Children of Armenia A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-long Struggle for Justice

From 1915 to 1923, the ruling Ottoman Empire drove 2 million Armenians from their ancestral homeland; 1.5 million of them were viciously slaughtered. While there was an initial global outcry and a movement led by Woodrow Wilson to aid the "starving Armenians," the promise to hold the perpetrators accountable was never fulfilled and a curtain of silence soon descended on one of the worst crimes of modern history. Now, almost a century later, the Armenians are still fighting for justice. After uncovering his family's experiences during the Genocide, Michael Bobelian struggled to rationalize how an event as widely reported as the Genocide -- more than a hundred articles ran in The New York Times in 1915, with a typical headline exclaiming "Wholesale Massacres of Armenians by Turks" -- could fade from public consciousness. Why was the Genocide ignored, forgotten, and, worse, relegated to fiction for so long? What role did America's national self-interest play in helping Turkey evade public accountability? Why did Armenians themselves initially stand silent? Based on years of archival research and personal interviews, Children of Armenia is the first book to trace this post-Genocide history and reveal the events that have conspired to eradicate the "hidden holocaust" from the world's memory. At the close of World War I, the upsurge of support for the Genocide's survivors, considered one of the world's first international human right movements, inspired the few remaining Armenian leaders -- such as Simon Vratsian, the ravaged nation's last prime minister, and Vahan Cardashian, Armenia's chief advocate in the United States -- to seek relief and justice for their people. But despite their tireless efforts, the promises made to them by the war's victors were systematically cast aside during postwar negotiations. In the end, the Armenians received nothing, not even an apology, and decades of silence would pass before the Genocide's survivors -- dispersed, stateless, and on the verge of extinction -- would produce a new generation of activists who would renew their fight for justice. In Children of Armenia, we meet Gourgen Yanikian, a seventy-seven-year-old terrorist bent on revenge, whose act of terrible violence in Southern California galvanized a movement for recognition; Vartkes Yeghiayan, a lawyer who brought a class action suit against New York Life, seeking to win a judgment for thousands of unclaimed policies; and Van Krikorian, who teamed up with Senator Bob Dole to gain public acknowledgment of the Genocide from the U.S. government. From the initial acts of revenge-fueled terrorism to the birth of an organized movement seeking recognition for these unacknowledged crimes -- including political maneuvering to get a resolution passed by the U.S. Congress -- this is a groundbreaking account of the Armenian struggle to seek redress in the face of recalcitrant perpetrators and an indifferent world. Bobelian delivers a powerful lesson on the price that is paid when injustice goes unacknowledged and a moving story of a people living in the shadow of a century-old genocide.

Michael Bobelian, a graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, is a lawyer, journalist, and third-generation Armenian survivor. His work has appeared in Forbes .com, American Lawyer, and Legal Affairs magazine. He has also appeared on NPR’s Leonard Lopate show. He lives in New York City with his wife and infant daughter.