A rocket propelled grenade slams into the terrace outside of the bedroom window of the apartment he and his wife share in West Beirut, Lebanon. It makes a much louder sound than the routine gunfire to which they’ve become accustomed. A half-dozen members of a Communist militia group, all brandishing AK 47s, pound on the door in the middle of the night. This scene is repeated over and over throughout a seven-year period, with armed militia representing the Mourabitoun, Saiqua, Druze, Fatah, Kurds, PPS (Partie Populaire Syrienne) and Syrian army. One night, a group storms in with fixed bayonets, their leader ripping the phone line out of the wall and threatening their lives.
‘Yalanci Dolma’ Diplomacy
Yes, it was a meeting, but not a “historic meeting” as posted by the Friends of Hrant Dink, the organizers of an academic event entitled “Closing the Divide.” The event was designed to build cultural bridges between the Armenian Diaspora on one side and the Turkish people on the other, to traverse a colossal gorge, not divide, created by centuries of slavery, abuse, colonization of Western Armenia, and pogroms, which peaked with the infamous genocide of 1915-23.
Beware of Superficial and Feel-Good Formulations: A Perspective, Before Obama Meets Erdogan
One close example is the righteous family who, during the great genocide and national dispossession of 1915, risked its own to save my grandmother Khengeni from certain death in the coastal town of Ordu. The stories of thousands like them have not been told because of the Turkish state’s official dialectic of denial.