‘Just take a look at the Baku Armenians. I wonder if their experience wasn’t an example for the rest.’
The somber silence deepened. In January, 1990, the news about wildfires with Armenian people, set on fire on the streets of modern and industrialized Baku, shocked the whole world. That was the second time, after the Sumgait pogrom, that the Popular Front successfully carried out its operation on the deportation of Armenians, at the same time offering a ferocious armed resistance to military units of Soviet Army which belatedly tried to introduce order in the city, flooded with blood and driven mad by medieval horrors.
Anahit handed in the examination records and hurried home to dive into housework and get rid of anxious thoughts for а while. She had a degree in Turkish studies. Her mother had insisted on it. She had been talking to her daughter in Turkish since the early childhood and kept repeating every time: ‘You must know this language. One day you will return there. You shall. Then the others shall return too.’
Anahit’s father and mother were among the hundreds of Genocide survivors, unlike the million of Armenians that were sentenced to death by the Turks. Anahit’s mother Shekhnaz (as the second child in an Armenian family, she had to receive a Turkish name) was four years old at that time, and remembered well how some armed soldiers forced them out of their house, made them stand in a line and announced that they were going to ‘convoy’ them to Aleppo. The ‘convoy’ of the raw in which Shekhnaz and her mother were lined up (her father and brother had been separated from them since the very beginning), was over as they reached the outskirts of Diyarbakir. There the defenseless women and children were attacked by gangs of marauders which were specially formed for this occasion, with the active participation of ‘chetens’– descendants of immigrants from the South Caucasus. With the gendarmes’ laughter and cheerful exclamations, the marauders tore off the clothes of the miserable victims and beat them with war hammers: those actions were their main lucre, for they gave the money and gold to Turks. The look in their eyes never conveyed even the least sympathy: being the ancestors of those who now expatiate on the freedom of ‘their’ nation, they themselves ruthlessly deprived a whole nation of its right to exist- a nation that had inhabited this land since the formation of the Earth’s crust.