“Our strength lies in our intensive attacks and our barbarity...After all, who today remembers the genocide of the Armenians?”

    - Adolf Hitler

    In 1915, 1,500,000 Armenians, 750,000 Assyrians, and 500,000 Greeks were killed by the young Turks who ruled the government of The Ottoman Empire which is now known as The Republic of Turkey. Neither the Ottoman Empire or the Turkish Government has admitted that the Armenian Genocide took place inside of the borders of Turkey. No U.S. President has ever passed a law that states that the Armenian Genocide took place.

    My work comes from accounts of Genocide survivors and my own interpretation of these accounts. Methods in which the Genocide victims were killed can not be described in words. The murders were not only planned but the killers took great pride in their work. This is the only Genocide in which I have found pictures and documentation of the murderers posing next to their victims and arranging the heads of their victims as though they were trophies. I don't understand the pathology of a person who can cut a baby out of a pregnant woman's stomach. I don't understand how a person can take a woman hostage, rape her, and make her bear his children against her will. I don't understand how a man can castrate a child, force him to wear a spiked metal collar, and keep him as a slave.

    When I talk to people who have traveled to Turkey and find out that they know nothing of the Armenian Genocide, it sickens me. It makes me feel that the government has escaped their crime. I am not a revisionist or a racist person. I do not blame every Turk for what happened(there are accounts of Turkish people helping Armenians during the years of the Genocide). My aggression and frustration towards the perpetrators and deniers of this crime is overwhelming. To say in Turkey that the genocide was committed is to insult “Turkishness.” I have titled two of my pieces Turkishness because both past and current governments of Turkey represent the worst acts ever committed by man and one of the greatest lies ever told. .

    This tragedy has been denied for almost 100 years.The Armenian Genocide is a widely documented, widely believed, proven fact. The only country to discredit this truth is Turkey and it's “historians.” The only way progress can be made between Armenians and Turks, is if Turkey admits to the widely proven fact that the Genocide occurred. I will not consider Turkey a morally civilized nation until they accept their past.

    - Stephen Koharian