From WWI to ISIS, Genocide Casts a Long Shadow

LANCASTER, Pa. (Fandm.edu)—Genocide never fully succeeds in eradicating a people, no matter how much its perpetrators destroy. They always leave behind evidence—documents, memories, and human remains—to inform future generations of their atrocities, Armenian Genocide scholar Khatchig Mouradian said.

Speaking to an engrossed audience at Franklin and Marshall College during the Oct. 1 Common Hour, a community discussion held each Thursday during the academic year, Mouradian talked about the atrocities that occurred 100 years apart in the same region of the world.

“The 21st century is already known as a century of turbulence, as a century of refugees, especially in the Middle East,” said Mouradian, the program coordinator of the Armenian Genocide Program at Rutgers University’s Center for the Study of Genocide, Conflict Resolution, and Human Rights.

Mouradian, who teaches history and sociology at Rutgers, said that to understand what genocide means for the future generations of the victims—those who were not murdered but were exiled from their homelands—and what it means for the perpetrators, who not only murdered but stole from the victims, is almost incomprehensible.

“It’s really difficult to think about the long-term challenges that this particular problem presents,” he said. “Violence, genocide, and mass atrocities…do not end when the killing stops, when the violence stops. [The violence] casts a very long shadow that keeps affecting the victims and the perpetrators, through years and decades, and often through generations.”

Mouradian suggested looking to the past to try to understand today’s atrocities perpetrated by ISIS, the militant Islamic group of Sunnis who have slaughtered Shiites, Kurds, members of other ethnic groups, and westerners in Syria and Iraq.

Specifically, he pointed to the plights of the Armenians in that same region in 1915, when the Ottoman government began the systematic extermination of Armenians from their homeland in what is today the Republic of Turkey.

To distill further the history, to allow the audience to relate to the larger issue of the Armenian Genocide, Mouradian told the story of two young Armenian women, sisters Siphora and Nurista, who were midwives in their hometown from the late 19th century until 1922, when they were exiled.

“The two sisters together delivered most of the babies in that city,” Mouradian said. “One sister, Siphora, delivered 4,271 children.”

The sisters left behind journals, which Mouradian recently obtained, that tell their story. They were exiled to Aleppo, Syria, where ISIS commits atrocities today. When they arrived in Aleppo, the sisters continued their midwifery.

“This was a period when they were surrounded by thousands upon thousands of survivors of the Armenian Genocide, and they were delivering their children,” Mouradian said.

Cecilia Plaza, a junior sociology major, welcomed Mouradian’s discussion as “right down my alley” because her field of study is human rights. “I thought his perspective was really interesting,” Plaza said. “He told stories with photographs and made it personal.”