Unhappy remembrance

Friday, April 23, 2004 | 4:40 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

April 24 - 25, 2004

What: Armenian Genocide Commemoration Ceremony, sponsored by the Armenian-American Cultural Society of Las Vegas.

When: 1:30 p.m. Sunday.

Where: West Sahara Library, 9600 W. Sahara Ave.

Who: Keynote speaker John Kasbarian, lecturer, activist and former editor of the Armenian Weekly.

The passing of several decades has not dimmed the memory of the horror Malvine Papazian Handjian witnessed as a 10-year-old Armenian refugee on the streets of Izmir, Turkey, during the first genocide of the 20th century.

Speaking in half-Armenian and half-English, the longtime Las Vegas resident vividly recalled watching Turkish soldiers during a 1922 raid pull an Armenian priest by his long beard from his burning church and laugh as they drove nails through the soles of his shoes and into his feet.

Handjian wept recalling how Turkish soldiers carried off teenage girls during the chaos to rape and kill them. She still sees the terror in the eyes of young Armenian men who, to escape Turkish bayonets, dove into the harbor and swam for foreign-flagged ships only to be turned away and then drown.

"We must never forget -- never forget," said Handjian, 91. "I saw these things with my own eyes. And I will never forget."

Today marks the 89th anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian genocide in Turkey, which lasted eight years. On Sunday the Armenian-American Cultural Society of Las Vegas will hold a commemoration ceremony at the West Sahara Library to thank those who have kept alive the memory of one of the world's worst atrocities.

On April 24, 1915, the genocide began when about 200 Armenian intellectual and political leaders were arrested in what is now Istanbul and publicly executed. What followed was the systematic slaying of 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children. Many, including Handjian, were taken on long death marches, where a number of them succumbed to hunger and thirst.

"Perhaps if we had done more to remember the plight of the Armenians, we would not have seen repeats of genocide in the 20th century," said John Dadaian, coordinator of the Las Vegas ceremony, Handjian's son-in-law and local spokesman for the Armenian National Committee of America.

"Perhaps the Holocaust of World War II could have been prevented, as well as the killing fields of Cambodia, the tribal slayings in Rwanda and the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia."

Dadaian said, however, because the United States has long been an ally of Turkey and benefits from its oil production, many American leaders have been hesitant to put pressure on Turkey to admit to the genocide, which it steadfastly denies happened.

"Turkish officials spend million of dollars lobbying Congress, pushing an agenda of revisionist history that the genocide never happened," Dadaian said.

But, he said, many Nevada officials have not bought into the Turks' denials. One is Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., who at Sunday's ceremony will be honored as the Armenian National Committee's Western Region Man of the Year.

Last year Ensign, along with Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., introduced a Senate resolution reaffirming there indeed was a genocide of Armenians. Ensign said the measure "represents a renewal of America's commitment to preventing future genocides."

Also, Gov. Kenny Guinn has issued this year a strongly worded proclamation confirming Nevada's position on "the genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire." In that document Guinn calls Turkey's actions a "systematic and deliberate massacre of the Armenian people."

Some experts believe the Turks' failure to admit and atone for the actions of their ancestors has hampered Turkey's attempts to gain admission into the European Union despite its growing economy.

Supporters of Turkey's position say claims that a genocide occurred are part of efforts to drive a wedge between Muslims, including the Turkish people, and Christians, including Armenians.

"Armenian-Americans have attempted to extricate and isolate their history from the complex circumstances in which their ancestors were embroiled," reads turkishembassy.org, the Turkish Embassy's Web site. "In so doing, they describe a world populated only by white-hatted heroes and black-hatted villains. The heroes are always Christian and the villains are always Muslim."

The Turkish Web site further claims that the numbers of Armenians living throughout the Ottoman Empire in 1915 were fewer than 1.5 million, and thus the numbers of the dead have been inflated; that many Armenian victims were casualties of World War I and disease; and that the Armenian losses were "few in comparison to the over 2.5 million Muslim dead from the same period."

But opponents of the use of the term "Armenian genocide" cannot easily shrug off the accounts shared by the traumatized Armenian survivors, including Handjian.

In 1917 her father, a dentist, was abducted and put on a train supposedly bound for battlefields to treat wounded Turkish soldiers. News later came back to the family he died in a hospital far from a war zone, she said.

A Turkish dentist who was in partnership with Handjian's father then took her family's home and property, leaving Handjian, her mother, two sisters and her brother homeless, she said. Hanjian went to live in a suburb of Izmir with a family friend, Mari Yerganian, who became her surrogate mother.

In 1922, during a post World War I Greek-Turkish conflict, Yerganian and Handjian found themselves on the streets of Izmir, then called Smyrna, in western Turkey, as Armenian-owned homes were burned by the forces of future President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk after they had routed the Greek army.

Handjian said Yerganian protected her on their long march to abandoned army barracks, where hundreds of Armenians were starved as they awaited execution. Once, she said, Yerganian took a gold coin she had sewn into her dress and gave it to a Turkish soldier who in turn gave Handjian a sip of water.

"The day before we were to be slaughtered, a miracle happened when the American Relief Society came and rescued us," said Handjian, referring to the BibleLands Missions Aid Society, which today is known simply as BibleLands. "They got us on a ship to Greece. I could never thank the Americans enough."

In Greece, at age 15, Malvine married fellow Armenian genocide survivor Kourken Handjian. They moved to France in 1929, where Malvine became a volunteer with the Armenian Blue Cross, helping other Armenian refugees. They moved to the United States in 1958, where she became a volunteer with the Armenian Relief Society in Los Angeles. They moved to Las Vegas in 1990.

The Handjians had three children, eight grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. Kourken, a retired candy maker, died in 2002 at age 95.

The Handjians were the subject of the 2002 documentary film "The Handjian Story: A Road Less Traveled," produced and directed by their granddaughter Denise Gentilini.

At last year's Moondance International Film Festival in Denver, the film won best feature documentary. Handjian joined her granddaughter onstage at the awards ceremony and received a standing ovation.

Handjian said she is proud that her great-grandchildren today show the film in their classrooms so that new generations from all ethnic backgrounds will learn the truth about the brutal murders of her people and perhaps remember.

Dadaian said his ancestors' plight sends a foreboding message from which the world can benefit. He recalled a London Times story of Nov. 24, 1945, which reported chilling words from Adolf Hitler that perhaps best exemplify why the Armenian genocide should never be forgotten.

"Speaking to his generals before Nazi troops invaded Poland, Hitler assured them that they need not worry what the world would think of their actions," Dadaian said. " 'After all,' said Hitler, 'Who remembers the Armenians?' "

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