World Pays Little Attention To This Holocaust

There’s no “Schindler’s List” to put a popular face on this holocaust.

No celebrities speak out about it. No political leaders demand justice.

Few classrooms give much more than a passing nod to one of the world’s worst cases of mass murder.

Scattered across the globe like grains of sand, only Armenians such as Spokane’s Sona Cassem pause to commemorate the butchery of their people so long ago.

A sign on a wall of Cassem’s downtown espresso shop last week proclaimed Thursday as the 82nd anniversary of the Armenian genocide.

Not many latte sippers noticed it or took time to ask what the sign meant. The few customers who did were treated to a grim history lesson:

The horror began in Turkey in 1915. As the rest of the world shamefully looked away, perhaps 2 million Armenians systematically were rounded up and murdered by the “Young Turk” government of the Ottoman Empire.

April 24 marks the first day of the slaughter. More than 300 leading Armenians were arrested and killed in Constantinople while 5,000 of the poorest Armenians were murdered in the streets and in their homes.

It was religious persecution - Muslim Turks taking their fear and ignorance out on Orthodox Christian Armenians.

For Armenians, what happened is no less painful than the Holocaust is to the Jews.

Cassem, like most descendants of people from this Maryland-sized country in the southernmost part of the former Soviet Union, can trace her heritage directly back to a survivor.

Her grandmother, Eva, was forced to watch as her husband and two children were killed by Turkish thugs. Eva later remarried and fled to Iraq, where Cassem was born.

Nearly as outrageous as the carnage is the slight attention the genocide of the Armenians has received. Even today, Turkey stubbornly refuses to acknowledge this blackest part of its past.

And try as they might, Armenians have been unable to put much pressure on Turkey to formally apologize or make restitution.

American presidents have acknowledged the genocide - but little else. Located so close to Russia, Turkey, after all, is a valued U.S. ally offering vital air bases.

“Unfortunately, people without power and money are not taken seriously,” says Cassem, 45, who runs Next Door Espresso at Lincoln and Riverside with her husband, Bruce.

“Armenia is a little dot on the map with no power and wealth. The bottom line is that everything is politics. “But what happened to us should not be written off.”

Being Armenian in Spokane is a lonely affair. Cassem, who moved here six years ago, has found fewer than 10 Armenians.

“This is my country, but every now and then, I miss speaking the language,” says Cassem, also fluent in Arabic as well as English.

Raised in Iraq, Cassem earned a college math degree. She luckily got out and moved to the United States in 1980, just before Saddam Hussein went to war with Iran.

Cassem, like most American Armenians, located in California. She became a citizen and married Bruce, a geologist. They have a 7-year-old son, Kevin.

Life here, Cassem says, is overwhelmingly good. Yet, it pains her that Americans are so poorly schooled in history.

Few remember that it was the genocide of the Armenians that inspired Adolf Hitler’s attempted extermination of the Jews.

The evening before Hitler sent his death squads into Poland, he remarked, “Go, kill without mercy. … Who today remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?”

“I’d like for Americans to learn about this so they will appreciate what they have,” says Cassem. “We must never forget these things so they might never happen again.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo