accounts of actual events that occurred in this
century. I myself bear no relation to the victims or the witnesses.
But I may as well; like 400 other students on this campus, I am of
Armenian ancestry.

The above-mentioned accounts were part of an exhibit at UCLA
last year, sponsored by the Armenian Students Association and the
Armenian Genocide Project in the Kerckhoff Art Gallery. The exhibit
reflected on survivors of the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923,
during which over 1 million Armenians were massacred by the Ottoman
Turkish government.

The mental images disturbed me then and still disturb me today.
My peers think it is unnatural for me to reflect on the past so
heavily and permit it to affect me on such a deep and personal
level. But as a history student, I guess I am allowed to reflect on
the past. I know that my great-grandparents, if they were alive
today, would not want me to forget these images – no matter how
gruesome. They were survivors of the Armenian Genocide, unlike
thousands of others who died – including their own brothers and
sisters. I bear no hatred toward Turks. I don’t believe that it is
justifiable to hate any individual purely on the basis of their
race, religious beliefs, ideologies or the past. I know that this
is what my great-grandparents would want. As an Armenian American,
however, the genocide is an integral part of my history.

And as I mentioned before, history is pretty important to me.
Perhaps one day, it will be easier to face every April 24, the day
the Genocide is commemorated. I think this day will arrive when the
Turkish government formally acknowledges the Genocide as historical
fact.

Observing recent pictures of the horrors in Rwanda – the
mountains of skulls and the images of the corpses floating down
red, blood-stained rivers – curdled my stomach. This reminded me of
another story I had read of a boy whose mother, having reached a
river, knew what was in store for the caravan of "deportees" and
told her son to hide in the reeds until she returned. The soldiers
who were supposed to guard the people during their forced migration
suddenly turned on them and began throwing everyone into the
Euphrates River – including the boy’s mother. For three days, the
boy hid in the reeds, waiting for his mother to return, and as he
waited he created a game to pass the time, like any young child
would. He counted the bodies that floated by and would race one
against the other.

Why is it that, 80 years after the Armenian Genocide, 55 years
after the Jewish Holocaust, there are still those who believe that
they can commit genocide against a helpless group of people and get
away with it? The fact that Turkey has not been pressured to
recognize the first genocide of the 20th century is a major
contributing factor.

In a day and age when images of death are commonplace on
television, in movies and in magazines, it is easy to become
desensitized to the suffering of others. After all, what is there
to be gained by disrupting our comfortable lives to feel the pain
of others? But the pain that I, as an Armenian American, feel is
not only for the hundreds of thousands who died during the Armenian
Genocide, but for those who survived and had to endure the
indelible scars of such an ordeal. These people are not an obscure
race in a foreign country that I heard about on the evening news.
They are my relatives. My grandparents.

The Armenian nation today is a fraction of the size of historic
Armenia. The Armenian people today are a living testament of
survival. Their mere existence is a reminder of the will to
triumph. And their commemoration of the tragedy of 1915 is a
reminder to the world of the inhumanity that people are capable of
inflicting upon the innocent.

It is by recognizing, acknowledging and remembering the esoteric
past, we ensure the survival of all other nations, no matter how
small.Gruesome past must be made known, remembered, noted