Armenia: The Unanswered Question

Dec 3, 2007
Indymedia UK, UK

On Tuesday 6th November, Aegis Trust and Nottingham Student Aegis Society, in association with Nottingham Playhouse, a pre-show talk for Beast on the Moon to look at the history behind this compelling play took place.

Richard Kalinoski, author of the play was kind enough to join in the discussion, and explained how writing a story like Beast on the Moon was a way for him to learn more about the subject that he didn’t really know about. After marrying an Armenian-American in the 1970’s, Richard was keen to learn more about the subject, and by writing the play hoped to try and understand the effect that such horrific events can have on people who have experienced them, and how they strive to come to terms with them.

Giles Croft, director of the play and artistic director for Nottingham Playhouse said that when he first saw the play years ago, the emotion, power and resonance of the play really struck accord and stayed with him. When planning the current season for the Playhouse, that resonance kept ringing through his head and compelled him to put the play on here in Nottingham.

I was very grateful to have Dr. James Smith, Chief Executive of Aegis Trust, the anti-genocide organisation based at the Holocaust Centre in Newark, join in the discussion. Despite other commitments to another talk organised by Nottingham University Jewish Society that night, James was able to create enough time to attend this discussion and give his invaluable analysis of the word ‘genocide’ and how it is applied to atrocities around the world and throughout history. As he explained, Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the word in 1943, had looked back over mankind’s history and seen how although individuals are imprisoned for acts of murder, Governments that are responsible for the deaths of thousands to millions of people, somehow manage to get away with it, unpunished. He went on to explain how it’s very easy for governments and countries to try and justify huge numbers of innocent people dying through civil-war, religious differences or defectors, but mass murder is still genocide no matter what reason you use.

James also highlighted the important point that atrocities like these and the repercussions they cause can have on an affect on the descendants of these people, whether on the side of the victims or the perpetrators, and resolving these issues is required to move past them. A question from the audience which I’m really glad was asked, was what we as individuals can do to help try and stop atrocities like those, such as in Darfur today, from happening. James explained how one of the biggest reasons is that people just don’t know or care about them. The more that awareness is spread and action taken, the more likely governments and institutions are to act upon them. He also highlighted the way that people can get involved with organisations like Aegis Trust through their website.

At this point Giles noted how interesting it has been during rehearsals and performance to see the cooperation between Karine (Seta) an Armenian, and Youssef (Aram) a Muslim, and how they have been able to work around each other to ensure a positive working atmosphere.

I tried my best to organise a representative of the Turkish community to participate and explain Turkey’s position on the Armenian question, but unfortunately no one responded to my requests. As a result, I did my best to relay this information, explaining that Turkey, though admitting that people did loose their lives during the civil war, they do not accept the events that took place as genocide. From websites such as the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, I explained how they wished to highlight events prior to World War I, particularly the war between Turkey and Russia, and how Russia had sought to undermine the Ottoman Empire’s strength from within, stirring up unrest between the Christians of Armenia and the Muslims of Turkey. This resulted in the formation of revolutionary groups such as the Hunchak and Tashnak Committee’s, who encouraged backlashes against the native Turks within the Empire, hoping that they would retaliate with violence and lead to intervention from the European and Russian powers, to gain independence in a ‘Greater Armenia.’

I closed by adding that Turkey has opened its archive of records and documents completely, and that an attempt to form a joint investigation into genocide claims between Turkey and Armenia had been turned down.

Haniel Riviere-Allen then proceeded to talk about her grandfather, Hagop Arevian, an Armenian whose father had been imprisoned by the Ottoman Empire and had his forearms cut off by his captors as an act of humiliation, because they likened the Armenians to pigs and forced him to eat as such. She talked about how Hagop had fought for the French at the Somme, and after being injured by a bullet to the head, he survived and went on to fight with the French Foreign Legion, determined to continue fighting against the Turks. When the opportunity rose, he jumped at the chance of being part of a 5000 strong troop of Armenians, in particular fighting in the battle against General Moustapha Kemal in Syria, September 1918.

The final speaker, Hugh Goddard, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham, gave some fantastic information on Muslim-Christian relations in history. He talked about a book he had written on the subject, and how he was corrected by a reader who pointed out that there was nothing referring to Turkey and Armenia’s relationship. Having assumed that this conflict was based on an ethnicity issue, he was glad to have been corrected, and duly went about correcting this oversight. He also looked at how such fractures could be reconciled in the future, and how difficult such a resolution would be. Religious disputes will always be a highly contentious issue, with neither side wishing to lose pride for their country or religion that they have defended so vigorously. Unfortunately, there is no single answer to this difficult question, but countries and individuals need to find some way of overcoming them in order to restore peace between one another.

Bringing the talk to a close, Haniel told the audience about an upcoming event on Wednesday 16th January, 2008 where the documentary ‘We have drunk the same water’ by Serge Avedikian will be shown, and a debate will follow with Dr. Claire Mouradian, a specialist in Armenian history.

Dr. Smith also re-emphasised the importance of individual actions, not just writing to your local MP, but working together with like minded people, and organisations like Aegis Trust.

Unfortunately time was always against us for this talk with the stage needing to be setup for the performance, but I did manage to end with what I see as a very important message to the audience; governments and organisations thrive on their ability to mislead the people that they rely on, for their own personal gains of money, territory and power - don’t be sucked in by whatever means they use to blind you, do some work for yourself and find out the truth on your own.

I would like to extend my special thanks to all of the speakers who shared their time, knowledge and experience with us. It was a great discussion that I am extremely proud to have been a part of. Each of the panellists topics of discussion linked together better than I could have planned, resulting in an informative and engaging discussion.


For more information on Aegis Trust, please visit www.aegistrust.org

For more information on Hagop Arevian, please visit www.hagoparevian.com

For more information on Nottingham Trent Aegis Student Union, please visit http://www.trentstudents.org

For more information on Nottingham Playhouse, please visit www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk

Thanks for reading,

Charlie Cox
Audience Development
Nottingham Playhouse

Charlie Cox
e-mail: charliec@nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk
Homepage: http://www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk/

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.

Turkish Documents

March 4, 2007
The New York Times
Book Review

To the Editor:

Christopher de Bellaigue ended his review of Antonia Arslan’s “Skylark Farm” (Feb. 4) here, with a dig at Arslan’s “iffy” grasp of history, noting “the lack of a universally authenticated document implicating the Ottoman leadership in a plan to kill the Armenians,” which lack “is a central part of the Turks’ argument that the massacres were not a premeditated genocide but a tragic and unintended consequence of war.”

Hundreds of documents from the Ottoman archives and the post-World War I trials of former Ottoman officials attest that under cover of war, the Ottoman leadership organized and executed the annihilation of the Armenian citizens of the empire. Corroborating the Turkish sources are thousands of documents from American, German, Austrian and other archives, as well as countless testimonies of eyewitnesses and survivors.

In “A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility,” a work of scholarship that draws primarily on Turkish sources, Taner Akcam concludes that: “Taken in their entirety, these sources leave us in no doubt that the scale of the operations would have been impossible without planning at the political center. ... Under the terms of the U.N. definition, and in light of all the documentary evidence, we cannot but call the acts against the Armenians genocide.”

De Bellaigue has the right and obligation to critique Arslan’s novel on its literary merits. It is deeply regrettable that he used this platform to misrepresent the level of knowledge about and documentation of the Armenian genocide.

Marc A. Mamigonian

Belmont, Mass.

The writer is director of programs and publications for the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.

The Terminated

February 4, 2007
The New York Times
Sunday Book Review
SKYLARK FARM By Antonia Arslan. Translated by Geoffrey Brock.
By CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE

After a silence dictated by shame, pain and politics that lasted the better part of a century, the suffering of Armenians massacred by the Ottoman Turks and their Kurdish allies during World War I has recently become an urgent issue. The parliaments of several countries in the European Union, a club Turkey wants to join, have labeled the massacres genocide. The Turks refuse to do so. Of all those involved in this slow, bitter process of remembering, it is writers and journalists, not politicians, who have touched the rawest nerves. On Jan. 19, Hrant Dink, a prominent Turkish-Armenian who had promoted both reconciliation and an honest appraisal of the past, was murdered, apparently by a Turkish nationalist. Earlier, Orhan Pamuk’s reference to the massacres in an interview and an allusion to the Armenian “genocide” in a novel by Elif Shafak led to the prosecution of both on charges of “insulting Turkishness.” Neither was convicted (unlike Dink, who received a suspended sentence on the same charge) but the country’s reputation has suffered.

The Italian writer Antonia Arslan’s first novel, “Skylark Farm,” is based — how closely, we are not told — on the experiences of her Armenian grandfather’s family during those massacres. The farm of the title is, in fact, a country house that Sempad, a well-to-do Armenian pharmacist living in a town somewhere in Anatolia, is trying to complete in time for the visit of his brother, Yerwant, who emigrated years earlier to make his fortune in Italy. Absorbed in their domestic affairs, Sempad and his family are oblivious to the signs, unmistakable in hindsight, that Turkey’s government is preparing to get rid of a minority population it suspects of abetting the empire’s Russian enemies.

May 1915 comes around and what follows is, for any Armenian, a dismally familiar story. Out at the farm, Sempad and his male relations are murdered by Turkish soldiers. His wife, their daughters and hundreds more women from the same town are then forced to walk many miles through hostile country to Syria, where death camps await. The marchers are “escorted” by guards who connive with marauding Kurdish tribesmen to take first the women’s possessions, then their honor and finally — in many cases — their lives. It’s a despicable story, and one that has been told, in Armenian and other languages, in countless memoirs and histories.

In Arslan’s hands, the gruesome details of this tragedy are palliated by an old-fashioned story of redemption. After the marchers set off, Nazim, a Muslim beggar who used to inform on the Armenians for the authorities, joins forces with a Greek woman to shadow them, slipping them food and dressing their wounds at night, before finally using guile and gems to buy the survivors’ release in Aleppo. As it happens, the unappealing Turkish suitor of one of the family’s young women has been posted to Syria. Once he regarded most Armenians as worthy of elimination, but by the end of the book, even though his sweetheart has died, he undergoes a conversion of his own, using connections to secure passports for the surviving members of the family so they can join Yerwant in Italy.

Although history keeps wrenching her back into shocking events, Arslan seems instinctively a writer of magic and intuition. Premonitions, dreams and religious faith provide her characters with respite from the horror. A bereaved mother dies by allowing her heart to break; a decent German official becomes an angel; and there is a delightful image of those medieval knights-errant “for whom hospitable Anatolia, with its small courts rich in flowing water and lovely maidens, proved more pleasing than their gloomy, distant northern lands.”

Arslan reports dialogues involving the architects of the deportations, including the interior minister, Talat Pasha, who writes in a telegram: “No mercy for women, old men or children. If even one Armenian were to survive, he would later want revenge.” This is a prophetic reference to Talat’s murder in exile at the hands of an Armenian who chanced upon him in a Berlin street.

“Skylark Farm,” is an affecting book, and sensitively translated by Geoffrey Brock, but it is marred by uneven writing. Arslan’s habit of flashing forward at moments of happiness to the wretched times that lie ahead detracts from the novel’s intensity without adding to its resonance. And some of her deadpan descriptions of hideous events — “This was sufficient time for the young bride Hripsime to recover from her delivery and to see her baby die, skewered on a bayonet and held aloft” — slue into bathos.

Putting down this book, it’s worth trying to separate Arslan the promising novelist from Arslan the iffy historian. She describes the Armenians as a “gentle, daydreaming people” who would like nothing more than to share their ancestral homeland, a platitude that ignores the existence of Armenian political groups seeking independence from the Turks. And in a novel containing footnotes to explain historical events, readers might mistakenly assume Arslan’s Talat telegram is irreproachably historical. The lack of a universally authenticated document implicating the Ottoman leadership in a plan to kill the Armenians is a central part of the Turks’ argument that the massacres were not a premeditated genocide but a tragic and unintended consequence of war.

Christopher de Bellaigue is the author of “In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran.” He is currently writing a book on eastern Turkey.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.

"We are all Armenian"

The Globe and Mail (Canada)
Feb 3 2007
BOOK REVIEW; Pg. D15

The murder of a journalist in Turkey has reopened the discussion
about genocide and its denial, filmmaker ATOM EGOYAN says.

by ATOM EGOYAN

The first book I ever read about the Armenian genocide was written by
an Austrian Jew. Franz Werfel's epic novel Forty Days of Musa Dagh
(Viking Press, 1934) created a sensation when it was published.
Meticulously researched and written with an astute sense of
psychological detail, the novel was intended as a wake-up call to
European Jewry. If it could happen to Armenians in 1915, it could
happen anywhere.

But what exactly happened to Armenians in 1915? The enduring value of
Werfel's great book is his ability to render all aspects of Armenian
life in the Ottoman Empire with a startlingly vivid clarity and
nuance. Very much in the tradition of the works of Thomas Mann (they
were contemporaries), every character is observed with a sense of
psychological magnification and kaleidoscopic vision.

Faced with certain death at the hands of the Turks, an Armenian
village mobilizes itself into action. Five thousand are led into the
impenetrable mountain area of Musa Dagh, where they heroically defend
themselves. The plot is linear and straightforward, yet each of the
main characters is infused with marvellous complexity. Werfel
presents the terrible events of 1915 with grandeur and scope, yet
fills every detail with precision and tenderness.

A defining aspect of the Armenian genocide is the methodical and
highly efficient denial of its perpetrators. Many scholarly works
have been published on this subject, including the Turkish academic
Taner Akcam's A Shameful Act (Henry Holt, 2006). The most succinct
and compelling explanation of this history is offered in Robert
Fisk's recent The Great War for Civilization (Fourth Estate, 2005).

Fisk has been in the forefront of the Middle East's conflicts for 30
years, and this monumental work is a passionate and heartfelt
indictment of the lies and deceit that have defined the politics of
the region. In many ways, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire - and
the subsequent dividing of its spoils by the West - set the stage for
the instability of the entire region. Fisk devotes an entire chapter
(titled The First Holocaust) to the Armenian Question.

In fewer than 50 pages, Fisk brilliantly sets out the brutal
machinery of genocide, chronicling Hitler's familiarity with the
mechanics and - just as ominously - its denial. He clearly explains
how the issue of the Armenian genocide began to fade from European
and U.S. attention after the First World War, despite the huge amount
of attention the massacres received at the time.

Hrant Dink, the Armenian journalist who was murdered in Turkey three
weeks ago, used this point as a way of explaining the event to his
Turkish countrymen. Turkey has been able to suppress "the Armenian
Question" because the West has allowed it to do so. Even with a
growing number of countries (including Canada) recognizing the
genocide, it still runs counter to general Western interests to
pursue the matter.

When MGM tried to make a film of Forty Days of Musa Dagh in the
mid-thirties, the Turkish ambassador filed a protest with the U.S.
State Department. If the film were to be made, Turkey would ban all
U.S. films from entering the country. After a year of exchanges
between the two governments, the State Department acquiesced to the
Turkish demand, and the project was dropped.

Peter Balakian, in his highly charged memoir Black Dog of Fate
(HarperCollins, 1997), wonders how Franklin Roosevelt's State
Department could care so little about artistic freedom, especially in
light of what was about to happen to the Jews of Europe. Like Fisk,
Balakian is obsessed with the question of how a catastrophe that
loomed so large in the U.S. consciousness could slip from collective
memory (his most recent book, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian
Genocide and America's Response, explores how and why the Armenian
crisis became for the United States, its first international
human-rights movement.

Balakian is a wonderful poet, and if I were to suggest one book that
combines carefully researched history with an emotionally charged
journey into the contemporary Armenian soul, this is certainly the
one to read.

Black Dog of Fate presents Balakian's upbringing in the optimistic
years of 1950s and '60s U.S. suburbia. With warmth and affection,
Balakian describes an adolescence of athletic seasons (football,
basketball, baseball), Sunday feasts of Armenian food and beautiful
evocations of his family and relatives. Balakian is a great lover of
carpets, and he weaves his words and highly charged imagery in a
masterful way. The unexpected discovery of how his grandmother made
an actual legal claim against the Turkish government after the First
World War is unforgettable. Balakian sets up his beloved
grandmother's fragmented dreams and whispered stories, disarming the
reader with a poetic sense of melancholic reverie.

Balakian then presents a dry legal document he discovers that lists
the family she lost to the genocide (husband, brothers, sisters,
nieces and nephews), as well as a complete itemization of the
plundered goods of the family business. The plaintive claim for
compensation is simply devastating.

Balakian's grandmother, signing this legal document on Jan. 31, 1920,
states, "The Turkish government is responsible for the losses and
injuries. . . . I am a human being and a citizen of the U.S.A. and
under the support of human and International law." Needless to say,
there was no response to this claim.

Last month, thousands of Turks poured into the streets of Istanbul
after Hrant Dink's murder, yelling, "We are all Hrant Dink. We are
all Armenian." In the face of such confusion, pain and hatred, there
is an urgent human need to find empathy. Great literature strives for
this generosity of spirit, and these three authors will leave a
lasting impression on the reader.

Atom Egoyan is working on Auroras, a meditation on the Armenian
genocide. This installation will be exhibited during Luminato,
Toronto Festival of Arts & Creativity, in June, 2007. Among his many
films is Ararat, about the 1915 massacre of Armenians in Turkey.

Taviani brothers’ film to be screened at Berlin festival

30.01.2007
Yerkir

YEREVAN (YERKIR) - Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s film "Masseria delle Allodole" (Skylark’s Farm) shot on the basis of Antonia Arslan’s novel will be screened at the 57th festival film in Berlin (Germany) on February 8, 2007, independent journalist Jean Eckian told PanARMENIAN.Net.

This film tells about the Armenians Genocide through the story of a family which lives in Western Armenia and awaits the arrival of their parents from Italy.

Alas, the First World War prevents this family from joining and the family members fall victims to the genocide perpetrated by the Turks. This film with total budget of 9,7M € ($9M) is a co-product by Italy, Spain, Belgium, France and Eurimages

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.

A family confronts a time of madness

January 30, 2007
Christian Science Monitor
By Yvonne Zipp

An Armenian author re-creates memories of the ordeal of her people.

Say the word "genocide," and anybody not currently running Iran will immediately think of the Jewish Holocaust. Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia might also come to mind. But say Armenia and in the United States even highly educated people may draw a blank.

Antonia Arslan has taken steps to rectify that situation. Those who read her unsparing debut novel, Skylark Farm, will never forget the events of 1914-1918, when more than 1 million Armenians living in what is now Turkey were massacred in what is widely regarded by the international community as a genocide.

Arslan's family was among that number. Her book is classified as fiction because she uses the structure of a novel to re-create events that occurred before she was born, but not because she is inventing them. In "Skylark," the Italian professor of literature has woven her family's "obscure memories" together with research, including interviews with survivors and her own imagination to tell the story of how three young nieces and one nephew escaped the genocide and made it safely to their uncle in Italy.

The Arslans were a prosperous family living in the hills of Anatolia. In 1914, family patriarch Sempad awaits the return of his older brother, Yerwant, who had gone to Italy as a teenager to study. Both men engage in elaborate preparations: Yerwant buys a red Isotta Fraschinni with a silver monogram, so that he can travel in style, loading it with gold and silver trinkets for everyone in the family. Sempad, meanwhile, renovates Skylark Farm, the family's country house. He orders a stained-glass window from Great Britain, lawn furniture from Austria, and has the ground dug for a tennis lawn.

But instead of the long-cherished family reunion, World War I begins. A few weeks before Yerwant and his family are to leave for Anatolia, Italy closes its borders. Yerwant desperately tries to get information about his family, not knowing that a campaign to destroy the Armenian minority had begun in April, and that by May, Sempad's tennis lawn had become a mass grave.

In the first part of the novel, Arslan introduces all the members of the family, laying out who will survive and who will not. The language in Part 1 can, understandably enough, veer into the overwrought, and Arslan indulges in a few too many prophetic dreams. The human warnings that Sempad and his family ignore are heartbreaking enough, without throwing in green angels and deathbed prophecies. Also understandably, Arslan tends to have Turkish characters spout overripe dialogue rather than engage in a precise examination of the banality of evil. One exception: in a chilling scene, the Interior Minister Talat Pasha, in a secret meeting, orders the roundup of Armenian males and then goes off to play backgammon with Armenian poet Krikor Zohrab. "He's always right on time, a real gentleman," Pasha remarks to his aide.

But once the massacre at Skylark Farm occurs – in a powerfully unflinching scene – the narrative takes hold and Arslan's writing surges to meet her material. All the Armenian women, children, and the elderly are rounded up and forcibly evacuated from the city. They leave in loaded carriages, but are set on by Kurdish bandits operating on orders from the Turkish zeptiahs. Those who survive are forced to march, starving, all the way to Aleppo, where they will be deported to the desert. No one is allowed to give them food; there is a law that makes helping any Armenian punishable by death. (Arslan is careful to mention the brave people, such as the holy leader of Konya, who defied that order.)

At this point, the race to save the surviving Arslan children takes on an inexorable momentum. Their unlikely saviors include a Turkish beggar, a Greek wailer (a professional mourner) and the wife of a French consul. As they march, Shushanig, the mother, and Azniv, her second-oldest daughter, do everything to keep the children alive. (Shushanig only has one son left, her toddler, Nubar. All the men and boys in their city were murdered. Someone put little Nubar in a dress as a joke that saved his life.) Azniv's heroism is all the more poignant because she could have fled to Paris with a Turkish soldier who was in love with her.

The strength of the tale is striking: By page 23 readers know what the outcome will be and yet it's impossible to stop reading. "Skylark Farm" operates like "Schindler's List"; it's a story of hope that makes it easier for us to confront the horror of what happens when evil is allowed to run unchecked.

• Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews fiction for the Monitor.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.