Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 25, 1990 TAG: 9004250682
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Yervant's family embarked on a harrowing journey, eating grass to survive, stumbling across dismembered bodies, seeing babies trampled by horses. His father, Yervant says, was tortured and killed by the Turks.
Yervant's story had a happy ending. He was placed in an orphanage, ran away to France and became a dancer with the Folies Bergeres. He came on tour to the United States during the 1930s and stayed.
On Tuesday, Yervant, 83, knocked on the door of the Turkish Embassy to deliver a petition demanding that Turkey admit to the Armenians' claim that the Ottoman Empire committed genocide and killed 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923.
The embassy refused to open the door. "We know very well what they want and we don't deal with them," press counselor Tacan Ildem said.
Yervant was among several hundred Armenians who staged a protest outside the embassy on the 75th anniversary of the start of the Armenian deportations. Commemorative events also were being held in Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco and New York, among other cities.
Turkey says 300,000 Armenians died in the deportations but rejects the accusation of genocide, saying Turks and Armenians alike were the victims of a civil war, famine and epidemic. Turkey says Armenians started the civil war, in collusion with Czarist Russia, in order to secede from the waning Ottoman Empire.
In a statement on the Senate floor, Minority Leader Robert Dole, R-Kan., said 1.5 million Armenians were killed "as a result of conscious, vicious policies of the Ottoman Empire."
Dole led a fight in February for a resolution commemorating April 24 as Armenian genocide day, but the measure was defeated under strong pressure from Turkey and its lobbyists in Washington.
"We ought to be ashamed," he said. "One reason 6 million Jews were slaughtered is because of Hitler's conviction that no one remembered the Armenian genocide."
President Bush, whose administration also opposed the resolution, issued a proclamation to the nearly 1 million American Armenians, marking April 24 as "a day of remembrance for the more than a million Armenian people who were victims." Although he deliberately refrained from using the word "genocide," supporters of Turkey were angered.
Armenians, who trace their roots to the second millennium B.C., once commanded a mighty empire stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean.
by CNB