The World Was Silent

There aren’t many Armenian Americans in Pensacola, so when two of my students and I discovered our common heritage, we eagerly compared family customs and stories. Tabouli, grape leaves and choereg were familiar foods to us, and drinking thick, sweet Armenian coffee while our grandparents discussed in Armenian what they didn’t want us to understand was a common experience.

But greeting each other with "Eench bez-es? (How are you?)" or discussing Armenian culture didn’t form my strongest connection with the Kayir sisters. The real bond came from two painful truths: that our families were victimized by one of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century, and that, for most people around us, the Armenian Genocide remains invisible.

While in the 8th grade, Alex Kayir entered a project about the Armenian Genocide in a history competition. When she informed her teacher of her choice, Alex was surprised and disturbed by the teacher’s reaction.

"My history teacher hadn’t even heard of this tragic event, nor had the other history teachers at my middle school," recalls Alex. "My topic was even foreign to most of the judges!"

Although I shared Alex’s exasperation, I was not surprised. While in high school, I entered the same competition, also selecting the Armenian Genocide as my focus. I ran up against the same reaction. Like Alex and her sister, Karen, I was always more than willing to explain to teachers or friends what the Armenians endured almost 100 years ago and who they are today.

A few years ago, realizing how thin my understanding was of my own family’s history, I sent my grandfather in Memphis, Tennessee, a tape recorder, some blank cassettes and a few guiding questions.

Several weeks later, he sent back four tapes. Stretched out on a carpet that my grandparents had brought with them from Beirut, I loaded the first cassette into my tape player. In the comfort of my home, I listened as a nightmare unfurled around me.

Dear Kristine, This is the story of my life … . A 4-year-old boy named Garo, in a village in Southern Anatolia, learns that his father — a minister and physician’s assistant — has been beheaded by government forces. Garo is then displaced from all his cousins, grandparents, aunts, uncles and, for several years, his mother, sisters and brother. Sixty-nine members of his family are brutally killed.

Garo lives in orphanages, endures hunger, suffers through fevers, nearly dying. The orphanage officials give him a new, Muslim name — Mehmet. He works in fields, sleeps in filth, and starves for food and love.

Four years later he is reunited with two aunts, two sisters, a brother and his mother. They depart from Mercine in Cilicia by boat. They finally reach Beirut to start a new life, which will eventually lead him to Memphis.

A letter from Garo’s father, a photograph, two rugs and two water jugs are the only possessions they carry from their life in Anatolia.

I have never seen the village where my grandfather was born. I cannot speak the language of my ancestors, nor do I practice their Armenian Apostolic and Congregational Evangelical faiths.

I have not known hunger, pain or the death of loved ones, as my grandfather has known them. My schooling wasn’t appreciably different from that of any other middle-class American child of the 1970s.

I learned about literature, mathematics, sciences, social movements and wars. I learned that the Ottoman was a great empire stretching across the Middle East and into Europe, but I never learned that racism became an institutionalized aspect of that empire — a hatred powerful enough almost to destroy my own culture.

Remembrance and Denial

The ancient homeland of the Armenian people straddles the Caucasus Mountains between Russia and Anatolia, or Asia Minor, which is a part of modern Turkey.

Over the centuries, this region has been the scene of repeated conquests, annexations, independence movements and population shifts. By the late 19th century, more than 2 million Christian Armenians were living in the Muslim Ottoman Empire, to the west of Russian Armenia.

Fears of an Armenian separatist movement fanned the flames of anti-Christian hatred among Ottoman leaders and led to the first wave of massacres and expulsion of Armenians in 1894-96.

The Ottoman alliance with Germany during World War I, after the "Young Turks" had seized control of the Ottoman government with the intention of modernizing the Turkish nation-state, once again aroused tensions between Turkish nationalists and the Armenians, many of whom favored Russia in the war.

When a small segment of the Armenian community responded to Russia’s call for assistance, the Ottomans ordered the expulsion of the entire Armenian population. More than one million Armenians died in massacres or from starvation during the removal campaign.

Roughly 600,000 escaped, fleeing to the new Soviet Union, to Europe and to the Americas in what became known as the Armenian Diaspora. The massacres themselves are widely recognized as the Armenian Genocide, though the United States government has avoided using the term, out of concern for Turkey’s role as a NATO ally.

The will to destroy entire groups of people on the basis of their religion, race, ethnicity or political convictions has been the plague of the last 100 years, a period labeled by many historians as the Century of Genocide.

During the 20th century, more than 50 million people perished in genocidal campaigns around the world — from the Armenians in Anatolia to the Jews in Germany to the victims of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and, more recently, the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia.

Many high school students today, however, learn about this phenomenon solely through its most massive example, the Jewish Holocaust. Not only do many teachers lack training in non-Western history, much less genocide studies, but available resources on the topic also focus primarily on the Nazi campaign.

Some educators believe we are doing our students a disservice by shielding them from the devastating toll genocides in other parts of the world have inflicted on humankind.

"The deep attention to Holocaust education has really opened up an avenue for thinking about human rights," notes Adam Strom of Facing History and Ourselves, a human rights education project that has been promoting genocide studies for more than 25 years.

"If we focus only on Germany from ’33 to ’45, we miss the larger patterns of human behavior. There are threads connecting genocides, and as educators we need to recognize them."

The central thread is hate.

"Hate can happen anywhere," says Mercedes Metz, assistant principal at Wilson Middle School in Glendale, Calif., home to one of the heaviest concentrations of Armenians outside the Middle East. "That is one of the most important lessons we want students to understand from studying genocide — the pervasive problem of hate."

For Metz and a growing number of educators around the country, the Armenian Genocide serves as a portal to more universal human rights issues. Metz co-authored the California Curriculum Guide to Genocide, introduced in the mid-1980s and recently reissued, which places the Armenian Genocide in context with other mass killings of the 20th century to help students develop an overall awareness of how and under what conditions such atrocities occur.

The Armenian experience is particularly instructive in a discussion of genocide because, as the first such event of the "modern" century, it set a model that other groups followed in carrying out similar campaigns.

The use of technology for mass killings was a decisive development. The Ottomans used trains to transport large numbers of Armenians out of populous areas and into the desert, where they faced either forced marches or mass graves. Also, the newly introduced telegraph permitted Ottoman officials, notably Talaat Pasha, to order massacres in multiple villages at the same time.

The question of what causes a nation or empire to turn against a segment of its own population is one that San Diego teacher Dale Griepenstroh finds especially relevant for today. Students in his middle school world history classes read Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat, the story of the author’s discovery that his father endured the Armenian Genocide.

"I want them to understand that the Armenian Massacres are examples of intolerance within a multiethnic society that had once been tolerant and dependent on its diversity but changed its course when faced with its own demise," Griepenstroh explains.

Another compelling reason to study the Armenian Genocide is the international controversy that surrounds the event. The Turkish government continues to deny that it carried out an expulsion and extermination campaign in 1915.

Many European countries, including France, Italy and Sweden, have formally acknowledged the Armenian Genocide, but the United States has yet to do so. Diplomatic concerns over U.S. military bases in Turkey, as well as the nation’s participation in the international campaign against terrorism, have kept the United States from officially recognizing the atrocities.

Since the 1980s, Peter Balakian, a professor of literature and genocide studies at Colgate University, has been a forerunner in the Armenian American community’s efforts to bring an end to both official and popular denial.

Balakian received the 1998 PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for his memoir Black Dog of Fate.

"What is morally important about understanding perpetrators’ denials and attempts to cover up human rights crimes," notes Balakian, "is the lesson that the denial of genocide is the final stage of genocide. Judy Herman has written in her book Trauma and Memory that the last act of the perpetrator is always to cover up. Denial is an important aspect of the criminal pathology of both murder and mass murder."