Fall 2004
In Their Own Words
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Documenting Denial
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Photograph
courtesy of Richard Hovannisian |
Professor
Richard Hovannisian with tapes of Armenian-survivor testimony
being prepared for transcription |
THOUGH TURKEY for more than 85 years has rejected
the claims of Armenians that 1.5 million of their people were
slaughtered by the Ottoman Empire during World War I — the
first example of genocide in the 20th century — Richard
Hovannisian Ph.D. ’66 parries such denials with the voices
of the victims.
Over the past 40 years, UCLA’s holder of the Armenian
Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Armenian History and his
students have collected close to 800 oral histories. Other Armenian
groups have undertaken their own oral-history projects, but Hovannisian
asserts that his is the largest. “We sort of started about
the same time,” he says. “We all had a sense that
the last generation of Armenians to be born in the Ottoman Empire
was fast disappearing.”
As that generation died off, they were taking with them not
only eyewitness accounts of wartime atrocities, but also the collective
memory of the customs and ideals of a civilization 3,000 years
old. “What was being lost was enormous,” says Hovannisian.
The focus of his collection, however, remains the murder, forced
deportation and death by starvation of Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire in 1915 and 1916. Hovannisian has amassed what he considers
incontrovertible proof of the event, including evidence of premeditation
in the similar accounts of Turkish actions by survivors from different
regions. Hovannisian says the survivors describe a similar sequence
of events: first, a government order to disarm and turn in any
weapons; arrests of priests and community leaders; a relocation
order, to be carried out within two or three days; before relocation,
adult males are killed outright; women and children march for
weeks, during which time more than half die; the survivors find
they have been relocated to the open desert; a majority die there,
though some are taken in by Bedouin tribes or find some other
way to survive.
Despite widespread media coverage and an international outcry,
the genocide was quickly forgotten — so quickly, that Hitler
used it to convince his ministers that no one would remember the
Nazis’ extermination campaign against European Jews. Hovannisian
and his students are now focusing on the children of survivors.
Almost all the interviews have been converted to digital form
and stored on a hard drive. About a quarter to date have been
transcribed into Armenian. Hovannisian hopes to obtain funding
to finish the transcriptions and translate them into English.
—C.M.
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