Semerdjian is a fifth-year history and near eastern studies
student. He can be reached at [email protected].
By Harout Semerdjian
While many UCLA students would have chosen an exotic island in
the Caribbean or a popular European destination to spend their
summer break, I decided to take a rather unusual trip to a region
that more than 700 UCLA students call “home.”
My trip to Eastern Turkey, known to most of us as historic
Armenia, contained great adventure. In the meantime, however, it
was also a trip of unspeakable emotions, considering the genocidal
events that took place on those very lands against my people some
86 years ago.
Beginning in 1915, virtually the entire Armenian population of
Western Armenia, which later became Eastern Turkey, was either
exterminated or exiled from their historical homeland through the
order of the ruling Young Turk party of the Ottoman Turkish Empire.
After inhabiting these lands for 3,000 years, the physical presence
of the Armenians was almost fully wiped out by the time the Turkish
Republic was established in 1923.
 Church of the Redeemer at the medieval Armenian capital
of Ani. It is a reminder of Eastern Turkey’s Armenian past. Today,
all that remains of the region’s Armenian past are a few
decaying churches and fortresses that once prospered as a part of
the Armenian homeland.
Having studied the Armenian tragedy through several courses at
UCLA, and from extensive personal research, I found myself
retracing the steps of those who fell victim to this tragic chapter
in history decades before. I could not stop asking myself and my
liberal Turkish friend rhetorical questions as I traveled through
the region, the answers for which will perhaps never surface.
I did, however, receive some interesting facts and input from
several local Kurdish and Turkish inhabitants. Some of them having
Armenian blood, at least in part, they were well aware of the
horrific events that took place there in the early part of the 20th
Century.
With no reluctance, those who I spoke to openly admitted to the
unfortunate fate of the Armenian people. I learned about where the
Armenians lived, where they prayed, what kind of people they were,
and eventually what happened to them on a first-hand basis. The
feeling was as if the past I had studied so intensely slowly
unfolded before my eyes.
The generosity of these local inhabitants makes a person wonder
how such unspeakable acts could have been committed by members of
their culture against another group of people, their neighbors, and
to such an extensive degree where almost every single soul ““
two million of them ““ was either slaughtered or expelled.
The Ottoman government had employed key tactics, especially
religious ones, to engage the local “backward”
population in the massacres. As one Syrian priest residing in the
city of Diyarbakir recently told a Middle Eastern news agency,
“In that period the Kurds were preaching, “˜Whoever
kills seven Christians will go to heaven.'” Another
method employed was the release of tens of thousands of convicts
and “bloodthirsty criminals” from prisons to conduct
the cold-blooded murders.
When one examines the facts, and in the meantime encounters the
great hospitality and kindness of the local people, he will be
convinced that it is the government and not the people that has to
find acute answers and make amends for this unpunished crime
against humanity.
Today’s government, Turkey, is the successor state to the
Ottoman empire. This is the same government that has engaged in a
continuous denial of the Armenian Holocaust for some 80 years. It
is high time that the Turkish government came up with a solution to
officially acknowledge this great crime, just as Germany did for
the Jewish Holocaust, and set the cornerstone for a bright future
between the Turkish and Armenian peoples.