Attention That’s Long Overdue

The awareness comes every year around this time, pulling with an almost lunar force on the tides of my conscience. Most months, I am not especially conscious of my ethnic roots--someone will ask about my name, or my family will “wrap” grape leaves, or I will gracefully decline an invitation by an Armenian American charitable group to emcee a mother-daughter fashion show.

But this time of year, the end of April, I grapple anew with what it means to be a second-generation American whose paternal grandparents sailed for the New World to escape persecution in Armenia.

It’s a time when Armenians reflect on their grim distinction as victims of the first genocide of the 20th Century, a time when they bring it as forcefully as they can to the attention of the world and hope (always in vain) that the Turkish government will admit the complicity of its political predecessor, the Ottoman Empire, in the deaths of more than 1.5 million Armenians. The systematic extermination began fitfully in 1894 and reached full steam starting on April 24, 1915.

Every April, with a swelling sense of outrage, I wonder--along with millions of others--why it is that we Armenians have never received our historical due.

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For years, Washington politicians have tried to pass a simple resolution honoring “the memory of the victims of the Armenian Genocide.”

When he campaigned for President, George Bush pledged that the U.S. government would officially acknowledge the Armenian holocaust.

“The American people, our government and certainly the Bush Administration will never allow political pressure to prevent our denunciation (of the atrocities) and I would join Congress in commemorating the victims of that period,” Bush said.

After the election, he flopped.

The George Bush Administration lobbied hard against a Senate resolution introduced by Bob Dole that would have designated a “National Day of Remembrance of the 75th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide” in 1990. Dole’s commitment stems from his admiration for the Armenian doctor who treated him after he was seriously wounded during World War II.

But moral obligations shrink beside the exigencies of government and business. Turkey hosts American military bases; American arms manufacturers have a stake in sales of their goods to Turkey. And so the resolution to honor the 75th anniversary of the genocide was scuttled after a three-day filibuster by Sen. Robert Byrd, during which he invoked the hoary (and discredited) argument that perhaps the genocide never really occurred.

Some months later, Rep. William Broomfield of Michigan, explained the defeat to a group of Armenian American constituents in stark terms: “We knuckled under to the Turkish lobby.”

Five years have passed and a new resolution has been introduced to Congress. This time, though, it contains no reference to a specific anniversary.

“That was decided strategically,” said Berdj Karapetian of the Armenian National Committee of America. “If it is not tied to any specific anniversary, that will keep the time pressure off (the politicians).”

Today, thousands of Armenian Americans are expected to gather at the Los Angeles Convention Center, where they will rally in memory of those who perished at the hands of the Turks and against those who would pretend the genocide never happened.

Maybe one day, our Congress will have the guts to join them.

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All families of a diaspora have stories to tell, stories that remind them of why they are here instead of there and of why they behold in the eyes of their elders a pain that is often unspoken.

Our family story is about my sad-eyed grandfather, Mike Abcarian, who was born Manoog Apkarian in 1894, the year the Turks began their systematic assaults. I never met him; he died before I was born, and it took many years of probing before my grandmother, who emigrated with her parents before the real horrors began, related his tale.

He was a boy of 18, she said, when he and his father left Turkey for Alexandria, Egypt, where they were to sail to America. Eventually, they would send for the rest of the family. When they got to Egypt, my great-grandfather had a change of heart. Or was it my grandfather who talked his father into going back home? My grandfather sailed alone.

Promises must have been made. Were they spoken? Or just understood?

We may never know. My grandmother, clouded by a recent stroke, is unable to tell us.

What we do know is that no reunion ever took place. In 1915, the family was massacred in Turkey. The only survivor was my father’s younger sister, saved when she fell between bodies. Seven years later, she, too, came to America.

As red-blooded an American as I am, their tragic Armenian history is mine.

And their history-- our history--deserves to be honored.

* Robin Abcarian’s column is published Wednesdays and Sundays.