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**Gavur** · 10-14-2005, 01:33 PM

Peter Balakian's The Burning Tigris: The Horrors of Armenian Genocide

By Elsie Denton
Published: Friday, October 14, 2005
Article Tools: Page 1 of 3

In the early years of World War I, another tragedy was taking place far more quietly to the east. Between 1914 and 1916 over a million Armenians were rounded up by Turkish officials and systematically "deported" - in most cases this amounted to murder. Modern-day Turkey currently disputes that the Armenian tragedy should be called genocide, but there is little doubt in the international community that the mass killings of Armenians were in fact systematic genocide.

In his book, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, Colgate's own Professor of English and University Studies, Peter Balakian, brings to life both the horror of the Armenian genocide and America's humanitarian response to the crisis. Time and again he uses powerful eyewitness accounts of the genocide, which, though on a smaller scale, were no less horrendous than the Holocaust.

On the governmental level, the response to this international tragedy was meager. Most politicians, Woodrow Wilson included, found their hands tied by diplomatic complexities. This does not mean that there was no response to the crisis. As Balakian makes very clear over the course of his book, the Armenian genocide was America's first international human-rights effort.

Thousands of people around the country on many levels of society poured their hearts out to the Armenian people. They raised money for relief work and food supplies and helped find homes for the thousands of Armenians fleeing their homeland. "The Armenian genocide is important," said Balakian, "not only because it is one of the earliest examples of modern genocide, but also because it is America's first international humanitarian aid movement. Americans should know about that part of their history."

The Burning Tigris recently gained recognition when it won the prestigious Raphael Lemkin Prize, which is given out biannually to the best scholarly book on the subject of genocide, mass killings and gross human-rights violations. Despite the prestige conferred by the prize, Balakian did not want it to overshadow the real issue: the reality of terrible and continuing genocide throughout the world. "Genocide is a real problem today and it is not going away. Nobody is safe," he said.

Genocides are not dark phantoms locked firmly in our turbulent past. They are real and happening right now in many corners of the world from the Balkans, Rwanda, and East Tambour to the current massacres in the Darfur region of Sudan. "Genocide is a modern problem," says Balakian, "because before the modern era and the evolution of the nation state, governments didn't have the centralized bureaucracy or the technology to systematically target and exterminate ethnic minorities. It isn't just that killing occurs that distinguishes modern genocide, but how fast it occurs."
The problem of genocide gets surprisingly little governmental recognition. Many times the issue is simply ignored by those in power, while people suffer and die. This can often be attributed to two main causes: lack of recognition and information about the existence of a genocide and sticky diplomatic maneuvering by the governments involved.

For instance, the reality of the Armenian genocide is recognized by all Western powers except for the US and UK. These two countries have withheld official recognition of the massacres so that they could maintain their military bases in Turkey.

Even if governments were at all prepared to take action against genocide, there still remains the difficulty of realizing that genocide is taking place. A government engaged in the massacre of its people is unlikely to report its activities to the international community. Also, many areas in the world are so torn by war and strife that it is difficult to distinguish coordinated mass killings from the background level of death and violence. An effective system of detection needs to be created.

This system would need to be an impartial third party. Balakian suggests the creation of "an international organization charged with detection, prevention and intervention in instances of gross violations of human rights. Not only must this type of organization exist to prevent future massacres, but it must also have the power to enforce its edicts in the form of an International Human Rights Army not beholden to any one world power. Though Balakian maintained that "we can't reform or transform the human race," we can still install regulations and checks on their capacity to kill one another.

Such a coherent international effort to confront the issue of genocide is long overdue, particularly with major powers like the US and UK stalling on the issue. "The Bush administration has continually refused to take action on what is happening in Darfur, and refused to embrace the process of the international courts at the Hague," said Balakian. "It is then up to ordinary citizens to make a difference, to take the power into their own hands and to fight for human rights."
Last year, a group of students at Swarthmore College did just that. They started the Genocide Intervention fund to raise money to stop the slaughter of innocent people in Darfur. The group has been immensely successful. So far they have raised $250,000, which they are preparing to donate to the African Union peacekeepers. Their group may have started as a small group of Jewish and Armenian students whose pasts were deeply affected by genocide, but it has grown far larger than that. There are now over 100 colleges participating in the fund and more are getting involved all the time.

Students interested in becoming involved in the Genocide Intervention Fund can contact Balakian via email at [email protected] or to go talk to him during his office hours. More Information is avaibale at www.genocideinterventionfund.org.

Balakian teaches a course called Modern Genocide. It is about being educated about what is going on and doing something about it. "The study of history enables us to behave more ethically in the present. That is why teaching about genocide is so valuable," said Balakian.

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**Gavur** · 11-12-2005, 06:45 PM

The Memory of History:An Interview with Peter Balakian

The Memory of History:
An Interview with Peter Balakian, author of Black Dog of Fate
By Judith Bolton-Fasman

My grandfather, a Jew born in Turkey, never forgot the Armenians. What happened to them so frightened his father that the extended family dispersed. Some, like my grandfather, went west to Cuba. The rest went east to Palestine. Anywhere but Turkey, where as a young boy my grandfather witnessed a Turkish soldier decapitate a young Armenian man.

It was one of the defining moments of my grandfather's life. It did not just strengthen his Jewish identity, it made him a Jew--a Jew who, from that point on, believed that Jews and Armenians shared the same fate.

That memory is eerily familiar to Peter Balakian, who brilliantly charges his luminous memoir Black Dog of Fate (Broadway Books, 289 pp., $13.00) with personal and public histories that include a coming-of-age story illuminated by his ethnic awakening, as well as a family memoir marked by gaps of Armenian silence.

Now a poet and professor of humanities at Colgate University, Balakian looks back to his boyhood in an affluent New Jersey suburb as the time when his Armenian identity took root. Although he didn't realize it, his ethnicity was lovingly cultivated by his grandmother Nafina. Nafina told him stories that puzzled him as a child and haunted him as an adult. "My grandmother," Balakian writes, "was a strange shadow appearing now and then to remind me that there was something else I needed to know. She imploded my present at the strangest moments, without conscious provocation."

The fallout from those implosions was fragments of history and memory, pieces of a larger, unspoken trauma. It also marked the beginning of Balakian's life as a poet. In a recent interview he noted that in both poetry and prose he strives "to transmit the trauma of what I have come to call encoded ways because nobody could speak openly about the Armenian genocide."

That silence was never breached by his mother, a chemist turned fastidious housewife. It was permanently wedged between him and his father, a dedicated physician who once wrote to his son that "time and circumstance have not allowed me to talk about [the fate of our own people]." Among Balakian's aunts were Nona Balakian, the noted New York Times book critic, and Anna Balakian, a scholar of French symbolist poetry and Surrealism. It was a lively, boisterous family in which silence lurked in the background.

Like second generation writers whose parents survived the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide became a focal point in Balakian's life. And like second generation writers who did not experience genocide first hand, it nevertheless became a central experience. He writes, "I hadn't set out to write a book of social value or an "Armenian" book. I had little affection for nationalism, and I had been raised so outside of Armenian ethnic life that my life had become a hunt to find out about the past."

The search began in New Jersey but soon extended back to Turkey, Syria and Armenia. In predominantly Jewish Teaneck, Balakian "spent half of my early childhood wanting to be JewishŠMy Jewish friends had their own language and rituals they carried out each week that were bound up in thousands of years of history and stories and ideas. There was something secret and alluring about it all."

Balakian's early encounters with Jews set him on a trajectory towards his own activism. In his campaign to bring the Armenian genocide to public attention, he has forged alliances with Holocaust and genocide scholars. To that end he co-teaches a course on modern genocide at Colgate, the basis of which is the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. The course, which falls under the rubric of comparative genocide studies, is, according to Balakian, "the only way that these tragic episodes can play out into their fullest meaning."

Does that, however, diminish the unique horror of the Holocaust? For Balakian that is "the wrong question. It goes nowhere, it only leads to building fences and not bridges between events. All of the major scholars of genocide agree that it is destructive to the human enterprise of genocide scholarship for any one genocide victim group to claim that his event is worse or to claim territorial control of the field or to take the moral high ground. I know that scholars are mindful of these things. That's why I'm not worried about it all becoming soup given that we have those cultural, sociological, political, moral definitions to work with. It's important that comparative genocide studies involve the species, and I think the study of genocide is about species preservation, and memory is a moral act."

For Balakian memory is also "a tremor from the unconscious." Among the impressive moments recorded in Black Dog of Fate is the rush of memory Balakian shapes into a poem dedicated to the memory of his grandmother.

But poetry alone cannot set the historical record straight. In recent years Balakian has been actively combating Turkish denials of the Armenian genocide. In writing Black Dog of Fate he has amassed an arsenal of anguished stories and compelling testimonies. There is Dovey, a death march survivor who was beaten and raped by Turks and Kurds. There is his father's great uncle, a prelate in the Armenian church who survived the 1915 genocide of Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul. His compelling eyewitness account helped to acquit an Armenian accused of assassinating one of the Turkish masterminds of that massacre.

Balakian has also organized petitions protesting professorships endowed by the Turkish government at universities such as Princeton and Harvard. Balakian asserts that the sole purpose of the Turkish endowments is to promulgate an insidious version of history in which Armenians are portrayed as an imposing enemy rather than victims of war. "The distinguishing feature of Turkish denial in the Armenian genocide is that it is sponsored by the government rather than by eccentric hate groups of the kind that engage in Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism."

Although Balakian has enlisted the support of an impressive roster of scholars, government officials and others on behalf of the Armenian cause, it is Grandma Nafina who is still his greatest ally. Her courage resonates. While still a refugee from a death march, marooned in Aleppo, Syria, she sued the Turkish government and held it "responsible for the losses and injuries that happened to me, because I am a human being and citizen of U.S.A. (sic), I am under the support of human and international law."

The suit was quashed and the papers buried in a bureau for sixty years until Balakian found them. "My grandmother," he says, was ahead of her time in appealing to the world for human rights. I think it's one of our great triumphs as a culture in the 20th century that in the wake of rising Holocaust discourse, the African-American civil rights movement, feminism and the anti-Vietnam war movement, a powerful forum for human rights was created in the United States. Once that forum existed, Armenian Americans took their place on that platform."

On that platform Armenian-Americans began to assert a collective identity. Before then, an aunt tells Balakian, "we had a dream instead of a country." However, for Balakian there is more. His grandmother comes to personify "history knocking on the door of the heart, and when she came knocking, her message often was opaque, symbolic, evocative."

Her grandson decodes her messages, deciphering history in the immediate and intimate voice of the memoir. Those messages are also imbued with the realization that Grandma Nafina was his "beloved witness, and [he] the receiver of her story." In Black Dog of Fate Peter Balakian recoups Nafina's history for his family and memorializes her with simple and grateful acknowledgment.
Judith Bolton-Fasman is a freelance writer based in Newton, MA. Her column, On The Shelf, appears biweekly on Jewishfamily.com and JBooks.com

http://www.generationj.com/archive/politics/memory.html

**Gavur** · 05-09-2006, 02:08 PM

When the Tigris Burned and the Euphrates Ran Red

A New Book Chronicles America's Response to the Armenian Genocide

The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response
By Peter Balakian
HarperCollins, 475 pages, $26.95.

By James R. Russell
Imagine it is the present day in an alternate universe. A historically progressive American paper publishes a front-page article declaring that the Jews of Europe were killed in World War II because they were agents of a foreign power that did not yet exi›t. A prestigious literary journal sneeringly dismisses the Holocaust as having been the massacre of a few thousand Jews "who had rioted against their Christian fellow citizens" of Germany. Now let us imagine that the same Nazi Germany had been fought not to defeat, but to a draw. The modern state acknowledges that regrettable atrocities were committed on both sides during the Second World War, but venerates the architects of the Final Solution as national heroes. Tourists can visit the ruins of synago›ues and the cultural relics of Eastern European Jews who lived in the region, even as the government destroys the few remaining monuments — the more artistic of which are attributed in guidebooks to the ancestors of the Germans themselves. One U.S. pre›idential candidate after another promises to sign a Congressional bill acknowledging that what happened to the Jews was genocide but nobody ever does, for good relations with Germany come at the price of a courteous silence. There is an Israel, but it is isolated by a Nazi blockade, a third of its population dead of disease and starvation or in emigration in search of work. The Jews themselves have tried in vain to advance recognition of their cause. A very few have resorted to terrorism. Some write b›oks, and the most recent is about how the catastrophe, when it actually did happen, managed to rouse the conscience of the best and the brightest across America, only for everything — historical record meetings, missions, resolutions, headlines, eyewitness reports and published archives — to be consigned to oblivion soon thereafter.

Substitution of Armenians for Jews in the paragraph above returns us to this universe. It was a front-page article in the Forward in 1995 that claimed that Armenians, about 1.5 million of whom were exterminated by the Ottoman Turkish state in 1915, wereü"assisting the Soviet effort to overtake Turkey" — even though it was not until 1920 that the Russian Armenian province, the guberniya of Erevan, was conquered by the Bolsheviks, and two years more until a state called the Soviet Union came into being. The majority of the Armenians who were killed were farmers and craftsmen who knew no foreign language, lived in villages a fortnight from the nearest port or railhead, and rarely traveled even half as far. The second article, by Christopher de Bellaigue, which reduced the whole business to a few thousand Armenians "killed while rioting against their Muslim fellow citizens," was published in the New York Review of Books. The latter is not only an untruth, it is the opposite of the truth. There were two waves of the extermination of the Armenians in Ottoman Turkey, and de Bellaigue's remark seems to refer to the first: In 1895-96, members of the Armenian community of the capital, Constantinople, demonstrated peacefully against the systematic murder and extortion of their compatriots in the Anatolian interior (historical Armenia) by government tax-collectors and Kurdish marauders in the pay of the Ottoman authorities. The protest was suppressed with extreme violence; it was followed by a wave of state-sponsored massacres, called a jihad and led by Muslim mullahs and softas (theological students), in which some 200,000 Armenians were slaughtered. I replied to these lies and defamations in letters to the editors of both periodicals. Neither was published without phone calls, more letters and reminders stretching out over months, in the case of the Review, which cut my original letter down to 700 words — half its original length. And this in a publication that this year devoted thousands of words in its Letters section to arguments about the placement of an umlaut in a German name.

›oday's Armenia, a tiny state in the Transcaucasus, exists only because it was part of Tsarist Russia and then the Soviet Union. In Soviet times, it flourished: The country was cherished and supported by the Diaspora much as Israel was to be by Jews; there was even a kind of "law of return," of which many thousands took advantage. The region today is now independent, and has been under Turkish blockade for over a decade. As a result of severe conditions, many of my colleagues there have died young. The Ottoman leaders who planned and carried out the Armenian genocide are officially celebrated as heroes of the present successor state, which simultaneously denies the genocide took place. Throughout eastern Anatolia, the names of Armenian towns have been changed and priceless monuments of medieval Armenian Christian art had been systematically destroyed by 1997. The official Turkish line is that the Armenians are not there now because they never were; and if there were any, well, then it was they who did the massacring — of their Turkish neighbors. But the Armenians were also dangerous foreign elements, a fifth column, so the genocide was justified. Though it didn't happen. So all the testimony of the survivors, those unlettered, gentle grandmothers wh› never served a foreign state, who never struck a fellow creature in anger, but who worked and cooked and raised children and forged a new life in the factory towns and working-class neighborhoods of New England, is all a carefully corroborated fraud, a conspiracy.

The vast majority of Armenians seek recognition of the genocide through writing and political action (to such an extent that some Armenologists have come to believe that the domination of this single issue has frozen out other aspects of Armenian life and culture). One such writer is Peter Balakian, a poet and professor of English at Colgate University, who, in a memoir titled "Black Dog of Fate" (Basic Books, 1997), chronicled how he gradually became aware of his family's tragic past even as he was growing up in an affluent Tenafly, N.J. home, visiting scholarly aunts on Riverside Drive, going to college, being a jock, getting laid. At the end of the book, Balakian presents a dreamlike poem in which the hike for fixings for the night's dolma with Grandma becomes a kind of death march down the New Jersey Turnpike, with contemporary Newark in flames in the distance: Armenia in 1915 transferred to America. There is a coda to match this nightmare of repetition: It is the waking catharsis of transformation, of Balakian's first participation in a demonstration on Times Square to commemorate an anniversary of the beginning of the genocidal campaign of 1915. The writer, in finding a past that his family's sense of grief and shame had muted, had recovered a part of his own voice, thereby enlarging and sharpening his engagement with the world as he emerges as an activist.

So it may have been inevitable that from this newly enraged conscience on fire, "The Burning Tigris" would flow. It is a mighty work, a slow burn of muted eloquence, dense with scholarship. Balakian's training in English literature and American studies has served him especially well, since a large part of the book is dedicated to the stupendous and nearly universal outpouring of sympathy for the Armenians and condemnation of Ottoman barbarity throughout the nightmare years among American and British writers, intellectuals, clergymen and politicians.

Armenia was a pivotal moral issue in American society, and Balakian makes a compelling argument that the expressed sense of responsibility for a distant, oppressed nation marked the beginning of the modern human rights movement. It was not seen, even at the time, in isolation, nor was advocacy on behalf of the Armenians an expression of Christian chauvinism: The fate of the Armenians was likened repeatedly to that of the Jews enduring the Tsar's pogroms. The ancient Armenian language, with its rich literature dating back to pagan and early Christian times, enjoyed great respect and an intense academic interest nearly inconceivable today: Alice Stone Blackwell's anthology of translations, "Armenian Poems" (Caravan Books, 1978), the "vision of a culture in crisis," was but one of many popular books on Armenia. During World War I, eyewitness reports of the arrests, death marches and mass killings poured in from American diplomats and missionaries, journalists and physicians. When the war ended, President Wilson declared, "Armenia is to be redeemed."

But, as Balakian points out, no amount of agitation or mass of fact could ever materially affect American policy. The White House did not condemn the Ottomans in 1896. The United States did not go to war against Turkey in 1917. After the October Revolution, Russia withdrew from the war and Turkey invaded the Transcaucasus, continuing to massacre the Armenians even after its own capitulation. The surviving sliver of Armenia controlled by Russia was incorporated into the Soviet Union, and President Wilson's postwar plan for an American mandate in Armenia was eventually voted down by an isolationist Senate. Despite continuing public pressure on behalf of the Armenians, American policy in the 1920s was more concerned with achieving a foothold in the Muslim Middle East, and access to oil, than in a nation of which a third were refugees, another third under Soviet rule and the rest extinct.

Balakian's book rehashes the voluminous testimony to the dangerously disfranchised condition of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in the mid- and late-19th century and to the planning, execution and aftermath of the Armenian genocide at the close of that century and in World War I. Much of this material is already well-known from various published memoirs, and from the monographs of eminent historians specializing in the period such as Professors Vahakn Dadrian of SUNY Geneseo and Richard Hovannisian ›f University of California Los Angeles. Balakian's true accomplishment with this book is his demonstration of how visible, vigorous and universal was consciousness of, and support for, the Armenians — so much so that the book often reads like a Who's Who of New England and New York.

This raises in my mind a question that I think historians of Armenia have hitherto failed to pose. The late Edward Said's influential polemic, "Orientalism," presented a picture of the Near East without Ottoman official Islam, imperial power or Armenian massacres — an unreal world in which statements and concerns of scholars of the region would indeed appear biased or imperialistic. Armenian history gives the lie to Said's constructions. In the 19th century, there was no Arab state that played any significant political role in world affairs. The only Muslim state on the world stage was Ottoman Turkey, whose sultan also was the titular head of Sunni Islam and the guardian and ruler of Mecca and Medina (and Jerusalem, too). Turkey was a powerful empire whose borders were close to the heart of Europe. It ruled millions of Christian subjects, all of whom were second-class citizens at best. At worst, they were the victims of frequent extortion and pogroms. Any serious European or American student of Near Eastern affairs could not fail to take note of Turkey's strength as an adversary and of the oppressive and retrograde character of its official religion, Islam. It was natural, moreover, that such students dedicate their expertise, while exercising appropriate professional standards, to the service of their countries' interests. The case of the Armenians, so egregious and so universally known, throws into the sharpest relief this state of affairs.

Mountains covered with forests and orchards, their higher slopes often wreathed in fog, loom above the plain of Issos, where Alexander the Great inflicted a stunning defeat on Darius, above the waters of the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean. One of these is Musa Dagh, the Mountain of Moses. In 1915, the besieged people of five Armenian villages there fought the Turkish soldiers sent to exterminate them, and held them off until a French warship rescued the survivors. They returned after the war and placed a small stone plaque depicting a ship on the summit of Musa Dagh.

›ome of the Armenian citrus farmers are still there. I visited their new church, in the village of Vakifli. One old man led me out of town and showed me where the fighting had taken place, but the plaque was gone: The Turkish authorities destroyed it long ago. The German Jewish writer Franz Werfel published his novel "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" in 1933 and, two years later, Hitler acceded to Turkey's request that the book be banned; the same year, the U.S. State Department, under Turkish pressure, forced MGM to drop its plans to make a movie of the book. Since then, the U.S. government has steadfastly refused to term what happened to the Armenians a genocide. This year, an Armenian nurse at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem who specializes in the rehabilitation of survivors of Palestinian suicide bombings was to receive an award on Israel Independence Day: Under Turkish pressure, the government removed from the program booklet the lines mentioning that her grandparents had been survivors of the Armenian genocide.

It is well-known, of course, that Ottoman Turkey afforded a welcome, by the standards of the age, to the Sephardic Jews fleeing the Inquisition, and in recent years the Turkish Republic has been a crucial friend and military ally of Israel in a very tough neighborhood indeed. But the insistence of the government in Ankara that America and Israel deny the Armenian genocide as the price of continued friendship is too high to pay and in the end probably need not be paid for the alliance to continue. It is, besides, misguided. Denial warps Turkish society itself, as the Turkish scholar Taner Akcam has pointed out: Falsification of history leads to other kinds of repression.

Toward the end of his book, Balakian notes that in 1997 France recognized the Armenian genocide as such. Turkey protested loudly, but soon life went back to normal. The United States, he suggests, is too fearful, and he closes on a generous and optimistic note, citing the brave verses about the Armenian tragedy by the great Turkish poet, Nazim Hikmet.

Unfortunately, I fear Balakian's optimism is misplaced. His petitions and warm appeals to human solidarity have their place, but they are not the lesson of "The Burning Tigris." Since the Tigris burned and the Euphrates ran red, genocide has become a permanent aspect of human affairs. The Armenians, a visible and striving minority with economic and intellectual strength but no military or political power, dehumanized as infidels over a millennium of Muslim oppression and misrule, survived in the end only because the Russian army's nuclear umbrella sheltered (and shelters) Erevan. The Armenians of Karabagh averted a new massacre in the early 1990s because they got arms and learned how to use them. As a Zionist leader told an assembly full of yeshiva kids in Lithuania on the eve of the Holocaust: "Children! I want you to learn. I want you to learn to shoot."

James R. Russell is Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University. His most recent books are "An Armenian Epic: The Heroes of Kasht" and "The Book of Flowers."

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