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[Bananiot]

My Journey From Hate to Hope

The Armenian Genocide almost annihilated my ancestors. How could I not hate Turks?

By Line Abrahamian

When I heard in April that Turkey threatened economic sanctions against Canada and recalled its ambassador because Prime Minister Stephen Harper publicly recognized the Armenian Genocide, all the anger I’ve felt towards Turks came rushing back. Why do they use scare tactics on anyone who acknowledges that, between 1915 and 1923, the Ottoman Turks killed 1.5 million Armenians in the first genocide of the 20th century? Twenty-one countries have recognized it, and the European Union has been urging Turkey to face up to its past if it wants to join. I know you should never hate, but how else am I supposed to feel about a nation that tried to annihilate my ancestors—and is still denying it?

Instinctively I cringed when a co-worker first told me his wife was Turkish. As an Armenian-Canadian, I’d been raised with stories of the Genocide. I was five when I first saw a black-and white photo from the massacre, of a crying Armenian boy so emaciated his ribs were sticking out. That kid could’ve been me. So at age five, I decided to hate all Turks. At my Armenian school in Montreal, the worst insult you could hurl at another kid wasn’t a four-letter word, it was “Turk lover.”

Three years ago, at 28, I met my co-worker’s wife. She was the first Turkish person I had ever met. I shook her hand and smiled. She was lovely, but when we sat down and talked, it was not about the past. And that bothered me. I think I expected her to apologize profusely for what her ancestors did in 1915 or to slam her government for nearly a century of denial. She didn’t. So I decided to hate her, too.

It might have been irrational, but I wasn’t alone in feeling this way. When I asked an educated Jewish woman how she felt whenever she met a German, she offered up a guilty smile. “Whenever I meet an older German, I wonder, Were you the one who pushed my aunt into the oven? And if it’s a young German, I can’t help but think, Did your grandparents kill any Jews during the Holocaust? In my mind, I know I shouldn’t feel this anger. But my heart won’t let me forgive.”

This, even after Germany apologized and made restitutions. All over the world, Holocaust deniers are shunned and put on trial. Yet Turkey has gotten away with denying the Genocide for 91 years because most of the world doesn’t know that before Sudan, Rwanda, Cambodia and Nazi Germany, the Ottoman Turks killed 1.5 million Armenians in massacres and deportation marches through the deserts of Mesopotamia (parts of today’s Turkey, Syria and Iraq). Many people don’t even know what an Armenian is—“So you speak Arabic?” “No, I speak Armenian.” “Right. Your country is Russia.” “No, my country is Armenia.” The victims are largely unmourned. And last year Turkey dragged its most renowned novelist, Orhan Pamuk, to court for “insulting Turkishness” after he was quoted as saying a million Armenians were killed in his country.

Can you blame me for holding a grudge?

I walk into Manoug Khatchadourian’s apartment and hug him. We’ve never met, yet I feel an instant connection. Manoug, 104, is a Genocide survivor.

He asks me to make Armenian coffee, expecting that since I’m Armenian, I must know how to brew it—like baking choereg (Armenian bread) or cooking dolma (stuffed vegetables). I don’t. Still, I have a go, but it turns out thick and gloppy. Manoug takes a sip and cringes, not subtly. I smile apologetically. But he has survived far worse than bad coffee.

My eyes fix on a painting above Manoug’s head. A Turkish soldier is stabbing an Armenian woman. Another is ripping a baby from his pleading mother’s arms. An Armenian mother is cradling her dead daughter.

“How could I not hate them?” says Manoug, his body trembling. “They killed our mothers, fathers, children! No, I can’t forgive them. I still live it today.” His mind races back to a day in his childhood, on the deportation march in Mesopotamia, in July 1915.

“Have you seen Mama?” 13-year-old Manoug asked pleadingly, but the haggard Armenians mutely trudged past him, their tongues lolling, and threw themselves into a puddle of rain mingled with animal urine. They hadn’t had a drop for two days. Manoug had wriggled through the throng to fetch water for his family but had now lost them. “Have you seen Mama?” he asked anyone who would listen. But no one had.

The caravan set off once more. It had been four weeks since they’d been dragged from their homes in Kharpert, and every day marchers died of hunger, thirst, heat—or the dagger of a guard. Now Manoug was alone.

Suddenly a band of Turkish and Kurdish marauders came riding down with a roar. The frightened marchers scattered, but many were trampled under crushing hooves. Horsemen snatched up pretty girls and looted marchers; a few fell on a woman and began breaking out her gold teeth with a hammer.

Then a Turk started chasing Manoug. The boy ran, but his legs were weak. His assailant caught up, throwing Manoug to the ground, beating him fiercely with his bayonet, then stripping off his clothes.

Bloody and naked, Manoug staggered behind a boulder and collapsed. Some Armenian boys rushed to help him. “Leave me,” Manoug breathed. “I’ve lost my family. This is where I want to die.”

The phone rings in Manoug’s apartment. As he answers it, I think, How could he not hate the Turks? My eyes stray back to the painting. I hate them all over again.

As I enter the Ararat carpet store in Montreal, I can almost hear the giggle of my six-year-old self, climbing up carpet mountains and through carpet tunnels with store owner Kerop Bedoukian while Dad was with clients.

“This place hasn’t changed much since you were last here, has it?” asks Kerop’s son, Harold, who inherited Ararat when Kerop died in 1981. But it has. The carpets are neatly displayed on the floor instead of rolled into fun tunnels for the pint-sized and pigtailed. Kerop’s office looks different, but his original desk is still there. And tucked in a bookshelf is The Urchin, the book he wrote about his experiences on the deportation march. When I was a girl, I had no idea the man who playfully scaled carpet hills with me had climbed different kinds of mountains in the summer of 1915.

Nine-year-old Kerop couldn’t remember the last time they were allowed to rest. They clambered up yet another mountain, flanked by a steep drop. His eyes were fixed on a donkey swaying dangerously under its load. It lost its footing and toppled over the edge. The boy peeked down to see if donkeys land like cats do. They don’t. But he wondered why the lady who’d been leading it hadn’t let go of its halter when it fell. So many marchers tripped and toppled, reminding Kerop of shooting stars.

It was almost dusk. Still they ploughed on. Kerop noticed a Turkish guard creep over. He seemed intensely interested in someone in the caravan. The guard quickened his pace, slunk deep into the crowd—and pounced on a girl, drag-ging her behind a boulder as she kicked and screamed. Soon, the guard reappeared, pulling up his pants, and strode away. Kerop waited for the girl to emerge, too. But she didn’t. She must have been 15.

“I hated them for destroying an innocent and beautiful girl,” Kerop later wrote in The Urchin.

Harold tells me now, “That was the first time my dad said he felt hatred for Turks. But he didn’t hate all Turks.” His family had Turkish friends who trudged with them as far as they could on the deportation road, Harold explains. “I’m less generous in my anger than he was. Still, your generation seems to feel the strongest. When my son was ten, he came home one day with ‘Death to all Turks’ written on his arm. We were stunned. We’d told him about the Genocide but hadn’t taught him to hate.”

Every April 24—Genocide commemoration day—thousands of Armenians converge in front of the Turkish Embassy in Ottawa and chant, “Recognize the Genocide!”

I was there as a five-year-old. At that age, do we even know what we’re fighting for? We do. Every one of the 27 years she has been a teacher at an Armenian kindergarten, my mom has taught children about the Genocide.

I ask her if she thinks five is too young to hear about this. “You have to put it in their blood early on,” she says, “otherwise they won’t grow up with that fire in their belly to fight for our cause. That’s what we did with you.”

“So would I be less loyal to my heritage if I didn’t hate Turks?” I ask her.

“Yes,” my mom replies unflinchingly.

“So it’s okay for me to hate another human being?”

“No, not just anyone,” she says. “But after what they did, how could you not hate a Turk?”

“But is it fair not to distinguish between the generations?” I venture.

“Fair?” she snaps. “When they were massacring the Armenians, did they distinguish between the women, the children, the elderly? And today’s Turk is just as bad, for denying it happened.”

I’m watching the documentary The Genocide in Me, in which 32-year-old Armenian-Canadian filmmaker Araz Artinian tries to understand her father’s obsession with his heritage through a personal journey that leads her back to the roots of it all.

Five-year-old Vartan Hartunian clutched his father’s hand as Turkish soldiers herded hundreds of Armenians into a church in Marash, in the southern Ottoman Empire. Suddenly, horrifying shouts issued from nearby. Vartan peered outside and saw Turkish soldiers pouring kerosene on a neighbouring church and setting it on fire, ignoring the cries of the men, women and children inside.

A woman emerged from the flames. A soldier shot her down. The fire soon silenced the voices within the church.

Now, inside Vartan’s church, thick smoke was filling the air. The men madly tried to contain the blaze, but it was too wild. Suddenly, bullets whizzed overhead—Turkish soldiers had opened fire. The Armenians flung themselves to the floor, but the gunfire intensified. There was no escape. Tears streaming down his face, Vartan’s father huddled with his family and cried, “My dear ones, don’t be frightened, soon all of us will be in heaven together.”

“I’ll never forget that,” Vartan, 86, recalls. His voice trails off. The camera keeps rolling. A moment later Artinian asks, “Do you hate the Turks?”

I listen closely, expecting to hear “Of course! They tried to burn us alive!”

“No,” he says. “I don’t hate the Turks. Hatred is like putting poison in your own psyche. If you hate a Turk, you don’t hurt a Turk; you hurt yourself. My criticism of the Turks is in their [government’s] official denial of the Armenian Genocide. I think this hurts the Turks because it prevents them from coming up into the class of civilized nations who are admitting past errors. I don’t feel angry. I feel sorry for them.

“Armenians must learn that there are good Turks, and many Armenians will testify that Turks helped them survive. Unless we break through the walls of hatred, the question of Genocide is never going to be resolved.”

I couldn’t believe it. How could this survivor feel no hatred, yet I do?

Since my first meeting with his wife had soured, my co-worker found me a new Turkish friend. Born in Istanbul, she moved to Canada three years ago. “You’re going to love her!” he said. I doubted it.

I call her, and she immediately invites me to her apartment. Walk into the enemy’s turf? “Sure, I’ll see you soon,” I say hesitantly.

I knock on her door, and a short brunette with a warm smile opens it. “Come in,” she stretches out an enthusiastic hand. The apartment is Bohemian and homey—save for a mannequin in her living room. She chuckles, saying she often dresses it and it has become part of the family.

I laugh—I never imagined a Turk could have a sense of humour. My anxiety melts. I tell her of my reservations about coming over and ask if she feels any animosity towards Armenians.

The woman (who agreed to use her name but later changed her mind) tells me her parents never brought her up to hate, but in school there was an implicit hatred. She hadn’t even heard about the Genocide there; no teacher dared talk about it, and history books taught them that during World War I, the Armenians were stirring for independence, revolting against an already crumbling Ottoman Empire by joining forces with the Russians. So in self-defence the Ottoman Turks “relocated” these rebellious Armenians.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. If they were deporting the “rebellious” Armenians, why deport women and children? Why were Armenians deprived of food and water? Why were girls raped and babies killed? If they were being “relocated,” why had most Armenians in the Ottoman Empire disappeared?

I finally find my voice. “How did they justify what happened on the deportation marches?”

“They say, ‘It was wartime, you have to accept that.’ But,” she presses on, “I found myself questioning, Why are we supposed to hate Armenians? If [their deaths] were a terrible consequence of a terrible war, why cover it up?”

She found the answers in university, during the classes taught by influential Turkish historian, Halil Berktay.

“Then it started to dawn on me that it really was genocide,” she reveals. “I realized there wasn’t one single interpretation of history, as the nationalist ideology claimed. What do nationalist leaders do? They choose a scapegoat. In this case, the Armenians. The other side is, the Ottomans were responsible for what went wrong, which is true, but the government is having a hard time saying that because the Ottomans are where we come from; how can we be associated with murderers?”

“Has any Armenian told you, ‘Your ancestors killed my ancestors’?” I ask.

“No. And if they did, I don’t know how I’d react. If you dismiss me like that, you’re closing dialogue forever.”

The problem, she says, is the majority thinks the Ottomans back then are the same as Turks today. “Now when I meet an Armenian, I feel like making an explanation that I’m not associated with Ottoman Turks or people who deny the Genocide.”

I must have a look on my face somewhere between admiration and confusion that Turks like her exist: She asks, “Hasn’t it occurred to you that not all Turks are bad? That there might be Turks who recognize the Genocide?”

“Honestly…no,” I reply.

She tells me there are more of them than I think. “Then, why don’t we hear more from you guys?” I ask heatedly.

“When you talk about this in Turkey, there’s the danger of going to prison or being persecuted. But I do feel responsible for doing something in Turkey to open up discussion.”

Still, many Turkish youth know nothing about the Genocide, “because the only side they’ve been exposed to is what’s in their history books,” she says. “Should they be blamed? Perhaps, for not being curious about all sides, for blindly accepting as truth what they’re being told.”

We talk for hours, about everything from the Genocide to our careers to relationships. As I leave, she asks, “It was strange to hear that you hated all Turks. So when you meet a Turk you actually like, do you start questioning hating all of them?”

The word Turk still sends chills up my spine. But when I left the young Turkish woman’s apartment, I didn’t hate her.

In her I no longer saw that soldier in Manoug’s painting, ripping the baby from his mother’s arms; I saw a friend.

But later, when she told me she couldn’t be part of this article, my heart sank. My first instinct was to dismiss her as being “like every other Turk.” But then I read that another Turkish scholar is facing trial for referring to the Genocide in her book. How can I dismiss an entire nation when there are some fighting for us? How can I hate a Turk who tells me she’s striving for Genocide recognition—even if it’s in the privacy of her living room?

I’m not ready to say I don’t hate Turks in general. But I don’t want to hate. I don’t want to teach my kids to hate. In this violent world, I don’t want to believe blind hatred is the solution. Hopefully that makes me no less of an Armenian—but more human.

From Readers Digest

[runaway]

Armenian lady doesn't seem to know her people betrayed Ottoman Empire by helping the enemy Russians, their gangs killing innocent Turks, ASALA killing Turkish diplomats and her people are responsible for the Azeri massacres of 1990s. Don't you dare playing the innocent angel.

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/03/world ... orted.html

[YFred]

Armenian lady doesn't seem to know her people betrayed Ottoman Empire by helping the enemy Russians, their gangs killing innocent Turks, ASALA killing Turkish diplomats and her people are responsible for the Azeri massacres of 1990s. Don't you dare playing the innocent angel.

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/03/world ... orted.html

Runaway, I think you missed the main point. Hatred does nothing to your enemy, it only destroys your humanity, which does explain why some Armenians attacked and killed Azeris.
You have a choice in life and it will effect you and your children. I brought up my children with no hate what so ever against any nation or people with the exception of hatred itself.
It is your decedents life you are playing with.

The above article is a very touching article about how we should behave and we can learn from it or we can ignore it at our peril.

[runaway]

Armenian lady doesn't seem to know her people betrayed Ottoman Empire by helping the enemy Russians, their gangs killing innocent Turks, ASALA killing Turkish diplomats and her people are responsible for the Azeri massacres of 1990s. Don't you dare playing the innocent angel.

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/03/world ... orted.html

Runaway, I think you missed the main point. Hatred does nothing to your enemy, it only destroys your humanity, which does explain why some Armenians attacked and killed Azeris.
You have a choice in life and it will effect you and your children. I brought up my children with no hate what so ever against any nation or people with the exception of hatred itself.
It is your decedents life you are playing with.

The above article is a very touching article about how we should behave and we can learn from it or we can ignore it at our peril.

I just commented on her ignorance. She has no idea what her people are capable of doing. She was raised as Armenian being the victim throughout her life and has no clue that actually other people have reasons to hate her for being Armenian as well.

[denizaksulu]

A very touching article.

Whatever the reasons/excuses are, the deaths of these civilians is inexcusable.

To say 'they were in revenge' thats why the Ottomans did it is no excuse. It bsimply brings one down to the level of barbaric murderers.

May the innocents rest in peace and that Turkey takes steps to help bring this ugly chapter in their history to a close.,,,and the ignorant rot in hell.

[Get Real!]

To say 'they were in revenge' thats why the Ottomans did it is no excuse. It bsimply brings one down to the level of barbaric murderers.

Be careful there Deniz, because there’s a level of pacifism which borders with masochism…

[denizaksulu]

To say 'they were in revenge' thats why the Ottomans did it is no excuse. It bsimply brings one down to the level of barbaric murderers.

Be careful there Deniz, because there’s a level of pacifism which borders with masochism…

Oh!...............I will have to think about that one.

[repulsewarrior]

thanks mr B.