THE ARMENIANS OF ORANGE COUNTY : Community of 15,000 Prepares to Mark ‘Day of Remembrance’

Even now, 75 years later and thousands of miles away in another country, the memories of the carnage and devastation overwhelm Mary Balian.

Even now, 75 years later and thousands of miles away in another country, the memories of the carnage and devastation overwhelm Mary Balian.

She was only 6 at the time, but she remembers enough--too much--of the killings, the starvation, the death marches. Some of it she saw herself. The rest was told to her by older survivors.

And, as she sat in the living room of her Costa Mesa home, reliving the massacres of her family and other Armenians that swept across Ottoman Turkey, the images again became too vivid. She began to weep, softly.

The others in the room with her on this afternoon--her daughters, Alice and Nevart, and one of her American-born granddaughters, Hozanna--wept with her.

“We cannot forget how our people have suffered, how we have survived,” said the 81-year-old matriarch calmly but directly. “We can never forget we are Armenian. Never!”

No matter where exiled Armenians like Mary Balian have lived--Beirut, Aleppo, Tehran, Jerusalem, Paris, Los Angeles, now Orange County--they speak the old language, revere the old customs and go to their own churches to find solace from the anguished memories.

They will do so again this Sunday, when the Armenian faithful of Orange County gather at their Forty Martyrs Armenian Apostolic Church in Santa Ana to remember and pray for the massacre victims.

It is, they believe, their sacred duty.

Especially now. On the eve of April 24, the Armenian Day of Remembrance. The day the horrors that were to claim more than a million Armenians began 75 years ago.

To the estimated 800,000 people of Armenian descent in the United States--including the 300,000 in Southern California--their day of remembrance has always marked their grief and their pride as ethnic survivors.

But April 24 has also underscored their long anonymity in America.

For decades after their World War I-era cataclysm, the Armenian populace, which included many who had fled Ottoman Turkey, quietly pursued Americanization as another of this country’s invisible minorities.

It didn’t help that the ancient Armenian nation, which once flourished in a region from the Euphrates River to the Caspian Sea, had vanished from the modern map, its lands now divided among present-day Turkey and Iran and the Soviet Union’s small Armenian republic.

And despite a toll estimated to be as high as 1.5 million Armenians killed, despite the vast sympathy it had aroused in America and other World War I allied countries at the time, Armenians said the genocide itself became an obscure epoch to most of the world.

“First, our homelands were taken away. Then, our genocide was forgotten, even denied,” said Hagop Melkonian, 62, of Anaheim, the Syria-born son of massacre survivors and past chairman of the Forty Martyrs Armenian Apostolic Church trustees. “It was as if we no longer existed as a people, as a culture--except to ourselves.”

By the 1970s, the long-dormant Armenian American community, now galvanized by the huge influx of Armenians newly arrived from the Middle East, began to mount increasingly vocal demonstrations, including those calling for official Turkish acknowledgment of a 1915-1923 genocide.

Although most Armenian activists disavow the use of violence, there were bombings and other outbreaks, including the 1982 assassination of a Turkish consulate official in Los Angeles--all widely reported and most linked to terrorist groups.

But most of all, it has been the recent disasters in the Soviet Union--the 1988 earthquake in Soviet Armenia and the ongoing armed clashes in Azerbaijan between Armenians and Turkic-speaking Muslims--that has brought the plights of Armenians back into the headlines.

Now, Armenians in the United States are finding themselves the object of widespread sympathy--including much-publicized assistance for Soviet quake survivors--that is reminiscent of the American relief efforts 75 years ago for Armenian survivors.

Yet even this re-emerging visibility for Armenians has had its obvious limits.

The Republic of Turkey has long denied that a genocide took place under the then-Ottoman Empire. The official view, according to consulate and Turkish-American association officials in Southern California, is that there is no evidence to substantiate Armenian claims. Rather, they said, the deaths resulted from widespread civil strife and other unrest during the World War I era.

And Armenian advocacy organizations have still to win adoption of what they consider a crucial act of faith by the U.S. government--to declare April 24 an official national day of remembrance. Such a resolution is opposed by the Bush Administration and this year failed to clear the Senate because--supporters such as Gov. George Deukmejian maintained--the Turkish government is a close NATO ally and prominent defense-industry client.

“It means we have to press harder and wait longer for (April 24) recognition here,” said Razmik Bulujian, 27, of Irvine, chairman of the Armenian National Committee’s Orange County chapter. “But then, genocide is a universal tragedy. There is no statute of limitations for crimes against humanity.”

Armenian immigrants have long prided themselves on their ethnic independence, no matter what their fluctuating political or cultural status in America.

And nowhere is this sense of self-sufficiency more fiercely displayed than the Armenian-language communities that the immigrants have built in Southern California, now their most popular resettlement destination.

Consider Orange County, whose Armenian-descended population is now estimated at 15,000.

The great majority are families from Lebanon, Syria and Iran who have arrived here within the past 15 years and who represent occupations ranging from operators of grocery stores, service stations and restaurants, to engineers, architects and doctors.

The activities of this traditionally clannish group center on their newly built Forty Martyrs Church complex at McFadden Avenue and Euclid Street in west Santa Ana.

To them, their Armenian-language church, the first in Orange County, is a deeply rooted effort. They like to point out that Armenia in the early 4th Century became the first to declare Christianity a state religion. And their Apostolic Church is revered as both a spiritual and national symbol.

“It is the only (national) institution left us from the old homeland,” said Sarkis Yegenian, 58, of Fullerton, current chairman of the Forty Martyrs Church board of trustees. “So we always go where there is (an Armenian) church. If there isn’t, we build one!”

Thus, when the $3.5-million complex opened in 1986, it made an unmistakable ethnic statement. It came complete with community meeting hall and a 13-room day school that provides classes in Armenian language and history as well as the standard state-required curriculum. And the church’s soaring dome, designed in the classical Armenian style, became an instant landmark.

To church members, this kind of Armenian self-preservation is not at odds with being dutiful Americans as well. Most are already U.S. citizens or in process of becoming citizens. And, they emphasized, America has long regarded itself as a land that nurtures diverse immigrant heritages.

Typical are the reactions of Garo Tertzakian, a UC Irvine assistant clinical professor, and his wife, Sylvie, whose two children, 8 and 10, attend the Forty Martyrs school.

“Certainly, we recognize the strength of the (assimilation) process in this country,” explained Lebanon-born Tertzakian, 40, who was a member of American medical teams sent to Soviet Armenia after the 1988 earthquake. “But we can’t sit back and let the old culture slip away without doing all we can to slow the erosion.”

Other ethnic groups have said much the same thing. But Armenian immigrants believe their cause is one of greater-than-usual urgency.

“Our mother homeland was taken away from us and most of it has vanished,” said Vache Madenlian, 54, of Huntington Beach, founding board chairman of the Forty Martyrs Church. “So we are more fearful that our culture will be lost.”

Madenlian, who, like the other immigrants, had family who perished in Ottoman Turkey, added: “It is our legacy. It is our duty to the homeland and the people that were wiped out.”

To Armenians, the genocide epoch is the darkest yet most emotionally binding side of their heritage--the source of horror stories that have been handed down for more than seven decades.

The massacre sweeps began a decade before 1915 but reached a genocidal stage--the policy of systematic extermination--after the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of Germany, Armenian-American and other academic researchers say.

Starting with the roundups of intellectuals and community leaders--April 24, 1915--tens of thousands of Armenians were shot or burned to death or hanged, these researchers said. The Turks then ordered all Armenians--who were declared an ethno-religious minority of questionable loyalty--deported to relocation centers in the Syrian and Mesopotamian deserts.

As a result, the researchers said, Armenians on the forced marches died by the hundreds of thousands, including women and children--many slain by constant marauders, others from the lack of water and food and the circuitous routes over brutal terrain.

Sylvie Tertzakian’s father was on one of the marches.

“My father was 14. He saw his own father and uncle slashed to death by Turkish police, and then their bodies dumped into a ditch with the others,” Tertzakian related.

Her father survived the march and made it to one of the orphanages set up by relief organizations near Jerusalem. But his mother died in the desert of starvation.

Although her father died in 1975, “he never got over it,” said Tertzakian, who was born in Jerusalem, where her father had resettled. “After all those years, the pain of those memories never seemed to subside. But then, how could they?”

Mary Balian, the 81-year-old survivor, remembers when her grandfather and uncle were dragged from the house and--she was told later--hanged. Later, she saw bodies piled up in the streets or floating in the river, and babies crying next to their dead mothers.

And she remembers the day that she and her grandmother, who had raised her after the deaths of her parents a few years earlier, became separated. She was picked by a Turkish family who--as in the cases of many other Armenian waifs at the time--kept her as a servant.

But four years later, her grandmother, who had managed to stay in hiding from the Turkish police and escaped the desert marches, found young Mary.

“We were the fortunate ones. Some of us survived and were reunited,” Mrs. Balian said. “So many other families were all killed--or never seen again.”

Indeed, the images of survival and rebirth in the immigrant communities--of the ethnic indestructibility of Armenians--have been the soaring themes at every April 24 remembrance.

As they will be again at commemoration services and rallies this weekend and Tuesday at the Forty Martyrs Church and other locations throughout Southern California.

And certain to again be quoted are the words that one Fresno-born son of Armenian immigrants--the famed novelist-playwright William Saroyan--wrote in 1935 for that year’s April 24:

Go ahead, destroy this race! Destroy Armenia! Send them from their homes into the desert. Let them have neither bread nor water. Burn their homes and churches. Then, see if they will not laugh again, see if they will not sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.

In 1990, this kind of optimism now extends even to Old Armenia--the dream of reestablishing a free Armenian republic on at least part of the ancient lands.

Immigrants hope the democratization movement that has overturned Iron Curtain regimes in Eastern Europe and is affecting even the Soviet Union will lead to a fully independent Soviet Armenia, where 3 million Armenians still live and where demonstrations have been increasing.

However, such massive signs of defiance and unrest have been taking place as Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is stepping up pressures to put down secessionist moves, including in Lithuania.

“No one knows, of course, what will happen in the long run there and what it will mean to our people,” said Abraham Kantzabedian, 32, who belongs to a 140-member new Armenian Apostolic group that meets in Newport Beach.

“But yes, we still dream of self-determination (in Soviet Armenia),” added Kantzabedian, who was born in Soviet Armenia and fled the Soviet Union with his family in 1965. “Yes, we wait--and we have not given up hope.”

However, on this eve of another April 24, immigrant families have new horror stories to tell.

These are centered on the virtual civil war between Soviet Armenia and the neighboring state, Azerbaijan, in the Transcaucasian region northeast of Turkey.

Some Armenian families in Orange County have relatives in Azerbaijan, which is populated mostly by Turkic-speaking Muslims and where--according to reports--hundreds of Armenians have been killed by Muslim mobs.

Aida Salatinjants, an Anaheim physician, said her grandmother and aunt in Baku, the Azerbaijan capital, were robbed and her aunt beaten by a Muslim band hunting for Armenians.

“None of our people is safe there. It is a terribly cruel time,” said Salatinjants, who left Baku 10 years ago with her husband, Robert. Her relatives and her husband’s brother and sister have since fled Baku for Moscow.

And Soviet Armenia, still reeling from the vast devastation of the December, 1988, earthquake, has itself been deprived of crucial food and fuel--the result, families here said, of rail lines being blocked into Armenia.

There is, immigrants and others here said, an ominously familiar pattern about it.

“To us, this is the same kind of cycle--the persecutions, the mass killings--a horrible replay of what happened to our people over 70 years ago,” said Lillie Merigian, principal of the Ari Guiragos Minassian School at the Forty Martyrs Church.

It is the awesome echo of 1915.