In the Lingering Shadow of Denial...

By Tatul Sonentz-Papazian

Since the inconclusive finale of the elaborate, State Department-staged Key West production, where the Bush administration made its foreign policy debut, the Armeno-Azeri negotiations over the destiny of Nagorno Karabagh are in dire need of a new script. Can the same production crew-whose selective memory and assessment of history seem to get fuzzy at the gates of 1915 and freeze at the close of 1921-come up with a sequel worth considering? Only the ghost writers of this well-oiled farce, working secretly in the shadows of lingering denial, might have a clue.

It can be safely assumed that, deprived of memory, articulated human experience would grind down to a grunt. That there would be no identity, no history, no culture, and above all, no language to speak of, since each word or name evokes a particular experience collectively encountered and defined over millennia. Perhaps this is the reason why, throughout history, powers consumed with the paranoid desire to have total control over their fellow men have resorted to rewriting history, often by renaming things that have existed for eons-like calling Ararat Agri Dagh, Artsakh Nagorno Karabagh, and Armenia "Western Azerbaijan."

The boundless arrogance of the mighty leads them to believe that truth, as such, is either irrelevant when in conflict with vested interests, or that it just doesn't exist. Thus, the pursuit of the truth since the dawn of scientific and intellectual endeavor, along with the recording of history, become casualties of an exclusive kind of establishment-the very antithesis of democracy-that persists on remaining accountable only to itself.

The collective memory of the Armenian people spans some three millennia. Almost every known-and not so well known-civilization has, one way or another, left its mark on the soul and soil of this nation. We remember the past through our awareness of shared experience, and face our present and its problems in a manner that stems from who we are, based on the self-image that our collective memory has fashioned for us.

They are legion-these problems that we have to solve now as a nation recently set free, as a people scattered to the four winds and severely battered at home by both man and nature. Most of our present problems trace their origins to "tragic events" of a not-too-distant past, events that we are now being asked politely to cease remembering. A new coterie, made up of "concerned" foreigners and "born-again" Armenians of all shades and colors, stalking our socioeconomic and academic establishments both in Armenia and the Diaspora. This elite of "reasonable," politically correct individuals keeps wagging a disapproving finger at the Armenians for having "too long a memory" for "unpleasant events" better forgotten in the interests of a "normal" present and the promise of a "brighter" future.

To begin with, this appeal puts the entire responsibility of scrubbing clean the telltale blood stains of a monumental crime on the shoulders of the victims. It also tries to conceal the embarrassing and cumbersome reality of the lengthening shadow of a denied Genocide-an outrage that remains alive through stubborn refusal of required restitution, both verbal and material. This "friendly" appeal maneuvers the first genocide of the past century into the realm of unresolved crimes, denying it the stamp of official recognition that would authenticate it as a dark page of world history, written in the blood of the innocent.

Thus, at a very vulnerable time in their long odyssey, the Armenians are being asked to curb their troublesome "long memory" and to forget an event which-according to the official, establishment-supported opinion-never really achieved genocide status in the first place (an opinion shared and vociferously expressed by none other than Israel's Foreign Minister on his recent visit to Turkey!) It seems that, after persistently denying the truth of an agonizing reality which the Armenian nation experienced, this new "concerned" establishment is trying to relegate our people and their continuing trauma to the never-never land of memorials dedicated to an "alleged" event. For a long time we were denied the truth, now we are being robbed of our place in reality itself.

It is doubtful that this time-juggling shell-game, designed to cheat the Armenians out of their legitimate rights backed by solemn promises and betrayed treaties in the aftermath of the Great War, can succeed; it blatantly ignores the present and its realities and insists on dealing with an existing problem as a thing of the past to be dealt with as a fading manifestation of an over traumatized tribal memory.

Once again, let's take a good look at where the Armenians are and why.

Let's look at the historic Armenian homeland: The west is now mostly inhabited by non-Armenians or forcibly turkified and kurdified Armenians; the result of a state-planned ethnic cleansing program which, as we speak, continues to bear its evil fruit by gradually and inexorably assimilating hundreds of thousands of the descendants of the survivors of the Great Crime into the very society and culture that willingly served as executioner of the death sentence of 1915. Should the Armenians be willing to relegate this ongoing ethnic cleansing to the realm of "ancient history"? If they don't, they will be accused of being obsessed by "events that took place in the past century" by the very circle of "friends" who express "concern" for our present difficulties and future survival.

To the east, in Artsakh-historically and culturally Armenian since time immemorial-our people are being asked to submit to the rule of a neighbor whose entire history as a "nation" created 83 years ago, has been mostly devoted to the fabrication of a "national" history in order to accommodate grandiose pan-Turanic designs hatched by their big brothers in Ankara. Should the Armenian people accept suicidal arrangements, proposed to them at this time, in order to bring the peace of the graveyard to Caucasian Armenia? Should they put down their victorious arms and shake the hand of a defeated enemy that still insists on wielding the pan-Turkic scimitar periodically sharpened by global oil cartels? If they don't, they will surely be chastised for emotionally dwelling on past, irrelevant menaces and giving in to atavistic fears generated by the bothersome memory of "unfortunate events" of the past-events that have already robbed us of Ararat, Nakhichevan, Ani, Kars, Ardahan, and the historic heartland of Wilsonian Armenia.

And to the north, Javakhk, with its overwhelmingly Armenian population, was arbitrarily severed from an already land-starved and land-locked Armenian state and trusted to the tender mercies of a chauvinistic Georgian mini-empire intent on assimilating all non-Georgians within its boundaries. Should Armenians ignore the stark ramifications of that situation? If they don't, it isn't hard to imagine the reaction of the self-righteous knights of that holiest of holies-the everlasting Status Quo, this time created by non other than ruthless despots like Joseph Stalin and Kemal Ataturk, whose bankrupt ideologies still cast a long, dark shadow from the Balkans to the Caucasus.

And finally, the Armenian Diaspora, spread from the former Soviet Union to the remotest corners of the earth, now close to five million souls in exile, demoted from legitimate nationhood to tolerated ethnicity, a status that diminishes the chances of survival as a distinct culture.

As we can see, what we are being forced to regard as a past calamity is very much here and now, affecting our lives and threatening our future. What we are being asked to forget is actually the very present that we try to survive in, day in, day out.

It is said that those who forget the calamities of the past are condemned to attend a repeat performance; but what is to be said of those who mistake the present for the past and erase it from their memory, lulled into complacency in the lingering shadow of denial? What kind of future-if any-can be in store for them?