Armenians Commemorate the 1915 Massacre of 1.5 Million

Thousands of Armenians around the world commemorated a 1915 massacre of 1.5 million Armenians at gatherings Sunday that took on an added significance as demonstrators also remembered victims of ethnic riots two months ago in the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan.

“As in the past, the cycle of death visited our kinsmen,” political scientist Hrair Dekmejian told a crowd of about 8,000 at Los Angeles City College. The February riots broke out after Armenians demanded that Nagorno-Karabakh, a heavily Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, be joined to the Soviet Republic of Armenia. The Soviet Union has acknowledged 32 deaths in the rioting; Armenians claim that the toll was much higher.

Armenians rally each year on this day to mark the deaths and expulsions that led to their homeland’s absorption by eastern Turkey and the western Soviet Union. They charge that the Turkish government systematically exterminated Armenians; the Turkish government has always denied that any genocide was planned and blamed the deaths on a civil war.

Sunday in Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia, the annual procession jammed streets leading to the “Genocide Monument” overlooking the ancient city, where a rally of about 1 million kicked off February’s ethnic unrest.

In Moscow, about 2,000 people gathered at the Armenian Cemetery, with one group waving a sign reading “Karabakh is ours” and another group holding a banner disputing the Soviet authorities’ figure of 32 deaths in the latest riots.

When Dekmejian told the city college audience about the large crowds in Yerevan and Moscow, there was scattered applause.

“They did not cheer, because it’s sad,” said Toros Bouchakian, a 33-year-old Armenian immigrant who lives in Redondo Beach. “Still, nothing is changed. All we care is to have our land back.”

Gov. George Deukmejian, speaking to about 1,000 people in a crowded Fresno high school auditorium, said “the unjust separation of Armenians in the Soviet Union should end. And it should end without any further bloodshed.” He also assailed Turkey for its “stubborn refusal even to admit that the massacre had happened.”

Without mentioning the Reagan Administration directly, the governor also criticized the failure of the U.S. government to establish a “national day of remembrance” for the victims of the Armenian massacre, the Jewish Holocaust and the wholesale slayings of Cambodians several years ago.

On Sunday night, police arrested 14 people at a demonstration involving 100 Armenian youths at the Turkish Consulate in Hancock Park.

Police responded in force after someone threw an object toward the building at Wilshire Boulevard and June Street, breaking a window near the consulate entrance. But police said only one man was arrested initially, after he set fire to an American flag.

Police and representatives of the Armenian Youth Federation of Western America, which organized the demonstration, met in an effort to prevent further incidents.

Afterward, the demonstrators began a candle-light vigil.

But the demonstration was declared an unlawful assembly and about 40 officers moved in and most of the marchers left. However, 13 people, who locked arms in front of the building’s entrance while singing the Armenian National Anthem, were arrested for failing to disperse, police said.