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Genocide survivor's riveting story; Slurs, repetition mar account

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  • Genocide survivor's riveting story; Slurs, repetition mar account

    Edmonton Journal (Alberta)
    August 2, 2009 Sunday
    Final Edition


    A genocide survivor's riveting story; Slurs, repetition mar Armenian
    account

    by Holger H. Herwig, Freelance


    ARMENIAN GOLGOTHA
    Grigoris Balakian Translated by Peter Balakian and Aris Sevag
    Knopf 509 pp., $42



    "Finally, the horrible year of 1915 passed, leaving in its wake
    mourning and wailing, blood and tears."

    These words, full of pathos and grief, summarize the collected memory
    of Grigoris Balakian concerning the Armenian genocide during the
    second year of the First World War.

    The epicentre of that monstrous affair was Der Zor, a city on the
    banks of the Euphrates River surrounded by the vast desert that runs
    across southeast Turkey, Mesopotamia and Syria. There, the author
    states, lies the true Armenian Golgotha. His figures are
    staggering. Of the 1.5 million Armenians deported to Der Zor from the
    interior provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the summer and fall of
    1915, about 800,000 were massacred, mainly by Turkish mobile killing
    squads (chetes), and another 400,000 died en route from disease and
    starvation. Of the 400,000 Armenians who reached Der Zor, by August
    1916, some 250,000 had fallen victim to starvation and roughly 150,000
    had been murdered by roaming chetes; by August 1918, between 400 and
    500 of the original deportees were left.

    Balakian's narrative is the story of horrible suffering and tragic
    murder.

    The outbreak of war in September 1914 had caught Balakian in Berlin,
    studying theology. He at once decided to return to Constantinople, and
    was among a group of about 250 Armenian assemblymen, bankers, doctors,
    editors, merchants and teachers arrested by the Ittihad (Committee for
    Union and Progress) government of Enver Ismail Pasha, Jemal Pasha and
    Mehmet Talaat Pasha on April 24, 1915. What was dubbed the "night of
    Gethsemane" is today the date of the worldwide commemoration of the
    Armenian genocide.

    For the next three years, Balakian was taken on a march of death into
    the interior of Turkey: Ekishedir, Chankiri, Kayseri, Hajin and,
    finally, Ayran on the Euphrates River. As most of his colleagues fell
    victim to starvation and murder, and as dozens of other caravans of
    Armenian deportees joined his, Balakian became obsessed with one
    thought: to survive to write the "horrific story" of the genocide "so
    that future Armenian generations would know the price of the freedom
    they enjoyed."

    Somewhere on that march he decided on the title, Armenian Golgotha: "I
    continually ruminated and mentally recorded everything;I analyzed all
    the events and occurrences; I examined them to determine their causes
    and reasons."

    In September 1918, back in Constantinople with the help of Austrian,
    German and Swiss engineers working on the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway,
    Balakian began to write. The first volume of his narrative appeared in
    Vienna in 1922, the second in Paris in 1959. After a brief stint as
    prelate of Manchester, Balakian became bishop of Marseilles, where he
    died on Oct. 8, 1934.

    The book, newly published in English, is a powerful personal
    narrative. The descriptions of the Armenian genocide are striking and
    the author spares his readers none of the gruesome details. The
    weapons of choice were those of the farmer, butcher and tanner--axes,
    sickles, meat cleavers, pitchforks and knives--and the tortures
    inflicted were horrendous: beheading, disembowelling, genital
    mutilation and eye gouging. Sexual violence was an integral part of
    the genocide. Balakian repeatedly provides details of abductions and
    gang rapes of women. The book is not for the faint of heart.

    But those seeking a scholarly history of the Armenian genocide will be
    disappointed. Balakian revels in stereotypes. The Armenians "for
    thousands of years" were master craftsmen, architects, merchants,
    physicians and scholars. The Turks "in their six-hundred-year history"
    were deceitful, duplicitous and perfidious, a people who "left no
    trace of memory of civilization except massacre, plunder, forced
    Islamization, and abduction." He also writes that the
    Germans--diplomats, statesmen and soldiers alike-- were more than idle
    bystanders of the genocide, they were its willing helpers to realize
    their grandiose dream of using the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway to
    assault India, the "crown jewel of the British Empire."

    Even Balakian's great hope for restoring the Armenian nation--the
    Entente -- proved to be a bitter disappointment. When a united Entente
    fleet finally anchored off Constantinople in November 1918, its
    commanders showed no interest in the Armenian genocide or in Armenian
    nationhood, and instead allowed themselves to be bought off by Turkish
    bribes and women. "God," in Balakian's bitter assessment, "remained
    silent."

    The book would have lost none of its impact with careful editing,
    removing countless repetitious accounts and phraseology and correcting
    the many historical inaccuracies for the non-professional reader. Its
    greatest shortcoming, of course, is the lack of source
    materials. Throughout, and especially in Chapter 11 of Vol. 1,
    Balakian refers to the "Plan for the Extinction of the Armenians in
    Turkey," yet he offers no solid evidence for the existence of such a
    formal national "plan." Addressing this critical matter in the
    introduction would have allowed the book to stand for what it is:a
    riveting and powerful indictment of a genocide that became a paradigm
    for future genocides, but that remains to be researched in Turkish
    archives by Turkish scholars.

    Holger H. Herwig is a professor of history at the University of Calgary.
    From: Baghdasarian
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