[Pages S9936-S9937]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

THE FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE

<bullet> 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.''<bullet>

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