It’s time the Turks owned up

Dan K. Thomasson: ‘Starving Armenians’ will not be forgotten

There was a time in this country when mothers regularly ordered their children to clean their plates by reminding them of the “poor starving Armenians.” So thoroughly inculcated in my recollection was this admonition that when I first met a person of Armenian descent, I blurted that he couldn’t be Armenian because he wasn’t starving.

The origin of this was of course the elimination of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians, or half of that nation’s population, by the Turks in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1919 by massacre, death marches and starvation. It was a tragedy only exceeded in modern history by the Holocaust and the murder of 2 million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge and it resulted in the coining of the word “genocide” to describe such a horrific event.

The Republic of Turkey has refused to take any responsibility for this policy of destruction or to acknowledge that it was genocidal in nature despite the fact that history and at least 20 other nations have recognized it as such. And most Americans have little understanding of the phrase once used to remind their grandmothers and grandfathers that food and the privilege of eating it is a precious thing that many do not have.

Many Armenians who survived the devastation made it to America and became among this nation’s most prosperous and productive citizens. The noted author William Saroyan and the San Francisco, financier, philanthropist and restaurateur George Mardikian, whose biography, “The Song of America,” became a paean to his adopted country and a bible of inspiration to tens and thousands of immigrants, are among them.

So the resistance of the Turkish government to official recognition of what the rest of the world knows is about to get a jolt from the American descendents of those who expired nearly 100 years ago. It will be in the form of a major new museum smack dab in the middle of Washington in one of the most traveled corridors in the nation’s capitol, 14th Street just above Pennsylvania Avenue where millions of American tourists will be tastefully but firmly educated about man’s inhumanity to man. About a half mile further down the street is the Holocaust Museum where millions have learned those lessons through the suffering of the world’s Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany.

The Armenian Genocide Museum of America will be established in an imposing limestone building that once housed the National Bank of Washington operated by the United Mine Workers of America. The building was erected in 1922, which coincidentally fits the time frame of the events it will memorialize. It has been vacant for a number of years. A modern “tower” addition will be added without disturbing the architectural integrity of the old building. Money and oversight of the project are under the guidance of a committee of distinguished Armenian Americans and directed by Dr. Rouben Adalian of the Armenian National Institute. A date for the restoration and opening is still a ways off.

Those who may think this will be just another memorial and museum in a city where there are already too many are missing the point. Coupled in proximity with the Holocaust Memorial and in a location so close to the White House and Capitol Hill, it will be one of the more significant punctuations to the ideal of human rights for which this country always has stood if not always adhered to in its own dealings with minorities.

As our mothers knew, it is often necessary to remind us that there are those less fortunate than we are and that survival is tenuous, requiring perseverance reached only by digging deep into the spirit and recognizing the lessons of sacrifice and refusing to forget the tragedies of the past. That is pretty heavy stuff, but my mother and millions of others, even in those harshest days of the Great Depression, distilled it into two words, “starving Armenians,” that instantly reminded us of our good fortune and warned us not to waste it.

Perhaps if the rest of the world had paid attention to the implications of Armenia, later genocides would not have occurred. It’s time the Turks owned up.

Scripps News

Dan K. Thomasson is a longtime Washington journalist and former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service.