Building Bridges: From Kayseri to Kigali

Wednesday, July 02, 2014

Recent Articles from The Armenian Weekly... Building Bridges: From Kayseri to Kigali Bedrosyan: The Genocide of the Pontic Greeks Camp Haiastan to Kick Off Tribute Weekend with Gala at Gillette Stadium ‘Sixty Minutes’ Lifts Chertavian into National Prominence Sassounian: Turkey’s Support Declines in Congress after Blunders at Home and Abroad Armenian Mass Graves Revisited: A Photo-Essay Ferllini and Croft: The Case of an Armenian Mass Grave Search Armenian Weekly

Building Bridges: From Kayseri to Kigali Nothing makes genocide more real than looking into the eyes of someone who has survived the unthinkable. I am always at a loss for words when I meet genocide survivors. What can I possibly say to them given what they have gone through? The author with François Bugingo, the founder and president of Reporters Without Borders in Canada and an avid advocate for freedom of press around the world, at the Rwandan Genocide commemoration event at Montreal’s City Hall. April 7 marked the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide. A commemorative event took place in Montreal’s City Hall in the presence of the city’s mayor, numerous municipal politicians, Rwandan community organizers, and members of the Canadian-Rwandan community. I delivered a short speech on behalf of the Armenian Genocide Centennial Committee to emphasize our solidarity with the Rwandan community and our will to work together to combat denial. Besides highlighting some of the chilling parallels between these two... Read More »          • Email to a friend • Article Search •

Bedrosyan: The Genocide of the Pontic Greeks The annihilation of the non-Turk/non-Muslim peoples from Anatolia started on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of 250 Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul. Within a few months, 1.5 million Armenians had been wiped out from their historic homeland of 4,000 years in what is now eastern Turkey, as well as from the northern, southern, central, and western parts of Turkey. About 250,000 Assyrians were also massacred in southeastern Turkey during the same period. Then, it was the Pontic Greeks’ turn to be eliminated from northern Turkey on the Black Sea coast, sporadically from 1916 onward. The ethnic cleansing of the Pontic Greeks got interrupted when the Ottomans ended up on the losing side of World War I, but their real destruction resumed in a well-organized manner on May 19, 1919. This article will summarize the tragic end of the Pontic Greek civilization in northern Turkey—a series of events less researched and documented than the Armenian Genocide, but equally denied and covered up... Read More »          • Email to a friend • Article Search •

Camp Haiastan to Kick Off Tribute Weekend with Gala at Gillette Stadium Gala Sponsored by Alex and Ani, Rafaelian Family FRANKLIN, Mass.—Camp Haiastan will host a Tribute Weekend on Sat., July 26 and Sun. 27, which will be highlighted by a Tribute Gala event on Saturday evening to honor the camp’s past and present summer directors, and a Road Dedication Ceremony on Sunday afternoon to honor past director Bob Avakian. The Tribute Gala event will be a dinner and dance held at the Gillette Stadium Putnam Club in Foxboro. Tickets are $125 for adults and $50 for children age 16 and under, and must be purchased by July 11 (details are available on the camp’s website at www.camphaiastan.org/events). Tables of 8 may be reserved when ordering tickets. Also available for purchase are digital ads to honor our past summer directors. Admission to the dance only ($50 after 9:30 p.m.) will be available for purchase at the door. The Tribute Gala is being sponsored by Alex and Ani and the Rafaelian family, who are donating special commemorative Camp Haiastan... Read More »          • Email to a friend • Article Search •

‘Sixty Minutes’ Lifts Chertavian into National Prominence BOSTON, Mass.—He grew up in nearby Lowell, the son of a dentist and dental hygienist, bent on cutting his own teeth in the business world. Gerald Chertavian hit the national spotlight with a TV stint on ‘Sixty Minutes’ as founder and CEO of ‘Year Up,’ an intensive one-year education program that serves low-income young adults. Today, Gerald Chertavian is riding his own crest as a social entrepreneur, founder and CEO of a nutmeg called “Year Up,” an extensive one-year education and training program that serves low-income young adults between the ages of 18-24. He helps 2,100 young adults every year, including African-Americans, Hispanics, and the downtrodden; has visited 63 countries including Armenia; has written a best seller; and has compiled a resume that reads like a “Who’s Who.” As if his notoriety didn’t already precede him, a recent stint on TV’s “Sixty Minutes” vaulted him over the top. The sequence showed the value of Year Up both to the young... Read More »          • Email to a friend • Article Search •

Sassounian: Turkey’s Support Declines in Congress after Blunders at Home and Abroad Due to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s widespread human rights abuses of his own citizens and foreign policy blunders vis-a-vis Armenia, Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Iran, Iraq, Israel, and Syria, Turkey has lost much of the support it once enjoyed in the United States and, indeed, around the world. The most recent evidence of this downturn is the adoption of House Resolution 4347 (Turkey Christian Churches Accountability Act) on June 26 by the Foreign Affairs Committee. Because of souring relations between Ankara and Washington, the U.S. government refrained from spending its political capital on the Hill to prevent the bill’s passage. In addition, inter-Turkish feuds such as the one between Erdogan and Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric with extensive influence in Turkey and abroad, have deprived Ankara of important grassroots support in the United States. Gulen-affiliated groups did not lift a finger to bail out Erdogan’s government from a humiliating defeat in the Foreign... Read More »          • Email to a friend • Article Search •

Armenian Mass Graves Revisited: A Photo-Essay Special for the Armenian Weekly April 2014 magazine It began in Yerevan, while I was photographing the National Geographic story on Armenia that was published in 2005. “Sandra, there are a lotta bones still out there in the desert in Syria. You have to see it, jan!” When Hirair Hovnanian told me this in 2004, I could not stop thinking about it. I knew about the Armenian Genocide, of course, but as a third generation Armenian American (on my father’s side), my grandparents didn’t want us to think about these terrible things. At Margedeh Syria 2005: Armenian Mass Grave site. Buses of Armenians arrive to pray at the site on Genocide Day and dig for bones. (Photo by Alexandra Avakian) They wanted us to be truly American, free of the sorrows of the old country, like many Americans who have fled starvation, war, genocide, dictatorship, and economic insecurity from all over the world. I decided to go to Syria on the 90th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide and find those bones. I... Read More »          • Email to a friend • Article Search •

Ferllini and Croft: The Case of an Armenian Mass Grave By Roxana Ferllini and Alexandra M. Croft The Armenian Weekly April 2014 magazine The following article is aimed at both the Armenian community and the general reader, with the intention of highlighting work conducted whilst exhuming a mass grave at Tell Fakhariyah, Ras al-Ain, in Syria during the summer of 2007. Although two of the authors (Roxana Ferllini and Alexandra M. Croft) had previously published the work and results of the exhumations in a peer reviewed journal, the information, for the most part, has not made its way to a general readership outside of academia. Yet, this topic retains information of great importance, and needs to be made available to the wider public, which is why its publication is being made available through the Armenian Weekly. The content of this article will summarize the events and results of the 2007 archaeological season, including the discovery of coins, textiles, and buttons associated with the human remains. The memorial ceremony and storage of... Read More »          • Email to a friend • Article Search •

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