Ivy and Gregory Ivazian

‘To spite them, I decided I gotta stay alive’

By J.D. Lasica

Aghasi “Ivy” Ivazian invites a visitor into his North Sacramento home with a sweep of his hand. In a back room, amid scrapbooks and photo albums, he tells his story animatedly.

He is 78 years old, perhaps — there is no way to be sure. He was born in the city of Van, the historic center of Armenian civilization. It was in Van that the first fighting between Turks and Armenians broke out in early April 1915, an episode that historians say led to the government’s decision to deport the Armenians into the desert.

The Ottoman authorities, according to historical accounts, demanded 4,000 Armenians for the war against Russia, but the Armenians held back. Says Ivazian: “We knew what they had done in other places. They barely put these people in the army, made them dig ditches. They shot them and buried them in the very ditches they dug.”

Turkish troops and irregular soldiers from Kurdish villages in the area, under the command of their German allies, launched a five-week assault on the outnumbered Armenians of Van.

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Where do historians come down on all this?

Irving Horowitz, an expert in the study of genocide at Rutgers University, says scholars agree on this much: In 1915 the government of the Ottoman Empire, caught up in the Great War against Czarist Russia and the Allied powers, saw the Armenians as an untrustworthy minority that might align with their cousins across the Russian border. (Armenia was divided in 1827 between the Ottoman Empire in the west and Russia in the east.) The predominately Christian Armenians tended to be wary of their Moslem rulers, who had encouraged a wave of religious pogroms in 1894-96 that left an estimated 200,000 Armenians dead.

Accordingly, the Ottoman government issued an edict in 1915 that all Armenians, of whatever age or condition of health, in the eastern provinces (Armenia) were to be deported into the empire’s southern deserts. Between 600,000 and 2 million Armenians lost their lives, many from starvation and exposure.

Says Horowitz: “It is widely accepted by historians that hundreds of thousands of Armenians were massacred, arbitrarily removed from their historic homeland, and that all traces of their presence were eliminated. We have eyewitness accounts, diplomatic accounts, that huge numbers of people were liquidated, wiped out. De facto, you had a genocide. The bottom line is the Armenians got what they got because they were not a loyal minority.”

That widely held view is not universally shared. A dissenting group of 69 American academics with backgrounds in Turkish history signed a letter to Congress stating that “current scholarship does not support a charge of genocide” — that is, a premeditated attempt to annihilate an entire group of people.

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‘We were so happy we were going to live, we showered the officer with kisses. We showered his horse with kisses.’

By J.D. Lasica

‘Emmy” has never before told her story to an odar, the Armenian word for foreigner. There is a reason for this: She does not speak English.

Emmy — an English transliteration of the Arabic word for “mother” — is what everyone calls Haygouhi Shahinian.

At an even 5 feet tall, she is a slight, wiry woman of 86, with white hair and a high-pitched voice. Her son, George, translates, but she forges ahead with her story before he can get the words out.

“I remember when the troubles started,” she begins. “I was in the first grade, in Tarsus. One day my grandmother came and pulled me out of school. She was crying. We rushed home, and my father and uncle were standing with a gun at the window, looking at all the commotion in the streets.

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The boy who was sold into slavery for a silver coin

By J.D. Lasica

Joyce Poirot is the only offspring of Mesrop Boyajian, the boy who was sold into slavery for a silver coin.

Boyajian seldom talked about his experience, so it was not until adulthood that Poirot understood her father’s place in the massacres. But she knew, from her early years in Detroit, that there was something about her heritage that set her apart.

“I knew it from the secret language we spoke at home and the way my grandmother dressed me,” she says. “I knew it when I’d open my lunch box in kindergarten. Everybody else would have bologna on Wonder Bread. I’d open mine, and a couple of kuftas (meatballs) or lahmajoun (meat pies), smelling of garlic, would roll out.”

Poirot, 51, rests on a sofa in her downtown condominium. She is a top academic administrator at the University of California, Davis, overseeing a statewide continuing-education program.

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Photo of the governor by J.D. Lasica

California’s governor reflects on the Armenian genocide — and how it still affects his people’s spirit

This Q&A with the sitting governor of California appeared in The Sacramento Bee on April 24, 1988 and was reprinted in the magazine Ararat. It was one of the few one-on-one interviews Deukmejian granted during his governorship.

By J.D. Lasica

Gov. George Deukmejian, who is looked upon as a source of pride in the nation’s Armenian community, has made public discussion of the Ottoman Empire massacres a recurring theme of his administration. The governor’s parents emigrated to this country from Armenia in 1907 and 1909, before the massacres of 1915-18. Following are excerpts from an hourlong interview conducted by J.D. Lasica:

Let’s start off with your early years. Were there some Armenian traditions that thrived in the Deukmejian household?

Oh, absolutely. My parents were very much involved in Armenian community activities. My father used to participate in some of the Armenian fraternal organizations. … My mother was actively involved with what they called the Armenian Relief Society, which is like the Armenian Red Cross. My mother used to sing at a lot of different Armenian events and functions, and my sister was a very accomplished pianist and so she had to play the piano while my mother sang. And obviously little Corky, as I was called in those days, used to have to go along to all these events.

Where was your home?

It’s in a village called Menands, New York. It’s like a suburb of Albany.

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