Flora Munushian Mouradian PHOTO: Courtesy Kay Mouradian 

Witness to genocide

How one survivor of the Armenian Genocide made peace with the past, and why the United States has yet to do likewise

By Jake Armstrong 07/15/2010

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For 400 miles Flora Munushian Mouradian and her family marched, the dead and dying underfoot as nearly an entire nation inched closer to oblivion.

This forced exodus from Turkey was filled with horrors, and by its end the 14-year-old Mouradian would see her share of them — Turkish soldiers trying to abduct her and her sister, the disappearance of her brother at the hands of the same soldiers, the death of her grandmother during the march to Syria, and camps filled with tens of thousands of Armenians on the brink of starvation.

So slim was the chance of survival that Mouradian’s parents chose to abandon her and her sister along the way in an unfamiliar Syrian city, where she would be sold into a harem before stealing away to the United States, while her mother and father were forced to continue on for at least 100 more miles, never knowing what would become of their teenage daughters.

Mouradian lived to tell her story, and it is now one of many being entered into the Congressional Record to propel US leaders over increasingly complicated political obstacles keeping the United States from officially recognizing the Armenian Genocide, in which 1.5 million people perished at the hands of the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923. That recognition could carry enough weight to force reparations from the government in modern-day Turkey — a strategically positioned US ally in a volatile region — and bring some solace to a culture that has long been denied peace, say descendents of Armenian Genocide survivors.
 
“What other country will be the most powerful country to stand up and say this happened and it should be corrected, it should be recognized?” asked Katia Kusherian, a Glendale resident who submitted three stories of her family’s struggle to Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena, who is heading up the project. “Otherwise, the souls of the dead cannot be in peace, and our souls are not in peace.”

‘Pain that never sleeps’
Memories of the death march, which began in 1915 after the reformist and nationalistic Young Turks came to power in the Ottoman Empire, haunted Mouradian from the time she set foot in Boston, a member of the growing Armenian diaspora fleeing persecution that would continue through 1923 under the Young Turks’ equally ethnically exclusive predecessors, the Turkish Nationalists. Bottled for decades, the torment would escape in bursts when Mouradian tried to relate her ordeal to her young daughter, Kay Mouradian.
 
“Hunger is a pain that never sleeps,” Kay Mouradian, now a South Pasadena resident, recalled her mother saying.
 
But it wasn’t until 1984, at the onset of series of cathartic brushes with death, that Flora Mouradian would finally overcome profound feelings of self-pity and grief over losing what could have been some of the most enjoyable years in life. It was then, too, that her daughter saw the value in recording her mother’s horrific experience.
 
At 83 and diagnosed with a terminal heart condition following a heart attack, Flora came to South Pasadena to stay with her daughter to live out what a doctor expected would be her last days. Kay figured those days would be very few; dementia had already made strangers of friends and family in Flora’s mind, and tremors kept her from feeding herself as her health declined in the years prior.
 
But, gradually and inexplicably, Flora became more alert, more active and, as her daughter tells it, the “dark shadow” so much death and suffering created suddenly lifted. The tremors stopped, she rekindled friendships with people she was unable to recognize months earlier and the hardness tragedy had forged in her heart began to soften. “I just can’t explain it. It was as if all the trauma that had fallen upon her was completely released,” Kay said.
 
But health problems landed Flora in the hospital again soon after. One night as she seemed to be leaving the living world, she returned again, this time with a sibylline prophecy. “Do you know why I’m still here?” she asked her daughter. “Because if I died, nobody would know.” Then she told her daughter she would write a book about her life, and Kay set out soon after to trace the desert path her ancestors walked during their forced deportation.
 
One of the stories Flora relayed to her daughter began in Aleppo, Syria, where her mother and father left her and her sister before walking to their likely demise. That’s where the then-14-year-old Flora was sold to a wealthy Turkish man who made her the newest member of his harem. But as she was being carted off, Flora pleaded with a young Armenian boy in the street to tell her sister what had happened to her. The same night, her sister donned Muslim garb and snuck her away from the harem, her daughter said, and a Syrian family then gave her refuge until she left for the United States.
 
‘The bastards!’
Researching for a book about her mother’s struggle, Flora in 1988 was in Aleppo searching for relatives of the family that took in her mother after she escaped the rich man’s harem. Then she learned her mother was back in the hospital for the fourth time. 
When Kay arrived at the hospital, her mother was on her side in bed in the cardiac care unit. “I don’t know why I didn’t die,” her mother whispered.
 
Days later Kay was bewildered to find her mother sitting straight up in the hospital bed bellowing in Turkish, a language she hadn’t used in 50 years, before reverting back to English.
 
“They took my education! They took my family! Do you know what it was like? I went crazy!” Flora shouted. “The bastards!”
With that, the Turks seemed to gain atonement and Flora a peace that lasted until her death in South Pasadena in 1989, her daughter said.
 
Doomed to repeat
Glendale and Pasadena are home to one of the largest Armenian populations in the country, and for years Congressman Schiff, who represents the area, has tried to convince Congress of the need to formally characterize the 1.5 million Armenian deaths as a genocide, as France, Belgium, Russia, Italy, Canada and more than 20 other countries have already done. But legislation that would accomplish that goal has fallen prey to the political process each time it’s been introduced, due in large part to this country’s strong political relationship with Turkey, a key ally in the Middle East that to this day denies the massacres and death marches ever happened.
 
But Schiff is hoping the Turkish government’s recent actions in support of Iran, which he said complicated US diplomatic efforts to curtail Tehran’s nuclear capability, its complicity in the recent fatal Gaza aid flotilla raid and its changing sentiment toward Israel may finally break the hold diplomacy has had on recognizing what most historians consider a crime against humanity.
 
"If we are to assert our moral leadership in the fight for human rights, we cannot pick and choose which genocides to recognize,” Schiff said. “Every year, the Turkish lobby fights recognition with a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort. But Turkey's recent decision to embrace Iran, its attempt to block sanctions against Iran's nuclear program and its defense of the clerical regime's crackdown on its own people should cause members of Congress to question their willingness to back its campaign of genocide denial.”
 
Now, in what he calls an effort to educate his colleagues on the importance of recognizing the genocide, Schiff is making the stories of Flora Mouradian and other survivors part of the national record.
 
But while Ankara’s actions may not be winning any new friends in Congress, Turkey’s position as a US trading partner, ally and NATO member give it a strong enough position to continue denying the genocide despite the recent developments, according to Levon Marashlian, a Glendale Community College history professor who’s written opinion pieces about Armenian-Turkish relations for newspapers here and abroad.
 
“I’m not sure that the real tension that exists now is enough to overcome those other factors,” Marashlian said. “Turkey is still viewed in Washington as a valuable ally, so its image has declined a bit, but it’s nowhere near being an out-and-out break.”
Call for revival Glendale’s Katia Kusherian, who submitted stories on her family’s ouster from the ancient Armenian capital Tigranakert, said the near-perennial defeat of legislation recognizing the genocide has been a constant disappointment to Armenians here who want their adopted country to recognize the atrocities that brought many of them here. “My expectation is justice with a capital J,” Kusherian said. “Armenian people all hope that this time is the time. We have been disappointed year after year. For political reasons we can’t just ignore the justice, ignore the truth. This is a moral thing, and without morals any country will go down.”
 
What exactly would happen if the United States were to recognize the genocide is uncertain, but some hope it would bring about the return of property and territory taken by the Turks. “The dream for a lot of Armenians is that we gain all that territory back and once again call it Armenia, but I doubt that will ever happen,” Kay Mouradian said.
 
But, as a retired educator, Mouradian said she would rather see Turkey sponsor a college fund for Armenian students. “We lost our best and brightest, and it’s taken 96 years for the Armenian intelligentsia to revive,” she said.
 
Mouradian said it could also heal the rift that exists between Turks and Armenians in the Middle East and clear up misconceptions that hinder greater cultural unity. “The ordinary citizen in Turkey has no knowledge of what happened 
at that time. They have an opinion of Armenians as bad people,” she said. 

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Part I

WHAT ABOUT THE TURKISH PAIN AND SUFFERING?

I am one of the eight children of a much ignored and dismissed Balkan-Turkish genocide victim. My father, as a one year-old baby, somehow escaped the horrors of the Balkan wars (1911-13) but without any parents, relations, or even neighbors or acquaintances. All vanished from the face of this earth without a trace. To this day, we don't know where my father's family is buried although we suspect somewhere near the village of Kirlikova, which today sits in northern Greece. In 1912, he was thrown along with thousands of other orphaned Turkish babies into one of the last trains departing from Selanik (Thessaloniki today) to the Ottoman capital of Istanbul. The Ottoman state cared for him until 1923 when the newly-established Turkish republic took over. He graduated from the University of Istanbul in 1939 and served as a forestry engineer for thirty-four years before passing away in 1973.

There are millions of Turks today who have similar stories. Those Turkish refugees who survived massacres in the Balkans, the Aegean Islands, the Crimea, the Caucasus, and elsewhere, were met with yet another cycle of Christian violence in Anatolia at the hands of Greeks in the West and Armenians in the East. Our stories have not been told because of endless Armenian propaganda, such as the above article, which, since 1915, has saturated the West. My pain was never shared. My tears went unnoticed. The story above stirred such deep emotions in me, and a sense of unfairness, bias, and bigotry emanating from it deepened my wound.

posted by FlipSide on 7/15/10 @ 04:20 p.m.

Part II
TURKISH SUFFERING AT THE HANDS OF ARMENIANS DELIBERATELY IGNORED

If one cherishes values like fairness, objectivity, truth, and honesty, then one should use the term “Turkish-Armenian conflict”. Asking one “Do you accept or deny Armenian Genocide” shows deep-routed anti-Turkish bias. The question should be re-phrased “What is your stand on the Turkish-Armenian conflict?”

Turks believe it was an inter communal warfare mostly fought by Turkish and Armenian irregulars, a civil war which is engineered, provoked, and waged by the Armenian revolutionaries, with active support from Russia, England, France, and others, all eyeing the vast territories of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, against a backdrop of a raging world war.

Armenians, on the other hand, totally ignoring Armenian agitation, raids, rebellions, treason, territorial demands, and Turkish victims killed by Armenians, unfairly claim that it was a one way genocide. While some in unsuspecting public may be forgiven for taking the blatant and ceaseless Armenian propaganda at face value and believing Armenian falsifications merely because they are repeated so often, it is difficult and painful for someone like me, the son of Turkish survivors on both maternal and paternal sides.

Those seemingly endless “War years” of 1912-1922 brought wide-spread death and destruction on to all Ottoman citizens. No Turkish family was left touched, mine included. Those nameless, faceless Turkish victims are killed for a second time today with politically motivated and baseless charges of Armenian genocide.

posted by FlipSide on 7/15/10 @ 04:21 p.m.

Part III

ALLEGATIONS OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE ARE RACIST AND DISHONEST HISTORY

They are racist because they ignore the Turkish dead: about 3 million during WWI; more than half a million of them at the hands of Armenian nationalists.

And the allegations of Armenian genocide are dishonest because they simply dismiss
the six T’s of the Turkish-Armenian conflict:

1) TUMULT (as in numerous Armenian armed uprisings between 1882 and 1920)

2) TERRORISM (by well-armed Armenian nationalists and militias victimizing Ottoman-Muslims between 1882-1920)

3) TREASON (Armenians joining the invading enemy armies as early as 1914 and lasting until 1921)

4) TERRITORIAL DEMANDS (where Armenians were a minority, not a majority, attempting to establish Greater Armenia, the would-be first apartheid of the 20th Century with a Christian minority ruling over a Muslim majority )

5) TURKISH SUFFERING AND LOSSES (i.e. those caused by the Armenian nationalists: 524,000 Muslims, mostly Turks, met their tragic end at the hands of Armenian revolutionaries during WWI, per Turkish Historical Society. This figure is not to be confused with about 2.5 million Muslim dead who lost their lives due to non-Armenian causes during WWI. Grand total: more than 3 million, according to Prof. Justin McCarthy.)

6) TERESET (temporary resettlement) triggered by the first five T’s above and amply documented as such; not to be equated to the Armenian misrepresentations as genocide.)

posted by FlipSide on 7/15/10 @ 04:21 p.m.

Part IV

VERDICT WITHOUT DUE PROCESS AMOUNTS TO LYNCHING

Those who take the Armenian “allegations” of genocide at face value seem to also ignore the following:

1- Genocide is a legal, technical term precisely defined by the U.N. 1948 convention (Like all proper laws, it is not retroactive to 1915.)

2- Genocide verdict can only be given by a "competent court" after "due process" where both sides are properly represented and evidence mutually cross examined.

3- For a genocide verdict, the accusers must prove “intent” at a competent court and after due process. This could never be done by the Armenians whose evidence mostly fall into five major categories: hearsay, mis-representations, exaggerations, forgeries, and “other”.

4- Such a "competent court" was never convened in the case of Turkish-Armenian conflict and a genocide verdict does not exist (save a Kangaroo court in occupied Istanbul in 1920 where partisanship, vendettas, and revenge motives left no room for due process.)

5- Genocide claim is political, not historical or factual. It reflects bias against Turks. Therefore, the term genocide must be used with the qualifier "alleged", for scholarly objectivity and truth.

posted by FlipSide on 7/15/10 @ 04:22 p.m.

PART V

HISTORY IS A MATTER OF SCHOLARSHIP, NOT CONSENSUS

History is not a matter of "conviction, consensus, political resolutions, political correctness, or propaganda." History is a matter of research, peer review, thoughtful debate, and honest scholarship. Even historians, by definition, cannot decide on a genocide verdict, which is reserved for a "competent court" with its legal expertise and due process.

POLITICAL LYNCHING OF THE TURKS BY ARMENIANS TODAY
What we witness today amounts to lynching of the Turks by Armenians to satisfy the age old Armenian hate, bias, and bigotry. Values like fairness, presumption of innocence until proven guilty, objectivity, balance, honesty, and freedom of speech are stumped under the fanatic Armenian feet. Unprovoked , unjustified, and unfair defamation of Turkey, one of America's closest allies in the troubled Middle East, in order to appease some nagging Armenian activists runs counter to American interests.

Those who claim genocide verdict today, based on the much discredited Armenian evidence, are actually engaging in "conviction and execution without due process". Last time I looked in the dictionary, that was the definition of “lynching”.

Isn’t it time to stop fighting the First World War dishonestly and give peace a real chance?

(PS: For photos of armed Armenian gangs, both in and out of uniform, and their Turkish victims can be seen here: www.ethocide.com )

posted by FlipSide on 7/15/10 @ 04:22 p.m.

The last 5 posts are the typical Turkish denialist propaganda at it's finest by Kirli-the-Clown. The truth about the Armenian Genocide is that is was centrally planned and implemented by the Turkish government for the sole purpose of theft of property and possessions by liquidating the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian population. This fact was confirmed by Henry Morganthau, our own US Ambassador who witnessed the Genocide first hand. Morganthau also disproved the excuse of "rebellious Armenians" which was another excuse used to liquidate the whole population. Further, the idea that we should all take into account the "Turkish Suffering" as an even trade off, is akin and is as absurd as feeling sorry for the "Nazi suffering" during WW2.

Anyone wanting facts on the Armenian Genocide and not Turkish Propaganda can just wikipedia it at:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide

posted by john1234 on 7/16/10 @ 12:01 p.m.

Well! Everybody's so caught up by the fabled details of their own, special past genocides (millions of my own ancestor's compatriots were intentionally starved to death -- several times, from the 1600s damn-well until the 20th Century -- by the genocidally unacknowledged conduct of England's war criminal royal family) that they (meaning most of us) fail to even recognize the prevailing genocide that America is currently conspiring with Zionland to expand (to the expanding order of hundreds-of-thousands) against Palestine's non-Judaic population.

The word hypocricy cannot even begin to describe what America -- as a taxpaying population -- is sponsoring in what we so sanctimoniously call "The Holy Lands."

http://palestinevideo.blogspot.com/2006/...

DanD

posted by DanD on 7/17/10 @ 03:59 p.m.

Here you see a typical Armenian bigotry. Anyone who disagrees with them is dirt; to be insulted, intimidated, threatedn, and terrorized. Look at the two racist answers above: do you any shred of facts, ideas, or viewpoints there, other than defamation and falsification?

The facts are simple: Turks and Armenian lived in peaceful co-habitation in Anatolia for nearly a millennium. They would continue to do so today if Armenian did not take up arms against their own government, terrorize their Muslim neighbors, join the invading enemy armies, did not level territorial demands, and did not kill half million Muslim, mostly Turks. Turks were only defending their home like any decent citizen anywhere would do when the sanctity of one's home and country is violated.

posted by FlipSide on 7/19/10 @ 05:32 p.m.

Wow, talk about projection ... .

Is it "racist" to merely suggest, acknowledge, or otherwise confirm that Jews -- specifically those functioning within the Zionist culture -- can be war criminals who just casually commit their version of evil against humanity?

Flipside, you sound so much like those Ziobots of the Megaphone ( http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comme... ) brand of shills perpetually running interference for that schitty little war-crimes state operating out of Palestine.

Within the two posts above the last to this one, exactly where are the insults, intimidation, and threats to terrorize? How can anyone be considered as an "anti-Semite" merely because they may have compared a genocide committed against their ancestors with that historically inaccurate, Zio-fable called the Shoa?

Why aren't the war-crooks of Zionland not held criminally responsible for committing the exact same kind and scope of crimes against Palestine's vast majority of non-Jews that the Nazis had assaulted the equally innocent Jews of Germany with?

Why does America's taxpayer consent to the use of THEIR money to support such evil conduct?

Flipside spews his ad-hominem allegations like a porn-star squirting out his whiny essence of intellectual bankruptcy ... flatulence of the brain-case.

See? Calling people names is the cheap way out. Unfortunately for Flipside, it's all he's got.

DanD

posted by DanD on 7/20/10 @ 10:45 p.m.
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