“What is your name?” people ask me.
“Araz,” I reply, anticipating the next question.
“What nationality is that?”
“Armenian” I answer, anticipating once again the too familiar reaction, a sympathetic smile, or sometimes a confused face.
“So when did you move to Canada ?”

At this point, I usually take a deep breath and get ready to tell again the story I have told 5,000 times.

“I was born here. My parents were born in Egypt. My paternal grandparents were from Egypt. My maternal grandparents were born in Turkey. But all of us are Armenian. You see, in 1915, there was a Genocide committed by the Turks against the Armenians. There was an Armenian population of 2-3 million living in Ottoman Turkey. 1.5 million were massacred during the Genocide and the forced marches to the Syrian Desert, and the rest were deported to different countries. Turkey denies it ever happened. Today, there are less than 8 million Armenians left around the world. 3 million live in present-day Armenia. The other 5 million live in the Diaspora and I’m one of them.”

With The Genocide in Me I feel compelled to tell the Armenian story, which is also my story.

When a self-introduction like the one above becomes part of your daily life, you know that the Genocide is not only something that happened in 1915. You know that you are a remnant of a very ancient civilization which today is struggling to keep its national identity alive on foreign lands. You feel your people’s struggle on your skin every day. The elements of that struggle become an enormous responsibility on the shoulders of the ones who have survived and the ones who will pass the history and culture on to the next generation. The pressure of keeping our ancestors’ language could become, as in my case, enormous and even intolerable.

A need as natural as finding the man of your dreams and falling in love becomes very complicated. "Your non-Armenian husband will not speak your language with you and your children will lose their Armenian identity" is what my parents and the parents of almost all my friends believe. It’s actually the breakdown of the relationships between Armenian parents and children who have chosen to marry non-Armenians that drove me to make this film. They put us in a situation where we have to choose between love and our national identity. It’s a feeling that prevents us from living life fully. And it becomes harder as you grow older.

This film, The Genocide in Me, is about my need to free myself from the pressures, the burden imposed by history. I need to understand. I want to discover where my father’s national obsession comes from. That kind of obsession can only be born from loss and denial.

I need to publicly ask the questions about my identity, about our identity, about the importance of language, and the impact of the denial of injustice. In working on this film, in undertaking my journeys to talk to Armenian Genocide survivors, in daring to make a journey to Eastern Turkey to see the land for myself, to see the way the Turks present our story, I have started the process of understanding.

As I write these words, I ask myself “How many more generations will suffer under the impact of the Genocide?”. Sometimes the responsibility of telling the history of that event and seeking justice for the 1.5 million victims surpasses the loneliness I feel at night. Being alone becomes nothing compared to the immensity of what I need to do to get this cause recognized. I am torn between worlds and that has led me to a journey that I’ve named The Genocide in Me.

The film also answers my deep need to share this story with others, to help the Armenian community discuss issues that haunt it, and to reach out to my Canadian fellow-citizens – and citizens of all nations – to help them understand their Armenian neighbours from the Diaspora.

Do I need to stop thinking about my national identity, our lands and the history of the Armenian Genocide or do I go towards it, to give meaning to my childhood and find justice? I hope this film will record a personal journey that might reconcile my worlds.

Araz Artinian
October 2005

Almost 20 years before the genocide, the Turkish government of the Ottoman Empire began committing atrocities against the Armenians, whom they considered “subversive”. In these years alone, it is estimated that 300,000 Armenians were massacred or perished as a result of the destruction of their villages. Consequently, between 1896 and the beginning of WWI, about 100,000 more Armenian citizens of the Ottoman Empire fled abroad, emigrating to France, Egypt and the Balkans (in particular Bulgaria). Eventually, many of them made their way to the United States, with a majority settling in Massachusetts and Detroit. Those who remained put their trust in a reform project of local administrative autonomy, as provided by the Berlin Treaty of 1878. Under joint European pressure, the Ottoman government signed the project in 1913, but cancelled it a year later because of WWI.

Following a military coup d’état in 1908, Ottoman Turkey was governed by nationalists, who gradually came to the conclusion that further territorial losses and the collapse of the Empire could be avoided only by ethnic homogenization or turkification of this multiethnic and multi-religious feudal state. In particular, the two largest Christian nations, the Armenians and the Greeks, were considered to be “internal enemies” or “traitors”. The First World War, which Turkey entered as an ally of Imperial Germany, offered ample opportunities to “free” Turkey from the suspect Christians. The declaration of the Holy War - Jihad - on the 14 of November, 1914, delivered a legal and religious permission to include Christian co-citizens on the list of the Ottoman Empire 's official enemies.

In 1915, behind the screen of war, the Young Turks, officially known as the Committee of Union and Progress, implemented a plan to exterminate the Armenian population of Ottoman Turkey and “free” Turkey for ever from any reform obligations.

The genocide was carried out through the “Special Organization”, a previous intelligence service and later a tool in the hands of the War and the Home Ministries. The number of members in the “Special Organization” increased to 15,000 in the year 1915. They were the actual henchmen of this genocide, among them convicts and many members of Muslim ethnic groups uprooted by the Balkan wars and Russia ’s conquest of the Caucasus. The atrocities were veiled under the guise of deportations, as the Young Turk government ordered the Armenians to leave their ancestral homes. Slave labour and massacres reduced the adult male population, in particular of the Armenians, whereas women, children and old people were marched to death in the Syrian Desert.

According to an estimation of October 4, 1916 by the Imperial German Embassy of Constantinople, 1.5 million of the Armenian pre-war population of 2.5 million perished in the short period of 18 months.

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For more information, you may visit:
www.twentyvoices.com: Araz Artinian’s documentary web site on 20 survivors of the genocide.