Armenian Cause Foundation

(yerakouyn.am) – By Gabriella Gage

The late Josephine Mangasarian’s Diyarbakir Exodus is more than the story of a singular life; the memoir is an extensive family history — the interconnected stories of Mangasarian’s mother’s, father’s and husband’s families — between the years 1895 and 1927. In April, the Mangasarian family published her unfinished memoir.

In 1905, Josephine Mangasarian’s father, Achod Amassian, accepted a transfer from his post at the Diyarbakir telegraph office at the mysterious urging of the telegraph office’s director and relocated his young family there — roughly a 15-day journey. Her family was in Aleppo at the time of the Genocide and deportations and she watched as countless relatives came to Aleppo seeking refuge and rebuilding. At one time, 20 people were living in her family home, many of whom were friends and family who had fled the massacres.

Josephine Mangasarian wrote of how she collected these stories, saying, “The events that I have described in this family memoir are all true. The account of these incidents was related to me by the survivors who took refuge in my family’s home in Aleppo.” Her father’s position at the telegraph office afforded her access to secret messages that he decoded corroborating the mass killings and much of what she learned was confirmed by eyewitness accounts from family members.

The publication of Diyarbakir Exodus itself was a family endeavor. Josephine Mangasarian began the work with three detailed genealogical charts completed in her late 80s. From there, she wrote 270 pages by hand about her family and the events during this time period.

Josephine Mangasarian died in 2002 before she could complete the section on the 35 years of her life spent in Baghdad, Iraq after they left Syria. Her son, John Mangasarian, had already begun aiding his mother in her endeavor by transcribing and typing her handwritten pages. Upon her death, he continued editing and assembling the materials for the book until he passed the torch to his sister-in-law, Claire Mangasarian, in 2010. In 2011, John Mangasarian died and she continued editing and assembling the manuscript. Claire Mangasarian, a painter, had experience assembling memoirs after she had put together and published her own grandfather’s memoir, Farewell Kharpert: The Autobiography of Boghos Jafarian, years prior to her work as editor on the Mangasarian text.

Claire Mangasarian described her mother-in-law as a “very generous and very confident in her own ability,” who had spent years of her life working with charitable organizations in Baghdad. According to Claire Mangasarian, Josephine was known for her “sharp mind” and spoke five languages.

Unlike many memoirs centered on Genocide survival, “hers shows the day-to-day life and situation of a young Armenian woman and the experiences of these families that fled during turbulent times and started to rebuild,” said Claire Mangasarian.

In addition to the three family histories — that of the Amassians, Kurkgys and Mangasarians — Diyarbakir Exodus includes several rare photographs offering a visual perspective into these stories.

Copies of Diyarbakir Exodus are available at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) and the Armenian Library and Museum of America (ALMA), with further copies available upon request.

– See more at: http://www.mirrorspectator.com/2013/08/13/diyarbakir-exodus-chronicles-memories-of-three-families/#sthash.htTSNTWP.dpuf

mirrorspectator.com

(horizonweekly.ca) 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 –

By 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.

The press hailed Tehlirian as a hero. But legally his situation was a disaster. Whereas Pasha never had to face a court, Tehlirian was put on trial as a common murderer. In the event, he was set free, but only because a Berlin court was willing to pretend that he had acted under “psychological compulsion.”

Raphael Lemkin, then a young law student at the University of Lwow, wasn’t satisfied with that subterfuge. He was revolted that somebody who had “upheld the moral order of mankind” should be “classified as insane.” And so Lemkin set out to persuade the world to adopt a law against the kind of “racial or religious murder” that had claimed the lives of Tehlirian’s relatives.

Against the odds, he succeeded.

“Totally Unofficial,” Lemkin’s posthumous autobiography, tells the story of his remarkable achievements. Born in 1900 to Polish-Jewish parents of modest means in a remote corner of Western Ukraine, his rise was meteoric. In short succession, he established himself as a prominent lawyer in Warsaw, escaped the Nazi invasion of Poland, coined the term “genocide,” served as an adviser to the U.S. War Department and became a law professor at Yale.

Thanks to Lemkin’s efforts, on Nov. 9, 1948, the 10th anniversary of Kristallnacht , the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted a “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” Cleaving closely to his proposal, it described genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

The horrors of the Holocaust had helped sway world opinion in favor of Lemkin’s cause. And yet he emphasized that—from Nero’s persecution of the Christians to the Mongols’ massacres of Eastern Europeans in the 13th century—genocide had occurred many times throughout history. It was at his insistence that the U.N.’s definition covered all cases—past, present or future—in which an ethnic or religious group was marked out for destruction.

Thanks to this adaptability, the term has gained lasting political as well as legal relevance. In the decades since Lemkin died of a heart attack in 1959, the term he invented has become the focus of a strange tug of war: Activists hope that the powerful label of genocide might move reluctant publics to stop atrocities; politicians fear that it could force them into costly foreign adventures or preclude negotiated settlements. In cases like Darfur, the question of whether given atrocities amount to “genocide” now plays a key role in determining how the international community will act.

Unfinished at his death, and published now for the first time, Lemkin’s autobiography gives a detailed account of his tireless advocacy. It will prove useful to generations of historians. But, like most autobiographies by historical figures, it also aims to cast its protagonist in a flattering light. By that metric, it is at best a mixed success.

“Totally Unofficial” suffers from big chronological jumps and uneven prose. While Lemkin is candid in parts, he just as frequently veers into the smug or self-righteous. Most of his contemporaries at the U.N. respected him; few found him winning. His autobiography makes it easy to see why.

In recent years, Lemkin has been lionized as a lone fighter who managed to make the world a better place. (The best example is “A Problem From Hell,” the 2002 best seller that launched the career of Samantha Power, President Barack Obama’s nominee for the U.S. ambassadorship to the U.N.) This is very much the reading Lemkin himself encourages, promising to show his readers “how a private individual almost single-handedly can succeed in imposing a moral law on the world.”

The truth is more complicated. Lemkin was clearly a man of rare talents and single-minded devotion. To further the “lifesaving idea” for which, he believed, providence had chosen him as a “messenger boy,” he remained single, gave up a lucrative legal career and literally worked himself to death. Down to the details—like his poverty and his lifelong impatience with small talk—he makes for an excellent secular saint.

And yet his influence may not have been as transformative as he thought. The genocide convention would never have passed if it hadn’t been conformable to the interests of contemporary superpowers. Locked in a battle for ideological supremacy, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had strong reasons of their own to play to world opinion by condemning genocide. That also explains why Lemkin’s star quickly faded when he began to advocate for an international court to prosecute state officials for war crimes. While the great powers were happy to pay lip service to his lofty ideals, they were unwilling to compromise their sovereignty.

In the end, then, Lemkin doesn’t quite fit the role of the extraordinary individual bending history to his will. His life is interesting in an altogether different way: It is emblematic of both the ample promise and the real disappointment of international law.

In Lemkin’s own words, the point of the genocide convention had been nothing less than to be “a starting point for a new conscience.” Over time, he hoped, “a combination of punishment and prevention” would help to avert atrocities. Today, well-funded NGOs raise the alarm as soon as genocide looms in any part of the globe. Under Mr. Obama, the White House has even instituted an Atrocities Prevention Board. (Its first head: Samantha Power.)

But atrocities persist. Plenty of mass murderers remain at large. In recent years, a number of countries have agreed for the International Criminal Court to prosecute their citizens for war crimes, including genocide. But in reality only the genocidal leaders of small powers need to fear justice. Were Tehlirian alive today, he would have as much reason to become a murderer as he did in 1921.

Mr. Mounk’s “Stranger in My Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern Germany” will be published in January.

A version of this article appeared July 24, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Father Of Genocide.

(armenia.com.au) – Dr. Donna-Lee Frieze, a scholar of genocide studies from Deakin University in Australia, recently edited the book “Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin.”
Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” using the Armenian case as an example, is considered one of the great early thinkers in the field of human rights.
In the interview below, Frieze talks about her work in genocide research and the different aspects of the crime of genocide.

Issue 12, Winter 2012

Does Grandfather Turn Over in his Grave, or is Turkey somehow in Part Moving Forward?

(GPN) – The grandson of one of the major executors of the Armenian Genocide Cemal Pasha, Hasan Cemal, has published a book entitled 1915: The Armenian Genocide. “To reject the Genocide means to be a part of the crime against humanity. Moreover, the pain of 1915 is not history, it is an up to date question,” says Cemal.

The author describes how he got to know about the 1915 events. He describes what he thought about the 1915 events and how he came to change his opinion. In one chapter he focuses on one of the major organizers of the genocide, Cemal Pasha, who was his grandfather.

“One interesting piece of information provided in the book has to do with the late İlhan Selçuk, a columnist of the Cumhuriyet daily who has held great value for Kemalists. He has apparently never spoken of his Armenian mother. This is quite a remarkable example of how the Kemalist state has not only tried to cover up historical facts but also induced citizens to hide their ethnic origins.

The First Armenian News and Analyses observes: “Hasan Cemal’s book is significant in various respects. One aspect has to do with him being the grandson of Cemal Paşa, who was one of the leading figures in the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) government that took the decision to forcefully deport nearly the entire Armenian population of the empire, and who was gunned down in revenge by Armenian nationalists in Tbilisi in 1921.”

Speaking at UCLA a year ago, Cemal described his deeply moving 2008 visit to the Armenian Genocide Monument in Yerevan, where he laid three carnations in memory of his close friend, Hrant Dink, the Armenian journalist who was assassinated in Istanbul by a Turkish extremist. While visiting Yerevan, he had a startling encounter with Armen Gevorkyan, the grandson of the man who in 1922 assassinated his grandfather, Cemal Pasha.

Harut Sassounian, President of the United Armenian Fund and publisher of the California Courier reports: “Cemal described the progress made in Turkey during the past three decades on the recognition of the Armenian Genocide, going from total denial to an apology campaign, the restoration of Armenian churches, and holding academic conferences on this topic. He asked Armenians to come to Turkey to participate in the ‘recovery of memory.’ He urged them never to forget the past, without becoming its captives.”

Harut Sassounian concludes: “I found Cemal to be both candid and brave. He could have easily avoided the use of the term Armenian Genocide, maintaining that doing so could land him in jail. However, he made no excuses and used the genocide term several times. Considering his grandfather responsible for ‘the Great Catastrophe,’ he described today’s Turkey as ‘a manic-depressive country.’ “

Today’s Zaman, a Turkish newspaper, wrote about his experience upon returning to Turkey after a trip to the U.S.: “As soon as I stepped into the Istanbul Ataturk Airport, I rushed to a kiosk to buy Turkish newspapers. While I was handing over the money my eye caught a book on display, Hasan Cemal’s latest, “1915, Ermeni Soykırımı” (1915, Armenian Genocide). Seeing it here, on the display table of a kiosk in the domestic terminal of the airport, really surprised me.

“Just five to six years ago, writing an article on the ‘Armenian question’ would cause you to receive hundreds and hundreds of death threats. Today, a book with the title Armenian Genocide is on sale amongst the most popular bestsellers in Turkey. Something is really changing.

“So many paradoxical things happen in this country. Do not believe it if anyone tells you there is either fascism or advanced democracy in Turkey now; things are progressing in a unique way. This is now a country in which there is no taboo subject that you cannot discuss on television or in the press. The so-called Armenian genocide, the Kurdish question, Cyprus and so on are freely discussed in all imaginable ways in Turkey today.

“However, in the same country, if your comments somehow offend our prime minister you may be sued by him or lose your job. Well, as I have said before, we are advancing like Ottoman janissaries, two steps forward and one step back, or sometimes one step forward and two steps back.”

Ahmet Hakan, a columnist of Hurriyet Turkish newspaper, praised Hasan Cemal’s book. The Turkish columnist wrote in Hurriyet that “one of the best ‘elements’ in the book is the fact that it was written by the grandson, who managed to prevail over his own grandfather and condemned the latter’s actions, as well as developed an opinon different from the one of his grandfather.”

Cemal Pasha was killed in Tbilisi in July 1922 by Stepan Dzaghigian, Artashes Gevorgyan and Petros Ter Poghosyan as part of Operation Nemesis for his role in the Armenian Genocide. His remains were brought to Erzerum and buried there.

In Issue 5 of GPN Yair Auron and others wrote about a proposed and partly begun expulsion of Jews from Palestine in 1917 also by Cemal Pasha. Auron spells the name Jemal Pasha. See Special Issue 5, Armenian Genocide and co-Victims:Assyrians, Yezidis, Greeks, http://www.genocidepreventionnow.org/Home/GPNISSUES/SpecialIssue5Winter2011/tabid/145/ctl/DisplayArticle/mid/607/aid/295/Default.aspx

Sources:
Armenpress.am (October 30, 2012). The book about the Armenian Genocide by Hassan Cemal has become a bestseller in Turkey. http://armenpress.am/eng/news/697882/the-book-about-the-armenian-genocide-by-hassan-cemal-has-become-a-bestseller-in-turkey.html

First Armenian News and Analysis (October 30, 2012). Hasan Cemal’s book, titled “1915: Armenian Genocide” published last month, is in the list of bestsellers in Turkey. http://www.1in.am/eng/region_rsociety_4320.html

Cengiz, Orhan Kemal (October 11, 2012). 1915 and terrorists on mountains. Today’s Zaman. http://www.todayszaman.com/columnist-295073-1915-and-terrorists-on-mountains.html

California Courier (September 13, 2012). Genocide mastermind’s grandson issues book on Armenian Genocide.

News.am (September 12, 2012). Cemal Pasha’s grandson publishes a book, 1915 Armenian Genocide. http://news.am/eng/news/120570.html

Armenpress.am (September 11, 2012). Turkish journalist valued the book of Cemal Pasha grandson 1915. Armenian Genocide. http://armenpress.am/eng/news/692850/

Sassounian, Harut (April 5, 2011). Cemal Pasha’s Grandson says genocide, Morgenthau’s great granddaughter doesn’t. http://www.armenianweekly.com/2011/04/05/cemal-pasha/