By Nouritza Matossian

On a wind-swept hillside in Anatolia, a deer and a sheep frolic and nibble tender shoots for it is almost 24 April.

"Ain’t you ‘eard, me old Capreolus Capreolus Armenus?" chomps the sheep, "you’re no longer a second class beast."

"Huh? And you’re not Ovis Armeniana like your great grandparents?"

"Look, even humans Turkified their names so as not to offend our killers. Try finding a ‘ian’ in this country! The Minister complained we animals "threaten national unity" so he renamed me "Ovis Orientalis Anatolicus" and you "Capreolus Cuprelus Capreolus."

"Hell’s bells!"

"You watch young red fox come sniffing about, "Vulpes Vulpes Kurdistanica!" He won’t recognize us no more. Poor chap’s been ethnically cleansed to plain old "Vulpes Vulpes". How the mighty are fallen."

"Let’s hope the old Minister chokes on his apricots! Or ‘Prunus Armeniaca’ will be next for the chop!"

If you think this is fiction, the ethnic cleansing of fauna was reported on the BBC last month. Mt Ararat has been expunged along with hundreds of place names. For Armenians it is just one more act of state vandalism by Turkey, destroying a culture while hammering at the gates of the EU. Respect for other cultures and nations, tolerance of the individual, justice for minorities, open borders with neighbours, all aims of the European Union, would be welcomed by many Turkish citizens, but so far not by their government.

Sixty thousand Armenians live in Turkey today, many with Turkish names or one official and one Armenian name. It is possible that almost a million Armenians also live in Turkey without knowing their true parentage or suspecting they had an Armenian grandparent. Lately some are ‘coming out.’ Ask any Armenian you meet anywhere at random about his or her family and eventually the story will come around to the Genocide, or as we Armenians call it ‘The Great Catastrophe.’ How does that affect around 7 million Armenians living around the globe? The majority are exiles from their homeland.

For the first time in a century world attention has turned to this small nation. Armenia and Turkey share a border which is still closed. Meanwhile some countries, France, Italy, Sweden, have acknowledged the Genocide, while others, UK, Germany, USA, argue against it. Is it because their consciences are pricking them? European countries who want Turkey excluded have suddenly remembered a 90 year old debt.

Each Armenian family preserves a death toll and memories like a historical epic. Even after the loss of lives from one million to two million according to foremost genocide historians, the theft of historic lands, of goods and inheritance, Armenians have been refused the right of memory, of justice, or even a dignified acknowledgement of the dead victims, and the right to their own history. The rape of culture has stripped us of memory and identity. Small wonder that we revisit a moral vacuum, a black hole, genocide. Never before in the modern age has a systematic state killing of its own citizens been so methodically, cold-bloodedly and concertedly covered up with the collusion of western democratic countries.

As a writer I turned to a repossession of memory too late. The anguish of my grandmother, Hajigul, describing her daughter dying before her eyes, her search for a husband who was bastinadoed in the Army then saved by a Turkish officer, was not something I could listen to as a child. I still get that sensation of choking as I write now. During my first pregnancy, waking or dreaming, she was always with me, pregnant like me, walking from her home town Kayseri in a desperate caravan of women and children whose men had been killed. She’d given birth to my mother on the back of a cart, while I lay in a sanitized hospital. And I started writing a book on another survivor, Arshile Gorky, little realizing that his childhood as Manoug Adoian was also a hidden Armenian epic. He took me through histories, written and whispered. Taking solace in his dazzling art, I found the clarity to study our pain-racked past, often throwing books away in angry tears. I had to approach him, to relive his life somehow, and only then begin to understand the greatest puzzle of creation, how hideous suffering can be transformed into tender beauty.

My quest became a repossession of our effaced history, of journeys to lost homelands, cities, churches, all defaced, renamed, denied their true lineage. I sickened at magnificent tenth century churches, too robust to destroy, turned into stables and bazaars, elegant Armenian mansions made over as shrines to Kemalist ideology. I almost missed Gorky’s village, for it too had been renamed, along with everything that was or sounded Armenian.

I was armed with facts and so were thousands of other Armenians all over the world who had grown up on foreign soil, speaking strange languages, living with similar experiences, none prepared to give up on their identity and their past. Performing Gorky’s Women in a solo piece I came into contact with far-flung communities. My book, my quest, resonated with director Atom Egoyan, who made his first Genocide movie Ararat, smashing through the taboo and sanctions imposed by successive Turkish governments suppressing earlier films. A personal need was satisfied to see on the screen characters become more than flesh and blood, Gorky, his mother, even myself. Why? Because our predicament had a universal resonance for other dispossessed people. Because in Turkey the word ‘Armenian’ had become a term of abuse. Why such guilt and hatred?

The Ottoman Empire overran Armenia, just as it did Greece and the Balkan countries. Armenia was a protectorate whose sovereignty was to be guaranteed by Western powers. In the conflict between the West and Russia, Armenia fell victim. A subject nation, Armenians had no legal rights in Moslem courts of law. Periodic massacres kept down their numbers and intimidated them into submission. Their firstborn sons were snatched at birth to be trained as Janissaries. As the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ began to weaken, Sultan Hamid turned on his Armenian subjects. On April 24th 1915, 200 Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople were seized, transported. tortured and killed. This was called ‘cutting the head off the snake.’ I propose those poets’ names be added to PEN’s list of banned writers on April 24th this year. The Young Turks with a telegraph system in place, a German railway across the country put into operation a systematic and scientifically planned extermination of the Armenian populace to seize Armenian territories. Men were rounded up and killed. Old people, women and children driven out of homes, forced to march, tortured, raped, butchered, the survivors driven to the deserts of Syria to die or be killed later. Butcher regiments of convicted murderers were set upon the victims, Kurdish peasants were bribed to kill, German officers directed fire. Some Armenians fought back. Documents in the state archives of Britain, Germany and the USA, have been studied and verified by international scholars. Less well known is that at the end of World War 1, a Turkish Military Tribunal was convened. The Prime Minister, Minister of War, Minister of the Navy and the Minister of Education were declared guilty by unanimous vote of the Tribunal, and allowed to escape.

In 1920 The Treaty of Sevres restored territories to a Greater Armenia but it was not enforced. Turkey was a useful ally; all was forgotten. Had Nuremberg style international trials been held, the Jewish Holocaust could not, would not have happened. Adolf Hitler said before invading Poland, "Who, after all, speaks nowadays of the annihilation of the Armenians." Even Turkey’s alliance with the Axis powers in the Second World War was forgiven and Armenians forgotten.

Today the Armenian minority in Turkey is subject to discrimination by the law which prevents certain kinds of inheritance, careers, education in their own language, and forbids the mention of the 1915 killings, in print or in speech. However a new educated class emerging throughout Turkey rejects censorship, the abuse of human rights and freedoms. Writer Orhan Pamuk courageously spoke out, was condemned, but also supported by many with civic courage. World pressure on Turkey to accept that the killings of the Armenians as ‘genocide defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’ falls on deaf ears. The resolution of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the major organization of the world’s foremost experts on affirming the Armenian Genocide is rejected. So is the statement in the New York Times in June 2000 declaring the "incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide" and urging western democracies to acknowledge it by 126 Holocaust scholars led by Elie Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer.

Imagine present day Germany defending the Nazi position and re-opening ‘an investigation’ of whether the Holocaust really took place. This is Turkey’s response, rejected by Diaspora Armenians. Turkish scholar Taner Akcam recently attested in the European Parliament in Strasbourg on denial and laundering of Turkish official records and intimidation of investigators.

I appeal to writers and member of English Pen, by writing accurately about this tragedy, to help Turkey towards democracy and co-existence with neighbouring Armenia. Irrespective of whether the EU eventually refuses or grants membership, the process itself will have been worth it. If acknowledgement of the first mass extermination of the 20th century, be it called ‘Armenian Genocide’ or not, results in securing world respect and human rights to the nation whose forebears perpetrated it, then some good might even come from an incalculable moral and human sacrifice.

Nouritza Matossian is author of Black Angel, A Life of Arshile Gorky, (Pimlico) See www.arshile-gorky.com