Just a little shy of 33 years ago, I wrote my first piece since moving to the west coast. The title was, if memory serves, “A Successful Genocide,” inspired by an obituary in the LA Times about the last full-blooded Kwaaymii Indian (native to the San Diego, CA area). Of course I drew parallels to our Armenian situation.
A few weeks ago, I saw a similar obituary. Even his tribal belonging was unknown, although one report referred to him as a Tanaru, but this name is just the designation of an indigenous territory in Brazil. “The Man of the Hole” as he was known (because he dug deep holes) was the last survivor of what was already a very small tribe, one report placing their number at only six! His cohort along with others were victims of bloodthirsty, money-grubbing, ranchers and farmers who killed natives to grab land in the 1980s. And there you have it, another successful genocide.
The recentness of this murderous process should serve as a wake-up call to anyone who thinks the era of mass-murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide is over. It should be particularly jarring to any self-respecting Armenian, both on principle and out of self-interest.
Today, we are facing a situation with Azerbaijan’s Turkey-supported ongoing aggression, in all its beastly and gruesome manifestations, where “Armenian Genocide – The Sequel” might be imminent.
Yerevan’s clueless leadership, drunk with Euro-American notions of coexistence and kumbaya, seems to be opening the door to such a horrific development. These people fail to recognize the CONTEXT in which those notions and their very real existence and implementation evolved. Slavery, Jim Crow racism (apartheid?), World Wars I and II, Holocaust and eventually and most importantly, MUTUAL agreement, consensus, among (almost) all countries, interests, parties and groupings of all types that the time for hatred-based policy is past. Armenia (all of it, not just the two current republics) and Armenians are not in that situation, plain and simple.
There isn’t the remotest hint of such consensus with our neighbors. Turks are to our east and west, subtly but intently bent on implementing their pan-Turkic pipe dreams. To the north is multi-ethnic Georgia, a neighbor with huge problems of its own, rendering its motivations and future actions dubious. To the south is the only mostly-real partner, Iran, which also confronts huge international problems. Stateless though they are, the Kurds are also our neighbors, and their attitudes and inclinations toward us are still mixed. Yerevan’s policymakers and leaders cannot afford to think and act as if our country is located where Switzerland is.
I hope to write regularly again.
I hope the era of genocides ends.
I hope Yerevan’s leadership wakes up before it’s too late.
I hope it doesn’t take Armenian Genocide – The Sequel to rouse our eastern homeland dwelling compatriots and alert them to the kind of leadership they should be voting for to preserve the slivers of Armenian land still under our nation’s control.
But then again, maybe genocide, dispersal and leading a scattered national existence for 1,900 years is what it will take for all of us to be on the same page, and only then, millennia later, return fully to all our lands.
Garen Yegparian
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