Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News

Sister City plan opens old Wounds
by Karen Hershenson, Contra Costa Times - Friday, February 16, 2001
Posted: Wednesday, February 21, 2001 06:21 am CST

RICHARD HAGOPIAN was just 5 years old then, so he remembers only a few scenes, as if from a movie. He recalls being herded on foot through a valley, along with thousands of fellow Armenians. He can still see the infants left to die in the snow.

Most excruciating, though, is the memory of his uncle darting out of line and being shot by Turkish soldiers hiding behind boulders. The bullet tore through the man's side, and hit Hagopian's mother as she tried to save him.

"She lived just long enough to get to Baghdad, a British Army refugee camp," he says.

As Armenians living in Turkey -- Christians in a Moslem land -- they had become used to persecution. Hagopian's father was killed in an earlier round of violence, in 1915. Tensions subsided, then flared up again in 1917, and his family had been heading east, toward Russia and safety.

Hagopian turns 89 next month. A retired Lockheed manager, he lives in Orinda with his wife Beatrice, who also survived this horrifying time. Cultured and soft-spoken, he has tried to put the experiences of his past into deep storage.

So it was like a slap on the face when he learned that the Pleasant Hill City Council had embraced Merzifon, Turkey, as its sister city. These were the people who robbed him of his parents and cast a shadow over his life.

The story gets tricky at this point. Armenians insist that by 1918, the Turkish Ottoman Empire had slaughtered some 1.5 million of their people in an outright genocide. They have books detailing the massacre, and point to resolutions passed from here to the Vatican acknowledging it.

The Turks insist there was no genocide, and that the Armenians who were killed -- a number they put closer to 300,000, according to one specialist -- were part of the events of World War I.

That discrepancy is a knife in the heart of every Armenian. By maintaining a sister-city relationship with the country, Pleasant Hill is twisting the knife in deeper, they say.

"It just hurt right down in my gut," says Hagopian. "We sort of tried to put it out of our minds until this came along."

All this makes it tough to take a stand on whether Pleasant Hill should continue the relationship. So many conflicting viewpoints, and fiery passion on either side. The sister-city program is all about global understanding and cultural exchange -- not politics.

For insight, I turned to Amnesty International and Turkey specialist William Jones. Now living in Washington, D.C., he spent six years in Turkey, as a university professor and diplomat.

"This has become, for an Armenian, the defining point in their history," says Jones. "That (they) are the people of genocide, so there's really no dialogue possible."

Turks suspect that the Armenian position ultimately will translate into claims for lost property, he says.

Pleasant Hill approved the sister-city ties in June, at the urging of a resident who lived in Merzifon as the child of missionaries. In a letter to city leaders, he takes the Turkish stance, referring to the murders as part of a civil war, in which "both sides bear some measure of responsibility."

Statements like that appall Hagopian. He was so incensed when he learned about the sister-city arrangement that he came to a council meeting and spoke, at one point crumpling over with emotion.

"It angers me, it hurts," he says. "It's just like people in Germany saying, 'Hey, there was no Jewish Holocaust, it's nothing but Jewish propaganda.'

There are all kinds of unequivocal documents that have been written on the subject."

One thing Hagopian doesn't want is pity, either for himself or his countrymen. They fought hard to save themselves, he says.

While Amnesty International won't take a stand on the Pleasant Hill controversy, it is willing to send a representative to brief the council on human-rights violations in Turkey, says spokesman Dennis Palmieri. "Clearly,there are some problems."

More than 100 people showed up at an earlier meeting, and local Armenians promise an even bigger contingent when the matter resurfaces, after a delegation returns from a May visit to Merzifon. Hagopian will be there.

"I owe it my father and his memory," he says.

Karen Hershenson writes about life in the San Francisco East Bay. You may contact her at 925-943-8252, or khershen@cctimes.com.

Contra Costa Times
2640 Shadelands Drive
Walnut Creek, CA 94598

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