Liberation Movements Read Online Free PDF Page B

resulting in the most fatalities. But you’re young. You just don’t understand yet.
    And that, as Gavra well knew, was true.
    It had been true the previous winter, back in the Capital, when a young woman named Dora was discovered taking photographs of military documents at her office and delivering them to her lover, a West German with diplomatic papers. Gavra had been alone on that case—Brano was on one of his many Vienna trips—and had decided that she was, in the end, apolitical. She was simply in love, and thus capable of immense stupidity. So he didn’t bring her in. The next day, Dora flew to Bonn with her lover and was promoted to major in the West German secret police, the BND.
    The Mercedes maintained an even clip, following signs to Beyolu, yet sometimes Gavra had trouble keeping up. He swept around two car accidents, neither serious but both surrounded by small Turks shouting at one another and waving hands in the air.
    Finally, after driving up Atatürk Bulvari and across Atatürk Bridge, spanning the Golden Horn, then rising toward the Galata Tower, Mas stopped at a surprising place: the splendorous cube of the Hotel Pera Palas, where he handed his car keys to a doorman and strolled inside. Gavra parked a little farther down the narrow street, then jogged back, narrowly avoiding an accident.
    When he reached the ornate foyer, with Ottoman columns and a wall of coral marble, Mas was to the left, at the front desk, taking his key from a smiling clerk. Then he jogged up a few stairs and entered the century-old elevator.
    For the next half hour, Gavra waited in the lounge with a copy of the International Herald Tribune, reading dismal editorials on Pol Pot’s recent proclamation of the “Democratic Republic of Kampuchea” in Cambodia before drifting to thoughts of Armenians.
    Being at the top of his class in the Ministry academy, he had a strong grasp of history. He knew that, despite Turkish claims to the contrary, a series of forced movements took place in the early part of the century, coming to a head in 1915, when the ruling group known as the Young Turks took it upon themselves to rid their country of Armenian Christians while the Great War diverted the rest of the world’s attention. The expulsion was carried out so systematically that no one could reasonably deny that orders from above set it in motion.
    The Turkish military was first purged of Armenian soldiers, often by group execution. Then cities and villages were taken over by newly purified Turkish troops, who killed Armenian men and forced the remaining women and children into overcrowded trains that spilled them into the desert, or sent them on death marches, where they died of starvation and disease under the summer sun. Reports from American and German officials at the time noted that the roads were lined and rivers choked with the rotting bodies of these ill-fated people. Later, according to a questionable American journalist, Adolf Hitler would tell his generals, Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
    Gavra believed most complex disputes to be hopeless, and this one was no exception.
    Brano had often wondered aloud about his pupil’s innate pessimism when it came to international affairs. Then why are you working for the Ministry? If you don’t believe some sort of good can come from what we do, then why are you doing it?
    Gavra had been recruited straight out of high school, by a man in his village he knew his father despised. He joined in order to make his father suffer for a childhood of humiliations. Even though it had begun in anger, over the years Gavra had found security in the shell of the Ministry that he nonetheless treated with suspicion. So why did he remain?
    Not even he knew the answer.
    He closed the newspaper and tried to recall Libarid Terzian. He didn’t know Libarid that well—only through his file and a few casual conversations—but for the last year they had sat at desks in the same