At Heritage Park, Young and Old Connect Through Historic Wounds

Also speaking was Argine Harutyunyan, a freshman at Harvard. Like Shahverdyan, she tied what had happened 111 years ago to what happened to her people in Artsakh.

“It was a deliberate and systematic war on culture, identity and memory. More than a century after the Armenian genocide, Azerbaijan, fully backed by Turkey, carried out ethnic cleansing against the indigenous Armenian  population, forcing us to flee our homeland,” Harutyunyan said.

She referred to the blockade on Karabakh, which though decried by some human rights groups, was ignored by most governments.

“In a matter of days, we were violently uprooted from our homeland,” she said. “Villages were emptied, communities collapsed and people had to leave behind everything they had built over generations.”

The images of the human and automobile traffic jam heading from Artsakh to Armenia are haunting. Experiencing it firsthand was even worse, as Harutyunyan recalled the chaos.

“There was absolute chaos on around. There were people dying, parents whose kids were missing. The screams of starving children were everywhere. Along the road, Azerbaijani forces were beating innocent people, stripping them of dignity in every pssible way. I still vividly remember holding a small lemon from our garden, in my hand. One of the soldiers noticed it and demanded that I give it to them. I handed it over. He took the lemon, threw it on the ground, crushed it under his feet and then gave it back to me,” she recalled.

She then referred to anti-Armenian actions in Azerbaijan, in Baku, Kirovabad and Sumgait, saying the pattern had been set in the 1980s and continued to this day.

“Over the following decades this pattern continued and intensified because those responsible faced no real consequences,” she said.

Now, with the people removed from the land, the Azerbaijani authorities are expending their energies on destroying all monuments which point to evidence of millennia of Armenian life in Karabakh.

“Everything that shapes our identity, everything that makes Artsakh Armenian, is currently being destroyed. Azerbaijan’s goal is to erase Artsakh from history, to destroy its culture, to eradicate its Armenian presence. If this is not genocide, then what is genocide,” she asked.

She praised Armenian resilience. “No power can truly destroy a nation until and unless the nation itself decides to let go. No matter our circumstance, by knowing our history, who we are and what we have contributed to civilization, we can find a path forward through collective action and unwavering commitment. It is our responsibility, to ensure that if not us, then our descendants, will one day have an independent Artsakh.”

The third speaker, Israyelyan, a master’s candidate at Harvard, added her expression of pain about the recent loss of Artsakh.

“I learned the word ‘home’ before I understood that a home could be taken away,” she recalled. Tying her experience to those of a century ago, she recalled, “At 10, I recited poetry in Western Armenian, the language carried by the survivors of Genocide and their descendants. The poems were beautiful but heavy. They spoke of villages, exile, silence, loss and return. I used to ask my mother why these poems were so full of sadness. She would not give me a single answer, maybe because Armenian history is not only something you learn, but something you slowly grow old enough to understand. In 2016, I began to understand.”

Added Israyelyan, “The Armenian Genocide teaches us that violence does not end when the killing stops. It continues when denial continues, when truth is questioned, when suffering is minimized and when the world learns to look away. That is why Artsakh belongs in this remembrance,” she said. “When denial becomes a policy and silence becomes convenient, erasure can return in new forms.”

She decried the neutral language adopted by many countries and institutions when it came to the Azerbaijani attack on Artsakh, which ended with its ethnic cleansing, such as “When forced displacement is called relocation, when ethnic cleansing is called conflict, when a people’s homeland is treated as if it never belonged to them.”

Raffi Barsamian served as master of ceremonies. Several members of the clergy representing Armenian Churches in the region opened the program, offering a prayer invoking the now sainted martyrs of the Armenian Genocide.

There were several artistic components in the program. Vocalist Lia Sarkisyan and keyboardist Arno Melkonyan offered two songs and young dancers from Armenia Dance Studios of Waltham performed two dances. In addition, 7-year-old Anahit Melkonyan recited a poem by Paruyr Sevak.