{"id":303,"date":"2015-01-05T12:29:38","date_gmt":"2015-01-05T10:29:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atcmiddleeast.wordpress.com\/?p=303"},"modified":"2015-01-05T12:29:38","modified_gmt":"2015-01-05T10:29:38","slug":"atoning-for-a-genocide-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/derechavraham.org\/atoning-for-a-genocide-the-new-yorker\/","title":{"rendered":"Atoning for a Genocide (The New Yorker)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Raffi Khatchadourian writes on how a family survives the Armenian genocide<\/a> and its long aftermath as well as how the Kurds helped perpetuate the killing only to find themselves also under attack. An excerpt:<\/p>\n

My grandfather spent most of his life in Diyarbakir, a garrison town in southeastern Turkey. Magnificent old walls surround the city; built of black volcanic rock, they were begun by the Romans and then added to by Arabs and Ottomans. In 1915, the Ottomans turned the city, the surrounding province, and much of modern-day Turkey into a killing field, in a campaign of massacres and forced expulsions that came to be known as the Armenian genocide. The plan was to eradicate the empire\u2019s Armenians\u2014\u201ca deadly illness whose cure called for grim measures\u201d\u2014and it was largely successful. The Ottomans killed more than a million people, but, somehow, not my grandfather.<\/p>\n

He guided his family safely through the tumult, and he remained in the city long afterward, enduring the decades of subtler persecution that followed. There was no real reckoning for the perpetrators of the genocide; many of them helped build the modern Turkish republic, founded in 1923. The violence may have been over, but its animating ideology persisted. As \u0130smet \u0130n\u00f6n\u00fc, the President of Turkey from 1938 to 1950, said, \u201cOur duty is to make Turks out of all the non-Turks within the Turkish country, no matter what. We will cut out and throw away any element that will oppose Turks and Turkishness.\u201d The state cut away Armenians from its history. At the ruins of Ani, an ancient Armenian city near the country\u2019s northeastern border, there was no mention of who built or inhabited it. In Istanbul, no mention of who designed the Dolmabah\u00e7e Palace, once home to sultans. This policy of erasure was called \u201cTurkification,\u201d and its reach extended to geography: my grandfather\u2019s birthplace, known since the days of Timur as Jabakhchour (\u201cdiffuse water\u201d), was renamed Bing\u00f6l (\u201ca thousand lakes\u201d). By a law enacted in 1934, his surname, Khatchadourian (\u201cgiven by the cross\u201d), was changed to \u00d6zakdemir (\u201cpure white iron\u201d).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Raffi Khatchadourian writes on how a family survives the Armenian genocide and its long aftermath as well as how the Kurds helped perpetuate the killing only to find themselves also under attack. An excerpt: My grandfather spent most of his life in Diyarbakir, a garrison town in southeastern Turkey. Magnificent old walls surround the city; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1689,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7],"tags":[20,21,70,107],"class_list":{"0":"post-303","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-link","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-articles","8":"category-resources","9":"tag-armenian-genocide","10":"tag-armenians","11":"tag-kurds","12":"tag-turkey","13":"post_format-post-format-link"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/derechavraham.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/ATC-logo-featured.jpg?fit=1400%2C700&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paVWuv-4T","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/derechavraham.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/derechavraham.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/derechavraham.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derechavraham.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derechavraham.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/derechavraham.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derechavraham.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/derechavraham.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derechavraham.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derechavraham.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}