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.
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.