Armenians around the world are preparing to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. The official day of commemoration is April 24, 2015 as April 24, 1915 was the Kristallnacht of the Armenian Genocide. It was the evening that the Turkish Ottoman Government arrested 250 Armenian artists and leaders, many of whom were subsequently killed. It was also the night that the same government arrested 5,000 migrant male Armenian workers trying to eke out meager livings in Istanbul. These folks all disappeared. After that fateful night, the government systematically killed and deported most of the Armenian population from what is today the Republic of Turkey. It was a brutal and heinous ethnic cleansing of people from their ancestral homelands. It was Genocide.
In the Genocide, the Turks had one criterion which they applied in a most uniform manner. The criterion was simply one question: Are you Armenian? If the answer was yes, you qualified. You qualified to be slaughtered on the spot. You qualified to be slaughtered, only after you were made to watch everyone you knew or loved be killed or burned in their local church. If you were a young girl or boy, you might have been a little luckier and qualified to be adopted by a Turkish family and have your life dramatically changed forever. If you qualified, you got to leave with whatever you could carry on a death march into the Syrian Desert—you got to experience every indignity before starving to death. If you qualified and were luckier, you might have been forced to become a prostitute. If you qualified and were really lucky, you might have escaped with horrible memories of all the above and found yourself in Syria, Europe, the U.S., or South America to create a new life, a new family, and as Saroyan said… a new Armenia.
The only criterion was if you were Armenian. They did not care which political party you belonged to. Were you Hunchak, Tashnag, Ramgavar, or even a Young Turk? It didn’t matter as long as you were Armenian. Were you Catholic, Apostolic, Protestant? It mattered not, as long as you were Armenian. There were families split by politics where one “side” did not acknowledge or speak to the other “side.” Apostolic members of families ignored or disliked Protestant and Catholic branches of their families. Yet, no one escaped this most simple criterion. If you were Armenian, you were subjected to the Genocide.
Since then we, Armenians around the world, have found ways to create rifts, divisions, and schisms between ourselves for, well, any of the above reasons. We create distrust if not hatreds between people from different political parties. We might all be Christians but like Sunnis and Shias, we figure out ways to not associate with people of other Christian denominations. In the U.S., we even have divisions based on which Pope… er… Catholicos of the Apostolic (Orthodox) church we follow.
It is crazy. In this year of commemoration of what our people endured 100 years ago, we should apply the same criterion as the Turks… with, of course, the complete opposite action. Are you Armenian? Excellent. I embrace you my brother… my sister. Let us not look at what makes us different. Let us look at what makes us the same and that quite simply is being Armenian. There is no better year in which to do this than this year. It is a good way to honor our martyrs, ourselves, and our nation. Let’s put all of our differences aside and value that simple criterion that would have qualified us all for the Genocide: being Armenian.
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