And Then There Was One

BY GAREN YEGPARIAN

The title is my first thought when I heard the message from my mother, left this morning, about the death of one of my grand-aunts. Those morning calls always seem to bear ill tidings.

Now, only one of the seven sisters (and one infant boy who died during the Genocide) remains. This is it for me, covering both sides of my family.

Meanwhile, the bastards in Ankara continue their smug denialism. No doubt they snicker over sentimental-seeming articles such as this one. No doubt their calculus is to “wait it out” so that with the passing of all the survivors (how many are left now? a few hundred, or is it time to start counting by dozens?) our resolve to regain what’s rightfully ours will diminish.

The people enjoying the riches stolen from all of us rendered the lives of millions, across four generations, abnormal— a tale of repeated dispersal, loss, rebuilding…

In my Apposs Auntie’s case, it was doubly Turkish induced. You see her husband, born in Adana, had ended up in Cyprus, another land infested by Turkish invaders/expansionists.

And still, the progeny of the murderers and looters and Genocide organizers go on gloating over our pain, loss, and their ill-gotten-gain of land, loot, and the strangled souls of 1.5 million humans. As a friend said just yesterday, “the Turks must be very proud of what they’ve accomplished.” It’s very difficult not to tar all of them with one brush. Yet the shining hopes of Turkey are the likes of Ragip Zarakolu, a publisher, and Ayşe Günaysu, a human rights activist, the latter of whom I had the pleasure and honor of meeting.

This whole thing just acts like a rasp on skin. We died, they deny. We struggle for miniscule gains along the path to justice, they spend millions through their government, and now, ordinary citizen, minions. They even have people functioning under the guise of religion and “promoting understanding” (as one legislator told me) among people—these are the Gulenists. They have a guy in Massachusetts who made his money selling products to the U.S. defense establishment and is now funding the astroturf (fake grassroots) efforts of Turkish denialists in the U.S.

And another of my Genocide survivor grandaunts has died, with all this vileness intact.

Get out there in the various arenas of our struggle, and act.

Soon it’s going to be “and then there were none.”