Genocide Related Articles -- Posted By ArmoArmeN

[Aratta-Kingdom]

Reformatorisch Dagblad

Dutch daily newspaper

 

 

http://www.refdag.nl/website/article.php?id=1211802

 

 

25 April 2005

 

 

Take legal action against denialists of Armenian Genocide

International community must perform an act

 

 

On Sunday Armenians commemorated the 90th anniversary of the massacres

of

thousands of their ancestors by Turks. I. Drost pleads for broad

recognition of the Genocide, only in this way pressure can be put on

the

denialists.

 

 

The Netherlands commemorate this year the 60th anniversary of the

Liberation. Also this year the Armenians commemorate the Armenian

Genocide

of ninety years ago. On 24 April they commemorate 1.5 million victims -

the

major part of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire - who, under 'cover'

of

the first world war, were swept away from the land where they were

living

for thousands of years. A commemoration, but no liberation. The memory

is

depressing. The flag remains half-mast.

 

 

The perpetrator has not confessed. He denies. The security of Armenians

is

thereby not guaranteed. Recurrence lies always in wait.

 

 

The international community has been silent for long time, hence the

"forgotten genocide". But now the countries, one after the other,

recognise

the Genocide. The European Parliament already did it in 1987. The Dutch

parliament fortunately did it also, on 21 December 2004. A very small

liberation for many people.

 

 

The European Council gave Turkey on 17 December meanwhile, however, the

desired date for accession negotiations, without any engagement on the

Armenian Genocide, the closed borders with Armenia or lack of

diplomatic

relations.

 

 

Second genocide

Turkey continues to deny the facts. Thereby the current Turkey, the

legal

successor of the regime of the perpetrators, meanwhile do commit the

"second genocide", such as the denial of a genocide is called.

 

 

Under international pressure there are, however, more publications in

Turkey

on this matter. But there is no substantive progress in recognition of

the

Genocide. Still recently Prime Minister Erdogan pulled with strange

insolence the wool over the world's eyes with his call for an "open

debate"

with Armenia. A feint, because he added that one would not worry about

the

outcome of the debate and one would be proud of Turkey's history. In

short

Erdogan means no debate, because it is certain in advance, that there

was no

genocide.

 

 

The international community must perform an act on the occasion of 90th

commemoration, must rise above its own interest, requiring from Turkey

to

recognise the Armenian Genocide. Protecting Turkey is also not good for

Turkey itself. Pressure from outside is necessary. Let the US, often

'hostage' of strategic interests, now adopt the resolution, which is

waiting

for consideration. Let Israel, a fellow-sufferer of Armenia, reconsider

her

support to Ankara on this matter. And especially: let Europe, to

present now

this point openly to Turkey, before the start of negotiations for

Turkey's

accession to European Union, to prevent itself from becoming accomplice

to

the existence and continuation of the denial.

 

 

And the Netherlands? Clear up the denial, to start from the

Netherlands.

 

 

Own security

Lets catch up the information delay and give good information to the

youth

(also Turkish youth) with lesson material at schools. Lets show the

denialists, if necessary with legal procedures, that we are no longer

accepting such behaviour in the Netherlands. Lots of examples, such as

the

statements of the leader of the Contact Body of Moslems and the

Government,

who recently claimed that Armenians were deported for their own

security.

Lets urge Minister Bot to be still more clear towards his Turkish

colleague

on this matter.

 

 

Problems in Turkey? Sure, but they will ever appear. It is better now

than

at the end of the accession process.

 

 

A liberation day will never follow the commemoration of this Genocide.

But

recognition by Turkey will have a releasing effect for Armenians and

eventually also for Turkey.

 

 

The author is a member of the 24 April Committee of the Federation of

Armenian Organisations in the Netherlands (FAON).

[MosJan]

EP Representatives Urge Turkey To Recognize Armenian Genocide

11.10.2005 20:21 GMT+04:00 Print version Send to mail

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Members of the European Parliament Human Rights Subcommittee led by Helene Flautre last week paid a visit to the Turkish Parliament. During the meeting, delegation members urged Ankara to recognize the Armenian Genocide and consider the issue of education in Kurdish. Polish members of the delegation noted that Poland had to acknowledge its part in the Jewish holocaust and asked when Turkey would face up to its own history. Afterwards, Ozlem Cercioglu said, "There were losses on both sides during the war.” “Although Turkey has opened up all of its archives, Armenia still refuses to open theirs," Cercioglu added, reported the Yerkir.

! Reproduction in full or in part is prohibited without reference to «PanARMENIAN.Net».

[Aratta-Kingdom]

Independent on Sunday (London)

October 16, 2005, Sunday

 

'THE TURKS BROUGHT WHOLE FAMILIES UP HERE TO KILL THEM'

ROBERT FISK DESCRIBES HIS RETURN TO THE SCENE OF THE ARMENIAN MASSACRE;

THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILIZATION BY ROBERT FISK FOURTH ESTATE £25

 

by ROBERT FISK

 

 

Robert Fisk recovers after being beaten by a mob on a road near

Quetta, Pakistan, 2001 HUSSEIN MALLA/AP

 

Exposed to the air, the bones became soft and claylike and flaked

away in our hands, the last mortal remains of an entire race of

people disappearing as swiftly as their Turkish oppressors would have

wished us to forget them. As many as 50,000 Armenians were murdered

in this little killing field, and it took a minute or two before

Ellsen and I fully comprehended that we were standing in a mass

grave. For Margada and the Syrian desert around it " like thousands

of villages in what was Turkish Armenia " are the Auschwitz of the

Armenian people, the place of the world's first, forgotten,

Holocaust.

 

The parallel with Auschwitz is no idle one. Turkey's reign of terror

against the Armenian people was an attempt to destroy the Armenian

race. The Armenian death toll was almost a million and a half. While

the Turks spoke publicly of the need to 'resettle' their Armenian

population "as the Germans were to speak later of the Jews of Europe"

the true intentions of the Turkish government were quite specific.

On 15 September 1915, for example " and a carbon of this document

exists " the Turkish interior minister, Talaat *****, cabled an

instruction to his prefect in Aleppo. 'You have already been informed

that the Government... has decided to destroy completely all the

indicated persons living in Turkey... Their existence must be

terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard

must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience.'

 

Was this not exactly what Himmler told his SS murderers in 1941? Here

on the hill of Margada, we were now standing among what was left of

the 'indicated persons'. And Boghos Dakessian, who along with his

five-year- old nephew Hagop had driven up to the Habur with us from

the Syrian town of Deir es-Zour, knew all about those 'tragic

measures'. 'The Turks brought whole families up here to kill them. It

went on for days. They would tie them together in lines, men,

children, women, most of them starving and sick, many naked. Then

they would push them off the hill into the river and shoot one of

them. The dead body would then carry the others down and drown them.

It was cheap that way. It cost only one bullet.'

[Aratta-Kingdom]

Independent on Sunday (London)

October 16, 2005, Sunday

 

BOOKS: WITNESS FROM THE SAVAGE ZONE;

THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILISATION BY ROBERT FISK FOURTH ESTATE £25

 

by NEAL ASCHERSON

 

Robert Fisk recovers after being beaten by a mob on a road near

Quetta, Pakistan, 2001 HUSSEIN MALLA/AP

 

 

Robert Fisk is the sort of reporter who walks in the opposite

direction. I first came across him as an absence, 30 years ago in

Belfast. We, the pack, had spent the day waiting for the big Paisley

briefing, but where was Bob? It turned out that he had gone off alone

to the battlefield of the Boyne, to see what the place and the past

would say to him. In the first Gulf war, he enraged 'pool' colleagues

under Army control by hiring an old car, putting on a borrowed helmet

and driving down forbidden roads until he reached the front. When a

'facility trip' is laid on for the press corps, Fisk stays behind,

suspecting " usually rightly " that it's to get the hacks out of the

way while something interesting happens.

 

Right at the end of this book, he describes himself sitting in the

roadside mud with an Iraqi family, watching as a 40-mile convoy of

American armour thunders up Highway Eight towards Baghdad. For Fisk,

it's a moment to reflect on Roman and American empires which have a

visceral need to 'project power on a massive scale'. For the reader,

it's almost a caricature: the journalist who wants to see the world

from down in the muck with the victims, rather than from a tank

turret as an 'embedded' correspondent.

 

Today, Robert Fisk is one of the best-known reporters in the world.

Long before 11 September, he had an enormous following of readers who

had come to regard him as the only journalist consistently describing

the Middle East 'as it is'. He has also accumulated a pack of

vengeful enemies, longing to discredit and silence him. Not all of

them are Israelis or American diplomats. Some are fellow-journalists,

maddened by his gift for being in the right place at the right time.

(The bomb which changed Near-Eastern history went off down his street

in Beirut; the dead man with his socks still burning turned out to be

his friend Rafiq Hariri, ex-prime-minister of Lebanon...)

 

For the last 30 years, Fisk has been covering an enormous arc of

territory which is not just 'the Middle East' but reaches from the

Moroccan Atlantic to the Punjab with a northward extension into the

Balkans. Almost all the peoples who live there are Muslim. All of

them, without exception, have been the objects of imperial conquest

and colonialism, of cultural suppression and big-power

frontier-drawing.

 

This is a book about what Fisk saw, heard, thought and wrote in those

years. It is not an autobiography. Apart from his relationship with

his parents, the door on his private life is locked. Neither is it a

complete chronicle. Having just written a separate book about them,

Fisk leaves out the experiences in Lebanon which generated some of

his best-known writing (his accounts of the Israeli shelling of Qana

in 1996, for instance). But what remains is overwhelming.

 

This is a very long book, allowing Fisk to interleave political

analysis, recent history and his own adventures with the real stories

which concern him. These are the sufferings of ordinary people under

monstrous tyrannies or in criminal, avoidable wars. Fisk reported the

Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf war of 1991, the Palestine intifadas, the

Taliban rule in Afghanistan and its sequel as the Americans and their

allies invaded in 2002, the terror regimes of Saddam, the Shah and

the ayatollahs, the frenzy of bloodshed in Algeria as Islamists and

security forces competed to slaughter the innocent, and " of course "

the Bush-Blair war against Iraq and its outcome. His chapter on the

1915 Armenian genocide, still unpardonably denied and evaded and not

only by Turks, revives his famous report from Syria when he stumbled

across the mass graves at Margada (see extract, above).

 

The source of most of this horror, for Fisk, is the post-1918

carve-up of the Middle East between European powers. 'We' " Britain,

France and much later America " are responsible. Subtly, Fisk weaves

this sense of guilt around his own ambiguous feelings for his father,

a young officer in the Great War for civilisation who became at once

a cold, bullying husband and a stiffly proud parent. Shame for that

generation's imperial mistakes, he seems to feel, is heritable, and

when he is attacked and almost killed by an Afghan refugee mob,

Fisk's impulse is that they are not to blame. He might have done the

same to a Westerner, in their place.

 

All the same, the cumulative impact of these terrible accounts of

massacre, torture and almost unimaginable ruthlessness may not be

what Fisk wants. The case against 'Us' (the West) diminishes; the

unjust impression that this is a zone of endemic savagery grows

stronger. He writes with a marvellous resource of image and language.

His investigative reporting is lethally painstaking (see how he

pieces together the biography of an American missile which somehow

came into Israeli hands, was fired at an ambulance and killed an

innocent Lebanese family).

 

But the sense of inescapable doom which builds up in this book is

misleading. What's missing is a sense that it's not just Fisk but

most of the world which finds Western policy crazy. Fisk includes

here several unforgettable, marvellously observed meetings with Osama

bin Laden. Maybe he should try his talents on a meeting with George W

Bush.

[Aratta-Kingdom]

The Independent (London)

August 5, 2000, Saturday

 

 

 

by Robert Fisk

 

 

 

In the spring of 1993, with my car keys, I slowly unearthed a set of skulls

from the clay wall of a hill in northern Syria. I had been looking for the

evidence of a mass murder - the world's first genocide - for the previous

two days but it took a 101-year-old Armenian woman to locate the river bed

where her family were murdered in the First World War. The more I dug into

the hillside next to the Habur river, the more skulls slid from the earth,

bright white at first then, gradually, collapsing into paste as the cold,

wet air reached the calcium for the first time since their mass murder. The

teeth were unblemished - these were mostly young people - and the bones I

later found stretched behind them were strong. Backbones, femurs, joints, a

few of them laced with the remains of some kind of cord. There were dozens

of skeletons here. The more I dug away with my car keys, the more eye

sockets peered at me out of the clay. It was a place of horror.

 

In 1915, the world reacted with equal horror as news emerged from the dying

Ottoman Empire of the deliberate destruction of at least a million and a

half Christian Armenians. Their fate - the ethnic cleansing of this ancient

race from the lands of Turkey, the razing of their towns and churches, the

mass slaughter of their menfolk, the massacre of their women and children -

was denounced in Paris, London and Washington as a war crime. Tens of

thousands of Armenian women - often after mass rape by their Turkish guards

- were left to die of starvation with their children along the banks of the

Habur river near Deir ez-Zour, in what is today northern Syria. The few men

who survived were tied together and thrown into the river. Turkish

gendarmes would fire a bullet into one of them and his body would drag the

rest to their deaths. Their skulls - a few of them - were among the bones I

unearthed on that terrible afternoon seven years ago.

 

The deliberate nature of this slaughter was admitted by the then Turkish

leader, Enver *****, in a conversation with Henry Morgenthau, the US

ambassador in Constantinople, a Jewish-American diplomat whose vivid

reports to Washington in 1915 form an indictment of the greatest war crime

the modern world had ever known. Enver denounced the Armenians for siding

with Russia in its war with the Turks. But even the Germans, Ottoman

Turkey's ally in the First World War, condemned the atrocities; for it was

the Armenian civilian population which was cut down by the Turks. The

historian Arnold Toynbee, who worked for the Foreign Office during the war,

was to record the "atmosphere of horror" which lay over the abandoned

Armenian lands in the aftermath of the savagery. Men had been lined up on

bridges to have their throats cut and be thrown into rivers; in orchards

and fields, women and children had been knifed. Armenians had been shot by

the thousand, sometimes beaten to death with clubs. Earlier Turkish pogroms

against the Armenians of Asia Minor had been denounced by Lord Gladstone.

In the aftermath of the 1914-18 war, Winston Churchill was the most

eloquent in reminding the world of the Armenian Holocaust.

 

"In 1915 the Turkish Government began and ruthlessly carried out the

infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor,"

Churchill wrote in his magisterial volume four of The Great War. "... the

clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act,

on a scale so great, could well be ... There is no reasonable doubt that

this crime was planned and executed for political reasons." Churchill

referred to the Turks as "war criminals" and wrote of their "massacring

uncounted thousands of helpless Armenians - men, women and children

together; whole districts blotted out in one administrative holocaust -

these were beyond human redress."

 

So Churchill himself, writing 80 years ago, used the word "holocaust" about

the Armenian massacres. I am not surprised. A few miles north of the site

where I had dug up those skulls, I found a complex of underground caves

beneath the Syrian desert. Thousands of Armenians had been driven into this

subterranean world in 1915 and Turkish gendarmes lit bonfires at the mouths

of the caves. The smoke was blown into the caves and the men were

asphyxiated. The caves were the world's first gas chambers. No wonder,

then, that Hitler is recorded as asking his generals - as he planned his

own numerically far more terrible holocaust - "Who does now remember the

Armenians?"

 

Could such a crime be denied? Could such an act of mass wickedness be

covered up? Or could it, as Hitler suggested, be forgotten? Could the

world's first holocaust - a painful irony, this - be half-acknowledged but

downgraded in the list of human bestiality as the dreadful 20th century

produced further acts of mass barbarity?

 

Alas, all this has come to pass. When I wrote about the Armenian massacres

in The Independent in 1993, the Turks denounced my article - as they have

countless books and investigations before and since - as a lie. Turkish

readers wrote to the editor to demand my dismissal from the paper. If

Armenian civilians had been killed, they wrote, this was a result of the

anarchy that existed in Ottoman Turkey in the First World War, civil chaos

in which countless Turks had died and in which Armenian paramilitaries had

deliberately taken the side of Tsarist Russia. The evidence of European

commissions into the massacres, the eye-witness accounts of Western

journalists at the later slaughter of Armenians at Smyrna - the present-day

holiday resort of Izmir where British sunbathers today have no idea of the

bloodbath that took place around their beaches - the denunciations of

Morgenthau and Churchill, are all dismissed as propaganda.

 

When a Holocaust conference was to be held in Israel, the Turkish

government objected to the inclusion of material on the Armenian slaughter.

Incredibly, Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel withdrew from the conference

after the Israeli foreign ministry said that it might damage

Israeli-Turkish relations. The conference went ahead, but only in miniature

form. In the United States, Turkey's powerful lobby groups attack

journalists or academics who suggest the Armenian genocide was fact.

Turkish ambassadors regularly write letters - which have appeared in all

British newspapers, even in the Israeli press - denying the truth of the

Armenian Holocaust. No one - save the Armenians - objects to this denial.

Scarcely a whimper comes from those who would, rightly, condemn any denial

of the Jewish Holocaust.

 

For Turkey - no longer the "sick man of Europe" - is courted by the Western

powers which so angrily condemned its cruelty in the last century. It is a

valued member of the Nato alliance - our ally in bombing Serbia last year -

the closest regional ally of Israel and a major buyer of US and French

weaponry. Just as we remained largely silent at the persecution of the

Kurds, so we prefer to ignore the world's first holocaust. While Britain's

massive contribution to the proposed Euphrates dam project in south-eastern

Turkey was in the balance, Tony Blair was not going to mention the Armenian

atrocities. Indeed, when this year he announced that Britain was to honour

an annual Holocaust Day, he made no mention of the Armenians. Holocaust

Day, it seems, was to be a Jewish-only affair. And it was to take a capital

"H" when it applied to the Jews.

 

I've always agreed with this. Mass ethnic slaughter on such a scale -

Hitler's murder of six million Jews - deserves a capital "H". But I also

believe that the genocide of other races merits a capital "H". Millions of

Jews - despite Wiesel's gutlessness and the shameful reaction of the

Israeli government - have shown common cause with the Armenians in their

suffering, acknowledging the 1915 massacres as the precursor of the "Shoah"

or Jewish Holocaust. Norman Finkelstein in his angry new book on the

"Holocaust industry" makes a similar point, adding that the Jewish

experience - both his parents were extermination camp survivors - should

not be allowed to diminish the genocide committed against other ethnic

groups in modern history. Indeed, the very word "genocide" was invented for

the Armenians in 1944 - by a Polish-born Jew, Raphael Lemkin.

 

Nor can I myself forget the Armenian Holocaust. The very last survivors of

that genocide are still - just - alive, and several of them live in Beirut

where I am based as Middle East correspondent of The Independent. I have

read extensively about and, occasionally, researched the Jewish Holocaust -

my own book about the Lebanese war, Pity the Nation, begins in Auschwitz,

where I found frozen lakes filled with the powdered bones of the dead from

the ashpits of Birkenau. But the Armenian Holocaust has been "my" story

because it is part of the Middle East's history as well as the world's.

Only this year, I interviewed Hartun, a 101-year-old blind Armenian in an

old people's home in East Beirut who remembered how, in the Syrian desert

in 1915, his mother pleaded with Turks not to rape her 18-year-old daughter

- Hartun's sister. "As she begged them not to take my sister, they beat her

to death," Hartun recalled. "I remember her dying, shouting 'Hartun,

Hartun, Hartun' over and over. When she was dead, they took my sister away

on a horse. I never saw her again." Hartun - after years of bitterness and

longing for revenge - was overcome with what he called "my Christian

belief" and decided to abandon the notion of vengeance. "When the Turkish

earthquake killed so many people last year," he told me, "I prayed for the

poor Turkish people."

 

It was a deeply moving example of compassion from a man whose suffering

those Turks will not admit and whose Holocaust we prefer to ignore. Stirred

partly by Hartun's story, I wrote an article for The Independent in January

of this year on the "sublimation" of the Armenian genocide, its wilful

denial by US academics who hold American university professorships funded

by the Turkish government, and the absence of any reference to the

Armenians in the British Government's announcement of Holocaust Day. And,

yes, I referred to the Armenian Holocaust - as I did to the Jewish

Holocaust - with a capital "H". Chatting to an Armenian acquaintance, I

mentioned that I had given the Armenian genocide the same capital "H" which

I believe should be attached to all acts of genocide.

 

Little could I have guessed how quickly the dead would rise from their

graves. When the article appeared in The Independent - a paper which has

never failed to dig into human wickedness visited upon every race and creed

- my references to the Jewish Holocaust remained with a capital "H". But

the Armenian Holocaust had been downgraded to a lower case "h". "Tell me,

Robert," my Armenian friend asked me in suppressed fury, "how do we

Armenians qualify for a capital 'H'? Didn't the Turks kill enough of us? Or

is it because we're not Jewish?"

 

There are no conspiracies on The Independent's subs desk; just a tough, no

-nonsense rule that our articles follow a grammatical "house style" and

conform to what is called "common usage". And the Jewish Holocaust, through

common usage, takes a capital "H". Other holocausts don't. No one is quite

sure why - the same practice is followed in newspapers and books all over

the world, although it has been the subject of debate in the United States,

not least by Finkelstein. Harvard turned down a professorial "Chair of

Holocaust and Cognate Studies" because academics objected to the genocide

of other groups (including the Armenians) being lumped together as

"cognate". But none of this answered the questions of my Armenian friend.

To have told him his people didn't qualify for a capital "H" would have

been shameful and insulting.

 

A debate then opened within The Independent. I wrote in a memo that the

word "holocaust" could be cheapened by over-use and exaggeration - take the

agency report last year which referred to the "holocaust" of wildlife after

an oil -spill on the French coast. But I said that I still had no answer

worthy of the question posed by my Armenian friend.

 

One of the paper's top wordsmiths was asked to comment - a grammatical

expert who regularly teases out the horrors of definition in an imperfect

and savage world. He cited Chambers Dictionary, which stated that the

Jewish Holocaust was "usually" capitalised. And, said our expert on the

paper, "It is in the nature of a proper noun to apply to only one thing."

Thus there may be many crusades but only one Crusade (the Middle Ages one).

There may be many cities but the City is London. Similarly the Renaissance.

 

"There can be only one Holocaust," he wrote. "Is the Holocaust really

unique? Yes. It was perpetrated by modern Europeans. Its purported

justification was a perversion of Darwin, one of the great thinkers of

modern Europe. Above all, in the gas chambers and crematoria it

manufactured death by modern industrial methods. The Holocaust says to

modern Western man that his technological mastery will not save him from

sin, but rather magnify the results of his sins. There have been acts of

genocide throughout history and some of them have killed more people than

the Nazis did, but we call the Nazi holocaust 'the Holocaust' because it is

our holocaust."

 

Must we, our grammarian asked, "commit grammatical faux pas and overturn an

accepted usage for which there is ample justification? Finally, where does

it end? Are, for instance, the crimes of Stalin against minority

nationalities in the Soviet Union not just as bad as the Armenian

slaughters? What of the Khmer Rouge? Rwanda? The Roman destruction of

Carthage? Are these also to be 'Holocausts'? If not, why not?"

 

Powerful arguments, but ones with which I disagreed. The Jewish Holocaust,

I wrote back, should be capitalised not because its victims were European

Jews, or those of any other race, but because its victims were human

beings. Human values, the right to life, the struggle against evil, are

universal - "not confined to Europeans or one ethnic or religious group, or

involving those who distorted Darwin's theories of biological evolution".

It was, after all, The Independent's editorial policy that the world must

fight against all atrocities - a belief which underlay our demand for

humanitarian action in East Timor and Kosovo. This did not mean that I

regarded Timor and Kosovo as holocausts, but that we should never accept

the idea that one group of victims had special status over others. I spend

hours telling Arabs that they must accept and acknowledge the facts of the

Jewish Holocaust, but if we are now to regard this as a specifically

European crime, as "our" crime, I have few arguments left. The Arabs can

say it is none of their business.

 

As for the question, "Where does it end?" Yes, what about Armenia? And

Rwanda? If Armenians are disqualified from a capital "H" because they only

lost one and a half million, what is Rwanda's sin of exclusion? Religion?

Race? Colour? When Armenians in Israel speak of their people's suffering,

they use the Hebrew word Shoah - which means Holocaust.

 

The Independent's editor suggested that we should debate these questions in

an article in the paper - this is the article - but the issues, of course,

remain unresolved. "Common usage" is a bane to all us journalists but it is

not sacred. It doesn't have to stand still. My father fought in what he

called the Great War - common usage which was later amended, after 1945, to

the First World War. Similarly, I believe, the Holocaust. In the aftermath

of my January remarks on the Armenian genocide, The Independent published a

denial of that same genocide by a Turkish Cypriot academic, in which we

printed the word Holocaust with a capital "H". The world did not end. The

Turks did not complain. Nor did any members of the Jewish community.

Indeed, only last year, a prominent academic at the Hebrew University's

Armenian studies programme in Israel talked of the Armenians and Jews

having "suffered holocaust".

 

In the meantime, Holocaust - or holocaust - denial continues. President

Chirac has declined to endorse the French parliament's acknowledgement of

the Armenian genocide and forthcoming Holocaust conferences have not

invited Armenians to participate. Mr Blair doesn't mention the destruction

of the Armenians. They don't count, literally. Common usage - and our

concern for Turkish sensitivities - has seen to that, even though genocide

is anything but normal. Germany dutifully acknowledges its historical guilt

for the wickedness of the Jewish Holocaust. Not so the Turks. Armenians

accept that a few Turks - courageous, outstanding men - risked their lives

in 1915 to shelter their Armenian friends and neighbours, just as

"righteous gentiles" did for the Jews of Europe. But Turkey cannot honour

these brave men. Since the Armenian Holocaust supposedly did not exist, nor

did they. A holocaust rather than a Holocaust helps to diminish the

suffering of the Armenians. What's in a name? What's in a capital letter?

How many other skulls lie beneath the sands of northern Syria? Did the

Turks not kill enough Armenians?

[Aratta-Kingdom]

The Independent, UK.

31 August 2002

 

by Robert Fisk

 

 

 

In the years that followed the Second World War, Lord Beaverbrook's

old Sunday Express would regale its readers with the secret history of

the 1939-45 conflict: "What Hitler would have done if England was

under Nazi occupation"; "How Ike almost cancelled D-Day"; "Churchill's

plans for using gas on Nazi invaders." Often though not always the

stories were true. After war come the facts. It's not so long ago,

after all, that we discovered that Nato's mighty 1999 blitz on

Serbia's army netted a total of just 10 tanks.

 

But it took Eric Lowe of Hayling Island in Hampshire to remind me of

the inversion of history, the way in which historically proven facts,

clearly established, come to be questioned decades later or even

deleted from the record for reasons of political or moral weakness.

Eric runs a magazine called Palestine Scrapbook, a journal for the old

British soldiers who fought in Palestine against both Arabs and Jews

until the ignominious collapse of the British mandate in 1948. In Mr

Lowe's magazine, there are personal memories of the bombing of British

headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem a "terrorist"

bombing, of course, except that it was carried out by a man who was

later to become Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin.

 

Dennis Shelton of the King's Royal Rifle Corps writes a letter,

recalling an Arab attack on a British Army lorry in Gaza. "We opened

up on them, the ones who could still run away. We found two [british]

army bods under the wagon, both badly wounded. I went in the ambulance

with them to Rafah hospital. I was holding the side of one's head to

keep his brains in. I often wondered if indeed they recovered." Mr

Lowe has asked for information about the soldier whom Dennis Shelton

tried to save.

 

But he's probably wasting his time, because the British Army's first

post-World War Two war the 1945-48 conflict in Palestine has been

"disappeared", sidelined as something that no one wants to remember.

According to Mr Lowe, many of the British campaign medals for

Palestine were never issued. Dennis Peck, of the Sherwood Foresters,

only realised he'd been awarded one in 1998. Until two years ago, the

campaign was never mentioned at the Armistice parade in London. There's

not even a definitive figure for the British troops who died around

400 were killed or died of wounds. And it took over 50 years for

British veterans to get a memorial for the dead: in the end, the

veterans had to pay for it from their own pockets.

 

But in the late Forties, all Britain was seized by the war in Palestine.

When Jewish gunmen hanged two British sergeants, booby-trapping their

bodies into the bargain, Britons were outraged. The British, it must

be added, had just hanged Jewish militants in Palestine. But now

nothing. Our dead soldiers in Palestine, far from being remembered at

the going down of the sun, are largely not remembered at all.

 

So who are we frightened of here? The Arabs? The Israelis? And isn't

this just a small example of the suppression of historical truth which

continues over the 20th century's first holocaust? I raise this

question because of a recent and deeply offensive article by Stephen

Kinzer of The New York Times. Back in 1915, his paper then an

honourable journal of record broke one of the great and most terrible

stories of the First World War: the planned slaughter of 1.5 million

Christian Armenians by the Turkish Ottoman government. The paper's

headlines, based in many cases on US diplomats in Turkey, alerted the

world to this genocide. By 16 September, a New York Times

correspondent had spoken of "a campaign of extermination, involving

the murdering of 800,000 to 1,000,000 persons".

 

It was all true. Save for the Turkish government, a few American

academics holding professorships funded by Turkey and the shameful

denials of the Israeli government, there is today not a soul who

doubts the nature or the extent of this genocide. Even in the 1920s,

Winston Churchill himself called it a "holocaust". But not Mr

Kinzer. Over the course of the past few years, he's done everything he

can to destroy the integrity of his paper's brilliant, horrifying,

exclusive reports of 1915. Constantly recalling Turkey's fraudulent

claim that the Armenians died in the civil unrest in Asia Minor at the

time, he has referred to the genocide as "ethnic cleansing" and

treated the figure of 1.5 million dead as a claim something he would

surely never do in reference to the 6 million Jews later murdered by

the Nazis.

 

Recently, Mr Kinzer has written about the new Armenian Genocide museum

in Washington, commenting artfully that there's "a growing recognition

by advocacy groups that museums can be powerful tools to advance

political causes". In other words, unlike the Jewish Holocaust museum

and the Jewish Holocaust itself, which would never be used by Israel

to silence criticism of its cruel behaviour in the occupied

territories there might be something a bit dodgy about the Armenian

version. Then comes the killer. "Washington already has one major

institution, the United States Holocaust Museum, that documents an

effort to destroy an entire people," Mr Kinzer wrote. "The story it

presents is beyond dispute. But the events of 1915 are still a matter

of intense debate." Are they hell, Mr Kinzer.

 

But why should we be surprised at this classic piece of historical

revisionism? Israel's own ambassador to present-day Armenia, Rivka

Cohen, has been peddling more or less the same rubbish, refusing to

draw any parallels with the Jewish Holocaust and describing the

Armenian Holocaust as a mere "tragedy". She is, in fact, following the

official Israeli Foreign Office line that "this [Armenian Holocaust]

should not be described as genocide".Israel's top Holocaust scholar,

Israel Charney, has most courageously campaigned against those who lie

about the Armenian genocide I advise readers to buy his stunning

Encyclopaedia of Genocide and he has been joined by many other Jewish

scholars. But with Turkey's alliance with Israel, its membership of

Nato, its possible EU entry, and its massive arms purchases from the

United States, the growing power of its well-paid lobby groups has

smothered even their efforts.

 

Which raises one last question. Armenian academics have been

investigating the identity of those young German officers who were

training the Ottoman army in 1915 and who in some cases actually

witnessed the Armenian Holocaust whose victims were, in some cases,

transported to their deaths in railway cattle-cars. Several of those

German soldiers' names, it now transpires, crop up again just over a

quarter of a century later as senior Wehrmacht officers in Russia,

helping Hitler to carry out the Jewish Holocaust. Even the dimmest of

us might think there was a frightening connection here. But not, I

guess, Mr Kinzer. Nor the modern-day New York Times, which is so keen

to trash its own historic exclusives for fear of what Turkey or Israel

might say. Personally, I'd call it all a form of Holocaust denial. And

I know what Eric Lowe would call it: cowardice under fire.

[Aratta-Kingdom]

JUSTICE NEEDED FOR ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

Mona Karaguozian

 

The SunDial - Daily Sundial, CA

(California State Univ. at Northridge)

Oct 18 2005

 

Daily Sundial

October 17, 2005

 

According to Merriam Webster's dictionary, the term genocide is

defined as the "deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial,

political or cultural group."

 

In April 1915, during World War I, the Ottoman Empire began

systematically annihilating Armenians, by first ridding the

intellectuals, men, elderly, women and then children in the Eastern

Anatolia and Western Armenia region, in what should be known as the

first genocide of the 20th century.

 

The Turkish government has continuously refused to accept

responsibility for the atrocities that have taken place, and it also

refuses to acknowledge the existence of this "alleged" genocide.

 

The Turkish government makes claims now that the Armenians who were

killed during that period died as wartime casualties and that many

Turks were killed as well. This is false because only the Armenians

that were living in that region in Turkey were being "relocated"

for safety. Why weren't the other residents of that region being

relocated? It was a deliberate destruction of a specific group

of people.

 

Who alleges the massacres of 1.5 million people? How could the

destruction of a substantially large number of people be alleged? The

evidence is in the death toll. There are also photographs, hundreds

of chronicles from American newspapers and documentation depicting

the massacres as they were taking place not to mention countless

horror stories passed down generations.

 

The issue of the Armenian genocide is less than ten years shy of

being a century- long struggle for recognition. Ninety years might

seem like ages ago, but I, as an American born Armenian, still feel

the effects of the massacres. My grandfather was a survivor of the

genocide. I hold knowledge of eyewitness accounts and experiences of

the genocide that were passed down through him. It pains me to be

a third generation Armenian after the genocide and to see that the

struggle for recognition continues to this day.

 

There are numerous advocacy groups, such as the Armenian National

Committee of America and the Armenian Assembly that are seeking

justice on behalf of the Armenian people. These activists dedicate

their time and effort to spread awareness of the genocide and to gain

recognition for its occurrence.

 

In a letter sent to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Oct. 5, ANCA

Chairman Ken Hachikian voiced the profound moral outrage of Armenians

over the Bush administration's ongoing complicity in Turkey's campaign

of genocide denial.

 

Turkey has also been trying to gain admission into the European Union,

yet they continue running into complications. European Union foreign

ministers have attempted to agree on terms for Turkish membership,

but many countries, like Austria, have refused to agree on full

membership. They are only willing to offer Turkey a "privileged

partnership" with the EU until such claims as the Armenian genocide

have been resolved. If the EU is unable to agree on terms with the

Turkish government, there must be a reason. For being just an "alleged"

claim, the Armenian genocide is a substantial cause for concern among

many European countries.

 

This is not the first attempt by Armenian-Americans to gain a political

voice regarding this issue. Many bills have been presented to Congress,

each of which would have been instrumental toward the fight for

justice, but none have been passed yet.

 

Instead, all these bills have been shot down. Armenian activists

have also organized many public events, such as marches, protests,

vigils and pickets at the Turkish embassy in Los Angeles as well as

all over the world.

 

Throughout the years, these activities have gained some local media

exposure. None, however, have had a national effect on legislation.

 

Many of the local media outlets are familiar with the commemoration

of April 24 due to the heavily concentrated Armenian community Los

Angeles, but the voice is barely heard.

 

As the years pass the story gets old and people begin to forget. This

is the goal of the denial.

 

This situation may change with another attempt to pass legislation.

 

On Sept. 15, after nearly three hours of debate, the House

International Relations Committee, voted overwhelmingly in favor

of two measures calling for proper U.S. recognition of the Armenian

Genocide (H.Res.316 and H.Con.Res.195) and urging Turkey to end its

decades-long denial of this crime against humanity.

 

The Senate should finish the work started by the House and call

for recognition of the Armenian genocide. Only with the support of

the United Sates will the movement to have the Turkish government

recognize the past crimes of the Ottoman Empire succeed.

 

Justice needs to be served and not withheld because of politics.

 

Mona Karaguozian can be reached at ane@sundial.csun.edu.

[Aratta-Kingdom]

AZG

Alghuli-Another Blemish on Azeris' Conscience

 

In September of the current year "Alghuli" Association applied to the authorities of Nagorno Artsax to officially mark the 100th anniversary of 1905-1906 events. The government elaborated a corresponding project in response. Following the government's decision, last week a rally was held and a temporary monument was erected in Alghuli village to be replaced soon by another one to immortalize the memory of the perished Alghuli residents.

 

A scientific workshop with the participation of eminent scholars and descendents of Kashatagh residents on October 15 was held as a continuation of arrangements.

 

All reports made at the workshop dealt with the historic past of Kashatagh from Middle Ages to early 1900s, the events of 1905-1920 -- the period when the region was finally deprived of Armenian population. Another group of reports dealt with the policy of eliminating of Armenians in Kashatagh.

 

The participants tried to find answers to a number of questions concerning the history of Kashatagh-Aghahechk region. They alluded to diverse Armenian, Georgian and Russian sources indicating that Kashatagh used to be an Armenian land whose ethnic population - the Armenians - had to immigrate to survive.

 

The reports claimed that the former authorities destroyed monuments and changed Armenian names of settlements to appropriate the region. The word "Lachin" was said to be the Azeri contraction of Aghahechk-Lahechk name.

 

The scholars were unanimous in one thing: there can be no return of territories liberated in 1992 as it will mean weakening Armenia's and Artsakh's defense.

 

By Kim Gabrielian

[Aratta-Kingdom]

"The Armenian Genocide: 1915-1923" DVD/CD-ROM - Among The First TenBest Projects In E-Education

 

PRESS RELEASE

 

UN Department of Public Information, Yerevan Office

2 Petros Adamyan str., First Floor

Yerevan 375010, Armenia

Contact: Armine Halajyan, UN DPI Information Assistant

Tel.: (374 1) 560 212

Fax/Tel.: (374 1) 561 406

http://www.undpi.am

 

 

"ARAM KHACHATURIAN: THE LIFE AND WORKS" HAS BEEN RECOGNIZED AS THE WORLD'S

BEST E-CULTURE DVD/CD-ROM IN 2005

 

"THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: 1915-1923" DVD/CD-ROM - AMONG THE FIRST TEN

BEST PROJECTS IN E-EDUCATION

 

"Aram Khachaturian: The Life and Works" DVD/CD-ROM of the Armenian

company "ITE" (Information Technologies Education), has been selected

by the World Summit Award 2005 (www.wsis-award.org) Grand Jury as

the world's best cultural CD/DVD multimedia product of 2005.

 

Another project of the same company, the interactive CD-ROM "Armenian

Genocide of 1915-1923" was recognized by the World Summit Award 2005

Grand Jury as one of top 10 products in e-learning category and was

specially mentioned.

 

Those products were selected in a five-stage process from over 20,000

candidates from 168 countries. The selection of the best products in

the world included national evaluations, a 35 member Grand Jury review

of over 750 nominations and a 6-day methodical judging process. The

overall process meets near-scientific requirements of independent,

inter-subjective judgment and of establishing the best available

expert views.

 

The success of ITE "Bazmaweb" studio proves its further significance

when we consider the fact that other major projects that were chosen

as the world's best five e-culture products, were the websites

"Eternal Heritage of Egypt" created by IBM, "Virtual Roman Paris"

created by Ministry of Culture of France, "Lakota Winter Counts" of

USA Smithsonian Institution, and the Russian website about the history

of the Second World War (see www.wsis-award.org/index.php?folder=297).

 

Shortly before, in June 2005, both Armenian products won All Armenian

2005 National e-content contest "Mashtots 1600"(www.mashtots1600.am).

 

As projects with best content, both of them will be officially

announced and presented at the World Summit Award 2005 Exhibition

in the framework of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS)

2005 in Tunisia, from November 16 to 18.

 

Garegin Chugaszian, president of ITE company will accept the award

on November 16 at a special Gala ceremony to be attended by more

than 500 VIPs from all over the world, including heads of States,

leading representatives of international organizations, the private

sector and civil society.

 

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), initiated by

the United Nations and directly organized by the International

Telecommunication Union (ITU) is a twofold process. The first phase

has been held in Geneva from 10-12 December 2003, while the second

will take place in Tunisia from 16-18 November this year.

 

The Armenian delegation to participate in WSIS this year will be

headed by the Prime Minister of Armenia Andranik Margaryan. Armenia

will also have the opportunity to present its best e-content products

to consumers in an individual pavilion.

 

The second Phase of WSIS together with the awards giving ceremony of

the e-contents world contest will take place in Tunisia from 16-18

November of this year. Heads of States (Presidents and Prime Ministers)

and other 500 high ranking guests will participate.

 

The World Summit Award is organized under the patronage of Austrian

chancellor Wolfgang Schussel, Argentine President Nestor Carlos

Kirchner and other presidents intending to observe existing worldwide

electronic contents be it Internet, DVDs, or CDs. The awards have 8

nominations: e-learning; e-culture; e-science; e-government; e-health;

e-business; e-environment; and e-inclusion.

 

It is worth mentioning that, amongst 168 countries only 14 had the

chance of gaining the World Summit Award twice and Armenia is one

of these few counties. At the first Phase of WSIS in Geneva (2003)

Armenia was awarded with the WSA 2003 in e-science for the website

"A Space Weather Aerie" created by Ashot Chilingarian's Cosmic Ray

Division Center (CRD) from the Institute of Physics in Yerevan.

 

"ITE" (Information Technologies Education), and its "Bazmaweb" studio

are founded in 1998, and represent software company specializing in

the design and development of multimedia products (CD/DVD-ROMS),

as well as knowledge management applications based on portal

technologies("Armino Web Solutions").

 

For getting further information, both in Armenian and English, about

the WSIS Armenia's participation you can visit the Summit's website:

http://www.undpi.am/wsis which has been prepared by the "Information

Technologies Foundation" (ITF) with the assistance of UN Resident

Coordinator and UN Department of Public Information in Yerevan.

[Aratta-Kingdom]

Accepting the Past Will Set Us Free

 

Talin Suciyan reflects on the groundbreaking Armenian conference and the

liberating effect that the open discussion of this history will have for

Turkey and for the Armenian diaspora.

 

BIA News Center

10/10/2005

 

By Talin Suciyan (talin@bianet.org)

 

BIA (Istanbul) - Are we able to admit the fact that after the departure

of Armenians this country became barren; ideologically, artistically,

politically and by every means socially? Can this society admit that we

need to be able to express this issue, and that the Armenian Diaspora

needs to hear it?

 

The recent "Ottoman Armenians During The Last Period Of The Empire:

Scientific Responsibility And Democracy" conference was realized as a

result of great efforts, and was an event of extraordinary properties,

meanings and references. Under our current conditions we are in, the

importance of this event can be approached from many different angles,

and people have been writing about if from every perspective.

 

I would like to take this chance to reflect on these two days, in which

many different disciplines complemented each other, while shedding light

on some old questions and presenting new ones. With the vast amount of

information and comments presented on this one particular period in

history, this conference shook its audience and lifted a huge dead

weight that was bearing on the shoulders of this issue.

 

The questions at the beginning of this article are asked in response to

Elif Safak's paper and they are very important ones related to this

moment. Can we leave aside the never-ending polemics and claims--" it is

genocide or not"-and "they massacred us, the numbers of victims are such

and such," and look at our present situation, where Safak directs her

attention?

 

Safak, in her paper, presents an extraordinary mix of her authorial and

academic identities. Her presentation on the life and works of feminist

Armenian writer Zabel Yesayan was prepared with the scrutiny of an

academic and the elegance of a writer of literature. She concluded it

with a quotation from a novel. Safak relays to us the answer of a

question which is asked of the hero of the novel: What would an Armenian

survivor of the events of 1915 like to hear from the Turks ?

 

He replied " I would like to hear that after we left, their country

became barren". Safak, directing this sentence to us, continued: "Yes,

after you left, our country became barren ideologically, artistically,

politically and every means socially, we have the need to say this, as

the Diaspora has the greater need to hear it ". In the end she presented

an approach that passed beyond the Armenian Diaspora's, which dictates

'You have to recognize the genocide first; then we start talking' or the

official Turkish thesis, which claims 'Genocide didn't happen, in fact

they massacred us'.

 

Safak continued; saying that today the people of Turkey, having lost

their Armenian neighbors (except roughly 60 thousand people living)

should acknowledge that as a result of this loss, we became lonely and

barren. Today we should start mourning for this loss: "The mourning of

their absence, and that which made us barren".

 

Feelings

 

Like Melisa Bilal said, can we integrate feelings into our social and

intellectual systems without the confines of nationalism? Can we recall

the feeling of times that we lived together? As she said, can people who

are living in this country really understand that Armenians in Turkey

were made homeless and that they are lost? Not all were necessarily made

homeless by means of deportation, but as Bilal defines it, "they were

uprooted from their language, religion, history at the very place they

had been living, [and entered a] state of homelessness by means of

estrangement. " And indeed like Hrant Dink said, having been uprooted

and scattered around the world, as Bilal says, when they are constantly

searching for a surname with an 'ian-yan' suffix at the back credits of

every film, in reality they are searching for a piece of themselves.

Today, are the people of Turkey capable of understanding all of feelings?

 

Weight

 

Can we rethink the phrases that entered in to our language, particularly

those which carry the traces of negative historical weights? As in the

example Fethiye Cetin provided, why is it that while lifting a heavy

load, we say "It is heavy as an infidel's corpse." Are we able to ask

ourselves the question, "Why is the corpse of an infidel is that heavy?"

 

Paranoia and Trauma

 

As Erol Koroglu said in his presentation 'Examples of forgetting and

remembering in Turkish literature: The breaking points of silence',

Armenian-ness is an identity that is constantly kept at the threshold,

at at the same time we have the incapability of not being able to

describe it as different as well as familiar. This gives way to an idea

that makes Armenians traitors and enemies. Can we think over this idea

and accept it as a social paranoia? Hrant Dink is right to say that the

antidote to this paranoia is the democratization of Turkey. This process

not only would cure the paranoia in Turks, it would also help heal the

trauma that the Armenians live with.

 

Amnesia

 

Elif Safak directs our attention to writer Zabel Yesayan. When she

escaped the events of 1915 and settled in Baku, she started to write her

memoirs. This demonstrates her importance in preventing a social amnesia.

 

In contrast, Etyen Mahcupyan emphasized how the State, by its constant

repetition to Turkish people that they are a people whose memory is very

short and that Turkey is a country that should always look to the future

and not to the past, constantly creates space for communal amnesia . In

response to the victim's attitude of 'not letting it to be forgotten and

talking about it' the perpetrators covers themselves to an extent that

they reache a point where even talking about events becomes frightful.

At this point, can the victim, with the comfort to speak, help the

perpetrator?

 

Empathy

 

As Aysegul Altinay says, Fethiye Cetin's book "My Grandmother", Takuhi

Tovmasyan's book "Be Your Meals Cheerful" and Osman Koker's "Armenians

In Turkey 100 Years Ago" books, follow a therapeutic approach which can

lead people to create an environment where empathy can grow, opening the

way to cry and laugh together. Following this approach, can we multiply

these examples so that we can exercise more empathy in this direction?

 

Defence and getting tired of being right

 

Halil Berktay describes the mood of Turkish foreign policy: defence by

means of digging a trench so deep that it became a synonym for being

stuck at the bottom of the trench, and therefore foreign policy became

enslaved by the trench. Temel Iskit, a former diplomat with a career of

40 years, agreed with Berktay's characterization.

 

Iskit states that Turkish foreign policy was mortgaged by the Armenian

Question, because the " power policy" that Turkey was following required

an absolute obligation to be right. He added, "During 41 years of

service I got tired of always being 'right'."

 

"We won't do it"

 

Cemil Kocak presented an interesting story on Ruseni Bey and his place

in the Special Organization (Teskilat-i Mahsusa). Ruseni Bey coined a

definition of nationalism that stated "Societies grow/get nurtured by

eating one another." Against this outrageously nationalistic statement,

is it too difficult to say 'No, we won't do it'? As Halil Berktay points

out, isn't it about time that spanner needs to be thrown in the

clockwork of these spine-chilling historical repetitions-- a repetition

that starts with "Every Armenian is a Tashnak Guerilla" and continues as

"Every Kurd is a PKK member"?

 

Purification

 

Berktay also told of an unfinished novel written by Omer Seyfettin

between 1912-13, named "Primo Turkish Child II". Can we wake the hero of

this novel from his dream? In the dream, he sees a crescent moon and a

star in the sky, meanwhile he feels a wetness on his feet. This wetness

is the blood of Turkish enemies-and as he walks in their blood, he

notices the reflection of the moon and the star on the surface .

 

Departing from this point, Berktay continued to say that the red colour

of Turkish flag does not symbolize the blood of Turkish martyrs (as we

are always told), but actually comes from the blood of our enemies. We

can purify ourselves of this history of hatred and violence. We can get

out of pools of blood and set out to a new journey, in which the moon

and the stars won't spare their light to illuminate our road, and with

the knowledge that at the end of a clear starry night, the coming day

will be sunny and hopeful.

 

Liberty

 

"This meeting will liberate us," said former Health Minister Cevdet

Aykan, who compiled the memoirs of old people he knew. As Cem Ozdemir

stated, the realization of this conference will relax Europe as well as

Turkey . Turkey's initiation of this talk on the "Armenian issue"--which

Europe saw as a burden to Turkey's process of democratisation--will

lighten this load for Europe as well as Turkey.

 

It is time to acknowledge these loads, to recognize them, and to be

liberated from them. We will feel relaxed by means of liberation from

them. We passed the threshold and we are on that road now. We will

continue to move forward slowly but surely.

 

Mourning

 

As I was talking with historian Christoph Neumann, he draw my attention

to the point that during the conference there had rarely been talk of

mourning--only once or twice. He said, "Why is there no talk of

mourning?" ...meaning not the mourning of events 90 years ago, but the

mourning of our state in the present, the mourning of our loneliness.

Maybe by acknowledging our present loneliness slowly, we can go back

from the present to the past and try to see more clearly how we were

made so lonely in the first place?

 

Despite all the insistences of amnesia, contrary to our state of

defensiveness due to unresolved traumas, we would be able to find the

path to empathy. By acknowledging the lost and deported ones, we could

start to sympathize with their sensitivities. And by getting rid of our

paranoia and trauma from historical burdens in our language and

consciousness, could we not turn back even just for a moment to our true

feelings, and mourn?

 

To Pass the threshold, pass beyond the 'genocide'

 

Has any threshold been passed? Surely the answer is yes. This conference

has been the embodiment of that very crucial move. The conference has

led us pass the threshold of Turkey's democratization progress, the

threshold of scientific freedom in universities, the threshold of

freedom of expression, the disappearing threshold of being unable to

speak, the threshold of endless arguments about 'who massacred who' and

'is it or is it not a genocide'--and even past the thresholds of

hardened, polarized and immobile identities.

 

Today we reached a different point, because during these past two days

whoever witnessed this historical event tried to understand amnesia,

empathy, trauma, paranoia and what actually happened. While they

examined and scrutinized all these issues with the help of many

different disciplines, we mourned for our present day a little, we

became purified a little, and we became little more liberated. We

listened, we thought and we learned--and then we learned more, thought

more, and listened more.

 

Now, it is time for this experience to leave the confines of the

building where the conference was held and spread, so even more people

can rethink what they had already known and learn to listen more.

Because this conference has liberated us, it provides hope that there

will be many others. It is this very hope that will make our roads

intersect.

[Aratta-Kingdom]

BUCKLEY: WELLESLEY WOMAN IMPRISONED IN ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

By James J. Buckley / Local Columnist

 

MetroWest Daily News, MA

Oct 19 2005

 

Modern-day Turkey's efforts to join the European Union (EU) is being

opposed by humanitarians throughout the world. They repeatedly cite the

genocide perpetrated by the Turks between 1915 and 1923 as sufficient

reason to deny Turkey membership.

 

The Turks claim nothing out of the ordinary happened to Armenians

during those years. However, the events surrounding the capture of a

young Wellesley woman clearly shows that something quite out of the

ordinary was indeed occurring in that part of the world in 1920.

 

Some historians have suggested that if the world had reacted negatively

toward Turkey's actions in Armenia in 1915, Hitler would not have

concluded he could get away with the genocide of Jews during World

War II. And in fact Hitler did cite the lack of any worldwide efforts

against Turkey in the years 1915-1923 as proof that he could get away

with exterminating Jews without any significant backlash.

 

All this implies that nations such as the U.S. did nothing for the

Armenians during those years. But such an implication is not completely

valid. The U.S. took a number of steps to help -- one of those steps

involved Miss Marion Peabody of Arlington Road, Wellesley Hills.

 

The Near East Relief (NER) was organized with congressional approval

and with the ardent support of President Woodrow Wilson. Its job was

to coordinate all relief efforts and fundraising activities throughout

the U.S. in order to save "the starving Armenians." In time, millions

were raised and filtered through the U.S. Embassy in Constantinople

that in turn handed the funds over to missionaries who delivered the

money and goods to Armenians.

 

Needless to say, the Turks were not happy with this arrangement, even

though it was abundantly clear that the U.S. was making every effort

to help the Armenians without antagonizing the Turkish government. But

the Turks wanted no aid to reach the Armenians who were unwilling

subjects of the Ottoman Empire.

 

Some Turks set out to make life as miserable as possible for the

missionaries and NER workers who were charged with distributing the

funds and goods. As a result, in 1920, 20 workers associated with

the NER and working in the Black Sea port of Samsoun were detained

by a group calling themselves Turkish Nationalists.

 

The press at that time had virtually none of the abundance of resources

available to it today. But even so, the news media of that time was

somehow able to uncover this incident and highlight it in their news

reports. This forced the NER to confirm that the workers were being

detained, but it stressed that they were in no danger.

 

But subsequently it was learned that two weeks before the Samsoun

incident, five other workers, including Colonel Coombs and Marion

Peabody, had been captured by the Turks. If the leaders of NER had

kept the earlier incident secret because they did not want to alarm

the families of the detainees and the American people in general, they

must have been dismayed when their secrecy had the opposite affect.

 

If detaining the 20 Americans had been an isolated incident, the

American people might have not become alarmed. But when they discovered

that another group of Americans had been detained two weeks before,

Americans saw a pattern of behavior by the Turks that was interpreted

as a definite threat against their countrymen.

 

Suddenly Colonel Coombs and, to a lesser extent Marion Peabody, became

celebrities whose ominous situation became the topic of discussion

throughout the nation.

 

In order to quell the fears of the American people, the NER decided

that Charles Vickery, secretary of the NER, should personally travel

to Samsoun and other locations where NER personnel were in order

to determine firsthand what was happening to Colonel Coombs, Marion

Peabody and the other detainees.

 

Fortunately for the workers, even though the leaders of the Turkish

government stubbornly refused to admit any genocidal action against

the Armenians, they nevertheless began to realize that detaining

Americans was causing the American press to spotlight their activities

in Armenia. Since their policy was to keep their persecution of

Armenians as quiet as possible, they reluctantly decided to release

the Americans. As a result, Vickery was able to announce upon his

return to the U.S. that the NER workers were being released and that

they had not been harmed.

 

When Marion Peabody's brother Harry learned that Marion was no

longer in custody and was on her way back to the U.S., he and his

wife journeyed to New York City to await her arrival and bring her

back to the safety of her home in Wellesley Hills.

[Aratta-Kingdom]

UK PREPARES REPLY FOR TURKEY'S BLUE BOOK LETTER

 

ARMINFO News Agency

October 18, 2005

 

YEREVAN, OCTOBER 18. ARMINFO. The British House of Lords is preparing

a reply for the letter about the "Blue Book" sent by the Justice and

Development Party (AKP) and Republican People's Party (CHP) to the

British Parliament, reports Zaman (Turkey).

 

The British answer claims that the "Blue Book", which deals with the

Armenian genocide, is reliable. British Parliament Human Rights Group

Co-Chair Lord Avebury said that the Turkish Parliament was not informed

sufficiently about the issue. Therefore, he offered that British and

Turkish deputies should hold a joint meeting with academicians. The

answer defends that "Blue Book" nourishes from sufficient sources. "One

point, which is not taken into consideration in the letter, is the

fact that documents supporting the book can be easily accessed. On

the contrary to what the letter claims, Arnold Toynbee did not say

that the "Blue Book" is inaccurate," it was told.

 

The Blue Book was written by the British historian Arnold Toynbee

and was published with the approval of the House of Commons in 1916.

 

Turkey wants the UK to accept that the book is not telling the truth

and apologize to Ankara.

[vava]

Turkey wants the UK to accept that the book is not telling the truth

and apologize to Ankara.

 

Good grief! Now Ankara wants an apology?

[DominO123]

Good grief! Now Ankara wants an apology?

 

It is not something new, but according to Akcam, Ankara shut its mouth, when he wrote about it in a Turkish newspaper, saying why the British will never appologize for it. I didn't knew that Ankara still request appology, when the most valuable and important records in the Blue Book, originate from the US and can be tracked down to the US archives.

[phantom22]

The Turkish government is. so to speak, "digging its own grave"

by challenging the book. Hopefully some screenwriter will make

a movie out of it.

[Aratta-Kingdom]

AZG

CULTURAL GENOCIDE: 'THEY DESTROYED THE CHURCH TO BUILD A MOSQUE'

 

Under this title Milliyet daily of Turkey informed on October 19 that in Argun village of Kulp province of Diarbekir an Armenian church was pulled down to build a mosque in its place. Construction of the mosque was suspended after a few citizens' complaint. According to Milliyet the historic Armenian church of Argun was partially destroyed in the time of republic to build houses with its stones thus making it useless for religious services.

 

But the Council of Protection of Cultural Heritage and Ecology included the semi-ruined church and the Armenian graveyard into the list of historic monuments needing protection. But builder Kerem Emre, resident of the village, pulled the church down together with part of the graveyard by approbation of his fellow villagers and used the stones of the church to lay foundation of the mosque.

 

The construction of the mosque began on May 10 but it was stopped after the complaint of several citizens that made the mayor of Kulp and the Diarbekir museum administration intervened.

 

Head of the village administration, Sadek Turan, told Milliyet on occasion of the illegal construction: "I tried to stop the construction. I provided them with another area for the mosque and told that there are already two mosques functioning in the village. Then builder Emre gathered his fellow villagers and came to me. They accused me of being against the mosque and therefore concluded that I must be an Armenian. I could not stand the pressure any more and gave in."

 

The village of Kulp was formerly Armenian village Khulp that administratively belonged to province of Mush before 1915.

 

By Hakob Chakrian

[Aratta-Kingdom]

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY MUST PREVENT RECURRENCE OF GENOCIDES: YURI BALUYEVSKY

 

ARKA News Agency

Oct 20 2005

 

YEREVAN, October 20. /ARKA/. The international community must do all

in its power to prevent the recurrence of events like the Armenian

Genocide of 1915, Chief of the General Headquarters, RF Armed Forces,

RF First Deputy Minister of Defense Yuri Baluyevsky stated during

his visit to the Memorial to the Genocide Victims in Tsitsernakaberd.

 

"Culprit are difficult to find among the contemporary Turkish people,

but the crime must be denounced," he said. "The Armenia people,

who experienced horrible events of the Genocide, lost a third of its

population, deserves respect on the part of us all," Baluyevky said.

 

During his visit to Armenia, Yuri Baluyevky is to visit the Institute

of Ancient Manuscripts "Matenadaran."

[Aratta-Kingdom]

PRESS RELEASE

Gomidas Institute (UK)

Garod House

42 Blythe Rd.

London W14 0HA

 

Contact Person: Roland Mnatsakanyan

Email: info@gomidas.org.uk

 

14 November 2005

 

British Foreign and Commonwealth Office rejects Turkish Parliament's

letter against 1916 British Blue Book

 

In a further development in the on-going Blue Book saga, the British

Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has responded in kind to the

Turkish Parliament's criticism of the 1916 British Parliamentary Blue

Book The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-16. The

Turkish letter of 28 April 2005 claimed that the Blue Book was British

propaganda fabrication and that it vilified Ottoman Turks and continues

to harm Turkish interests today.

 

However, in a letter dated 8 July 2005, the British Ambassador to

Turkey, Sir Peter Westmacott, informed the Speaker of the Turkish

Parliament that the Turkish Parliament's letter and enclosures

criticising the Blue Book had been placed "in the Library of the House

of Commons where they are available to all Members of Parliament" and

where "it would act as a comment on the Blue Book itself and one to

which historians have access."

 

There has been no formal response from British MPs and Peers because

they were not told of the existence of the Turkish letter, even though

it was addressed to all members of the Houses of Parliament and

solicited a response.

 

In his opening remarks, Ambassador Westmacott explained that the 1916

Blue Book, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-16, was

a Parliament-owned document and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

could not make a statement on it. "However," Sir Westmacott added, "the

Foreign and Commonwealth Office understands that whilst the publication

of the Blue Book may have been regarded as desirable at the time in the

context of the war effort, none of the individual reports has been

refuted; and few have suggested moral or intellectual dishonesty on the

part of the authors, Lord Bryce and Arnold J. Toynbee."

 

Sir Westmacott's words are significant because they represents a careful

rejection of the Turkish position.

 

1/ Despite Sir Westmacott's statement that the Foreign and Commonwealth

Office cannot say anything about the Blue Book because it is "a

Parliament-owned document," he actually made such a statement on behalf

of the British Foreign Secretary. His words were not an oversight but a

warning to Turkish Parliamentarians that the FCO could engage the Blue

Book issue if need be.

 

2/ Sir Westmacott clearly chose to disagree with the two cardinal points

of the Turkish letter when he pointed out that (a) truth and propaganda

are not necessarily mutually exclusive and do not appear to be so in the

blue book; ( Bryce and Toynbee remain in good standing, and their

roles in formulating the Blue Book have not been seriously challenged.

This was a further suggestion that the British were able to dispel the

Turkish criticism if need be.

 

3/ Finally, when making these statements, Sir Westmacott did not credit

the offending Turkish letter and its assertions about the Blue Book with

any weight at all. In fact his blanket rebuttal of Turkish criticisms is

a measure of the British government sentiment regarding the Turkish

position.

 

According to Ara Sarafian, who edited the "uncensored edition" of the

1916 Blue Book, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's response was a

skilful effort to defuse the Armenian issue before it became a

self-inflicted debacle for Turkish Parliamentarians. By burying the

Turkish letter in the House of Commons library, the FCO has prevented

British Parliamentarians from defending their own document in a

forthright manner. It also answered allegations against Great Britain by

Turkish Parliamentarians, and threatened to examine the 1916 Blue Book

in a forthright manner, should the Turkish side insist on their

allegations.

 

To date, there has been no response to the British ambassador's letter

[Aratta-Kingdom]

Raw Story, MA

Aug 3, 2006

 

Thursday August 3, 2006

 

A Republican senator who has called on Democrats to give President

Bush's controversial pick for UN Ambassador John Bolton an up or

down vote is now voting to block the nomination of another ambassador

picked by President Bush, RAW STORY has learned.

 

Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota announced his intention to vote

against recommending confirmation of Richard Hoagland to be President

Bush's ambassador to Armenia. Coleman intends to block the nominee

because he refused to term Turkey's early 20th century of Armenians

living in the country a 'genocide.' Coleman declared in an interview

with the Associated Press "My problem isn't with Hoagland...I continue

to be troubled by our policy that refuses to recognize what was a

historical reality."

 

The article goes on to explain that the US will not call Turkey's

killing of Armenians in the early 1900s an act of genocide, a position

Hoagland hewed to during his confirmation hearing in June.

 

Senator Coleman has been a loud voice in favor of Ambassador John

Bolton's confirmation by a Senate vote. In one statement on Tuesday,

Coleman declared that "Blocking the nomination of Ambassador Bolton

is a case study in partisan excess....We must have an up or down vote

on Ambassador Bolton in the Senate."

 

During Bolton's confirmation hearing last month, he also said "if

you really look at the opposition at times to this nomination...it's

opposition to U.S. policy." He then added "But I think what we do

fundamentally agree with is the belief that the president has the

right to have his voice and his representation, somebody he trusts,

representing us at the United Nations."

[Aratta-Kingdom]

KALONSKA: GERMANY SHOULD RECOGNIZE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

 

Yerkir

21.08.2006 16:22

 

YEREVAN (YERKIR) - Germany should recognize the Armenian

Genocide unreservedly, Hans Kalonska, the director of Germany's

Marborg-Bidenkopf Red Cross said when speaking to reporters in Yerevan.

 

The German Red Cross delegation visited Sunday the Armenian Genocide

Memorial to pay homage to the 1915 Genocide victims.

 

Kalonska said the Armenian Genocide resolution passed by the German

Bundestag should have had described the events of the past century

in more precise legal terms.

 

"The resolution has not found adequate resonance in the German society

though Germany shares a responsibility for the crime," Kalonska

said. He added that only 10 percent of the German youth have some

idea of Armenia and even less are aware of the Armenian Genocide.

 

Kalonska also said that Turkey cannot join the European Union until

it has recognized the Armenian Genocide.

[Aratta-Kingdom]

Armenian Assembly of America

1140 19th Street, NW, Suite 600

Washington, DC 20036

Phone: 202-393-3434

Fax: 202-638-4904

Email: info@aaainc.org

Web: www.armenianassembly.org

 

 

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 18, 2006

CONTACT: Christine Kojoian

E-mail: ckojoian@aaainc.org

 

 

THE ARMENIAN ASSEMBLY OF AMERICA

STATEMENT ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE DENIAL CASE

 

Washington, DC - The Armenian Assembly of America has released the

following statement in the case of Griswold v. Driscoll et. Al. (the

Armenian Genocide Denial Case), which will be heard in U.S. District

Court in Boston today. The lawsuit, filed last year by the Assembly of

Turkish American Associations (ATAA), asserts that the Massachusetts

Department of Education's decision to remove denialist materials in

the school curriculum amounts to "censoring" and therefore would be

a violation of the First Amendment.

 

PRESS STATEMENT

OF THE ARMENIAN ASSEMBLY OF AMERICA

AND OTHER ARMENIAN AMERICAN AMICUS CURIAE

FOR HEARING BEFORE CHIEF JUDGE MARK WOLF

OF THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT, DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS

SEPTEMBER 18, 2006

 

The Armenian Assembly of America and the Armenian-American individuals

who have filed an Amicus Curiae Memorandum for today's hearing on the

Motion to Dismiss the Complaint in the case of Griswold v. Driscoll

et al will point out to the Court in the oral argument scheduled

today that:

 

1. The Armenian-Americans who have filed this Amicus brief are

affronted that the Turkish interests and other plaintiffs who have

brought this lawsuit are seeking to have students in Massachusetts

schools be referred to websites which characterize the Armenian

Genocide as a "myth" and "as bogus as a three dollar bill." In fact,

there is no credible argument that the massacres of Armenians during

and after World War One were not genocide and the overwhelming

historical and legal records supports the finding of genocide of the

Armenian population in Ottoman Turkey during and after World War One.

 

2. The choice of the Massachusetts Board of Education, in a sound

educational decision, to exclude the Turkish sponsored websites in

recommending what should be taught to students in Massachusetts

public schools without reference to the so-called denialist or

"contra-genocide" theory, fulfills the mandate of G.L. c. 276 of the

Acts of 1998;

 

3. When the Massachusetts Board of Education issued its curriculum

guide on teaching about the Armenian Genocide, it was government

speech and there is no First Amendment right to challenge such

government speech;

 

4. If the plaintiffs succeed with this lawsuit, there will be no

stopping point for the demands anyone can make for inclusion in

curriculum recommendations, no matter how flawed or outrageous.

 

5. No one's First Amendment rights to receive information have been

denied since the plaintiffs, and anyone else, can obtain whatever

information they want about the Armenian Genocide from sources outside

the curriculum guide.

 

CONTACTS: Arnold R. Rosenfeld, Esq.

Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham LLP

(617) 951-9125

arosenfeld@klng.com

 

Van Z. Krikorian

Attorney-at-Law

(914) 439-4333

vkrikorian@verizon.net

 

The Armenian Assembly of America is the largest Washington-based

nationwide organization promoting public understanding and awareness of

Armenian issues. It is a 501©(3) tax-exempt membership organization.

[Aratta-Kingdom]

The New York Times

September 15, 2006 Friday

Late Edition - Final

 

 

Turkey, a Touchy Critic, Plans to Put a Novel on Trial

 

 

By SUSANNE FOWLER; International Herald Tribune

 

 

 

''If there is a thief in a novel,'' said Elif Shafak recently, ''it

doesn't make the novelist a thief.''

 

Yet, Ms. Shafak is due in court here on Sept. 21 to defend herself

against charges that she insulted ''Turkishness'' because a character

in her latest novel, ''The Bastard of Istanbul,'' refers to the

deaths of Armenians in 1915 as genocide.

 

Ms. Shafak, a Turkish citizen who was born in Strasbourg, France, is

being sued under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, the same law

that ensnared Turkey's best-known contemporary author, Orhan Pamuk,

in 2005.

 

She is scheduled to give birth to her first child the week of the

trial. A conviction carries a possible penalty of up to three years

in jail.

 

The plaintiffs are vocal nationalists who she says oppose the

government's efforts to gain admission for Turkey, the only member of

NATO with a largely Muslim population, into the European Union.

 

''I believe they want to derail the E.U. process because that would

change many things in the structure of the state and the fabric of

Turkish society,'' Ms. Shafak, an assistant professor of Near Eastern

studies at the University of Arizona, said in an interview. ''They

would rather have an insular, enclosed, xenophobic society than an

open society.''

 

Ms. Shafak, 34, initially escaped a court date by successfully

arguing that the statements over which she was being sued were made

by fictional characters who could not be prosecuted. In June, a

public prosecutor in Istanbul agreed and dismissed the charges.

 

But Kemal Kerincsiz, a lawyer who is also the leader of a rightist

group opposed to European Union membership for Turkey, filed a new

complaint. In July, a high criminal court in Istanbul overruled the

lower court decision, paving the way for the trial.

 

''Article 301 has been used by ultranationalists as a weapon to

silence political voices in Turkey,'' Ms. Shafak said. ''In that

sense, my case is not unusual. But for the first time, they are

trying to bring a novel into court. The way they are trying to

penetrate the domain of art and literature is quite new, and quite

disturbing.''

 

The European Union agrees.

 

Olli Rehn, the European Union's commissioner for enlargement, said in

July that such cases were evidence that Turkey had failed to align

its laws with the union's standards. He urged the Turkish authorities

to amend Article 301 ''in order to guarantee freedom of expression,''

which he called ''a key principle at the core of democracy.''

 

Mr. Pamuk, at the time of his trial, said he hoped the charges

against him would not hurt Turkey's chances of entering the union. He

was prosecuted for saying during an interview that ''a million

Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in these lands and nobody but

me dares talk about it.'' Eventually, with a groundswell of support

from the West, the charges were dropped.

 

But more than 60 similar cases have been brought against writers and

artists in Turkey, although no one has served time in prison yet. The

person potentially most at risk is Hrant Dink, a Turk of Armenian

descent who edits a bilingual Turkish and Armenian newspaper. In

July, an appeals court upheld a suspended six-month prison sentence

against him in connection with a column he wrote, and he faces new

charges based on remarks he made in an interview, according to

Reporters Without Borders.

 

''The Bastard of Istanbul,'' Ms. Shafak's novel, was published in

Turkish and has sold 60,000 copies, a best seller in Turkey. It is to

be published in English in January. Its plot centers on two families

with a common past: Turkish Muslims living in Istanbul and

Armenian-Americans in San Francisco.

 

Among the excerpts opposed by the lawyers' group is a passage in

which a man of Armenian descent worries about which version of

history his niece will accept as she is raised by her Turkish

stepfather. He wonders aloud if she will state, ''I am the grandchild

of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives to the hands of

the Turkish butchers in 1915, but I myself have been brainwashed to

deny the genocide because I was raised by some Turk named Mustapha!''

 

 

Turkey says that the deaths of as many as 1.5 million Armenians were

not the result of genocide, but rather of a war in which many Turks

also were killed as the Ottoman Empire was collapsing.

 

As a writer, Ms. Shafak has shown a penchant for provocative topics.

 

Her previous novels have touched on suicide, the intersection of

Islamic and Jewish mysticism, and even love between a Sufi dervish

hermaphrodite and a Greek man. She has angered critics in the past

by, in their view, eschewing Turkishness by writing in English and by

using what Turks today call ''old words'' from the Ottoman vocabulary

that preceded the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded the

Turkish republic in 1923.

 

Ms. Shafak also took part in a controversial conference in Istanbul

last year on the Armenian question (the first such conference in

Turkey, and one that Mr. Kerincsiz and his group, the Unity of

Jurists, tried to prevent).

 

So while Europe struggles to define the idea of Europe and who is

European, Turkey is in the midst of its own debate about what defines

Turkishness and whether Turks even want to be considered European.

''There is a clash of opinion in Turkey,'' Ms. Shafak said. ''On the

one hand are the people who are very much pro-E.U., sometimes for

economic reasons, sometimes for political reasons.'' On the other

hand, she said, are factions, including nationalists, who fear that

Turkish autonomy will be weakened by membership in the union.

 

''Fear is a powerful element,'' Ms. Shafak said. ''We were taught

ever since we were little kids that Turkey is a country surrounded by

water on three sides and enemies on all sides and that you can never

trust outsiders.''

 

The charges of ''insulting Turkishness'' seem particularly galling to

Ms. Shafak, whose mother was a Turkish diplomat and whose husband,

Eyup Can, is the editor of Referans, a respected Turkish daily

business newspaper.

 

''I was thinking of going back to the States to give birth, but

because of the trial I will stay here,'' Ms. Shafak said. ''And I am

happy to be giving birth in Istanbul. This city is very dear to me,

even though it suffers from a sort of collective amnesia.''

[Aratta-Kingdom]

THE MORE TURKS TRY TO DENY ARMENIAN GENOCIDE THE GREATER NUMBER OF STATES RECOGNIZE IT

 

PanARMENIAN.Net

08.01.2007 15:02 GMT+04:00

 

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ On the New Year's eve Harut Sassounian, the editor

of The California Courier, commented on the brightest events and

publications of the year 2006 on the Armenian Genocide issue. "The

Foreign Minister of Turkey, Abdullah Gul, announced this week that the

Turkish government is planning to launch in 2007 a new comprehensive

propaganda campaign to deny the Armenian Genocide. All previous Turkish

government attempts to bury the facts of the Armenian Genocide have

ended in failure, after wasting millions of dollars on lobbying firms

and books by phony "scholars." Ironically, the more the Turks try

to deny the crime committed by Ottoman Turkey in 1915, the greater

the number of countries, international organizations and individuals

that recognize it. In recent weeks, after the Argentinean Parliament

recognized the Armenian Genocide, Ankara warned that country's Senate

not to follow suit. Despite the Turkish warning, and maybe because of

it, the Argentinean Senate adopted the Armenian Genocide resolution

unanimously! A couple of months ago, when the French Parliament adopted

a bill that would make it a crime to deny the Armenian Genocide, the

Turkish government gave a similar warning to the French Senate," he

says. " Several Turkish newspapers reported last week that the Armenian

American lobby scored a major victory when Pres. Bush could not get

the Senate to confirm Richard Hoagland, the Ambassador-designate

for Armenia. The Turkish press quoted an analyst as saying that the

blocking of Hoagland's nomination was a major success for Armenians:

"The Armenian lobby has never been this strong," he continues.

 

"The Turkish Culture Minister announced last week that the official

opening ceremonies for the renovated Aghtamar Armenian Church would

take place on April 24.

 

The Patriarch of Constantinople, Archbishop Mesrob Moutafian,

issued an uncharacteristically bold statement, saying that holding

the ceremony on that date would be exploiting Armenian people's

suffering for political gain. He said that neither he nor any other

Armenian would participate in such a ceremony on April 24. It has

been obvious to me from the very beginning that Turkish officials were

planning to exploit the renovation of Aghtamar for political purposes,

independently of the date of the ceremony.

 

Maybe the Patriarch, instead of objecting, should have accepted that

date and turned the ceremony planned for April 24 into a commemoration

of the Armenian Genocide -- which would have been a first in Turkey

since 1915," Sassounian says.

 

"Sylvester Stallone announced last week that he is interested in

making Franz Werfel's famous novel, "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,"

into a blockbuster movie.

 

Turks went into total panic and organized a worldwide e-mail

campaign urging Stallone not to be "an instrument of Armenian

lobbies." Armenians on the other hand were so excited that they

started celebrating as if the movie was already made.

 

Surprisingly, neither Turks nor Armenians seem to remember that

Stallone has made this same announcement several times in the past

with nothing to show for.

 

However, should Stallone end up making this movie someday, he can

count on the Turks to provide a lot of free publicity, ensuring its

success!" he goes on.

 

"Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Erdogan, told the editors of the New

York Times last week that they had become "a tool in the hands of

the Armenians." He was unhappy that the N.Y. Times had decided that

the newspaper would refer to the Armenian Genocide as a historical

fact. This is the second time that the Turkish Prime Minister has

personally complained to the N.Y. Times on this issue in the past

couple of years. Maybe it's about time that Erdogan realized that

the N.Y. Times, true to its noble calling, is a tool for the truth

and not a tool for Turkish denialism," Sassounian remarks.

[Aratta-Kingdom]

TWO BILLS ON RECOGNITION OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AT US CONGRESS AND NORTH DAKOTA

 

The bill on Recognition of the Armenian Genocide of April 24 will be submitted to the consideration of the legis;ative bodies of the North Dakota, USA. In particular, the draft law stated that in 1915, the Turkish authorities were not only killing the Armenians, but also destroying the Armenian churches, schools, libraries, pieces of art, cultural monuments, i.e. they tried to destroy a civilization that lasted for over three tousand years. In case, the legislative bodies of the North Dakota recognize the Armenian Genocide, the number of states that did so will amount to over 40.

 

At the same time, Adam Schiff, member of the Commission for Armenian Issues at the US Congress, is going to submit a formula on the Armenian Genocide issue to the Congress. The formula will be submitted to the House of Representatives.

[Aratta-Kingdom]

"MY STATEMENT ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE WAS NOT A SLIP OF THE TONGUE"- JOHN EVANS

 

 

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ John Evans’s, US previous ambassador to Armenia statement on the Armenian Genocide ‘was not a slip of the tongue’, stated John Evans himself in the interview to the Los Angeles Times. "I knew it was not the policy of the United States to use the word ‘genocide’. But ninety years is a long time and at some point you have to call a spade a spade,” said John Evans. It is worth mentioning that the diplomat departed from Armenian on September and last month officially left the State Department. In his words, by July 2005, it was absolutely clear that he would be forced out. It is worth mentioning that during his meeting with San Francisco Armenian Diaspora on February 19, 2005 John Evans said, ”Today I’ll call it Armenian Genocide.” Later, on February 28, 2005, speaking in US Embassy to Armenia, Evans wanted to introduce clarity into his February 19 statement. “I used the word ‘genocide’, which reflects personally my, John Evans’s viewpoint, and not of a political figure.” he said.