Marchers Remind World of 1915 Armenian Genocide

They had marched for 14 days and 175 miles through the farm fields of California’s middle when they reached this quaint little town on a bend of a river.

They passed through Lockeford on Friday the same way they had passed through other towns along the way: a single line of 14 young Armenians and one sturdy grandmother, walking in silence and carrying a big, yellow banner that drew mostly puzzled looks from farmers and field hands alike: “Turkey tell the Truth. Acknowledge the Armenian Genocide.”

Their trek from Fresno to Sacramento to honor the 1.5 million Armenians killed by Ottoman Turkey 90 years ago had reached the last stretch of road that would take them to the steps of the state Capitol on Thursday.

There, hundreds of Armenians from throughout California are scheduled to gather with state leaders to commemorate the victims of what is widely considered the 20th century’s first genocide.

Caspar Jivalagian, an 18-year-old from Pasadena, said he was marching to expose a lie.

Unlike Germany and the Holocaust, he said, modern-day Turkey continues to conduct a vigorous campaign of denial. And the U.S. government, despite its own voluminous records of a planned and systematic extermination of Armenians, has tried not to offend its strategic ally, refusing to publicly call the massacres “genocide.”

“Turkey and my own government are telling me that everything I have heard is a lie,” Jivalagian said.

His march -- 19 days and 215 miles long -- in no way re-creates the march his great-grandparents took in the summer of 1915. They were herded from their homes in what is now eastern Turkey and forced to walk hundreds of miles without food or water to death camps in Syria.

That march, he said, drove the world’s oldest Christian nation from its homeland of 2,500 years. That march, in the words of Henry Morgenthau, U.S. ambassador to Turkey at the time, became a pretext for a “cold-blooded, calculating” slaughter of a nation.

And yet each day of the trek, Jivalagian said, he has tried to imagine the footsteps of his forebears.

“After you’ve been walking all day, you tend to zone out and forget where you are,” he said. “You concentrate on the footsteps of the person in front of you, and pretty soon you can almost feel like you’re walking in the shoes of your ancestors.”

For Sanan Shirinian, a 16-year-old from La Crescenta, every tie to that brutal past is gone. A snippet of story passed down from her great-grandmother, who died three years ago, is all she has as a memory. But to be young and Armenian, she said, is to grow up sensing a deep cultural wound that has never been allowed to heal.

“The genocide is why I am even in America. It changed everything about our lives,” she said. “So I can’t just sit back and watch denial happen. I won’t say it has made us bitter, but it has caused an anger in us that won’t go away.”

Each spring, the Armenian American community -- an estimated 300,000 strong in Southern California -- struggles to find a way to remind the world of a crime that Holocaust scholars consider a precursor to the annihilation of the Jews.

On the eve of invading Poland, scholars point out, Adolf Hitler told his commanding officers not to worry about any backlash from world opinion. The memory of such crimes didn’t even last 20 years. “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Hitler is quoted as saying.

Today’s Turkish government, fearing Armenian claims for land and money, argues that any atrocities were the unfortunate miscalculations of World War I, not genocide.

But in recent months, as Turkey has continued to make its case for membership in the European Union, some leading Turks have called on their country to come clean about the past. Turkey’s most celebrated novelist, Orhan Pamuk, told a Swiss audience last month that the massacres of Armenians were, indeed, a historical fact.

This spring, owing to the symbolism of a 90th anniversary, the Armenian American community has stepped up its fight for recognition, leaders say.

Armenian groups are lobbying even harder than usual to persuade a reluctant U.S. Congress to pass a resolution commemorating April 24 as a day of remembrance for the Armenian genocide. The Armenia Tree Project is raising money to plant 90,000 trees in Armenia, a tiny, mountainous country that represents but a sliver of the old homeland.

In Los Angeles, where Armenians protesting the genocide have frequently staged demonstrations outside the Turkish consulate, students at Armenian schools are wearing the same T-shirts the entire month. They read “90 Years of Denial” on the front and “Remember the Armenian Genocide” on the back.

And then there are the marchers who decided to unplug from their computers, if not their cellphones, and take a walk up the Central Valley.

For 18 days, through rain and sun, past alfalfa fields, dairy farms and walnut groves, they have marched with blisters and sore ankles. After logging 12 to 15 miles a day, they have found sleep in homes, churches and community centers opened to them by strangers.

Whenever they thought of quitting, the 14 young men and women from Los Angeles and Fresno simply looked to 63-year-old Zabel Ekmekjian, who was marching right behind them.

She had come to the U.S. from Syria in 1978 with her husband and four children.

She said her father was just a child when the Turks came to his village and killed his parents and dozens of other family members. He survived the march only to see one brother shot and two sisters stolen by a Turkish family and converted to Islam.

“I am walking for recognition and for justice,” she said. “The kids say I motivate them, but it is the other way around. I will go all the way because of them.”

At times, the Armenian marchers have looked out of place. Some townsfolk along the way have wondered: “Who were the Armenians?” “Why would Turkey kill more than 1 million of them in 1915?” “Why did it still matter?”

When they hit the town of Galt on the 16th day, a man and his son in a red pickup met them at the side of the road.

“He reached out of the window with something in his hand,” said lead marcher Serouj Aprahamian, 23, a graduate of Cal Poly Pomona. “It was the Armenian flag. I asked him, ‘Are you Armenian?’ and he said, ‘No.’ And then he handed it over to me.

“It was such an unbelievable gesture, and I didn’t know what to say. I said thanks and gave him one of our black beanies trimmed in the red, blue and orange of the Armenian flag. I said, ‘This is a gift from us to you.’ And he drove off.”

Three days shy of their destination, they kept walking.