I felt I should speak for those little children — my halfbrothers and sisters. I’m 91, and I could walk away, but I don’t choose to. I’m a Clarkie.
On May 4, 1929, while visiting relatives in Providence, Varter Deranian died when a blood vessel in her brain ruptured. She was 44 years old. Her son writes: “When she briefly regained consciousness, she cried, ‘My children, my children!’ These were her last words. Her thoughts and her being had returned to the waterless well in the barren deserts of Turkey. Mother and children were at last reunited and the wailing forever silenced.” Penning those words was painful for Martin Deranian, but he never expected anything less. He only wanted the truth to be told for whatever audience it may find. “The wrath of time is upon us,” he says today. “The survivors of the Armenian Genocide are virtually gone, and my generation, who had direct contact with survivors, is getting old. So there has been the pressure of time to do what I can, and I think I’ve done that. “Hopefully, I’ve lived a constructive life, but there are moments when I almost feel like I’m walking the route of the deportees through the desert. I’ve learned so much about my mother that she never told me. I suppose she wanted to protect me. That’s what mothers do.”
fall 2013
27 clark alumni magazine
Hrant Dink. “Turkey should learn that facing history and coming to terms with past human rights abuses is not a crime but a prerequisite for peace and reconciliation in the region,” Akçam said at the time. Article 301 has since been defanged to the point where it can’t be invoked without special permission from the Justice Ministry, an unlikely occurrence. He says that Turkey can no longer pursue a legal case against someone for raising the issue of the Armenian Genocide. Other than the prospect of physical retaliation, one of Akçam’s greatest foes has been apathy. He notes that Dink’s killing sparked demonstrations in the streets, and he believes that public sentiment now tilts in favor of Turkey recognizing the genocide. But he marvels at the “conspiracy of silence” the subject engendered among the people in the preceding years, particularly in the 1990s. “There’s a fatalism in our society, especially toward history. Nobody cared about it. I even have good friends who told me, ‘It was a hundred years ago. Let it go.’ This bothers me more than the threat of physical attack.” Even Turkey’s hardline stance has become more nuanced, he says. “They don’t take the extreme denialist position as in the past. It’s a new form of denialism, by saying there are ‘diverse opinions’ on the subject and room for ‘reasonable doubt.’ It’s just a different approach of presenting the same argument.” He is hopeful, but not overly optimistic, that the United States will officially acknowledge the genocide, an action the government has been unwilling to take because it could damage its relationship with Turkey, a strategic ally in the Middle East. To do so would be more than symbolic, he says. If the U.S. government recognizes the 1915 genocide, it will likely launch several court cases against the Turkish state and Turkish companies connected to the century-old crimes. For now, Akçam is focused on shepherding four Ph.D. candidates in Armenian Genocide studies, and lauds Clark as an exemplar for creating the only endowed chair in the Americas in this field. “The connection between the University and the Armenian community is very important,” he says. “We use and understand their pain for a broader context. Clark has been an unbelievable support. It’s a very serious thing to have a position in an American university to teach human rights and genocide. That’s something that everybody must respect.” Steven Migridichian, president of the Friends of the Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark, agrees. “Awareness is a great tool, and it’s important to promote and foster that knowledge among everyone,” he says. “Darfur. Rwanda. Cambodia. These events need to be brought forward. People say we shouldn’t dwell on the past, but history has a way of repeating itself once we forget.”