|
|
|
 
|
Beirut, Lebanon: Conference
“World War I as Remembered by the Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean”
APRIL 27 -
MAY 1 2001
WORLD WAR I AS
THE DEFINING MOMENT
IN MODERN
ARMENIAN HISTORY
Richard
G. Hovannisian
University of California, Los Angeles
No
people in the Eastern Mediterranean and for that matter the entire world was
so dramatically and drastically affected by World War I as were the Armenians.
In
1914 they were an ethno-religious element living
everywhere, in cities, towns, and villages, from Adrianople and Constantinople
(Istanbul) in Europe to the plains of Asia Minor and the great Armenian
Plateau east of the Euphrates River (now called Eastern Anatolia) all the way
to Baku on the Caspian Sea. By the end of World War I, the Armenians had been
eliminated from virtually all of the Asiatic provinces of the Ottoman Empire,
and during the next several years the remnants would be forced to leave the
bounds of the new Republic of Turkey. It was the case of a people being
violently and possibly irreversibly separated from their lands and
cultural-religious foundations of many centuries. The social, political,
economic, cultural, and religious infrastructures were completely demolished,
leaving the bewildered survivors scattered around the world in alien
surroundings and without means of rapid recovery.
The trauma of
the horrendous deaths of hundreds of thousands of people compounded by the
loss of the traditional homelands of three millennia has left deep, raw wounds
on the Armenian psyche. The on-going process of evolution into a
national-political collectivity was abruptly halted, and the Armenians as a
geographically-based people were extruded from the Middle East. They remained
at best merely a non-territorial minority in certain hospitable host
countries.
There had been in the Ottoman Empire an Armenian Question, primarily
one of implementing reforms that would ensure the security of Armenian life
and property and
the attainment of equal civil rights. It was beyond
the comprehension of the Armenians in 1914 that they could be swept away from
this land completely. After all, they had withstood the most devastating of
invasions and long centuries of foreign domination. Many had died, been forcibly converted, or been carried away
into captivity, but there had always been enough remaining to rebuild their
homes and churches and to begin life anew. The totality of modern genocide had
not yet been demonstrated. It was the technological advances of the modern age
that placed in the hands of the perpetrators the weapons of mass destruction.
Even in the backward Ottoman Empire, the telegraph, for instance, could
provide unprecedented means of coordination, control, and thoroughness. It was
this stunning totality perhaps that made the victims and the survivors
incapable of ever comprehending fully what had occurred and why.
Hence, whereas World War I and its aftermath brought ultimate statehood
and independence to the Arab peoples, the acquisition of certain additional
territories by Greece, and the creation of a Turkish republic, the
conflagration resulted in the expulsion of the Armenians. This development
gives rise to the question whether Armenia and Armenians still belong to the
Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East world. Even in a conference such as this
one, the Armenian presence may be regarded by some as being
an anomaly or perhaps as tokenism. There was a brief postwar period of
optimism that the Armenians would emerge as a regional nation state through
the unification of the small Caucasian Armenian republic, formed during the
final months of the war, with the contiguous Turkish Armenian provinces of the
Ottoman Empire. The Allied victors, who were pledged to the punishment of the
perpetrators of the genocide and the restoration of the Armenian survivors,
went so far as to create such a state on paper (Treaty of SPvres,
August 10, 1920). They did not, however, provide for the means necessary to
implement that decision. Theirs was a face-saving cynical calculation to
discharge their wartime promises and to satisfy international public opinion.
The self-serving maneuvers of the Western powers continue to affect the way in
which Armenians view the outside world and proferred external intercession to
resolve regional problems. The sense of being wronged, of being a pawn in
great power politics, of awaiting the elusive stroke of justice, all weigh
heavily upon the collective Armenian mind-set.
With the Turkish invasion and collapse of the fledgling Armenian
republic at the end of 1920, the little bit of Armenia that survived was
caught up in the Soviet orbit, and its orientation turned northward rather
than westward. Armenians in fact received somewhat of a new identity as a
people belonging not so much to the Middle East as to the Slavic-Russian world
and the Caucasus, where as a nation they now continue to exist as a
landlocked, vulnerable state.
The Soviet policymakers attempted to suppress or manage Armenian memory
to conform to their foreign policy objectives. The genocide was excised from
textbooks, and the whole of Armenian history was recast in Marxist terminology
and determinism. World War I was portrayed as an imperialistic conflict, from
which the long-suffering Armenians were ultimately saved by the victorious Red
Army and by their entry into the great family of Soviet peoples. Much of the
population of Soviet Armenia, however, was made up of the refugee generation
from the eastern Ottoman districts—Van, Mush, Sasun, Erzerum—who
maintained an underground subculture based on the oral transmission of memory.
It was in fact a counter-culture which burst into the open in 1965, the 50th
anniversary of the genocide, through unauthorized and unprecedented public
demonstrations in the capital city of Erevan and similar manifestations
throughout the Armenian world. The inability of the Soviet authorities to
suppress memory forced them to channel it, to accommodate it, by trying to
bring national sentiment under state sponsorship through the erection of
memorial monuments and cautious, measured discussions of the fate of the
“Western Armenians” during World War I. But the narrow limits that the
Soviet authorities sought to maintain were stretched by Armenian writers and
poets such as Hovhannes Shiraz and Paruyr Sevak, who set aside fear and
self-constraint to liberate memory in the inner drive to teach and inspire new
generations.
While half of the Armenian world population experienced the good and
the bad of the Soviet system, the other half gradually recuperated in
widely-dispersed diasporan communities. Armenians in the Middle East
concentrated first and foremost on attempts to preserve the foundations of
their culture. For this, community resources were poured into the building of
schools and churches. Thankful for the haven afforded by the tolerant Arab
peoples, the Armenian newcomers nonetheless felt themselves apart and focused
on the preservation and transmission of their language and their traditions in
the idealistic belief that someday they would be able to return to their lost
homeland. When political circumstances in the host country allowed, they
loudly voiced their claims and demonstrated their resentment against the
Turkish government. An abiding sense of injustice was passed on to the
succeeding generation. Internal political and religious differences gave way
to a solid, common historical memory of World War I and unpunished genocide.
In time, however, idealism waned and, except for the devoted few who were
prepared to move to the newly-independent, beleaguered post-Soviet Armenian
state, the Middle East communities came to the harsh reality that they must
regard themselves as long-term diasporan components and in order to survive
must integrate more closely with their host societies. This process was
already taking place independently of any conscious plan as new generations
were born outside the historic homelands and the numerical, cultural, and
political strength of the communities diminished because of the turmoil in the
Middle East. Still, the memory of the violent displacement during World War I
is powerful and omnipresent in every aspect of community life, whether joyful
or mournful.
The communities of Western Europe and North America developed along a
different course. Arriving as refugees in long-established nation states with
strong cultural traditions, the survivors faced much prejudice and intense
pressure to join the mainstream. Multiculturalism was neither encouraged nor
tolerated. While the Armenians managed to maintain a degree of identity
through their churches, political clubs, and after-school Armenian classes,
the children of the survivors, with rare exception, did not perpetuate either
the native language or the culture and often refused to identify with the
memories of war and massacre. Thus, the opportunities for social and economic
upward mobility in the Western world were counterbalanced by the rapid
processes of acculturation and assimilation.
Even among the young Armenian intellectuals, children of the genocide,
who still spoke and wrote in Armenian, there emerged a school of rejectionism—rejection
of past values and mores, perhaps contributors to the national calamity. That
catastrophe was too horrendous to face, and the Parisian intellectuals of the
“Menk” group, for example, picked for their themes the painted women of
Pigalle and a denationalized society. The sense of despair regarding Armenian
survival permeated Shahan Shahnur’s “Retreat without a Song,” the
product of the negativism and pessimism born of the genocide. If some sought
to escape memory by losing themselves in Parisian backdrops, even those
writers who were driven to confront the cataclysm, to capture the inferno in
its entirely, failed. Try as he may, for example, Hagop Oshagan found it
impossible to select from a very rich and expressive vocabulary the right
combination of words to create a literary reflection of the true hell that he
had seen and experienced. Dante’s Inferno
was too neat, too placid, perhaps too comprehensible to serve as a model. At
best, glimpses of the holocaust were captured in short stories and vignettes.
The representation of collective cultural memory of World War I, therefore,
was left primarily to the generation of orphans, “Children without
Childhood,” writers such as Antranig Dzarougian and Moushegh Ishkhan who
rose up out of the streets of Aleppo, Damascus, and Beirut to approach the
calamity through stories about life from the desert to the orphanage. These
works were supplemented by survivor memoirs, written in Armenian, English,
French, and other languages but rarely well-constructed either as literature
or as history. That challenge was left for second and especially
third-generation Diasporans to meet, albeit in a different genre, that is, one
of self-discovery and reconnection with the past, with Armenian memory.
The trauma associated with World War I has produced something of a
fortress mentality. The burden of historical memory makes the Armenian
collectivity extremely concerned about intermarriage, loss of cultural
attributes, and assimilation—“White Massacre”—giving rise to a
pronounced sense of “the us” beset by the powerful and dangerous forces of
“the them,” “the other,” “the foreign.” Self-imposed community
boundaries have been laid down and the effectiveness of policing those limits
is correlated with the vitality and continuance of the collectivity. In place
of a physical ghetto, the Armenian Diaspora has felt the need to create
intellectual and cultural defense parameters through the operation of schools
and churches, political, social, and cultural organizations, and scouting and
athletic youth groups—all of them linked in one way or another to the
collective memory of 1915. The individual is regarded as integral to the
group, so that the loss or waywardness of the individual detracts from the
viability of the whole.
Strangely but understandably, therefore, it is the negative impact of
World War I—genocide—that is the strongest common denominator linking
Armenian communities around the world and these communities, in turn, with the
new Armenian republic. Now speaking different languages, cut off from much of
their national literature and culture, Diasporan Armenians are bound together
by the collective memory of victimization. This sentiment is reinforced by
Turkish state denial of the genocide and efforts to cast this aspect of World
War I into an Orwellian “Memory Hole.”
In his studies, Ervin Staub has shown that genocide shapes not only the
outlook of the immediate victims but also of subsequent generations. Victim
groups, rather than viewing the world as a good and well-ordered place, are
filled with mistrust, fear, and a sense of danger of what may come. It is
essential, therefore, for victims to understand that the horrible events are
not normal but rather are aberrations of a generally benevolent world order.
Continued denial makes this impossible and reinforces feelings of insecurity,
abandonment, and betrayal. To overcome these apprehensions, the victims need
to share their sentiments of pain and sorrow, to voice their outrage, to have
the world recognize their suffering, and especially to receive expressions of
regret and apology from the perpetrator side. Until such time, the wound and
the rage fester and the healing process is blocked. Staub goes on to say that
for the descendants of the perpetrators, it is imperative to engage in
introspection, to face and learn from their history, to consider how such
violations could have occurred, to examine what there was and may still even
be in their society that led them down the road to genocide, and to find some
redemption through appropriate acts of contribution, beginning with a
knowledge and acceptance of the truth. If they are unable or unwilling to do
this, then they may again be placed on a path toward the victimization of
other groups.
The burden of memory has in simple terms brought about a two-track
Armenian response. On the one hand, the activists are obsessed with the past.
They cannot rest until the Turkish government, which has expropriated the
lands and collective assets of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, offers an
apology and initiates redemptive measures. The activists use the political
processes in their host countries—now their native countries—to win
reaffirmation of the acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide, just as these
countries had recognized and condemned the crime when it began in 1915.
Armenians are unable to face the future openly and freely unless and until
they can deal with the past. On the other hand, for those for whom the burden
is too heavy to bear—and there are many such persons—the alternative has
been repression of historical memory and often separation from the collective
community through assumption of a new identity. A strong undercurrent of
victimization lies at the core of both responses.
As a sequel to the genocide that took place under the cover of World
War I, Armenians suffered the mental and emotional trauma caused by the
calamity, world indifference, and attempts by successive Turkish governments
to deny or rationalize the crime. Yet the actual physical persecution had
passed, and there did not seem to be any real danger of renewed massacres,
except in the minds of persons who had been so severely affected as to suffer
from extreme anxiety disorders. The small Soviet Armenian state seemed safe as
a part of the powerful Soviet Union, even if this required giving up much of
its freedom, including the right to seek world recognition and redress for the
genocide. But the trade-off was upset abruptly in 1988, and the specter of
genocide now loomed over the Armenians no longer just as a haunting, terrible
memory but rather a living reality. The outbreak of anti-Armenian violence in
the Azerbaijani industrial city of Sumgait, with mayhem, mutilation, and
dehumanization, sent shock waves into Armenian communities far and near. The
terms “pogrom,” “massacre,” and even “genocide” sounded and
reverberated, and immediate spontaneous associations were made with 1915. The
Azeris, related by race, language, and culture to the Turks, became in
Armenian minds the same brutal murderers who had perpetrated genocide under
the cover of World War I, and the victims of Sumgait were seen simply as the
most recent martyrs claimed down through the centuries of Turkic domination.
Seventy years of Soviet mythology about having resolved the nationality
problem and about the friendship and brotherhood of the Soviet peoples
dissolved in a single instant, bringing the Armenians face to face with the
ghost of the past. The ensuing economic blockade of Armenia by both Azerbaijan
and Turkey again conjured up images of the starvation of hundreds of thousands
of Armenians in 1915. Even the forces of nature seemed to conspire against the
Armenians, as the massive earthquake in December 1988 devastated the northern
third of the small country and claimed as many as 50,000 lives.
A team of oral historians led by Joanna Bornat of the United Kingdom
undertook an interview program with the aged inhabitants of Leninakan/Gumri
after the earthquake and was struck by the repeated traumatic linkages made
between that disaster and the genocide of World War I. Another oral history
program by Donald and Lorna Miller in the earthquake zone and in Mountainous
Karabagh confirmed the persistence of traumatic memory among the Armenians,
even in districts that had not been a part of the Ottoman Empire. Time had
collapsed, and the Azeri of the 1990s became one and the same as the Turk of
1915...
What has been demonstrated in these interviews is the
trans-generational impact of genocide. In the best of circumstances, the
trauma persists for decades, but it is compounded when there are no acts of
contrition or redemption by the perpetrator side.
Historical memory forcefully shapes contemporary
views of self and other and puts heavy constraints on current leaders. The
failure to lighten the burden of history interferes with the re-establishment
of normal behavior and normal relations. It remains to be seen whether the
negative heritage of World War I can give way to a merger of Armenian and
Turkish memories, along the model of truth and reconciliation, thereby
allowing the Armenians to return in some ways to the Mediterranean world from
which they were unwillingly and painfully extruded. Until then, past remains
present.
Copyright © Richard G. Hovannisian, April 24,
2001.
Not to be used without express consent of the author
Back
|
|
