The Armenian Identity in France in the Grip of Memorialization

Tigran Yegavian

Four generations have succeeded the first wave of refugee survivors of the Genocide who ended up settling along the Paris-Lyon-Marseille axis in the 1920s. Formerly at the forefront of political activism in the Diaspora, the Armenian structures of France are now plagued by a general sclerosis, whose effects became apparent in the mid-1990s.

Losing the Core

Historian Hovann Simonian, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California, has written a thought-provoking article in the July 26 issue of Hetq Online (http://www.hetq.am/), the publication of the Investigative Journalists of Armenia. Simonian argues that the fashionable topic of Turkified, Kurdified, and Islamicized Armenians deals around a few thousand people who may want or may not want to reintegrate into the fold of the Armenian nation. Meantime, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people are on the verge of being lost, because of both diasporan processes and exodus from Armenia over the past two decades. The core of the Armenian is on danger (the demographic decline of Armenia, including Mountainous Gharabagh, is a case in point), while we play around third- or fourth-generation citizens of Turkey, for instance, who have started to realize that they have some kind of Armenian ancestry forcefully imposed on their identity after 1915. The challenge needs strategic thought at the level of leadership. Some passages from Simonian's essay are excerpted below: