War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

by Chris Hedges

  He lost his leg in 1993 as he and his Muslim neighbors fled under mortar fire from Sutjeska over Mount Igman to Sarajevo. His only son died in the war. His daughter’s husband was also killed. She cared for their two small children alone on her widow’s pension.

  “I don’t trust anyone anymore,” he said. “This is what the war has taught me, not to trust.”

  He shifted his hands to grip the handles of the crutches and moved away.

  5

  THE HIJACKING AND RECOVERY OF MEMORY

  Our people’s lives pass, bitter and empty, among malicious, vengeful thoughts and periodic revolts. To anything else, they are insensitive and inaccessible. One sometimes wonders whether the spirit of the majority of the Balkan peoples has not been forever poisoned and that, perhaps, they will never again be able to do anything other than suffer violence, or inflict it.

  •

  IVO ANDRIĆ

  Conversation with Goya: Signs, Bridges

  HAGOB H. ASADOURIAN, LIKE MANY SURVIVORS OF genocide, communes with shadows. Some are dark and frightening, like the shades of Turkish soldiers, who in 1915 herded him and his family from his Armenian village, leaving him to watch his mother and four of his sisters die of typhus in the Syrian desert. Some are sweet, revolving around the raucous Armenian-language plays performed in the 1920s at the Yiddish Theater at Madison Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street in Manhattan. And some are poignant, like the reunion with his sole surviving sister, thirty-nine years after they lost each other one night near the Dead Sea as they fled with a ragged band of Armenian orphans from Syria to Jerusalem.

  But his battle to preserve memory, the theme of his fourteen books, did not save him or his generation from the destructive march of time. And time, to the rapidly vanishing community of exiled Armenians, will soon finish the work that, he says, was begun by the Turkish army more than eighty-five years ago.

  The Turks have spent most of the past century denying, with rather startling success, the Armenian genocide of 1915, when the Ottoman Empire, fearing a nationalist revolt, forced two million Armenians into the Syrian desert to die. The few surviving Armenians no longer ask to go home. They do not ask for restitution. They ask simply to have the memory of their obliteration acknowledged. It is a moral obsession, the lonely legacy passed onto the third and fourth generation who no longer speak Armenian but who carry within them the seeds of resentment that will not be quashed.

  Asadourian’s latest book, The Smoldering Generation, was, he said, “about the inevitable loss of our culture.”

  “No one takes the place of those who are gone,” the ninety-seven-year-old writer said when I visited him at his home in Tenafly, New Jersey. He was seated in front of a picture window that looked out on a carefully groomed garden. “Your children do not understand you in this country. You cannot blame them.”

  As he spoke, his middle-aged son, John, who has used a wheelchair since a stroke, jerked himself into position behind his father. He listened, his head cocked slightly to one side, with a grimace.

  Although there were once ten major Armenian-language daily newspapers in the United States, there is just one left, published in California. Armenian clubs have closed, social societies have been disbanded, and cultural events have dwindled. Proceedings of Armenian meetings, when they take place, are usually in English (except at church affairs, where Armenian clergy nearly always speak in Armenian first, then English). Asadourian said that he had accepted that his writing would not halt the slide to obliteration of the language. (His two sons were raised speaking Armenian; his granddaughter speaks it, but does not write it very well.)

  Rather, he writes to give a voice to the 331 people with whom he trudged into Syria in September 1915. Only twenty-nine of those people survived.

  “You can never really write what happened anyway,” Asadourian said. “It is too ghoulish. I still fight with myself to remember it as it was. You write because you have to. It all wells up inside of you. It is like a hole that fills constantly with water and no amount of bailing will empty it. This is why I continue.”

  His passion, however, burns deep. He refused to halt the painful story of his deportation despite having to reach for a bottle of pills. He took a deep breath before plunging into the last bit of detail, one he had left out of the lengthy chronology.

  “When it came time to bury my mother, I had to get two other small boys to help me carry her body up to a well where they were dumping the corpses,” he said. “We did this so the jackals would not eat them. The stench was terrible. There were swarms of black flies buzzing over the opening. We pushed her in feet first, and the other boys, to escape the smell, ran down the hill. I stayed. I had to watch. I saw her head, as she fell, bang on one side of the well and then the other before she disappeared. At the time, I did not feel anything at all.”

  He stopped, visibly shaken.

  “What kind of a son is that?” he asked hoarsely.

  I had seen and felt it before, the awful indifference to pain, even your own. But just because he did not feel anything at the moment he released his mother’s body did not mean he did not care. He had spent his whole life honoring the memory of his mother. He had suffered, in later years, that moment of her hasty burial with an awful intensity. It was a display of the curious guilt of the victims who often carry with them torments not borne by the perpetrators of the crimes.

  The house fell silent. Asadourian’s son, as motionless as his father during the story, flipped the electric switch on his chair and rolled out of the room.

  The Turkish government still vigorously denies the event. It says that some of the Armenians killed were rebels during World War I and others were victims of the fighting and the widespread famine. The Turks claim they escorted Armenians away from the fighting for their own safety. They concede only that, because of the war, some unfortunate incidents took place.

  Much of the world of the Armenians, a people first mentioned by the ancient Greeks and Persians in the 6th century B.C., has been reduced to dusty, forgotten relics in present-day Turkey. After World War I, about 25,000 Armenians came to the United States. Some of their tales survive in small American collections of Armenian literature and poetry, like the 15,000 volumes in the Zohrab Center in New York. These books lie unread by all but a few scholars. Little of the work has been translated.

  The murder of more than one million Armenians in Turkey is often cited as the opening act for the genocidal campaigns that convulsed the twentieth century. Although the Allied powers condemned the Turks during World War I, there was no effort to hold them accountable for actions against the Armenians. The magnitude of the deaths and ultimate indifference may have led Hitler, on the eve of the invasion of Poland, to remind his followers, “Who still speaks of the extermination of the Armenians?”

  The globe is dotted with such anonymous burial pits. They are physical reminders of justice denied. Yet they have a startling power to plague the murderers decades after the event. These atrocities—denied by the perpetrators and sanctified by the victims—leave huge chasms between peoples. They serve to create two distinct and antagonistic histories. It is only with an historical consensus that there can be reconciliation.

  The return of historical memory restores a common language to the one usurped by war. The 1991 exhumations in the Katyn Forest outside Kalinin for the thousands of Polish officers executed by the Soviets in World War II permitted an historical narrative that could be accepted by the Russians and the Poles. What followed, once the truth was exposed, was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The exhumations in Cambodia, El Salvador, and the Bosnian town of Srebrenica are part of the same process. It is these exhumations, these final acknowledgments, that bring down regimes and force the restoration of history. But until such a moment happens, the wartime regimes zealously guard the lie.

  During conflicts, these hidden burial places are spoken of in hushed and nervous whispers. As wars wind to a close the killers make frantic and often futile efforts
to hide their crimes. They bulldoze fields where bodies are buried, as they did in Srebrenica, dynamite mine shafts where bodies were dumped, or dissolve the corpses in acid. But the industrial-scale killing of the twentieth century makes such erasure difficult. And years later there often is a dogged and methodical effort, usually by lonely dissidents, to uncover the past. These statisticians wield with index cards the fate of despots, the return of historical memory and, finally, hope.

  I was taken to a school in northern Iraq days after Iraqi soldiers withdrew from the region following the Gulf War. Kurdish rebels there told me that under the concrete in the schoolyard were hundreds of bodies. They vowed to smash through the concrete and dig them up.

  When I moved across central Bosnia with advancing Muslim troops after the NATO bombing campaign of 1995, survivors would enter villages even while the fighting was still dying down and point out burial sites. These sites, one sensed, were as important as their houses and personal property. Muslim officials who traveled with the army carried long handwritten lists of names of missing from the war. They began, even amid the skirmishes, to hunt for the graves that held the bodies of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of victims massacred when the Serbs swept through this area to drive out the Muslims years earlier. I drove with them to several sites. I watched as they marked them off with rope for excavation. Near a hamlet called Pudin Han, we found a cave that had human bones poking up out of a large circular depression. Another site, known as Crvena Zemlja, or “red earth,” had already given up bones and clothing. In Prhovo, a vacant ruin perched on a hillside about five miles north of Ključ, a man who witnessed a mass killing led these authorities to a spot where he told us dozens of victims of the massacre lay buried.

  Senad Medanović, twenty-five, a factory worker turned soldier, returned to his home with us after three years. He climbed the steep dirt track leading to his village, in the company of three other Muslims. All were armed with AK–47 assault rifles. The men scanned the dense undergrowth for the pockets of Bosnian Serb soldiers who were still hiding in the rolling, pine-forested hills.

  Medanović, ignoring the periodic crackle of small-arms fire, headed for the spot, a rough plot of land across from the gutted remains of his two-story house. He stood there and told me about the day the Serbs came. It was on the morning of June 1, 1992. He saw several hundred Bosnian Serb militiamen and Yugoslav Army troops surround the village of about two dozen houses. They herded the families into the center of the village and opened fire with automatic weapons and heavy machine guns. Mingled with the group were Muslim families from some neighboring villages.

  “I was over here,” said he, standing near the edge of a field. “I did not trust the Serbs, and I stood as far away as I could. I told my family they would kill us, but they did not believe such a thing was possible. When they started to shoot I ran. I could hear the screams of the women and the children. I could hear the awful noise of the guns. I ran across the field into the woods. The Serbs around the village fired at me, but I was able to reach the woods and hide in the undergrowth.”

  The Serbs spent the night drinking and looting the houses in the village, he said, and the next morning he watched as they searched the woods for any survivors. They rounded up about forty men, stripped them, and marched them down the road with their hands tied.

  “I saw them shoot two at the edge of the village,” he said. “When I was captured six days later, on the run, and taken to the Manjaca concentration camp, I found nine of the forty who had survived, including one of my brothers. The others had been murdered. The survivors told me where the mass grave was. They told me my mother, and the rest of my family, were dead. We ten are all that remain from Prhovo.”

  Lanky and bearded, he climbed through the window of his former house and began to search among the blackened debris. He pulled out the tattered remains of a blue shirt and hugged it.

  “This belonged to one of my nephews,” he said, “one of the twins.”

  The bloody campaign by the Bosnian Serbs to rid this part of Bosnia of Muslims, who had lived here for more than 500 years, left survivors vowing to take revenge. Medanović said he would hunt down the two Serbian commanders whom he said led the massacre.

  “The two beasts who directed this slaughter were Marko Adamović and Ratko Buvac,” he said. “We all knew the Serbian nationalists from Ključ before they came to kill us. We heard them preach hatred against the Muslims. And we saw them as they entered the village that morning to direct the killings.”

  But tempering his hatred was his relief at the chance to at least honor the memories of the family he lost, his mother, five of his six brothers, his only sister, his uncle, and two nephews.

  He stood over the field that held the bodies.

  “Here is where my family and my village lie now,” he said. “And God has permitted me to survive to come back and give them a decent burial.”

  It was dusk and we were a small group, lightly armed, on a hill that still had bands of fleeing Serb soldiers. We started down the dirt track. But when Medanović saw the shattered black granite tombs of his father and grandfather, who died before the war, he knelt. He tried to arrange the pieces of the headstones to spell out their names once again.

  “Can you read their names now?” he asked me. “Can you see who was buried here?”

  Wartime leaders, who know that exposing the murders means the loss of their own legitimacy and discrediting of the myth, harass and denounce the Cassandras who cry out for justice and historical accountability. The effort to give a name to the victims and killers begins a collective act of repentance, a national catharsis. The process, as seen in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is the only escape. And while justice is not always done—in South Africa the full admission of crimes saw killers granted an amnesty—dignity, identity, and most important, memory are returned. This, for many families, is enough.

  Only rarely do some of the top leaders end up in jail. Usually those who pay the price—if there is one to be paid—are the lowly gunmen who are tried and imprisoned to take the heat off of their commanders. Most of those who carry out war crimes, however, are never punished. They are allowed to fade away in retirement, whispered about but never finally condemned. There are powerful institutions, security services, armed forces, and ministries of the interior, that may permit some facts to be exposed but will rarely permit a society to ascribe any responsibility to the actual state organs that directed the killings. Yet despite the inevitable injustice of any investigation, the power it has to restore memory is vital for recovery from war.

  “The struggle of man against power,” wrote the novelist Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”1

  I walked one afternoon over the cavernous pits and gorges scattered throughout the hills above the Italian port city of Trieste. These hold dark secrets from the twilight days of World War II, secrets that still disturb Italy and its Balkan neighbors. The pits, covered with tons of debris, are believed to contain hundreds, perhaps thousands, of corpses. The bodies are those of Italians and Yugoslavs who opposed the Yugoslav Communist takeover of the city in May 1945, along with scores of captured German soldiers. But attempts to investigate, even after five decades, have gone nowhere.

  Trieste is a port city that for most of the twentieth century sat on the edge of the volcanic upheavals that tore apart the European monarchies and made up the front lines of the Cold War. It changed hands a half dozen times. James Joyce and Rainer Maria Rilke lived here. The notorious commander in the Spanish civil war, Commandante Carlos, came from Trieste, as did the writer Italo Svevo. The city, seedy, neglected, is no longer of any geopolitical significance. But the scars of its past infect the air. Old men with sad stories gather every afternoon in the seaside coffee shops.

  In May 1945, Tito’s Communist Partisans in Yugoslavia, after a bitter guerrilla war against the German and Croatian fascists, pursued the retreating forces toward Italy. The Partisan army seized
the Istrian Peninsula, in the northern Adriatic, and raced on toward Trieste. The Partisans’ forty-day occupation of Trieste and their hunt for German soldiers, Italian and Croatian fascists, and suspected opponents of Communism nearly led to a clash with Allied forces. In June, the Yugoslavs withdrew to the hinterlands, but Trieste was not handed back to Italy until 1954. Today the city has 230,000 people, many of them from Italian families who were forced out of Yugoslavia after the war.

  Trieste in May 1945 was a chaotic city filled with cornered German, Croatian, and Italian soldiers who continued to fight despite Italy’s capitulation in 1943. Scores of accused fascists were paraded daily by the Partisans through the cobblestone streets to Yugoslav military courts. Most were quickly condemned to death and shot, or thrown alive into gorges and pits around the city.

  Many Slovenes in Trieste at the time, ecstatic at the downfall of Italian fascism, greeted the Partisans as liberators and assisted in manhunts by the Yugoslav secret police. During the occupation, at least 3,500 residents of Trieste, along with an unknown number of Yugoslavs, Italians, and Germans who were trapped in the city, were shot and thrown into the fissures, or foibe, of the Carso mountain range, the eastern end of the Italian Alps. Thousands more were deported, and many perished in Yugoslav detention camps.

  A secret British-American intelligence report of September 1945, made public just a few years ago, is filled with accounts by witnesses to partisan atrocities. A Roman Catholic priest, Don Sceck, told the investigators that on May 2,1945, a group of 150 fascists were swiftly sentenced and then mowed down by partisan troops with machine guns in Basovizza, a small Slovene-speaking village just outside Trieste. The corpses, he said, were thrown into the huge Basovizza caverns, now a memorial to the victims. The next day he saw a group of about 250 prisoners at the mouth of the Basovizza pit.

  “These persons were questioned and tried in the presence of all the populace, who accused them,” the priest said in the report. “As soon as one of them was questioned, four or five women rushed up to them and accused them of having murdered or tortured one of their relatives, or of having burned down their homes. The accused persons were butted and struck, and always admitted the crimes ascribed to them.”