The Armenian Genocide Story At 100

One hundred years after the genocide, Armenians are still working through the story. Writers Litty Mathew and Eric Bogosian join us.

A hundred years ago this week – tomorrow – the round-up for killing began. For the killing of Armenians. First intellectuals and community leaders. Then able-bodied men. Then women and children marched to death, out of Turkey into the Syrian desert.  For much of the century since, we’ve heard a politically-loaded debate over whether to call it genocide. Today we want to talk about the actual memories and legacy of all that killing. The assassins that answered it. The music that captures it. The stories. This hour On Point: the Armenian genocide, in history and memory today.
-- Tom Ashbrook

Litty Mathew, former journalist. Author of the new novel, "The Musician's Secret." (@littymathew)

Eric Bogosian, actor, playwright and novelist. Author of the new book, "Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged The Armenian Genocide." (@eric_bogosian)

Martin Haroutunian, musician and student of Armenian folk music. Director of the Arev Armenian Folk Ensemble.

Los Angeles Times: It's enough to make you cry — "The duduk (pronounced doo-dook), is an ancient instrument from the Caucasus that looks a bit like a recorder. No longer than a forearm and with a range of just an octave, it sounds like a voice crying or wind howling across a mountaintop, its tone fleshy and pulpy, deep and haunting. Anyone who has watched a tear-jerker has probably heard the duduk's mournful echoes. Peter Gabriel's score in 'The Last Temptation of Christ' introduced us to it almost 20 years ago — music on which Djivan Gasparian, the duduk's best-known ambassador, played."

Glendale News-Press: Eric Bogosian retells an 'amazing' Armenian tale — "'In some ways, the genocide acts upon the Armenian people like the Holocaust did on the Jews,' Bogosian said. 'There were many Jews in Germany who didn't think of themselves as Jews first and foremost, but they were forced to. If they had forgotten, they were being reminded. Many Armenians at the time prior to the genocide did not see their lives as that terrible.'"

New Yorker: Remembering the Armenian Genocide -- "On April 24th, millions of people around the world will mourn the implementation of a plan—devised by Ottoman officials a hundred years ago, amid the chaos of the First World War—to annihilate the Armenian people in their native homeland. Initiated in 1915, the policy was brutally effective; by the war’s end, it had resulted in the destruction of virtually every Armenian community outside Constantinople, and the elimination of more than a million people from territory in what is now modern Turkey. This is what is meant by the term 'Armenian genocide.'"

https://www.scribd.com/doc/262753052/Excerpt-From-The-Musician-s-Secret-By-Litty-Mathew

https://www.scribd.com/doc/262753375/Excerpt-from-Operation-Nemesis-By-Eric-Bogosian