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Charlie Rose Show Transcripts
August 12, 2009 Wednesday
Transcript: Charlie Rose interviewing Peter Balakian
JERUSALEM, NY COLLEGE PRESIDENTS DISCUSS EDUCATION; AL JAZEERA
DIRECTOR ANALYZES MIDDLE EAST-US POLITICS; MEMOIRE EXPLORES ARMENIAN
GENOCIDE - PART 1
CHARLIE ROSE: Welcome to the broadcast. Tonight, two college
presidents, Leon Botstein of Bard College in New York, and Sari
Nusseibeh of Al Quds University in Jerusalem.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
[parts omitted]
CHARLIE ROSE: We conclude with Peter Balakian and a family memoir and
a look at the Armenian genocide.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PETER BALAKIAN, AUTHOR, TRANSLATOR: The trauma of the Armenian
genocide of 1915 was buried in my family. And people would celebrate
him as a bishop in the church. They never spoke about this
extraordinary memoir he wrote, 71-chapter memoir that he wrote.
(END VIDEO CLIP) CHARLIE ROSE: A collaboration on education in the
Middle East, Al Jazeera and the politics of the Middle East, and the
Armenian genocide when we continue.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[parts omitted]
CHARLIE ROSE: Peter Balakian is here. His great uncle, Grigoris (ph)
Balakian, was one of the leading Armenian intellectuals of his
generation. On April 25, 1915, he was arrested along with 250 other
leaders of Constantinople`s Armenian community. In 1918 he wrote a
memoir "Armenian Golgotha," which offered his eyewitness account of
the genocide. Peter Balakian first learned of the memoir in 1991. Now
after a 10-year translation project, the book has been published in
English for the first time. I am pleased to have Peter Balakian back
at this table. Welcome.
PETER BALAKIAN: Thank you, Charlie. Good to be here.
CHARLIE ROSE: Nice to see you.
PETER BALAKIAN: Great to be here.
CHARLIE ROSE: The finding of the memoir. How did that happen in 1991?
PETER BALAKIAN: Strange set of circumstances. I received a magazine
article from a friends cut out of a magazine in France where a
commemorative ceremony had just taken place in honor of my
great-uncle. And my friend wrote in the margin, "any relation?" And of
course I knew who it was, because Grigoris (ph) Balakian was an
honored ghost in our family. People talked about him with reverence...
CHARLIE ROSE: but they didn`t talk about what he had seen in the
family, did they?
PETER BALAKIAN: That is the complexity, because the trauma of the
Armenian genocide of 1915 was buried in my family. And people would
celebrate him as a bishop in the church. They never spoke about this
extraordinary memoir that he wrote, 71-chapter memoir that he wrote.
CHARLIE ROSE: It took then you 10 years -- how long did it take, from
`91 to 2001 to...
PETER BALAKIAN: First what happened is I had to get a book in
Armenian. There was a copy in the Middle East.
CHARLIE ROSE: In Beirut?
PETER BALAKIAN: Yes, right. It came from Beirut.
And then I had to find a collaborative translator to work with, and I
was working on other books.
So it was a complicated process, and all in all, 10 years working on
the memoir, but really almost 20 from the discovery of this lost book,
this great lost memoir.
CHARLIE ROSE: It is many stories. It is the story of how he did it,
just the journey of this man. It`s also a documentation of an event in
history. And it`s also the political story of the denial.
PETER BALAKIAN: Absolutely.
Very much this book brings together these layers. I think there`s no
doubt in the minds of scholars of this history that this is the most
comprehensive and complex memoir of the Armenian genocide.
First it has some panorama. It begins in Berlin on the eve of the
World War I. And it takes you then back. And he`s observing the
outbreak of the war with a very fine eye as an outsider, and he`s
contextualizing the Armenian genocide through setting up the war.
Then we move across Europe to Constantinople and follow him on the
night of his arrest of April 24, 1915, along with the other 250
Armenian cultural leaders. And then you`re going to go on this journey
northwest to this prison 200 miles away called Changari (ph), and then
you`re going to follow him south into the center of Turkey, into the
Toros (ph) and Amanos (ph) mountains.
And you`re witnessing all the way atrocities and the destruction of
the civilization, you know, the destruction of the buildings, the
schools. What Rafael Lambkin (ph) noted as an important part of
genocide with is the destruction of a people`s culture.
So you`re witnessing all of this, and at the same time he is a
terrific listener. So you`re not only getting his voice, but you`re
getting all the people he`s listening to.
And these are Armenian survivors of course, from little children who
find themselves alive in a midst of a pile of corpses, and walk away
and find this priest wandering in these, you know, horrific
landscapes. You`re getting those voices, but you`re also getting the
voices of Turks, of Turkish perpetrators, like one captain of the
Turkish police at a certain crucial part of the deportations actually
opens up to my great uncle.
CHARLIE ROSE: Because he thinks he`s going on his way to his death?
PETER BALAKIAN: Absolutely. There`s no way he could be as candid as he
was in that interview without feeling that this man will be dead and
no one will know what I`m saying to him.
And you also get the voices of German, Austrian, and Swiss railway
engineers who are working on the Berlin to Baghdad railway, because
Germany is Turkey`s wartime ally, and you`re hearing their bystander
witness, I would say they`re rather detached view of the massacres and
the atrocities. And their voices are very valuable.
You`re also hearing righteous Turks, Turkish governors and mid-level
administrators and bureaucrats who are appalled at the orders they`re
receiving from the government head in Constantinople, and actually are
trying to warn the Armenians in any way they can.
So all of these voices in my mind created a memoir of what I would
call a polyphonic kind of acoustic.
CHARLIE ROSE: Some people who read this say that they found themselves
-- how can I read another page of this? How I can read such awful
atrocities often committed by tools around the farm.
PETER BALAKIAN: Killing in the Armenian genocide was done so much by
hand, so much by gruesome implements -- tannery tools, farm tools,
hoes, rakes, knives, and axes. And there is a lot of gore in this
story. And yet the story is so remarkable in its evolution that I`m
finding people are saying, "I can`t stop reading. Even though I would
think the atrocity would deter me in some way, I want to keep finding
out how he survives, and I want to understand more deeply how the
structure of the Armenian genocide happened."
CHARLIE ROSE: Some speculate that Hitler knew about the Armenian
genocide and, therefore, it was one of the things that influenced what
he did.
PETER BALAKIAN: I think one of the most important links between the
Armenian genocide and the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe can be
found in Hitler`s statement made eight days before invading Poland in
1939, "Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the
Armenians?"
CHARLIE ROSE: He said that eight days before he invaded Poland?
PETER BALAKIAN: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: "Who speaks...
PETER BALAKIAN: ... today of the annihilation of the Armenians."
CHARLIE ROSE: So we can do whatever we want to.
PETER BALAKIAN: We can do whatever we want to, and history gets
forgotten. Who today remembers? The Armenian genocide was the most
covered international human rights disaster of the second decade of
the 20th century. By the late 1930s Hitler saw it disappeared down the
memory hall.
CHARLIE ROSE: Tell me his story and what happened and how he was able
to survive?
PETER BALAKIAN: Well, he was arrested, of course, with his notable
band of 250 intellectuals and cultural leaders at Constantinople. And
this night of April 24 is the night that Armenians commemorate now,
the American genocide worldwide.
CHARLIE ROSE: There is no question this was planned by the central
government?
PETER BALAKIAN: Absolutely none, no. You can see that there are
systematic arrests happening throughout Turkey from the middle of
April of 1915 on throughout the summer of 1915, village by village,
city by city, town by town.
You have the routine of the town crier ordering Armenians to a central
square. You have the deportation margins being set up with the
provincial police. And then you have the ordering of killing squads,
and this is coming from the central committee, and the killing squads
were administered by something called the special organization.
And what the Turkish government did was let out some 30,000 prisoners
from jails and organized them into killing bands. And it was a pretty
innovative idea. I mean, let`s make use of our killing manpower. And
again, I think that in some ways this can even foreshadow the
Einstazgruppen that Nazis used. The Nazis did have mobile killing
squads, especially in the period before the camps became the focus of
mass killing.
CHARLIE ROSE: Were a million people killed in a year?
PETER BALAKIAN: I think a million people were killed between 1915 and
the spring of 1916, and then another 200,000 massacred in the Syrian
deserts of 1916.
So we know by the end of the summer of 1916 we have at least 1.2
million people murdered, and it`s two-thirds of the Armenian
population of Turkey living on their historic homelands who were
eradicated.
CHARLIE ROSE: What role does it play in Turkish politics?
PETER BALAKIAN: Well, the Armenian genocide today has become almost an
obsessive issue for the Turkish government. I mean, they are spending
millions of dollars a year engineering campaigns of propaganda to
deny, to undermine, to sanitize, to try to rewrite mystery.
And it has become a kind, almost a lightning rod inside of Turkey,
because people who want to speak truthfully about the events of 1915
often find themselves a great risk. Orhan Pamuk, Turkey`s Nobel
laureate, faced trial because he mentioned the Armenian genocide, and
he mentioned the word "over a million," the phrase, "over a million."
This was seen as a crime against the Turkish state.
CHARLIE ROSE: I`m struck with this thought, because this is a huge
issue for the Turks as well as it is for the Armenians, and it
therefore becomes in some ways, part of the political dimension as
Turkey reaches out to play an increasing role in a kind of new world
order.
PETER BALAKIAN: Right.
CHARLIE ROSE: Turkey wants to be, is a secular state, but wants to be
a transition, wants to be a bridge between the western world and the
Muslim world.
PETER BALAKIAN: I think that the Armenian genocide remains a linchpin
for Turkey`s modernization, because it`s an event that the Turkish
government refuses to acknowledge honestly. And I think of what
President Obama said in the Turkish parliament in April, very
candidly, and I think very riskily, very edgy to the Turkish
leadership, when he said "A unresolved history will become a burden
too complicated to carry. You must dole with your past honestly." And
he was referring to the events of 1915 and the extermination of the
Armenians.
And I think he said it perceptively, that an unresolved history of
this kind will hinder Turkey`s efforts to become that leader, become
that bridge between east and west, to join the ER, because human
rights remains one of that country`s biggest problems both past and
present.
And I see the Armenian genocides. It`s very much connected to Turkey`s
prison problems as well, because this is about dealing with minority
populations and dealing with equality and democracy. And until you can
acknowledge your past properly, it`s hard to go forward.
CHARLIE ROSE: Thank you for coming.
PETER BALAKIAN: Thanks for having me. Good to be back with you.
CHARLIE ROSE: "Armenian Golgotha, a Memoir of the Armenian Genocide
1915-1918" by Grigoris Balakian, translated by Peter Balakian with
Erin Sobach.
PETER BALAKIAN: That`s right.
CHARLIE ROSE: Thank you for joining us. See you next time.
August 12, 2009 Wednesday
Transcript: Charlie Rose interviewing Peter Balakian
JERUSALEM, NY COLLEGE PRESIDENTS DISCUSS EDUCATION; AL JAZEERA
DIRECTOR ANALYZES MIDDLE EAST-US POLITICS; MEMOIRE EXPLORES ARMENIAN
GENOCIDE - PART 1
CHARLIE ROSE: Welcome to the broadcast. Tonight, two college
presidents, Leon Botstein of Bard College in New York, and Sari
Nusseibeh of Al Quds University in Jerusalem.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
[parts omitted]
CHARLIE ROSE: We conclude with Peter Balakian and a family memoir and
a look at the Armenian genocide.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PETER BALAKIAN, AUTHOR, TRANSLATOR: The trauma of the Armenian
genocide of 1915 was buried in my family. And people would celebrate
him as a bishop in the church. They never spoke about this
extraordinary memoir he wrote, 71-chapter memoir that he wrote.
(END VIDEO CLIP) CHARLIE ROSE: A collaboration on education in the
Middle East, Al Jazeera and the politics of the Middle East, and the
Armenian genocide when we continue.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[parts omitted]
CHARLIE ROSE: Peter Balakian is here. His great uncle, Grigoris (ph)
Balakian, was one of the leading Armenian intellectuals of his
generation. On April 25, 1915, he was arrested along with 250 other
leaders of Constantinople`s Armenian community. In 1918 he wrote a
memoir "Armenian Golgotha," which offered his eyewitness account of
the genocide. Peter Balakian first learned of the memoir in 1991. Now
after a 10-year translation project, the book has been published in
English for the first time. I am pleased to have Peter Balakian back
at this table. Welcome.
PETER BALAKIAN: Thank you, Charlie. Good to be here.
CHARLIE ROSE: Nice to see you.
PETER BALAKIAN: Great to be here.
CHARLIE ROSE: The finding of the memoir. How did that happen in 1991?
PETER BALAKIAN: Strange set of circumstances. I received a magazine
article from a friends cut out of a magazine in France where a
commemorative ceremony had just taken place in honor of my
great-uncle. And my friend wrote in the margin, "any relation?" And of
course I knew who it was, because Grigoris (ph) Balakian was an
honored ghost in our family. People talked about him with reverence...
CHARLIE ROSE: but they didn`t talk about what he had seen in the
family, did they?
PETER BALAKIAN: That is the complexity, because the trauma of the
Armenian genocide of 1915 was buried in my family. And people would
celebrate him as a bishop in the church. They never spoke about this
extraordinary memoir that he wrote, 71-chapter memoir that he wrote.
CHARLIE ROSE: It took then you 10 years -- how long did it take, from
`91 to 2001 to...
PETER BALAKIAN: First what happened is I had to get a book in
Armenian. There was a copy in the Middle East.
CHARLIE ROSE: In Beirut?
PETER BALAKIAN: Yes, right. It came from Beirut.
And then I had to find a collaborative translator to work with, and I
was working on other books.
So it was a complicated process, and all in all, 10 years working on
the memoir, but really almost 20 from the discovery of this lost book,
this great lost memoir.
CHARLIE ROSE: It is many stories. It is the story of how he did it,
just the journey of this man. It`s also a documentation of an event in
history. And it`s also the political story of the denial.
PETER BALAKIAN: Absolutely.
Very much this book brings together these layers. I think there`s no
doubt in the minds of scholars of this history that this is the most
comprehensive and complex memoir of the Armenian genocide.
First it has some panorama. It begins in Berlin on the eve of the
World War I. And it takes you then back. And he`s observing the
outbreak of the war with a very fine eye as an outsider, and he`s
contextualizing the Armenian genocide through setting up the war.
Then we move across Europe to Constantinople and follow him on the
night of his arrest of April 24, 1915, along with the other 250
Armenian cultural leaders. And then you`re going to go on this journey
northwest to this prison 200 miles away called Changari (ph), and then
you`re going to follow him south into the center of Turkey, into the
Toros (ph) and Amanos (ph) mountains.
And you`re witnessing all the way atrocities and the destruction of
the civilization, you know, the destruction of the buildings, the
schools. What Rafael Lambkin (ph) noted as an important part of
genocide with is the destruction of a people`s culture.
So you`re witnessing all of this, and at the same time he is a
terrific listener. So you`re not only getting his voice, but you`re
getting all the people he`s listening to.
And these are Armenian survivors of course, from little children who
find themselves alive in a midst of a pile of corpses, and walk away
and find this priest wandering in these, you know, horrific
landscapes. You`re getting those voices, but you`re also getting the
voices of Turks, of Turkish perpetrators, like one captain of the
Turkish police at a certain crucial part of the deportations actually
opens up to my great uncle.
CHARLIE ROSE: Because he thinks he`s going on his way to his death?
PETER BALAKIAN: Absolutely. There`s no way he could be as candid as he
was in that interview without feeling that this man will be dead and
no one will know what I`m saying to him.
And you also get the voices of German, Austrian, and Swiss railway
engineers who are working on the Berlin to Baghdad railway, because
Germany is Turkey`s wartime ally, and you`re hearing their bystander
witness, I would say they`re rather detached view of the massacres and
the atrocities. And their voices are very valuable.
You`re also hearing righteous Turks, Turkish governors and mid-level
administrators and bureaucrats who are appalled at the orders they`re
receiving from the government head in Constantinople, and actually are
trying to warn the Armenians in any way they can.
So all of these voices in my mind created a memoir of what I would
call a polyphonic kind of acoustic.
CHARLIE ROSE: Some people who read this say that they found themselves
-- how can I read another page of this? How I can read such awful
atrocities often committed by tools around the farm.
PETER BALAKIAN: Killing in the Armenian genocide was done so much by
hand, so much by gruesome implements -- tannery tools, farm tools,
hoes, rakes, knives, and axes. And there is a lot of gore in this
story. And yet the story is so remarkable in its evolution that I`m
finding people are saying, "I can`t stop reading. Even though I would
think the atrocity would deter me in some way, I want to keep finding
out how he survives, and I want to understand more deeply how the
structure of the Armenian genocide happened."
CHARLIE ROSE: Some speculate that Hitler knew about the Armenian
genocide and, therefore, it was one of the things that influenced what
he did.
PETER BALAKIAN: I think one of the most important links between the
Armenian genocide and the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe can be
found in Hitler`s statement made eight days before invading Poland in
1939, "Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the
Armenians?"
CHARLIE ROSE: He said that eight days before he invaded Poland?
PETER BALAKIAN: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: "Who speaks...
PETER BALAKIAN: ... today of the annihilation of the Armenians."
CHARLIE ROSE: So we can do whatever we want to.
PETER BALAKIAN: We can do whatever we want to, and history gets
forgotten. Who today remembers? The Armenian genocide was the most
covered international human rights disaster of the second decade of
the 20th century. By the late 1930s Hitler saw it disappeared down the
memory hall.
CHARLIE ROSE: Tell me his story and what happened and how he was able
to survive?
PETER BALAKIAN: Well, he was arrested, of course, with his notable
band of 250 intellectuals and cultural leaders at Constantinople. And
this night of April 24 is the night that Armenians commemorate now,
the American genocide worldwide.
CHARLIE ROSE: There is no question this was planned by the central
government?
PETER BALAKIAN: Absolutely none, no. You can see that there are
systematic arrests happening throughout Turkey from the middle of
April of 1915 on throughout the summer of 1915, village by village,
city by city, town by town.
You have the routine of the town crier ordering Armenians to a central
square. You have the deportation margins being set up with the
provincial police. And then you have the ordering of killing squads,
and this is coming from the central committee, and the killing squads
were administered by something called the special organization.
And what the Turkish government did was let out some 30,000 prisoners
from jails and organized them into killing bands. And it was a pretty
innovative idea. I mean, let`s make use of our killing manpower. And
again, I think that in some ways this can even foreshadow the
Einstazgruppen that Nazis used. The Nazis did have mobile killing
squads, especially in the period before the camps became the focus of
mass killing.
CHARLIE ROSE: Were a million people killed in a year?
PETER BALAKIAN: I think a million people were killed between 1915 and
the spring of 1916, and then another 200,000 massacred in the Syrian
deserts of 1916.
So we know by the end of the summer of 1916 we have at least 1.2
million people murdered, and it`s two-thirds of the Armenian
population of Turkey living on their historic homelands who were
eradicated.
CHARLIE ROSE: What role does it play in Turkish politics?
PETER BALAKIAN: Well, the Armenian genocide today has become almost an
obsessive issue for the Turkish government. I mean, they are spending
millions of dollars a year engineering campaigns of propaganda to
deny, to undermine, to sanitize, to try to rewrite mystery.
And it has become a kind, almost a lightning rod inside of Turkey,
because people who want to speak truthfully about the events of 1915
often find themselves a great risk. Orhan Pamuk, Turkey`s Nobel
laureate, faced trial because he mentioned the Armenian genocide, and
he mentioned the word "over a million," the phrase, "over a million."
This was seen as a crime against the Turkish state.
CHARLIE ROSE: I`m struck with this thought, because this is a huge
issue for the Turks as well as it is for the Armenians, and it
therefore becomes in some ways, part of the political dimension as
Turkey reaches out to play an increasing role in a kind of new world
order.
PETER BALAKIAN: Right.
CHARLIE ROSE: Turkey wants to be, is a secular state, but wants to be
a transition, wants to be a bridge between the western world and the
Muslim world.
PETER BALAKIAN: I think that the Armenian genocide remains a linchpin
for Turkey`s modernization, because it`s an event that the Turkish
government refuses to acknowledge honestly. And I think of what
President Obama said in the Turkish parliament in April, very
candidly, and I think very riskily, very edgy to the Turkish
leadership, when he said "A unresolved history will become a burden
too complicated to carry. You must dole with your past honestly." And
he was referring to the events of 1915 and the extermination of the
Armenians.
And I think he said it perceptively, that an unresolved history of
this kind will hinder Turkey`s efforts to become that leader, become
that bridge between east and west, to join the ER, because human
rights remains one of that country`s biggest problems both past and
present.
And I see the Armenian genocides. It`s very much connected to Turkey`s
prison problems as well, because this is about dealing with minority
populations and dealing with equality and democracy. And until you can
acknowledge your past properly, it`s hard to go forward.
CHARLIE ROSE: Thank you for coming.
PETER BALAKIAN: Thanks for having me. Good to be back with you.
CHARLIE ROSE: "Armenian Golgotha, a Memoir of the Armenian Genocide
1915-1918" by Grigoris Balakian, translated by Peter Balakian with
Erin Sobach.
PETER BALAKIAN: That`s right.
CHARLIE ROSE: Thank you for joining us. See you next time.