‘Agn Is In Ruins, The Nightingale Doesn’t Sing’: Songs of Pain of Genocide in Turkey

Harry A. Kezelian III

 

“That generation…”

Stephan Karougian, the 80-something male soloist of St. John’s Armenian Church Komitas Choir in Detroit, was telling me about his parents, as I sat in his living room, interviewing him about his life in Armenian music. He shook his head and sighed. He didn’t really expound upon those two words, but his tone of voice was enough to tell the story.

Karougian’s father had been born in Pingyan, a village in the Province of Sivas in Ottoman Turkey, very close to the large town of Agn in Harput province (the Ottoman borders divided up the Armenian villages of that region, which also included Armdan and Divrig). He told me that when his father would gather with friends, they would sing a song in Turkish beginning with the words “Egin de veran olmush” (“Agn is in ruins”). It was a very sad song about their region. But when Karougian first told me about this song, he didn’t say that it was a song about the Genocide, he simply told me that they sang it.

Armenian genocide: How Valley prosecutor missed his chance to be ‘immortal symbol of justice’

 David Minier

Twice each year, my thoughts turn to the Armenian Genocide. On April 24, the anniversary date of the 1915 massacres orchestrated by the Turkish government. And on Jan. 27, when 45 years ago Gourgen Yanikian assassinated two Turkish diplomats in Santa Barbara to avenge the genocide.

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article196785924.html#storylink=cpy

Yanikian, age 78 and a former Fresno resident, was charged with murder, and I was his prosecutor.

The aging Armenian had lured the diplomats to a cottage at Santa Barbara’s exclusive Biltmore Hotel, promising gifts of art treasures for their government. Instead, he pulled a Luger pistol from a hollowed out book and emptied it at them. He then called the reception desk, announced he had killed “two evils,” and sat calmly on the patio awaiting arrest.

My conversation with the son of Soghomon Tehlirian, the man who assassinated the organiser of the Armenian genocide

Robert Fisk

Soghomon Tehlirian Junior doesn’t have much time for those who want the Armenian genocide recognized by the world. “The Armenians keep trying to tip things out of the grave,” he says. “It’s three generations ago. It’s history. Everyone killed a lot of people. You can’t go back to the Spanish inquisition and the Roman Empire and bring it back. That’s not me. I never remember my father saying one bad word about the Turks. He just wanted to live his life in peace.”

I listen to the brisk, youthful voice of this 86-year-old Armenian talking to me down the phone from America and I have to shake my head to remember that his father, Soghomon Tehlirian, was the assassin who shot dead Mehmet Talaat Pasha, the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire and organizer of the 1915 genocide of one and a half million Christian Armenians.

"Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide"

Rupen Janbazian

 

Over the years, the story of Operation Nemesis, the clandestine plot to assassinate the chief architects of the Armenian Genocide, had been told with a certain cloud of mystery and ambiguity hanging over it. While the topic had been discussed and written about in parts, authors were generally hesitant to present an all-encompassing understanding of the often-ignored, true story of Nemesis. Moreover, nearly a century after the project was carried out, the topic continues to remain somewhat taboo in the Armenian community.

Eric Bogosian on Writing ‘Operation Nemesis’ and How the Project ‘Radicalized’ and Changed Him

Aram Kouyoumdjian

 

Eric Bogosian’s new book is not a novel or a script or a volume of monologues – the genres for which he is best known. In a surprising departure, Bogosian has written a non-fiction work entitled “Operation Nemesis,” which is about “the assassination plot that avenged the Armenian Genocide,” as its subtitle explains. The book, set for publication on April 21 (*), examines the coordinated Armenian campaign in the early 1920s to assassinate the leading perpetrators of the Genocide in Constantinople (Istanbul), in Tbilisi, and in European cities where they had sought refuge. A significant part of the book is devoted to the assassination of Talat Pasha – one of the Genocide’s key architects – in Berlin by a young Armenian named Soghomon Tehlirian and to the ensuing trial which captured international attention and, stunningly, resulted in Tehlirian’s acquittal.

Sacred Justice

Marian Mesrobian Mac Curdy

 

For the first six years of my life, my parents, brother and I lived in my maternal grandparents’ house in Syracuse, N.Y. The six of us were crammed into a small early 20^th-century frame house, with a front porch and tiny back study that served as my bedroom; an enticingly flat roof outside its window overlooked our grape arbor, fruit trees, and strawberry patch where my grandmother caught the thieving bunny she spanked and sent on its way. Our home welcomed many a visiting dignitary. As a small child I sat on the lap of family friend, Hamo Paraghamian, a huge man with a heart to match. My small hands carried a bowl of yogurt and garlic for General Dro sitting in the blue chair in the corner of our living room, who thanked me by intoning in his gruff voice, “This is food for the gods.”

Aaron Sachaklian (in Armenian, Aharon), my grandfather, spent most of his days in the red leather chair near the wooden radio he listened to every day, silently smoking his Camels with shaking fingers, perhaps from undiagnosed Parkinson’s that would, years later, steal my mother’s smile and cause her shuffling gait. But when I was three, four, five, this quiet man who wore a three-piece suit nearly every day of his life, who had private sessions with visiting community leaders and battle heroes, bounced me on his foreleg, carried me through the doorways on his shoulders like a queen, and took me outside at dusk to survey the peach, pear, and apple trees beyond our back door. When my grandmother Eliza and I made our weekly trip to Abajian Cleaners three blocks down on South Avenue, I was the one to carry his wool coat, hugging it to my chest, saying, “I love my medz-hairig [grandfather]. I wish he would live forever.”

Code Name “Haiko”: Discovering the Last Unknown Participant in Talaat Pasha’s Liquidation

The Zohrab Center in New York inaugurates its Spring Armenian enrichment series on Thursday, February 5 with a real-life detective story by Dr. Vartan Matiossian.
In 1921 the mastermind of the Armenian Genocide, Talaat Pasha, was killed in a Berlin street by a young avenger, Soghomon Tehlirian. This was the final act of Operation Nemesis, planned and partially carried out between 1919 and 1922 to fulfill the justice to the Armenian people that many believed had been denied them by tribunals.

Vartan Matiossian to Speak on Previously Unknown Participant in Operation Nemesis

Dr. Vartan Matiossian will give a lecture entitled “Code Name Haiko: Discovering the Last Unknown Participant in Talaat Pasha’s Liquidation,” on Thursday, June 5, 2014, at 7:30 p.m., at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) Center, 395 Concord Ave., Belmont, MA.

Raphael Lemkin and Samantha Power's Problem from Hell

Gabriel Sanders

Ten years ago, Samantha Power won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “A Problem From Hell,” a history of American inaction in the face of genocide. As she awaits Senate confirmation to be the country’s next ambassador to the United Nations (*), the book offers a glimpse into Power’s political philosophy — and a sense of whom she might want to emulate as America’s voice at the world body.             

The Father of Genocide

Outraged by the Ottomans' massacres of Armenians,

a young Polish lawyer pushed to have

the crime of genocide enshrined in law

 

 

Yascha Mounk

 

During World War I, Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian civilian, looked on helplessly as Ottoman troops shot his mother, raped his sisters and hacked his brother to death. Six years later, on a Berlin street, Tehlirian approached Talaat Pasha, a grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire who had coordinated the killing of Armenians. "This is for my mother," he told Pasha as he shot him dead.

Nuevos triunfos de la ética

Osvaldo Bayer

 

. . . Otro triunfo de la verdad histórica es la segunda edición en la Argentina del libro Un proceso histórico, que trata del juicio que se hizo en Berlín en 1921 contra el matador del genocida turco Talaat Pashá, el joven armenio Soghomón Tehlirián. Este estudiante se defendió ante el tribunal alemán sosteniendo el “derecho de matar al tirano”. El genocida había sido el gobernante que dejó que los turcos cometieran uno de los crímenes más horrendos de la humanidad: autores de la muerte de miles y miles de hombres, mujeres y niños de la minoría armenia. Se calcula el número de muertos en un millón y medio. El tribunal alemán, luego de hacer un intenso análisis de testimonios y documentación, resolvió absolver al joven estudiante de culpa y cargo. Un veredicto que causó conmoción en el mundo entero. En el libro que acaba de salir se trae también la opinión de jueces argentinos: del miembro de la Corte Suprema, Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni; del juez de la Cámara Federal de Apelaciones La Plata, Leopoldo Schiffrin; del juez federal Daniel Rafecas y del juez federal Arnaldo H. Corazza.

Talaat Pashá en los lugares públicos de Turquía: la lista completa

Vartán Matiossián

Como es habitual, la prensa gráfica y los medios digitales en Turquía estuvieron plagados de artículos relacionados con el Genocidio Armenio en los días previos al 24 de abril. Un extenso artículo aparecido en el sitio web "Aykırı  Doğrular" (www.aykiridogrular.com) se refirió a Mehmet Talaat Pashá,  ministro del Interior del Imperio Otomano y arquitecto del genocidio.

Sí, matar al tirano

Nunca hubiera imaginado que el destino me llevara a ser testigo de un hecho pleno de las fantasías que siempre contiene la realidad humana. En Bad Bramstedt, una pequeña ciudad del norte alemán, se llevó a cabo un acto de homenaje a Kurt Gustav Wilckens. Sí, nada menos. ¿Quién fue Kurt Gustav Wilckens? El obrero alemán que, en enero de 1923, mató al teniente coronel Varela, en Palermo, frente a los regimientos 1 y 2 de Infantería. El teniente coronel Varela había sido el ejecutor del fusilamiento de centenares de peones patagónicos en las huelgas rurales de 1921-22, durante el gobierno de Hipólito Yrigoyen.