Armenians Know Face of Genocide
In 1915, 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of the Turks, a massacre its survivors say is eerily similar to the ethnic cleansing taking place in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo.
4.26.99 00:09:42
By LYNN ARDITI Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- For seven days, Nevart Aramian survived by hiding with her mother and aunt inside a dark closet.
She was just a girl then, maybe 7 or 8, when her tiny Armenian village in Turkey was destroyed and most of her family members killed. Among them were her three uncles and a cousin.
"They hit them,'' recalled the 89-year-old woman, lifting a gnarled hand to the back of her neck to show where the rifles struck. ``They chained them and they throw them in the river...''
Yesterday, Armenians from around Rhode Island, along with a handful of dignitaries, gathered at the Armenian Martyrs' Memorial monument at the North Burial Ground to commemorate the 84th anniversary of the slaughter of some 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children by the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
It was a ceremony made more poignant because it brought to mind the atrocities recounted in news reports from Kosovo, Yugoslavia.
Armenian activists say the genocide began in 1915, with the torture and killing of intellectuals, writers and civic and political leaders. Men were herded away in caravans and slaughtered; women and children were left to die. It didn't end until 1923.
Although the U.S. government has never officially termed the atrocities in Armenia "genocide,'' almost every speaker yesterday -- including U.S. Rep. Robert A. Weygand, U.S. Sen. Jack Reed and Providence Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. -- called it that.
"We are witnessing at the end of this century another ethnic genocide,'' Sen. Reed said. The legacy of Armenia, he said, is "that people no longer turn away. They now try to help.''
Today, an estimated 15,000 to 18,000 Armenians live in Rhode Island, many of them descendants of those who died in the century's first ethnic genocide, said Joyce Yeremian, a member of the Armenian Martyrs' Memorial Committee.
"Most of us has had someone in our family massacred in the genocide,'' said Yeremian, who was among those responsible for getting the monument built in 1977. "Our families were marched out [of their homes] at gunpoint and everything was taken from them, the same way it's happening today in Kosovo.''
Among the family members of the survivors of the Armenian massacres is the daughter of Nevart Aramian, the elderly woman who as a child hid in a closet with her mother.
Martha Aramian's eyes filled with tears yesterday as she watched her mother struggle to speak about the horrors she witnessed. When her mother broke down and could no longer talk, Martha Aramian, 65, helped to fill in the details.
After emerging from the closet where they were hiding from the Turks, Martha Aramian said, her mother and grandmother walked for days with scores of other refugees. They survived by eating grass and berries they picked along the way.
It wasn't until her mother was 17 that she escaped to France, where she lived before coming to Providence.
Today, her mother is frail, cannot walk and has trouble speaking. But her mind remains sharp, her daughter says. Every day her mother watches the news on television about the killings in Yugoslavia.
Asked what she thinks about the events there, the elderly Aramian replied, "Terrible . . . same thing . . . ''
Does she think the United States is doing enough? Should we do more -- say, send in ground forces?
The woman shakes her head, no.
"Shouldn't bomb,'' she said. Bombs and guns kill innocent villagers, too. "They should . . . feed them.'' Add on this topic
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