Armenian Ppl

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A quest cuts across the generations

Hrant Zeitountzian, 97, of Pasadena still remembers being forced from his village into Syria by Turkish soldiers in 1915. He was 6 years old.

His father, a mule driver, had already been taken from the family farm by Turkish soldiers. As Zeitountzian marched to Syria, he watched his brother and sister, both toddlers, fall ill and die, bodies in the mud, two of an estimated 1.5 million who would die during the

It was stories like his, told by Armenian survivors in the decades following the mass deaths, that fueled a growing movement seeking official recognition of the killings. This week, Zeitountzian and others feel that they are closer than ever to winning official recognition in Washington of the genocide.

Until now, their quest has been blocked for geopolitical reasons: The U.S. is a close ally of Turkey, which strongly opposes any official recognition of the genocide.

Many in Washington have argued that it is more important to respect the Turkish government than to address past wrongs. Congress failed to pass legislation recognizing the genocide in 1975 and 1984, due in part to intense lobbying by Turkish groups.

But the latest resolution, sponsored by Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week and has the support of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

"We've been through this game," said professor Richard Dekmejian, director of the USC Institute of Armenian Studies.

But this time, "There seems to be a moral tipping point in favor of the Armenian genocide precisely because it has happened in other places, in Rwanda and Darfur, the feeling that if we don't come clean, they are going to happen in other places," he said.

For Armenian Americans in Southern California, which has the largest Armenian community in the United States, the campaign had become a multi-generational obsession. The movement included outreach to non-Armenians and the Bush administration, which is fighting the measure, saying that it would hurt relations with Turkey.

Many first-generation Armenian immigrants pushed the painful history aside to assimilate in America, settling where they found work in the Rust Belt, the mill towns of New England, in Glendale and Fresno.

A second wave of immigrants arrived in the 1960s, fleeing wars in Lebanon, Iran and other Middle Eastern countries, and settled primarily in Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena and an area that became known as "Little Armenia" in east Hollywood. They opened businesses, built ornate churches and schools, and sought elected office. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a third wave of Armenians flocked to hubs in Glendale and Hollywood, boosting the community's political clout.

Together they would become the country's largest Armenian enclave, with more than 60,000 in the city of Los Angeles and more than 300,000 in Southern California, a large chunk of the 800,000 Armenians in the U.S., Dekmejian said.

"Everybody has relatives who were lost," Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, said of Armenians in Southern California. "People are very motivated."

Each year, thousands of Armenians gather to commemorate the genocide on April 24, and as their numbers have grown, so have the ceremonies. Eventually, winning a national acknowledgment of the tragedy became a civil rights struggle. In 1965, on the 50th anniversary of the genocide, local Armenians unveiled the country's first memorial on public land in Montebello.

Former Gov. George Deukmejian, who recently recorded two promotional video messages in favor of passing the resolution, remembers standing with thousands of fellow Armenian Americans, watching then-Gov. Ronald Reagan dedicate the white concrete monument in Montebello's Bicknell Park, with its plaque commemorating the "Armenian victims of genocide" and "Men of all nations who have fallen victim to crimes against humanity."

Deukmejian said having Reagan attend the event was a huge moment for many Armenian Americans, giving them hope that they could also win recognition in Washington.

Father Vazken Movsesian, an Armenian American priest in Glendale, agreed.

"We realized at that moment that it wasn't just a family story, it was a community story," Movsesian said. "There is a struggle that has to be answered."

In recent years, the cause has been taken up by a younger generation of Armenians in their 20s and 30s who learned about the genocide from their elders.

Young people as well as survivors have traveled to Washington to share their stories. Armenian youth fasted outside the Turkish Consulate on Wilshire Boulevard, marched from Fresno to Sacramento and last week protested outside the office of Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice).

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Harman, a former sponsor of the genocide resolution, recently changed her mind and sent a letter to Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Burlingame) urging him to withdraw the bill. Harman did not return calls to her office late this week seeking comment.

But in a Times Op-Ed piece Friday, she said that although she recognizes that the Armenians were victims of genocide, she realized after visiting Turkey earlier this year that passing the genocide resolution "would isolate and embarrass a courageous and moderate Islamic government in perhaps the most volatile region in the world."

The Turkish government acknowledges that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died as a result of the forced relocations from eastern Turkey in 1915, but argues that it was not a systematic Ottoman government effort, but the result of World War I, famine and disease that killed Turks, too.

In response to the House's action, the Turkish government recalled their U.S. ambassador. The conflict could jeopardize transportation of U.S. military supplies to Iraq that pass through a key air base near the southern Turkish city of Adana.

A showdown on the resolution is expected on Capitol Hill in coming weeks.

Carla Garapedian, the granddaughter of survivors and a Los Angeles native, is scheduled to travel to Washington next week to screen her new documentary about the genocide, "Screamers," for members of Congress. Earlier this year she was summoned for a private screening of the film, which features Armenian Los Angeles rockers System of a Down, with David and Victoria Beckham in Beverly Hills.

"We're angry. It is our generation that is making people listen," Garapedian said.

The Armenians of Southern California intend to keep lobbying in coming weeks, the old and the young.

"A lot of people ask me why we care so much, especially the youth because we are a few generations out from the genocide," said Caspar Jivalagian, 20, of Pasadena, a senior psychology major at Cal Poly Pomona who has fasted and marched for the cause, most recently outside of Harman's El Segundo office Friday afternoon. "Every Armenian we have it in us, under our skin."

Zeitountzian, the survivor, said he was cheered by this week's progress.

"I am glad for the victory we have started," he said, but his real goal is to live long enough to see Congress finally pass the genocide resolution.

"That will make me very happy if I live," he said, blue eyes shining. "I am optimist."

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Armenian Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan has said that Yerevan has a resolve to boost deep-rooted ties with Iran as a vital country.

In a meeting with the outgoing Iranian Ambassador to Yerevan Alireza Haqiqian, the premier praised the growing trend of relations in all fields, calling for the expansion of bilateral economic cooperation.

He added that joint projects including a gas pipeline and electricity transfer network between Iran and Armenia, as well as construction of a power station on the Aras River would improve the already-bright prospects for bilateral cooperation and prepare the ground for implementing major projects.

The Iranian ambassador said that Iranian and Armenian officials have had good cooperation at the international level thanks to their political will.

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For decades the United States has funded an effort intended to help Christians, Zoroastrians and Jews escape persecution in Iran. Now some of their leaders are questioning American motives as sects that have endured here for thousands of years dwindle rapidly as a result of the migration.

Since the late 1980s, the U.S. government has made it easier for certain foreigners fleeing religious oppression overseas, such as in the former Soviet Union or Indochina, to immigrate to America.

But leaders of Iran's non-Muslim religious minority groups say their communities are not mistreated by the Iranian government, whose actions are overseen by Shiite Muslim clerics. Instead, some Christian and Zoroastrian leaders say, their members are leaving mainly to take advantage of the program's offer of a streamlined path to legal residence in the United States for a fee of $3,000.

"Christians and Zoroastrians leave because of unemployment, the bad economy, but these problems affect all Iranians," said Yonathan Betkolia, an Assyrian Christian leader and member of Iran's parliament who holds the United States responsible for his community's decline. "They give all those green cards to our people. Their only goal is to propagate the idea that Iran is mistreating its minorities."

The program is coordinated by the New York-based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, or HIAS, which traditionally has helped resettle Jews in the United States. It received about $3.4 million in U.S. government funding last year to help non-Muslim minorities leave Iran.

There are no reliable numbers on the sizes of those communities in Iran, a predominantly Shiite country of 65 million to 70 million that is also home to Muslim ethnic minorities, including Kurds, Arabs and Baluchis. According to a census taken in 1976, there were 420,000 non-Muslims in a population of nearly 34 million. Many non-Muslims fled the country after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Despite the Iranian government's bellicose approach to Israel, Jews in the country say they can practice their religion freely. More than 25,000 Jews remain in Iran, community leaders say, making it the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside Israel.

The State Department says 2,842 Jews have left Iran for the United States under the program in the past decade, compared with more than 18,000 members of other non-Muslim minority groups. More than 10,000 Iranians are waiting now to travel to Vienna, where HIAS facilitates their passage to the United States as refugees, according to a former U.S. official familiar with the program.

"The migration is a big, big problem for all non-Muslim minorities in Iran," said Kurosh Niknam, a parliament member representing Iran's Zoroastrians, adherents of the pre-Islamic national faith that he estimates has shrunk by half since the 1979 revolution. "I wish everybody would come back to Iran, but I guess they won't. It looks like there will be no Zoroastrians left in this country in 30 years."

HIAS was selected early this decade by the State Department to be the sole agency for processing Iranian minorities from Vienna, where it operates what it calls an "overseas processing entity." In 2004, Congress passed a law that made it easier for religious minorities from Iran to qualify as refugees.

U.S. funding for HIAS' work on behalf of Iranians has almost tripled, from $1.24 million in 2002 to $3.46 million in 2007, because of an increase in applications. The United States, which is at odds with Iran over its nuclear ambitions and role in the war in Iraq, classifies Iran as one of eight "countries of particular concern" because of what the State Department calls severe violations of religious freedom.

This designation "provides the substantive basis for running a refugee program for Iranian religious minorities," said Gideon Aronoff, chief executive of HIAS. "It speaks for itself that there are people who feel there is a need for this type of program to provide them with safety."

One Armenian Christian businessman in Tehran, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his family's persecution-based application for legal U.S. residence, struggled to come up with a list of reasons to leave Iran. For more than a decade, he said, he had been looking for reasons to stay.

"One, our Iranian passports are useless; we need visas for every country. Two, the Iranian economy is destroyed. Three, my daughters are forced to wear the Islamic head scarf," he said. The 2005 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the businessman continued, had increased the sense of uncertainty. "There are foreign threats, there might be a war. We feel pressure every day."

Sitting in his dining room, he took another sip of cognac, which like all other alcoholic drinks is illegal for Muslims to consume in Iran, and smiled wearily. "I guess our reasons for migrating are no different from other Iranians who want to go. But as Christians, it's so much easier for us to leave Iran."

Betkolia, the Assyrian Christian parliament member, said he and his co-religionists were "freer in Iran than our Muslim brothers." The politician sat in his large office in the Assyrian club in Tehran. "We can drink, our boys and girls can mingle in our clubs freely and we can dance and sing," he said. "Muslims are not allowed to do those things in here."

Members of the Bahai faith, however, face arrest and other forms of persecution, according to U.S. and other officials. Followers of Bahaism, which was founded in 19th century Persia and emphasizes religious unity and racial equality, are not allowed to practice their religion or study at universities. The government regards the faith as heretical, while Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians are respected as being members of traditional monotheistic religions.

The former U.S. official familiar with HIAS said persecution of non-Muslims continues. "The fact is that this regime treats religious minorities very poorly. It has acted viciously toward some of them," the former official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the program. "For Christians and others, it's a lower grade of persecution. They're treated like third-class citizens, day in and day out. If you are not a Shiite, you're going to face severe discrimination," he said.

"Maybe people grow accustomed to it and may learn to live with it," the former official said. "But to say they're living an OK life and they're just economic refugees is ridiculous."

The recent increase in applicants has caused a significant backlog, he said. "If the Iranians wanted to, they could stop cooperating and create trouble for the program."

But according to some Iranian authorities, that would not happen. "There is no way that the Iranian government would block members of religious minorities from leaving. This would cause an international outcry," said Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a former vice president and a Shiite cleric.

"If HIAS would open its doors for Muslims, lots of Iranians would leave for America. I guess the same would happen in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia," Abtahi said. "I am sad people of other faiths leave Iran. But for that to change, big problems which affect all Iranians need to be tackled."

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Ottoman-Safavid Rivalry and the Depopulation of Armenia

Tamerlane's invasion at the end of the fourteenth century and the wars between the Black and White Sheep Turkmen dynasties in the fifteenth century had a devastating effect on the population of historic Armenia. The latter part of the fifteenth century witnessed the weakening of the White Sheep and the attempts of the Ottoman sultan, Bayazid 11 (1481-1512), to take advantage of the situation and to extend his domains eastward into Armenia and northwestern Iran. At the dawn of the sixteenth century, however, Iran was unified under a new dynasty, the Safavids (1501-1732) and after some nine centuries once again acquired the sense of nationhood which has continued into the present.

The Safavids assumed importance during the early fourteenth century when Sheikh Safi ad-Din established his Sufi order in Iranian Azerbaijan. A century later, the order, now known as the Safavi, had assumed a wholly Shi'i nature and began gathering support among the Turkmen tribes of northwestern Iran and eastern Anatolia. The order obtained the support of a number of major Turkic tribes, who called themselves the kizil-bash, or "red heads" (from the red caps that they wore). By 1501 the Safavid leader Isma'il seized Transaraxia from the White Sheep and declared himself shah. Ten years later he managed to gain control over Iran, historic Armenia, and much of eastern Transcaucasia, and he founded a theocratic dynasty that not only claimed to be descended from 'Ali, the son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad, but that also portrayed the shahs as reincarnations of the Shi`i imams or saints. Shi' ism thus became and remains the state religion of Iran. The emergence of the Safavids and the rise of Shi'ism in eastern Anatolia were major threats to the Ottomans, whose claim to the caliphate and the leadership of the Muslim world was challenged by the new Iranian dynasty. In 1514 Sultan Selim I (1512-1520) crossed the Euphrates River and for the first time entered historic Armenia. Shah lsma'il was not ready to fight the Ottomans and withdrew his forces, burning many villages en route to forestall the advancing Ottoman army. Thousands of Armenians were force to leave their land. The Ottomans pushed deep into Armenia and on August 23, 1514, at the Battle of Chaldiran, destroyed the Iranian army through superior numbers and artillery. Although Selim captured Tabriz, the admimistrative center of the Safavids, he had to withdraw a week later, as Ottoman military leaders refused to winter in Tabriz or to pursue the enemy into the Iranian highlands. This pattern was to be repeated a number of times, particularly during the reign of Shah Tahmasb I (1524- 1576), who also pursued scorched-earth policy when he had to face the mighty Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566). The harsh Armenian climate and difficulties in transportation and in communications with Constantinople made it possible for the Safavids to repeatedly survive such defeats. Although the Safavids managed to recover Tabriz, Iran relinquished most of eastern Anatolia. The first peace agreement between the two powers in 1555 left the western parts of historic Armenia in Ottoman bands, while the eastern parts ended up under Iranian control. Realizing the vulnerability of Tabriz, Tahmasb moved the capital south to Qazvin. The uncertain situation over Tahmasb's succession encouraged the Ottomans to invade Armenia again in 1578 and to continue their campaign until 1590, taking most of Transcaucasia and once again occupying Tabriz.

Caught in the middle of these warring powers, some Armenians were deported by the Ottomans to Constantinople from Tabriz, Karabagh, and Nakhichevan and others, by the Iranians, to Iranian Azerbaijan from Van. To replace them, Sultan Selim and his successors settled Kurdish tribes in Armenia, a policy which continued into the seventeenth century. Indo-European speakers like the Armenians, the Kurds were Muslims who were divided into Sunni, Shi'i, and Yezidi sects. They were a nomadic people who were exempt from cash taxation, but had to present a quota of their herds and guard the border regions. Their settlement in historic Armenia was to create a major problem later for the Armenians when the state was powerless to control the Kurds or, conversely, when it actually used them against the Armenians. The protracted Ottoman-Safavid war and the resulting forced migrations depopulated parts of historic Armenia, and the Kurdish settlement changed its social and ethnic balance.

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