There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

by Meline Toumani

  2

  Summer Camp, Franklin, Massachusetts, 1989

  Wednesdays at Camp Haiastan were debate night, which I always looked forward to. We would have just finished dinner by then, an orderly affair where boys and girls aged eight to fifteen sat at picnic tables in the Mess Hall sharing platters of the menu du jour, maybe burgers or grilled cheese or lasagna and garlic bread. Inside the long, white-shingled building, at the head of each table hung a ghostly, blurred photo of a soldier wielding a gun. There was General Antranig, Kevork Chavush, Armen Garo, and even a woman, Sose Mayrig, Mother Sose, strapped with a vest of bullets. These were the early heroes of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), the organization whose youth branch ran our camp. The Armenians in these photos had fought against the Ottoman army in the years leading up to World War I.

  Before we ate, everyone stood and chanted the Armenian grace in a prepubescent chorus:

  Jashagetsookkhaghaghootyampuzgeragoorusvorbadrasdyalehmezeedyarnehorhnyalehdereebarkevusyoor. Amen.

  Although all of us were Armenian, we were also entirely American, and many of the kids did not speak the bewildering language of their ancestors; most were descendants of Armenians who had arrived in the United States three generations prior, so a cacophony of Boston, Long Island, and New Jersey accents lent our daily recitations all the convincingness of a Hanukkah blessing in Houston.

  Camp Haiastan (the name means “Armenia” in Armenian) had been around for decades by the time I got there in the 1980s. A circle of fourteen faded wooden cabins sat at the center of a hundred acres, along with a pool, a large pond covered with lily pads, a basketball court, and cushions of fields and paths and forests that made camp feel like a kingdom apart from the Massachusetts neighbors just a few minutes down the road.

  Each morning at camp began with the ceremonial raising of two flags: American and Armenian. In the cabin circle, lined up before a statue of the Armenian revolutionary fighter Karekin Nejdeh, we first sang “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” Then we sang “Gamavorin Kaylerkuh,” March of the Volunteers, an anthem of the ARF:

  Forward, immortals of a martyred race!

  Armored in six centuries of unforgotten vengeance,

  Upon the far mountaintops of our fatherland

  Let us go plant the tricolored flag.

  Even those who didn’t understand the Armenian lyrics understood, somehow, that the fatherland we were always singing about was not merely the small Soviet republic on the map. And I, it should be said, sang louder than anyone.

  In the evening, we lowered the flags to “America the Beautiful,” followed by the Armenian national anthem. On special song nights, we treated the lyrics of Ottoman-era battle hymns as dramatic texts. Some of these songs were lively entreaties to action; others were slow laments for revolutionaries who had fought and died. One year, my cabin was assigned to perform “Menk Angeghdz Zinvor Enk”—We Are Sincere Soldiers—and I played a plastic flute and led my cabinmates down the aisle and up to the stage. We were twelve-year-old girls sporting Champion sweatshirts and oversized men’s boxer shorts with the waistbands turned down, which was the fashion that year. After a somber procession, we lined up like a small platoon and sang all four verses.

  In my normal life, at elementary school in New Jersey, I was not what you would call an outgoing child, or a popular one. I was too tall too soon, and although I see now from photos that I was thin as a winter sapling, I felt like a clumsy giant, and was too shy to be helped even by my mother’s well-designed efforts at assertiveness training. (“You can have McDonald’s french fries if you go up to the counter and order them yourself. All you need to say is, ‘One small french fries, please.’” I couldn’t do it.) At camp, I still felt awkward, but at least one of my social handicaps was removed: I looked like all the other kids—dark hair and dark eyes, and a nose I hadn’t yet grown into, a nose that would have many competitors here for the nickname “Gonzo,” a taunt I had suffered at school. At camp I felt, if not exactly “in,” at least the possibility of belonging.

  That possibility was strong enough to keep me going throughout the other fifty weeks of the year. In between summers at Camp Haiastan, during the school term, I did everything I could to conjure the place. In those days before the Internet or digital photography, I contented myself by making pencil sketches from memory—the benches under a stand of pine trees, the entry gate with a sign that said “Paree Kalousd”—Welcome, in Armenian. Once, sitting on the floor of my bedroom, I spent hours drawing a minutely detailed map of the entire campground, attempting not to miss a single detail, from the swimming pool pump to the torn basketball nets.

  I trafficked in a constant stream of letters and packages with my girlfriends from camp, and I was not alone in feeling that these friends—Armenian friends—were special, more valuable. This was a sentiment that we shared bluntly in the pages of the camp newsletter, a yearbook of stories, poems, and lists of favorite things about camp, published at the end of each session. I saved all of these newsletters, storing them in a box in my parents’ garage, and when I discovered them recently, thick, stapled stacks of purple mimeographs, I saw that the theme was repeated like a collective agreement that had to be constantly reaffirmed lest it be questioned: Armenian friends are different from odar friends.

  Odar is an adjective that means “different” or “foreign”; but it is also used as a noun, a disparaging one, meaning “not one of us”—not Armenian. As in: “She married an odar.” It was one of the handful of words that even non-Armenian-speaking children at camp loved to invoke. (Others included vardig, for “panties,” vorig, for “bottom,” and, for reasons too complicated to explain here, madzun, which is the Armenian word for “yogurt.”)

  “It’s hard for odars to understand Camp and why we love it so much here, however if you could make any odar Armenian for two days, they would understand,” wrote one camper in the newsletter. “No other race has anything like us.… Never lose touch with your Armenian friends because when your odar friends let you down, it will be your Armenian friends who come through in the end.”

  The other popular theme was collective destruction. “It is fun to be at Camp Haiastan because you can learn lots of things and learn about how the Armenians died,” wrote a girl who was new that year. “Today we learned about the Armenian case and talked about our feelings and how we felt when the Turks killed the Armenians.”

  Many of the newsletter entries imagined genocide. Poems told of orphaned children (“A red, so red / drips so endless / Why, Daddy? Why?”) or national liberation (“But just when they think they’ve got us all / we will rebuild / One day an Armenian will find another, / and red, blue, and orange will raise high / And not another Armenian will have to cry.”).

  A poem by one of the counselors, in which a billiard table served as a metaphor for Armenian history, climaxed with the lines, “Is it the stick / Behind the white ball / Which forces him to do evil? / Or is it the Turk behind the stick?”

  And from a distant relation of mine, eleven years old then, now an intellectual property lawyer in Manhattan: “Keeping the Armenian nation alive is a hard task. But doesn’t it bother you when they say ‘What is Armenian?’ If you learn the language, if you learn the traditions, and most importantly fight for your freedom, you will see positive results.”

  But if you stopped by at the right time of day and didn’t stay too long, Camp Haiastan might have been just another wholesome East Coast retreat with a name that sounded vaguely Native American. We learned to swim and went canoeing. We made macramé bracelets in arts and crafts classes (in the colors of the Armenian flag, naturally) and attended Saturday night socials where, in between 1980s pop songs, we linked pinkies and stomped around for hours in circle dances derived from the Anatolian halay step but reinvented with names like the Michigan Hop or the California Run.

  Athletic activities at camp featured games like Capture the Flag, in which sections of the campgrounds were named for World War I battles the Arm
enians had fought: we raced from Sardarabad and Bash Abaran (near the pool) to Karmir Blour (over by the infirmary), which referred to a seventh-century BC citadel outside of Yerevan, erected by the last great Urartian king. In this way we merged normal camp activities with Armenian history.

  Debate night was held in the Rec Hall. Each week there was an issue to discuss concerning Armenians, usually something about the genocide. Not “was it or wasn’t it”—that was not considered a question—but innumerable variations about how Turkey’s denial should be fought, or once, on a lighter note, whether Armenia was ready to break free from the Soviet Union.

  The Rec Hall smelled like wet wood—summer in the Northeast was humid enough without packing a hundred children and twenty counselors into a room. The youngest campers, eight-year-olds, scrunched Indian-style in tight rows on the floor, while the older kids, fourteen and fifteen, lounged against the back wall, perched atop cabinets where art supplies, board games, and Armenian grammar worksheets were kept.

  I was thirteen, and it was my third summer at camp. I normally enjoyed debate night; I had a righteous streak, despite my shyness, and felt a lot more confident arguing about issues than, say, talking to boys at the Saturday night dance. Debates at camp were usually voluntary activities in which teams of campers faced off in front of the rest. But this week’s debate was different. We had a special guest speaker, an ARF representative from a nearby chapter. He was an Armenian man, barely older than the counselors, perhaps twenty-five, which would have made him the most senior figure in the room aside from the camp director. And although he was dressed as casually as the rest of us, in a T-shirt and shorts, with an unshaven face and wavy black hair overdue for a haircut, he did not appear relaxed. From the moment he stood up, he twitched with impatience, bouncing on his heels and scanning the room. It seemed like we were keeping him from some clearly more urgent business.

  “Tonight we are here to discuss what we are willing to sacrifice to achieve Hai Tahd,” he began.

  Hai Tahd is generally translated as the Armenian Cause (technically the Armenian “Case”). We treated it not as two words that somebody had decided to put together, but like a basic truth, as fundamental as gravity or the sunrise. The Armenian Cause was the official ideological platform of the ARF. Versions of it date back to the ARF’s early days. The group was founded in 1890, when Armenian activists in the Caucasus began to organize to improve the lot of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire; it quickly expanded to chapters all over the world and still takes seats in parliamentary elections in Armenia, Lebanon and Nagorno-Karabakh. Its junior branch, the Armenian Youth Federation (AYF), was founded in Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1933, and opened Camp Haiastan in 1951. Together, the ARF and the AYF are known as the Dashnak Party, shorthand for Hai Heghapokhakan Dashnaktsutiun.

  In my camp days, Hai Tahd meant (and still means) the following: gaining recognition of the Armenian genocide, reclaiming the formerly Armenian-inhabited provinces of eastern Turkey, and reunifying the other patches of historic Armenia that are now part of Georgia and Azerbaijan. We were always talking about Hai Tahd. It was in our language lessons, our history classes, our songs, and our debates. But since we chatted only in English at camp, a non-Armenian visitor overhearing these conversations might be struck by the Tourette’s-like interjection of a sudden greeting—“Hi, Todd”—making its way into otherwise intelligible sentences. Who was Todd?

  Most of the campers attended Dashnak youth group meetings throughout the school year where they learned about things like Hai Tahd, but I had never attended those meetings. Each summer, when I returned from camp, I asked my parents if I could join a nearby chapter, and although they didn’t reject the idea outright, my request never came to anything. (They had sent me to Camp Haiastan not for political reasons but only because some of my cousins were going there.) I understood Armenian—it was my first language—but Hai Tahd was the Western Armenian pronunciation. In my dialect, Eastern Armenian, it would be Hai Dat. Thus the words Hai Tahd did not communicate anything to me. I sometimes imagined my elementary school classmate, Todd Twersky, showing up unannounced at the perimeter of the campground. Hi, Todd.

  The speaker continued. “The question is, is violence in the name of Hai Tahd justified?”

  “An eye for an eye!” one of the male counselors shouted. Cheers went up.

  “The ends justify the means!” somebody else called out.

  Before long, the room was flaring with arguments. At first I thought of the old soldier photos hanging in the Mess Hall. But gradually, taking in the voices around me, I realized they were not talking about violence in the past. This was something new. The speaker was talking about a group called the Lisbon Five.

  I had no clue who the Lisbon Five were. I was, however, a geography buff, the sort of child who made a sport of memorizing capital cities, so I knew Lisbon was in Portugal. What could this possibly have to do with us?

  I looked at one of my cousins sitting to my left but got no signal of whether she was as lost as I was. I noticed a younger camper, Julie, weeping quietly while her friend rubbed her back—but then, Julie was always crying about something.

  How did everybody know what this man was talking about? Although I was confused, it was clear from the intensity of the debate that asking for clarification was out of the question. I was embarrassed that my parents had not taught me such things.

  I can’t say for sure how much of the story I pieced together that strange evening, how close I came to comprehending the murders that were the subject of our debate, but I got the salient point: five Armenian guys blew up a building to get back at Turkey.

  In 1983, these men, calling themselves the Armenian Revolutionary Army, had planted a bomb inside a Turkish embassy residence in Lisbon, Portugal. Although their primary target was the Turkish chargé d’affaires, it was his wife who was killed, along with a Portuguese policeman—and all five of the Armenian terrorists. Throughout the 1980s, the same network, and a similar group called the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), carried out more than eighty attacks against Turkish targets all over the world, including a few in the United States, killing forty-six people and injuring some three hundred. Their stated goal was to force Turkey to take responsibility for the genocide and compensate Armenians with land and money.

  As the debate continued, things grew chaotic. A folded-up metal chair slid to the ground with a clatter. The glass on the sliding doors fogged up. Younger kids squirmed as the older campers and counselors argued on. Some said the men were martyrs and that Turkish denial of the genocide was too powerful for softer measures. Now and then the prevailing “eye for an eye” sentiment was challenged by something along the lines of “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Others spoke of the horrors their grandparents had endured, and insisted that Armenians had the right to seek retribution. I was baffled by the certainty around me. How had everybody gotten to be so sure of themselves, so sure that it was okay to kill people to make a point?

  The speaker had become seriously agitated, spinning from an argument with one person to a question from another, and as the room grew hotter, his wavy hair coiled into tight curls. I was scared of him. I had never been this close to violence, even the idea of violence, before. Then he stopped talking long enough to wipe the sweat from his forehead, and all sound in the room seemed to go mute. Slowly, he looked up with an expression so hurt and raw that I wanted to enter into it. The passion in his eyes, the way he had taken on everything so personally, like it was all his responsibility, had hypnotic force. I decided to try on the idea, see how it felt. Tried to hear my own voice saying Yes, it made sense to bomb those people. They brought it on themselves. They chose to represent Turkey. That makes them murderers, too. I transported myself right into the speaker’s eyes. I wanted to be a part of whatever was in them. That I could not quite get there felt almost, if not completely, like a failing of my own.

  Suddenly one of the counselors, a young woman from S
an Francisco with a bohemian air about her, took a step forward. She had been leaning against a wall on the right side of the room, arms crossed, until she could no longer contain herself. When she tried to speak her voice collapsed into a sob. “You people are all crazy!” she shouted. Everybody turned to look at her. With her face swelling to a red, wet mess, hair sticking to her cheeks as she tried to wipe her tears away, she forced a path through the seated children and ran out of the room.

  You people are all crazy. You people, she had said. She had been one of us, until she chose for a moment not to be. In that moment the choice revealed itself as binary. Years later, it was not the shock of learning about the Lisbon Five that defined the evening for me. It was the explosive anger of the counselor from California—or rather, not her anger, but the clarity it revealed. It was not the same as the certainty that the others had been proclaiming. Her reaction came from somewhere deeper than camp, than family, than being Armenian. We had been taught to believe that nothing went deeper than the fact that we were Armenian, but in that moment I sensed, with a feeling too hazy to identify as either disappointment or relief, that this wasn’t necessarily true.

  Two decades later, in Armenian communities from Los Angeles to Paris to Beirut, ARF members would still gather each July to commemorate the anniversary of the Lisbon bombing, to celebrate the five men—aged nineteen to twenty-one—who killed a Turkish diplomat’s wife. A priest would say a blessing. The men would be called martyrs and heroes, and about this there would be no debate at all.