Chris Bohjalian to Speak at Columbia University

Dear Taleen

Thank you for such an informative article. I’d just like to point out that it’s a misconception to think that the stories of the Armenian Genocide were only told amongst the Armenians. During the First World War and its aftermath, Americans were very familiar with what was going on. In fact, the stories of a number of Armenian survivors of the Genocide were widely publicised. They include Aurora Mardiganian and others such as Azadouhi (Zade) and Arshalouys. In fact, at one point in the 1920s, it was stated that almost every school aged child in America had somehow contributed towards the collections of the Near East Relief organisation. What Chris Bohjalian is doing is simply “reclaiming” a forgotten part of American social history. We need to remind Americans of this fact.

I have just finished reading ‘The Sandcastle Girls’ and I absolutely loved the book. It was a great read.
However, there was a sentence in the novel that left me in shock. I kept reading it over and over again just to make sure I had read it correctly. I definetly had, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I truly wonder if anybody else who had read the novel realised the enormous mistake that Mr Bohjalian had made. Namely, the sentence that I still can’t get out of my head goes like this: ”There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Serbs and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?” Now how on earth is it possible that the writer put the word ‘Serbs’ alongside all the other mentioned nationalities in that particular sentence? Did he not do his homework? Did he not hear of the Bosnian genocide? Genocide was NOT done to the Serbs. They were the ones doing the genocide to the Bosnian people in the civil war that occurred in the first half of the nineties in former Yugoslavia. It was the Serbs who systematically killed, slaughtered, bombed, burned and starved the poor BOSNIANS. They wanted to annihilate the whole nation just because they were muslim. It was the Serbs who invented the ‘rape camps’ in modern war fare, where hundreds and perhaps thousands of Bosnian women were raped and then kept alive through pregnancy so as that they could give birth to little Serbs. They wanted the next generation of Serbs coming out of Bosnian wombs. How sick is that?
Do you get my point?!?!
What a huge mistake Mr Bohjalian has made. I hope he reads this, though I doubt it. I would love to hear his comment on this sentence. I think he owes the Bosnian people an apology. A big one too.
In the end, I would like to point out that I am not Bosnian nor do I have any Bosnian family connections, however I’m very well aquainted with the whole former Yugoslav war for I live in these parts and have lived through the war, and not being Bosnian but feeling so offended by what the writer has written, just goes to show what a colossal error he has made.