Yervant1 Posted January 10, 2008 Report Share Posted January 10, 2008 Another proof which shows the blatant lie of the Turkish Government, that their archives are open to the world and they have nothing to hide or be ashamed of their past. Notice to Press and Public My name is Mehmet Sait Uluýþýk and I was born in Eskiþehir (Turkey) on July 10, 1959. On November 20, 2007, at Yeþilköy Airport (Istanbul), without presenting any justification but based upon an order from the Ministry of the Interior, I was declared a suspicious person, denied entry into Turkey and sent back to Berlin on the first return flight. I have been living in Germany since 1984 and have worked as a journalist and publisher since 1992. Because of my Circassian ethnic background I have been interested in Circassian history and since 2005 have stopped working actively as a journalist and publisher and started devoting all of my time to gathering documents on the subject. I was stripped of my Turkish citizenship in 1991 because of my failure to perform obligatory military service (based on Order #1956, dated June 7, 1991, supported by Statute 403, Section 25, paragraph ç). Since 1997, the year I became a German citizen, I have been entering and exiting Turkey regularly without incident. I was not provided with the official reason for denying my entry into Turkey. Despite this, based upon information that I was able to gather from contacts I made, the reason I was denied entry into Turkey is apparently to prevent my performing research at the Presidential Ottoman Archives (Baþbakanlýk Osmanlý Arþiv, hereinafter "BOA") in Istanbul. There is a very simple reason why my entry to Turkey was blocked instead of directly prohibiting my research at the archives. If the latter had occurred, it would have made an obvious statement that would have belied the arguments of the governing AK Party administration that "Our archives are open to all. Everyone's welcome to come in and examine them," or "let the historians form a commission." By using a different strategy and preventing my entry into the country, it allows for the raising of a suspicion that there are perhaps other issues in my personal background. Recently, I started to wonder about the history of Circassians and I want to write a book about the subject. The actual topic that interests me is "Did the Circassians play any role in the events of 1915 and if so, what?" Also, I have been trying to find the answers to the question, "What was the relationship between Circassians and other minorities during the period in question, prior to that and afterwards?" For the past two years, I have been working in a regular, disciplined manner at the BOA and systematically gathering documents on the subject. A large part of my life during the past two years has been taken up this way at the archives in Istanbul. During my work at the archives I was frequently blocked in my efforts by the employees, who are known as followers of Turkish-Islamic synthesis (mostly supporters of the Turkish nationalist party). I believe that the denial of my entry into Turkey was the result of efforts by these same individuals. At the airport I was presented with a "Record of Denial of Entry" form. On the form was all of my identification information. This information taken from my German ID card is available in only one place, and that is the Presidential Ottoman Archives. The police officer at the airport informed me that the order [to deny entry] came directly from the Ministry of the Interior, not from the General Directorate of Security. Based upon his investigation of the issue, parliamentarian Mr. Ufuk Uras informed me that the entry denial did not come from the Ministry of National Defense nor did it have anything to do with military service. Since the issuance of the entry denial on Nov. 20, 2007, I have made no effort to broadcast this information. I believed that the ban was an effort to discredit the AK Party administration. I had hoped that the AK Party administration would quickly rectify the situation when it so obviously contradicts the government's policies as stated to the public. I tried to remain silent because if the incident were revealed, it would create an obstacle in Turkey's relations with the European Union and lead the way to lowering opinion towards the current administration and Turkey in general, especially after recent discourse regarding the events of 1915. I tried to resolve it through private channels. Unfortunately both my own efforts and those of my attorney to reach the authorities within the AK Party have come to a standstill. I was unable to get anywhere with my efforts. That leaves only one option: letting the public know, through the media, about a mindset that attempts to prevent an individual from conducting research in the archives by denying them entry into the country. It is obvious what sort of difficulty is going to befall someone like me who is doing nothing other than gathering documents in a systematic manner from the archives, if a government that claims "Our archives are open to all; we welcome the formation of a historians commission" turns around and not only denies that person access to the archives but even entry to the country itself. Nothing that Turkey and its administrations say on the subject can be considered credible. One can only smirk at a statement like "Let's solve our problems from the past" when it comes out of a mindset that views working in the archives and gathering documents as criminal. This can only be answered with the statement, "Do your homework first, then open up the archives to everyone." I want this disrespectful action against me resolved immediately and my work, which has been delayed because of it, compensated for as soon as possible. Respectfully, Mehmet Sait Uluýþýk Jan. 2, 2008 - Berlin Mehmet Sait Uluýþýk Berlin, Germany Email: muluisik@t-online.de Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garmag Posted January 10, 2008 Report Share Posted January 10, 2008 Another proof which shows the blatant lie of the Turkish Government, that their archives are open to the world and they have nothing to hide or be ashamed of their past. Notice to Press and Public My name is Mehmet Sait Uluýþýk and I was born in Eskiþehir (Turkey) on July 10, 1959. On November 20, 2007, at Yeþilköy Airport (Istanbul), without presenting any justification but based upon an order from the Ministry of the Interior, I was declared a suspicious person, denied entry into Turkey and sent back to Berlin on the first return flight. ....................it is obvious what sort of difficulty is going to befall someone like me who is doing nothing other than gathering documents in a systematic manner from the archives, if a government that claims "Our archives are open to all; we welcome the formation of a historians commission" turns around and not only denies that person access to the archives but even entry to the country itself. Nothing that Turkey and its administrations say on the subject can be considered credible. One can only smirk at a statement like "Let's solve our problems from the past" when it comes out of a mindset that views working in the archives and gathering documents as criminal. This can only be answered with the statement, "Do your homework first, then open up the archives to everyone." I want this disrespectful action against me resolved immediately and my work, which has been delayed because of it, compensated for as soon as possible. Respectfully, Mehmet Sait Uluýþýk Jan. 2, 2008 - Berlin Mehmet Sait Uluýþýk Berlin, Germany Email: muluisik@t-online.de Why are we surprised for the double talk prevailing NOW.... REGARDING.... the archives of the past regimes? Turkeys propaganda machine TODAY, must show the world a face that is civilized and progressive! At the same time..., IT MUST AT ALL COSTS, PREVENT THE IMAGE OF "GENOCIDE PERPETRATOR" IN THE LATE 19TH AND BEGINNING OF 20TH CENTURIES BY PREVIOUS GOVERNEMENTS THAT THE ARCHIVES MIGHT UNRAVEL! THERE MUST BE A CONTINUITY IN THE DENIALIST POLITICS SINCE 1923! BE IT SULTANATE OR REPUBLICAN... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aratta-Kingdom Posted January 13, 2008 Report Share Posted January 13, 2008 TURKEY BANS TURKISH GENOCIDE SCHOLAR Taraf Monday, January 7, 2008 BERLIN (Taraf)--Historian Mehmet Sait Uluishik, a German citizen of Turkish origin has been banned from entering Turkey without any explanation, the daily Taraf reported Sunday. Uluishik has been researching the role of Circassian's in the Armenian Genocide in the Prime Ministry's Ottoman Archives. He said while he was working in the archives officials employed there kept him under close observation. Uluishik has been living in Germany since 1984. His Turkish citizenship was revoked in 1991 for not performing his military service. Uluishik has been a German citizen since 1997. Since 2005 he has been working on Circassian history and has visited Turkey almost 20 times during the last two years for his research. The last time he arrived in Turkey was in November of 2007. When he arrived at the airport in Istanbul he was handed a paper from the Interior Ministry that declared he is barred from entering Turkey. He was immediately deported to Berlin. When Uluishik asked the police officer that handed him the paper for the reason behind it, he learned that the ban was not issued by the police department but came directly from the Interior Ministry. Uluishik told the daily Taraf that he requested to talk to a parliamentarian to learn the reason behind his ban. "The deputy told me that the ban had nothing to do with the revocation of my citizenship for completing my military duty," he added. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aubépine Posted January 13, 2008 Report Share Posted January 13, 2008 Ahh those Circassians... That war-like, opportunistic tribe from the Caucasus. The only Circassians I like is the chicken variety sort, best served with slices of bread or pitta. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ashot Posted January 14, 2008 Report Share Posted January 14, 2008 Ahh, good taste! Makes me hungry! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aratta-Kingdom Posted May 28, 2008 Report Share Posted May 28, 2008 Armenians Should Take $20 Million Offered by Turkey as Partial Payment By Harut Sassounian Publisher, The California Courier The largest Turkish daily newspaper, Hurriyet, carried the following sensational headline in its May 20, 2008 edition: "Turkey offers $20 million aid to open Armenian archives." Yusuf Halacoglu, chairman of Turkey's state-funded Turkish Historical Society, told Hurriyet that he had offered Armenians $20 million to open the ARF archives in Boston which he says include "very important documents" regarding the Armenian Genocide. Halacoglu said that he made this financial offer after Armenians allegedly told him that they do not have the necessary funds to organize these archives. He claimed that "Armenians do not want to have the archives opened because such efforts will start a real debate over the genocide claims." In recent years, Halacoglu has made many bizarre statements on the Armenian Genocide, bringing nothing but ridicule upon himself, his fellow genocide denialists, and the Turkish Historical Society. This latest offer is yet another wacky statement by this charlatan, masquerading as a historian. It shows his own, and his government's desperation in trying to counter what Hurriyet describes as the Armenian Diaspora's increasing worldwide activities in recent years for the acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide. There are several falsehoods in Halacoglu's statement. First, he does not say which Armenians, if any, had told him that they lack the necessary funds to catalogue the ARF archives in Boston. It is a pretty sure bet that he has never contacted a single ARF official regarding the status of these archives. If he had, he would have learned that these archives are already open to any serious scholar. I am also quite certain that no ARF official has ever told Halacoglu that the archives are not catalogued due to funding issues, because many of the documents have already been published in several volumes. Since Halacoglu knows neither Armenian nor any other language besides Turkish, he would be unable to read a single document located in these archives. Halacoglu claims that he had conveyed his offer of $20 million to "two Armenian historians, Ara Sarafian and Hilmar Kaiser," and had not received an answer. Betraying the depth of his ignorance, Halacoglu cannot even tell that Hilmar Kaiser is a German and not an Armenian! Tatul Sonentz-Papazian, who managed the ARF archives in Boston until 2000, was quoted by the Armenian Reporter as saying that, contrary to Halacoglu's claims, the cataloguing of the ARF documents through 1925 were completed in1995. Mr. Sonentz-Papazian told the Armenian Reporter that Hilmar Kaiser, whom he had seen as recently as a month ago, did not convey such an offer from Halacoglu . Ara Sarafian also contradicted Halacoglu's claims by telling the Reporter that he had not been asked to convey such an offer to the ARF. "This is obviously a publicity stunt," Sarafian was quoted as saying. "Halacoglu thrives on such publicity." Furthermore, there is no evidence that the ARF archives will lend any credence to the cause of genocide denialists. Gerard Libaridian, who was incharge of the ARF archives in Boston from 1982 to 1988, posted the following explanation on the armworkshop website on March 26, 2007: "I doubt that they [ARF archives] will shed much light on the genocidal process itself, since the leaders of that party, both national and local, were among the first victims of that process=80¦. These archives, of course, cannot be lumped in the same basket as state archives, since the Dashnaktsutiune [ARF] is a political organization and not a state." Halacoglu would do well to be more concerned about the accessibility and integrity of Ottoman/Turkish archives rather than those of the ARF. In the May 25, 2008 issue of the Turkish newspaper, Taraf, researcher Ayse Hur, in a detailed and lengthy report, courageously exposed the destruction and manipulation of the Ottoman archives. The Taraf article is appropriately titled, "Leave the Tashnak archives alone and look at the Ottoman archives." Over the past nine decades, the Ottoman archives have been cleansed from all incriminating documents and made available mostly to denialist "scholars" hired by the Turkish government. My advice to the officials in charge of the ARF archives is to take the $20 million being offered by the Turkish government and declare that sum to be a partial compensation for the billions of dollars of damages suffered by Armenians during the Genocide. Whenever Armenians have an opportunity to recover even a small portion of their immense losses during the genocide, be it money, personal property or other assets, they should grab it without hesitation! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aratta-Kingdom Posted June 11, 2008 Report Share Posted June 11, 2008 REPORT: TURKEY ENTICES U.S. SCHOLARS, LAWMAKERS TO COVER UP WWI GENOCIDE CBS 47 http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/re...de,418387.shtml June 3 2008 CA MONTGOMERY, Ala., June 3 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A network of U.S. scholars funded by the government of Turkey is part of an energetic campaign to cover up the Turkish genocide of as many as 1.5 million Armenians during World War I, an effort that has found success in Congress and the White House, according to the latest issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report, released today. Despite abundant documentation and eyewitness accounts of the slaughter of Armenians by Turkey's Ottoman government between 1915 and 1918, the current Turkish government has paid lobbyists and funded the network of American academics, many of whom dismiss or rationalize the killing. Genocide scholars agree that the slaughter was, indeed, a genocide. "What we are seeing is a despicable rewriting of history aimed at absolving the perpetrators of mass murder and demonizing their victims," said Mark Potok, editor of the SPLC's Intelligence Report, a quarterly investigative journal that monitors the radical right. "It is no different than the Holocaust denial of Nazi sympathizers who claim there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz and Treblinka." The summer 2008 issue of the Intelligence Report can be read at www.splcenter.org. The cover story recounts a March 2007 event where Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, told a Harvard University audience that the Turkish government at the time may have been guilty of ineptness and "bungling misrule" -- but not genocide. Lewy, one of the most active members of the network of academics, has made similar revisionist claims in speeches at other campuses and in his 2005 book, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide. As early as 1985, Turkey bought full-page newspaper advertisements to publish a letter questioning the genocide that was signed by 69 American scholars. All 69 had received funding that year from the Turkish government or its proxies. As the only Muslim-dominated country in a troubled region to call the United States and Israel its allies, Turkey also has wielded significant political influence in Washington. Last fall, lobbyists on the Turkish payroll stymied a congressional resolution commemorating the genocide by persuading more than 100 lawmakers to reverse their positions. Even President Bush flip-flopped on a 2000 campaign promise to back official U.S. recognition of the genocide. "Denial is the final stage of genocide," Gregory Stanton, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, told the Intelligence Report. "It is a continuing attempt to destroy the victim group psychologically and culturally, to deny its members even the memory of the murders of their relatives. That is what the Turkish government today is doing to Armenians around the world." Also, in the Summer 2008 issue of the Intelligence Report: "Secret Identity?" probes the ideology of Shepherd's Chapel, an Arkansas-based television ministry led by Arnold Murray that has an audience in the millions. Despite a theology that identifies an evil race he calls the "Kenites" as the killers of Christ, Murray says his ministry is not anti-Semitic. Mounting evidence suggests otherwise."Stalked by Skins" tells the story of twin brothers who have lived in fear since a bloody 2003 encounter with a gang of racist skinheads in Illinois that left one man dead. In interviews, Bill and Roger Larson recount how they and their families have been tormented by gang members ever since. "North Meets South" reports on the strange alliance forged by a Vermont separatist group in recent years. Born of the left, the Second Vermont Republic has now partnered with the white supremacist League of the South, which seeks a second Southern secession, to build a national movement."Of Race and Rockets" reveals famed aerospace scientist Walter Kistler's $200,000 in donations to the Pioneer Fund, a racist foundation that funds controversial studies of race and intelligence. A defiant Kistler says he is "not concerned about battles in society about what is and what is not 'racist.'" The Southern Poverty Law Center is a nonprofit organization that combats hate, intolerance and discrimination through education, litigation and advocacy. The Intelligence Report is a quarterly investigative journal that tracks the activities of hate groups and monitors militia and other extremist anti-government activity. For more information, visit www.splcenter.org. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aratta-Kingdom Posted June 11, 2008 Report Share Posted June 11, 2008 Turkish Ambassador Fires Scholar For Telling the Truth on Genocide By Harut Sassounian Publisher, The California Courier Back in 1985, Prof. Donald Quataert, Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston, and 68 of his pro-Turkish colleagues signed a joint statement questioning the veracity of the Armenian Genocide and asking the U.S. Congress not to approve a commemorative resolution on this crime against humanity. That denialist statement, paid for by the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, was published as a half-page ad in the May 19, 1985 editions of the Washington Post and the New York Times. Incidentally, Prof. Quataert, along with scores of other scholars, had received funding from the Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS) and other Turkish sources. The ITS was founded in 1982 by the Turkish government in Washington, D.C., with a $3 million grant. When I pointed out in my Oct. 24, 1985 column that many of the signatories of that Turkish ad had received funds from ITS, Heath Lowry, then Executive Director of ITS, threatened to file a libel lawsuit against me, unless I retracted my column and published his lengthy letter of complaint. I rejected his request and my lawyer threatened to counter-sue the ITS, prompting Lowry todrop his lawsuit. I had been told that Lowry had a direct hand in drafting the 1985 denialist statement as well as collecting the signatures of the 69 scholars. Twelve of those 69 scholars currently serve on the ITS board, including Lowry and Justin McCarthy, another notorious denialist. Last week, an unexpected revelation was made concerning Prof. Quataert who had served as Chairman of the ITS Board of Governors from 2001 until the end of 2006. Prof. Mervat Hatem, President of the Middle East Studies Association, sent a letter to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, expressing her outrage at the dismissal of Dr. Quataert from the ITS Chairmanship. The MESA letter revealed that Prof. Quataert was forced to resign "after he refused to accede to the request of ITS's honorary chairman, [Turkey's] Ambassador [in Washington] Nebi Sensoy, that he issue a retraction of a scholarly book review he wrote" about the Armenian Genocide. The letter also indicated that "unnamed high officials in Ankara" had "threatened to revoke the funding of ITS if he [Quataert] did not publicly retract statements made in his reviewor separate himself from the Chairmanship of the ITS." Prof. Hatem expressed her serious concern that "the reputation and integrity of the ITS, as a non-political institution funding scholarly projects that meet stringent academic criteria, is blackened when there is government interference in and blatant disregard for the principle of academic freedom." She reminded Prime Minister Erdogan that the dismissal of "Dr. Quataert sharply contrasts with your government's recent call to leave the debate regarding the events of 1915 to the independent study and judgment of scholars." Prof. Hatem concluded her letter by asking the Turkish authorities to reinstate Prof. Quataert as chairman and place ITS funds in "an irrevocable trust immune from political interference and infringement of academic freedom." Copies of the MESA letter were sent to Amb. Sensoy, the ITS Board and the President of Georgetown University where the Turkish Institute is housed. Prof. Quataert's difficulties started when in Fall 2006 the Journal of Interdisciplinary History published his review of Donald Bloxham's book, "The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians." In that review, Prof. Quataert boldly criticized Turkish scholars' work on the Armenian Genocide by stating that "they were not writing critical history but polemics=80¦. Many of their works were directly sponsored and published by the Turkish government=80¦." Dr. Quataert noted that the "wall of silence" of Turkish scholars on the Armenian Genocide was "crumbling." Despite his earlier objection to the word genocide, he explained why he had decided to use that term for the first time in his book review. While acknowledging that his reference to the Armenian Genocide "may provoke anger among some of my Ottomanist colleagues," he said that not doing so "runs the risk of suggesting denial of the massive and systematic atrocities that the Ottoman state and some of its military and general populace committed against the Armenians." Prof. Quataert further observed: "Indeed, accumulating evidence is indicating that the killings were centrally planned by Ottoman government officials and systematically carried out by their underlings." He concluded the book review by admitting that "what happened to the Armenians readily satisfies the U.N. definition of genocide." Prof. Fatma Muge Gocek, an Associate Member of ITS, told the Armenian Reporter last week that after Prof. Quataert's dismissal two ITS board members had resigned and two more, in addition to herself, were considering doing so. A knowledgeable source disclosed to this writer that the two ITS board members who have resigned are: Prof. Resat Kasaba, Chair of the International Studies Program at the University of Washington-Seattle and Marcie Patton, Associate Professor of Political Science at Fairfield University. Dr. Gocek, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, sent a letter to the ITS last week, expressing her surprise that she was still on its Board. She said that no one from ITS had contacted her in more than five years. She described Prof. Quataert's dismissal "as an infringement on his academic freedom" and the Turkish government's funding of ITS "with strings attached" as "unethical." Prof. Quataert's transformation from a denialist to a believer in the Armenian Genocide is based on the growing body of scholarship in recent years both within and outside Turkey. A comparison of the 2000 and 2005 editions of his book, "The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922," illustrates the gradual evolution ofhis position on the Armenian Genocide. In a sharp departure from the cautious language used in his first edition, Dr. Quataert in the 2005 edition of hisbook points out the organized nature of the killings: "The patterns of killings were chillingly similar in the various areas, powerfully suggesting the presenceof a coordinated program." He further states: "On the evidence presented, it seems plausible that high-ranking officials of the Ottoman state, utilizing the Special Organization, directed a concerted, centrally orchestrated program that murdered massive numbers of Ottoman Armenians." Finally, Dr. Quataert comes to the conclusion in his 2006 book review that what had happened to the Armenians in 1915 was indeed a Genocide. The Turkish government now has a new scandal on its hands, thanks to the reckless behavior of its Ambassador in Washington, who clearly violated the academic freedom of a prominent American scholar. The Ambassador's actions should embarrass the Turkish government in front of not only the public at large but also the academic community worldwide. This scandal may also cause the Internal Revenue Service to look into possible violations of U.S. laws by ITS in view of the improper control of an American non-profit organization by a foreign government. Georgetown University officials may also review their association with ITS, given the latter's blatant violation of academic freedom. Once again, the Turkish government has been caught trying to export its gag rule on the Armenian Genocide beyond its borders to Washington, D.C. Indeed, as the MESA President pointed out in her letter, Prof. Quataert's dismissal exposes the Turkish government's lack of sincerity in suggesting that scholars rather than politicians should deal with the Armenian Genocide issue. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aratta-Kingdom Posted June 11, 2008 Report Share Posted June 11, 2008 Turks spend millions I Early this year, the Toronto District School Board voted to require all public high school students in Canada's largest city to complete a new course titled "Genocide: Historical and Contemporary Implications." It includes a unit on the Armenian genocide, in which more than a million Armenians perished in a methodical and premeditated scheme of annihilation orchestrated by the rulers of Turkey during and just after World War I. The school board members each soon received a letter from Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, rebuking them for classifying the Armenian genocide in the same category as the Holocaust. "The tragic fate of the Armenian community during World War I," Lewy wrote, is best understood as "a badly mismanaged war-time security measure," rather than a carefully plotted genocide. Lewy is one of the most active members of a network of American scholars, influence peddlers and website operators, financed by hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the government of Turkey, who promote the denial of the Armenian genocide -- a network so influential that it was able last fall to defy both historical truth and enormous political pressure to convince America's lawmakers and even its president to reverse long-held policy positions. Lewy makes similar revisionist claims in his 2005 book The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide and in frequent lectures at university campuses across the country. Speaking at Harvard University in March 2007, he chalked up the ghastly Armenian death toll to "bungling misrule," and stressed that "it is important to bear in mind the enormous difference between ineptness, even ineptness that had tragic consequences" and deliberate mass murder. "Armenians call the calamitous events of 1915-1916 in the Ottoman Empire the first genocide of the twentieth century," he said. "Most Turks refer to this episode as war time relocation made necessary by the treasonous conduct of the Armenian minority. The debate on what actually happened has been going on for almost 100 years and shows no signs of resolution." But it's not only Armenians calling the slaughter a genocide, and there is no real debate about its essential details, according to the vast majority of credible historians. Although Lewy's brand of genocide denial is subtler than that of Holocaust deniers who declare there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, it's no less an attempt to rewrite history. "The overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide -- hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades -- is consistent," the International Association of Genocide Scholars stated in a 2005 letter to the Turkish government. "The scholarly evidence reveals the following: On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens -- an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years." Double Killing Despite this clear consensus of experts, Turkey exerts political leverage and spends millions of dollars in the United States to obfuscate the Armenian genocide, with alarming success even at the highest levels of government. Lobbyists on the Turkish payroll stymied a Congressional resolution commemorating the genocide last fall by convincing lawmakers to reverse their stated positions. Even President Bush flip-flopped. Revisionist historians who conjure doubt about the Armenian genocide and are paid by the Turkish government provided the politicians with the intellectual cover they needed to claim they were refusing to dictate history rather than caving in to a foreign government's present-day interests. "This all happened a long time ago, and I don't know if we can know whether it was a massacre or a genocide or what," said U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.) after changing his vote. "The last thing Congress should be doing is deciding the history of an empire [the Ottoman empire] that doesn't even exist any more," said President Bush. But experts in genocide saw things quite differently. "Denial is the final stage of genocide," says Gregory Stanton, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. "It is a continuing attempt to destroy the victim group psychologically and culturally, to deny its members even the memory of the murders of their relatives. That is what the Turkish government today is doing to Armenians around the world." Last year, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a letter condemning Armenian genocide denial that was signed by 53 Nobel laureates including Wiesel, the famous Holocaust survivor and political activist. Wiesel has repeatedly called Turkey's 90-year-old campaign to cover up the Armenian genocide a double killing, since it strives to kill the memory of the original atrocities. He was hardly the first. As long ago as 1943, law professor Raphael Lemkin, who would later serve as an advisor to Nuremburg chief counsel Robert Jackson, coined the term "genocide" with the Armenians in mind. Stanton, a former U.S. State Department official who drafted the United Nations Security Council resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, spoke this April at a United States Capitol ceremony honoring victims of the Armenian genocide -- a ceremony held four months after the bill to commemorate the slaughter was shot down. "The U.S. government should not be party to efforts to kill the memory of a historical fact as profound and important as the genocide of the Armenians, which Hitler used as an example in his plan for the Holocaust," Stanton said before an audience that included three survivors of the Armenian genocide and more than 100 representatives and senators. Infiltrating the Academy Efforts to kill the memory of the Armenian genocide began while carrion birds were still picking over corpses in their desert boneyards, with Turkey issuing a first official statement assuring the world at large that no atrocities had occurred. Turkey's primary strategy for denying the Armenian genocide since then has shifted from blanket denial to disputing the death toll to blaming the massacres on Kurdish bandits and a few rogue officials to claiming the Armenians who died were enemy combatants in a civil war. Turkey began intervening in the U.S. on behalf of denying the genocide in the 1930s, when Turkish leaders convinced the U.S. State Department to prevent MGM studios from making a movie based on the book The Forty Days of the Musa Dagh because it depicted aspects of the Armenian genocide. In 1982, the government of Turkey donated $3 million to create the Institute for Turkish Studies, a nonprofit organization housed at Georgetown University that pushes a pro-Turkey agenda, including denial of the Armenian genocide. Three years later, in 1985, Turkey bought full-page advertisements in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Washington Times to publish a letter questioning the Armenian genocide that was signed by 69 American scholars. All 69 had received funding that year from the Institute for Turkish Studies or another of Turkey's surrogates like the Ankara Chamber of Commerce, a quasi-governmental agency in Turkey's capital city. The Institute for Turkish Studies has since received sizable donations from American defense contractors that sell arms to Turkey, including General Dynamics and Westinghouse. Turkey continues to provide an annual subsidy to support the institute. In 2006, the most recent year for which tax records are available, the institute awarded $85,000 in grants to scholars. Its chairman is the current Turkish ambassador to the U.S., Nabi Sensoy. he first unassailable evidence of the extent of the Armenian genocide denial industry's reach in academic circles arrived in 1990 in an envelope addressed to Robert Jay Lifton, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the City University of New York's Graduate Center and John Jay College. It contained a letter signed by Nuzhet Kandemir, who was then Turkey's ambassador to the United States, protesting Lifton's inclusion of several passing references to the Armenian genocide in his prize-winning book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. "It is particularly disturbing to see a major scholar on the holocaust, a tragedy whose enormity and barbarity must never be forgotten, so careless in his references to a field outside his own area of expertise," Kandemir wrote. "To compare a tragic civil war perpetrated by misguided Armenian nationalists, and the human suffering it wrought on both Muslim and Christian populations, with the horrors of a premeditated attempt to systematically eradicate a people is, to anyone familiar with the history in question, simply ludicrous." There was nothing out of the ordinary about Kandemir's letter. Academics who write about the Armenian genocide were then and still are routinely castigated by Turkish authorities. What Lifton found intriguing, however, was a second letter in the envelope, which the Turkish ambassador had included quite by accident. It was a memo to Kandemir from Near East historian Heath Lowry, in which Lowry provided Kandemir with a point-by-point cheat sheet on how to attack Lifton's book, which Lowry chummily referred to as "our problem." Lowry at the time was the founding director of the Institute for Turkish Studies. He resigned that position in 1996 when he was selected from a field of 20 candidates to fill the Ataturk Chair of Turkish Studies at Princeton University, a new position in the Near Eastern Studies department that was created with a $750,000 matching grant from the government of Turkey. Prior to joining the Princeton faculty, Lowry had never held a full-time teaching position and had not published a single work of scholarship through a major publishing house. As a result of that and of what The Boston Globe described in 1995 as his work as "a long-time lobbyist for the Turkish government," his appointment sparked a firestorm of controversy. A protest group called Princeton Alumni for Credibility published a petition decrying Lowry's appointment that was signed by more than 80 leading scholars and writers, including Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Miller, Cornel West, Joyce Carol Oates and many historians and experts in genocide. Peter Balakian, the director of Colgate University's Center for the Study of Ethics and World Societies and the author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, called Lowry "a propagandist for a foreign government." Speaking at a 2005 symposium at Princeton commemorating the 90th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, Balakian posed a rhetorical question: "Would a university want someone who worked with a neo-Nazi group to cover up the Holocaust on their faculty?" The relationship of Turkey to U.S. scholars promoting Armenian genocide denial is similar to that of the oil industry to fringe climatologists who dispute the reality of global warming. The cause and effect relationship is murky. It's impossible to know for sure if they're making the claims to get the money or getting the money because they make the claims. And many of those who receive money from the Institute of Turkish Studies do little or nothing to support the government's version of what happened to its Armenian minority. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aratta-Kingdom Posted June 11, 2008 Report Share Posted June 11, 2008 turks Spend Millions Denying A.G. II But a number of them certainly seem to, including Justin A. McCarthy, a professor of history at the University of Louisville. McCarthy claims that death tolls attributed to what he calls "this imaginary Turkish plan" are grossly exaggerated and resulted from justifiable wartime self-defense actions triggered by traitorous Armenians conspiring with Turkey's enemies. McCarthy also points out that Armenians massacred Turks on at least one occasion before the "so-called Armenian genocide." In other words, they had it coming. "The question of who started the conflicts is important, both historically and morally important," McCarthy declared in a 2005 speech before the Turkish Grand National Assembly. "In more than 100 years of warfare, Turks and Armenians killed each other. The question of who began the killing must be understood, because it is seldom justifiable to be the aggressor, but is always justifiable to defend yourself." He continued: "If those who defend themselves go beyond defense and exact revenge, as always happens in war, they should be identified and criticized. But those who should be most blamed are those who began the wars, those who committed the first evil deeds, and those who caused the bloodshed. Those who began the conflict were the Armenian nationalists, the Armenian revolutionaries. The guilt is on their heads." Enforcing the Turkish View In France and Switzerland, it's a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. In Turkey, it's a crime to affirm it. Enacted in 2005, Article 301 of the Turkish penal code makes it illegal for any citizen or resident of Turkey to give credence to the Armenian genocide. Numerous journalists and scholars have been prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness" under that statute, beginning with Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, who was charged for stating, "A million Armenians were killed in these lands." Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink was prosecuted three times for criticizing the Turkish government's longstanding policy of denying the Armenian genocide. Where the law failed to silence Dink, bullets succeeded. He was gunned down in front of his central Istanbul office last January by a Turkish ultranationalist. Footage and photos later surfaced of the assassin celebrating in front of a Turkish flag with grinning policemen. Dink's friend and ideological ally Taner Akam, a distinguished Turkish historian and sociologist on the faculty of the University of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, attended Dink's funeral in Turkey, despite the considerable risk to his own life. Akam, a leading international authority on the Armenian genocide, was marked for death by Turkish ultranationalists following the November 2006 publication of his book, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and The Question of Turkish Responsibility. The book is a definitive history based in large part on official documents from Turkish government archives. "It would be better for world peace and truth if sewer germs like you were taken off the planet," went one of the dozens of anonymous threats Akam continues to receive in Minnesota. "Pray that the devil takes you away soon because otherwise you'll be living a hell on earth. Who am I? You're going to find out, Taner, you're going to find out." Turkish ultranationalists have, in effect, targeted many other people who, like Akam, affirm the genocide. Several of their websites include home addresses, phone numbers and photos of these scholars. Genocide deniers often disrupt Akam's lectures. In November 2006, a gang of Turkish ultranationalists attacked him at a book signing at City University of New York. "Denial of the Armenian genocide has developed over the decades to become a complex and far-reaching machine that rivals the Nazi Germany propaganda ministry," says Akam. "This machine runs on academic dishonesty, fabricated information, political pressure, intimidation and threats, all funded or supported, directly or indirectly, by the Turkish state. It has become a huge industry." Convincing Congress Academia is one of two major American fronts in Turkey's campaign to kill the memory of the Armenian genocide. The other is Congress. As the only Muslim-dominated country in a troubled region to call the U.S. and Israel its allies, Turkey wields significant political influence that it uses to prevent the U.S. from joining 22 other nations in officially recognizing the Armenian genocide as a historical fact. In 1989, the U.S. State Department released archived eyewitness accounts that, according to State Department officials, showed that "thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly innocent and helpless women and children, were butchered." That same year, a bill commemorating the genocide was introduced in the U.S. Senate. But Turkey responded by blocking U.S. Navy ships from entering strategically important Turkish waters and by declaring a ban on all U.S. military training operations on Turkish territory. The bill quickly evaporated. Last September, the matter came up again. The U.S. House Foreign Relations Committee voted to bring a nonbinding resolution to the floor of Congress condemning the mass murder of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, placing the death toll at 1.5 million, and labeling the killing a "genocide." This time, Turkey responded by recalling its ambassador to the United States and forecasting dire repercussions. "In the case that Armenian allegations are accepted, there will be problems in the relations between the two countries," warned Turkish President Abdullah Gul. "Yesterday, some in Congress wanted to play hardball," said Egmen Bagis, foreign policy advisor to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. "I can assure you, Turkey knows how to play hardball." The next day, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack apologized to Turkey on behalf of the United States by issuing a statement expressing "regret" for the committee's actions, which, he cautioned, "may do grave harm to U.S.-Turkish relations and to U.S. interests in Europe and the Middle East." Defense Secretary Robert Gates added his opposition to the resolution and pointed out that 70% of the air cargo sent to U.S. forces in Iraq and 30% of the fuel consumed by those forces is delivered via Turkey. President Bush, perhaps forgetting his campaign promise in 2000 to push for official recognition of the Armenian genocide if elected president, also came out against the resolution. While Turkish officials made threats, lobbyists paid by Turkey delivered money to congressmen in the form of campaign and political action committee donations. Louisiana representative Bobby Jindal (a Republican who's now Louisiana's governor) and Mississippi representative Roger Wicker (now a Republican senator representing that state) both dropped their sponsorship of the resolution and began speaking against it -- but only after receiving around $20,000 each from former congressmen Bob Livingston, a Republican, and Richard Gephardt, a Democrat, who now work for lobbying firms contracted by Turkey to oppose any recognition of the Armenian genocide. In 2000, while still in office, Gephardt had declared that he was "committed to obtaining official U.S. government recognition of the Armenian genocide." In 2003, he co-sponsored a resolution placing "the Armenian genocide" in the company of the World War II Holocaust and mass deaths in Cambodia and Rwanda that was voted down after a Turkish lobbying blitzkrieg. Since leaving office and accepting a $1.2 million-a-year contract to lobby for Turkey, the former House majority leader has experienced a profound change of heart. "Alienating Turkey through the passage of the resolution could undermine our efforts to promote stability in the theater of [Middle East] operations, if not exacerbate the situation further," he wrote in an E-mail to the International Herald Tribune. Last fall, as part of his efforts to help torpedo the symbolic Armenian genocide resolution, Gephardt escorted Turkish Ambassador Nabi Sensoy to meetings with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders. Bob Livingston, whose firm has been paid more than $12 million by the Turkish government since 1999, also pitched in. As part of the lobbying effort last fall that U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), one of the sponsors of the resolution, called "the most intense I've ever seen," Livingston shepherded Turkish dignitaries from office to office on Capitol Hill. As another part of that campaign, the government of Turkey took out full-page advertisements in major American newspapers calling upon the members of Congress to "support efforts to examine history, not legislate it." The ads featured a testimonial from Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice -- "These historical circumstances require a very detailed and sober look from historians" -- that implied that historians have yet to seriously study the Armenian genocide. More than 100 supporters of the resolution reversed their positions, and H.R. 106 was voted down. The government of Turkey has since continued to call for a "historian's commission" of scholars to "study the facts of what happened in 1915-1923." The proposed committee is marketed as a high-minded quest for truth and reconciliation, a long overdue arbitration of disputed history, and a chance to finally give equal weight to both sides of the story. But as the saying goes, a lie isn't the other side of any story. It's just a lie. "When it comes to the historical reality of the Armenian genocide, there is no 'Armenian' or 'Turkish' side of the question, any more than there is a 'Jewish' or 'German' side of the historical reality of the Holocaust," writes Torben Jorgensen, of the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. "There is a scientific side and an unscientific side -- acknowledgement or denial." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aratta-Kingdom Posted June 18, 2008 Report Share Posted June 18, 2008 PRISON FOR TURKEY BOOK 'INSULT' BBC NEWS http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7459729.stm 2008/06/17 17:37:32 GMT A Turkish publisher has been sentenced to five months in prison for publishing a book by a British author about the mass killing of Armenians in 1915. Ragip Zarakolu was found guilty of "insulting the institutions of the Turkish republic" under Article 301 of Turkey's penal code. The controversial law was recently reformed under pressure from the EU to ensure freedom of speech in Turkey. This is the first high-profile verdict to be handed down since then. Mr Zarakolu's sentence seems to confirm campaigners' fears that changes to the law were merely cosmetic, says the BBC's Sarah Rainsford in Istanbul. In April it became a crime to insult the Turkish nation, rather than Turkishness. But insulting the Turkish nation can still be punished by up to two years in jail. Sensitive issue Mr Zarakolu was brought to trial for publishing a book by British author George Jerjian on the mass killings of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire in 1915. I do not accept myself as convicted. This is a conviction for official history and for denialism Ragip Zarakolu Turkey denies the killings were genocide and the issue remains highly sensitive. Passing sentence, the judge told Mr Zarakolu he had insulted the Turkish republic and its founders. His own defence - that he had the right to criticise - was rejected. Mr Zarakolu's case was not referred to the Turkish ministry of justice, as required under the reforms, and he has said he will appeal against the verdict, our correspondent reports. His sentence will not be imposed until that appeal process is complete. Outside the court, Mr Zarakolu said that such rulings had silenced many writers in Turkey but that he would continue to challenge the restrictions. "I was partly waiting for this result. But it is a struggle for the truth and it will go on. I do not accept myself as convicted. This is a conviction for official history and for denialism," he said. The justice ministry recently revealed that 1,700 people were tried under Article 301 in 2006 alone. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aratta-Kingdom Posted July 2, 2008 Report Share Posted July 2, 2008 http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/01/turkey Inside Higher Ed July 1 Is Turkey Muzzling U.S. Scholars? Scholars of the Armenian genocide have long accused Turkey of using its financial support to promote the idea that a genocide didn't take place or that the jury is still out - views that have little credibility among historians of genocide. An incident in 2006, only recently being talked about publicly, has some scholars concerned that Turkey and its supporters may be interfering in American scholarship. The chair of the board of the Institute of Turkish Studies, which is based at Georgetown University, resigned at the end of 2006, and he says he was given a choice by Turkish officials of either quitting or seeing the funding for the institute go away. At least one scholarly group that has investigated the matter recently issued a report backing the ousted chair, and at least one other board member has resigned while another has called for more discussion of the accusations. The executive director of the institute, while flatly saying that the ousted chair is wrong, confirmed that he was asked by Turkish Embassy officials to have the scholar talk with the Turkish ambassador to the United States about an article where he used the word "genocide" in reference to what happened to the Armenians. It was after that talk that the chair - Donald Quataert - quit. The fact that Quataert is at the center of the controversy is significant. A historian at the State University of New York at Binghamton, Quataert is an expert on the Ottoman Empire. In the 1980s, when the scholarly consensus about the Armenian genocide was not as broad as it is today, he signed a statement calling for more research on whether a genocide took place. Quataert says today he never thought the statement would be used as it was by Turkish supporters to question claims of a genocide, but he notes that as a result of his having signed at the time, he was viewed favorably by the Turkish government and with considerable skepticism by Armenians. And it is Quataert who used the word "genocide" in a journal and who says he was given a choice by the Turkish ambassador, Nabi Sensoy, of quitting as the institute's chair or seeing its financing disappear. The Institute of Turkish Studies, founded with funds from Turkey, supports research, publications and language training at many American colleges and universities. Most of the work is not controversial. This year the institute is providing library grants to Kennesaw State University and the University of Mississippi, supporting doctoral students' work at New York University ("The Specter of Pan-Islamism: Pilgrims, Sufis and Revolutionaries and the Construction of Ottoman-Central Asian Relations, 1865-1914?) and the University of Texas at Austin ("Gender, Education, and Modernization: Women Schoolteachers in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1871-1922?); undergraduate exchange programs at the University of Nevada at Reno and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and seed money to create new faculty positions at Boston University and the University of Minnesota. The institute is led by a board, primarily made up of scholars of Turkey, only a few of whom have focused on issues related to what happened to the Armenians. Even those who question the way Turkey has responded to the genocide issue say that much of the work supported by the institute is important and meets high standards. Quataert led institute's board from 2001 until his controversial departure at the end of 2006. The dispute started when he published a book review in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History in the fall of 2006. The review, which included both praise and criticism, was of Donald Bloxham's The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford University Press). In the review, Quataert talks about how when he entered graduate studies in Ottoman history in the late 1960s, "there was an elephant in the room of Ottoman studies - the slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915." He writes that "a heavy aura of self-censorship hung over Ottoman history writing," excluding not only work on Armenians, but also on religious identity, the Kurds and labor issues. Only in recent years, he continues, has the "Ottomanist wall of silence" started to crumble. Quataert notes concerns about the use of the word "genocide," namely that discussions of its use or non-use can "degenerate into semantics and deflect scholars from the real task at hand, to understand better the nature of the 1915 events." But despite those concerns, he writes that there is no question today that what took place meets United Nations and other definitions of genocide, and that failure to acknowledge as much is wrong. Of using the term, he writes: "Although it may provoke anger among some of my Ottomanist colleagues, to do otherwise in this essay runs the risk of suggesting denial of the massive and systematic atrocities that the Ottoman state and some of its military and general populace committed against the Armenians." That sort of analysis is not exceptional for historians writing about the period. Most leading scholars of genocide have said that it is beyond question that what took place was a genocide. In 2005, for example, the International Association of Genocide Scholars issued a letter that said in part: "We want to underscore that it is not just Armenians who are affirming the Armenian Genocide but it is the overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide: hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades." While calling the Armenian genocide a genocide isn't controversial among historians, it is unusual for the board of the Institute of Turkish Studies. Its board hasn't been known for taking stands on the issue and one of its members is Justin McCarthy, a professor at the University of Louisville who describes what happened not as genocide, but a period of civil war in which many people died, more of them Muslims than Armenians. In an interview, Quataert said that after his review was published, he was told by David C. Cuthell, director of the institute, that people in Turkey were upset about his use of the word genocide and that he should call the Turkish ambassador. "He told me the embassy was unhappy and was getting a lot of pressure and maybe I should speak to the ambassador." Quataert said that he then called Ambassador Sensoy and had a "very cordial and polite" discussion, and that the ambassador "made it clear that if I did not separate myself as chairman of the board that funding for the institute would be withdrawn by the Turkish government and the institute would be destroyed." After thinking about it for a few days, Quataert said he decided to resign. "It was clear to me that there was a genuine danger that the funding would be withdrawn by these powerful elements in Ankara and all the good I have seen would vanish, and money that young scholars need to learn language and travel would dry up," he said. "I still feel that the institute over the decades has done a lot of good work. It was not for Turkish propaganda. That's why I agreed to be the chairman of the board." Based on his experience, Quataert said that it is "a very difficult question" to consider whether the institute at this point has credibility as a source of financing for research and education. "By forcing my resignation, the Turkish government has made very clear that there are bounds beyond which people cannot go," he said. Others share those concerns. Birol Yesilada, a professor of political science and international relations at Portland State University, where he focuses on contemporary Turkish studies, said he quit the institute's board for two reasons: health (he is recovering from a heart attack) and concern over what happened to Quataert. Yesilada said he didn't know all the facts, and has heard differing accounts of what happened, but that "it does not look good." Further, he said he was troubled by "the silence" of the institute director and many board members about Quataert's departure. One board member who sent a series of e-mail messages to other board members was Fatma Müge Göçek, a sociologist at the University of Michigan. She wrote that Quataert was within his rights as a scholar to write the review as he did. "[T]he only activities that ITS has any control or say over in relation to Donald's activities are only limited to his service as the board chairman, not as a research scholar," she wrote. "If ITS in any way intervenes in Donald's research activities, however, that would indeed be a violation of his academic freedom because Donald's research does not fall within the purview of ITS's domain of activities. In addition, of course, I should not have to point out that the funding agencies that provide money to ITS should not do so with strings attached with respect to the research the scholars do. That too is considered unethical. The Academic Freedom Committee of the Middle East Studies Association also recently reviewed the case, and weighed in with a letter to Turkish officials expressing anger over "the Turkish government's interference in the academic freedom of one of our most respected academic colleagues." The letter goes on to say that the association is "enormously concerned" that Quataert was pressured to either "publicly retract" parts of his review or to leave the chairmanship of the institute. "The reputation and integrity of the ITS as a non-political institution funding scholarly projects that meet stringent academic criteria is blackened when there is government interference in an blatant disregard for the principle of academic freedom." The press office of the Turkish embassy did not respond to phone or e-mail messages seeking comment. Cuthell, the director of the institute, said he did not think the embassy would want to comment because the embassy "is livid and rightly so. The ambassador's reputation has been impugned." Cuthell said that there is a "lack of logical consistency" in what Quataert says that shows it to be incorrect. Cuthell said that if Quataert really cared about the institute, he would not have described events as he did to the Middle East Studies Association or for this article. "He resigns to protect the institute and then criticizes the institute," said Cuthell. Suggestions that the institute does not uphold academic freedom are false, Cuthell said. "Has the Turkish government ever once ever tried to change any of our grants or activities? I can tell you flat out - they have not. They have never interfered in our grants or programs." Asked if the institute has ever supported any research that calls what happened to the Armenians genocide, Cuthell said he couldn't be sure, but "I doubt it." But he said that wasn't because of censorship or pressure but because "the jury is out" on whether genocide took place. "There are a lot of people who are not qualified to do the work because they can't read the archival material," he said. "There is no archival material the Armenians can produce. There is no smoking gun," he said. (In fact, many historians say that one of the notable developments of recent years has been the emergence of such smoking guns as some scholars have been able to use Ottoman archives to document the role of various leaders in orchestrating the mass killings of Armenians. Notable among these works is A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, by Taner Akcam of the University of Minnesota, and based largely on Ottoman documents.) While Cuthell repeatedly said that Quataert and the Middle East Studies Association were all wrong about what had happened, he also indirectly confirmed some of what they have said. For example, Cuthell said that he did in fact tell Quataert that the ambassador wanted to talk to him about his article. Cuthell also confirmed that funding for the institute comes almost entirely from an endowment created by the Turkish government. Cuthell said that there was no threat that the funds could be taken away, so there was no way that Quataert could have feared for the center's survival. But Cuthell also confirmed that the endowment had been moved from the United States to Turkey - a move he said had led to growth in the funds. None of this, he said, was proof that Quataert was pressured to leave. "Obviously there was concern" about the article Quataert wrote, Cuthell said. But all this was about was that "these are diplomats who wanted to have a conversation with Don." - Scott Jaschik Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aratta-Kingdom Posted July 8, 2008 Report Share Posted July 8, 2008 http://chronicle.com/news/article/4792/dis...udies-institute The Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog Higher-education news from around the Web July 6, 2008 Dispute Over Academic Freedom Roils Turkish-Studies Institute Several members have resigned from the board of the Institute for Turkish Studies to protest what they characterize as an infringement of the board chairman's academic freedom. The chairman, Donald Quataert, a professor of history at the State University of New York at Binghamton, resigned in late 2006, according to an article in The Washington Post, after writing a book review in which he used the word "genocide" to describe the mass killing of Armenians in 1915. This past May, Mervat F. Hatem, a professor of political science at Howard University who is the president of the Middle East Studies Association, wrote to Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, requesting that Mr. Quataert be returned to his position and that funds for the institute be placed in a trust to avoid political interference. The institute is supported by a grant from the Turkish government. In her letter, Ms. Hatem wrote that Mr. Quataert had stepped down after refusing to accede to the Turkish ambassador's demand that he retract his review, or face the loss of the institute's funds. But the Turkish ambassador, H.E. Nabi Sensoy, as well as the institute's director, David C. Cuthell Jr., denied any infringement of Mr. Quataert's scholarly freedom, according to the Post. Critics have accused the Turkish government for years of trying to manipulate scholarly studies, conferences, encyclopedia articles, and even novels that discuss the mass killings. -Lila Guterman Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aratta-Kingdom Posted July 8, 2008 Report Share Posted July 8, 2008 Chicago Tribune, United States - 1915 killings of Armenians stokes Georgetown furor on academic freedom July 6, 2008 By Susan Kinzie The Washington Post WASHINGTON - The issue that has roiled U.S.-Turkish relations in recent months ' how to characterize the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 ' has set off a dispute over politics and academic freedom at an institute housed at Georgetown University. Several board members of the Institute of Turkish Studies have resigned this summer, protesting the ouster of a board chairman who wrote that scholars should research, rather than avoid, what he characterized as an Armenian genocide. Within weeks of writing about the matter in late 2006, Binghamton University professor Donald Quataert resigned from the board of governors, saying the Turkish ambassador to the United States told him he had angered some political leaders in Ankara and that they had threatened to revoke the institute's funding. After a prominent association of Middle Eastern scholars learned about it, they wrote a letter in May to the institute, the Turkish prime minister and other leaders asking that Quataert be reinstated and money for the institute be put in an irrevocable trust to avoid political influence. The ambassador of the Republic of Turkey, H.E. Nabi Sensoy, denied that he had any role in Quataert's resignation. In a written statement, he said that claims that he urged Quataert to leave are unfounded and misleading. The dispute shows the tensions between money and scholarship, and the impact language can have on historical understanding. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed when the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I. Armenians and Turks bitterly disagree over whether it was a campaign of genocide, or a civil war in which many Turks were also killed. In the fall, when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) championed a bill that would characterize the events of 1915 to 1917 as genocide, the Bush administration fought it and several former defense secretaries warned that Turkish leaders would limit U.S. access to a military base needed for the war in Iraq. The Turkish studies institute, founded in 1983, is independent from Georgetown University, but Executive Director David Cuthell teaches a course there in exchange for space on campus. Julie Green Bataille, a university spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail, "We will review this matter consistent with the importance of academic freedom and the fact that the institute is independently funded and governed." The institute's funding, a $3 million grant, is entirely from Turkey. A few years ago, Quataert said, members of the board checked on what they thought was an irrevocable blind trust "and to our surprise it turned out to be a gift that could be revoked by the Turkish government." Quataert, a professor of history, said the institute has funded good scholarship without political influence. The selection of which studies to support is done by a committee of academics on the associate board, he said, and approved by the board, which includes business and political leaders. Never once, he said, did he think a grant application was judged on anything other than its academic merits. He also noted that during his time there, no one applied for grants that would have been controversial in Turkey. Asked if any of the research characterized the events as genocide, Cuthell said, "My gut is no. It's that third rail." Roger Smith, professor emeritus of government at the College of William and Mary, questioned whether the non-profit institute deserves its tax-exempt status if there is political influence ' and whether it is an undeclared lobbying arm for the Turkish government. Cuthell said none of the institute's critics ever bothered to check the truth of Quataert's account with the institute: It does not lobby, Cuthell said, and "the allegations of academic freedom simply don't hold up." The controversy began quietly in late 2006 with a review of historian Donald Bloxham's book, "The Great Game of Genocide." Quataert wrote that the slaughter of Armenians has been the elephant in the room of Ottoman studies. Despite his belief that the term "genocide" had become a distraction, he said the events met the United Nations definition of the word. He sent a letter of resignation to members of the institute in December 2006, and one board member resigned. But in the fall, around the same time that Congress was debating the Armenian question, Quataert was asked to speak at a conference about what had happened at the institute. He told members of the Middle Eastern Studies Association that the ambassador told him he must issue a retraction of his book review or step down ' or put funding for the institute in jeopardy. His colleagues were shocked, said Laurie Brand, director of the school of international relations at the University of Southern California. Ambassador Sensoy, who is honorary chairman of the institute's board, said in a statement this week, "Neither the Turkish Government nor I have ever placed any pressure upon the ITS, for such interference would have violated the principle of the academic freedom, which we uphold the most. The Turkish Government and I will be the first to defend ITS from any such pressure." Since the May 27 letter from the scholars association was sent, several associate and full members of the board have left. Marcie Patton, Resat Kasaba and Kemal Silay resigned; Fatma Muge Gocek said she would resign, and Birol Yesilada said his primary reason for stepping down at this time is his health, but that he is concerned about the conflicting accounts of what had happened. "It's a very difficult line that scholars walk," Patton said, "especially post-9/11, especially because of the Iraq war." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boghos Posted July 8, 2008 Report Share Posted July 8, 2008 Turks continue to make complete fools of themselves. I welcome such initiatives by Turkey and its enlightened representatives. They do much more harm to Turkey than hundred books written by the criminal McCarthy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DominO123 Posted July 8, 2008 Report Share Posted July 8, 2008 He also noted that during his time there, no one applied for grants that would have been controversial in Turkey. Asked if any of the research characterized the events as genocide, Cuthell said, "My gut is no. It's that third rail." Maybe not the research but researchers (eg. Fatma Muge Gocek) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arpa Posted July 10, 2008 Report Share Posted July 10, 2008 (edited) Dear Domino. Many are wishing you a Happy Birthday. I join them. I know all your past screen names, when you were our tireless defender. What happened to you? Did you fall victim to ankara's "industry of lies"? Who challenge our "anateur genicidalists" and invite "scientsist historians" to discuss the "question". Yes, Serge has responded to them. It is about time! With the only "provisio" that we don't talk about the given fact of "if it happened". No quesrtions. IT DID!. And now, lt is to see how and why it happened, what the prelude and what the aftermath? Edited July 10, 2008 by Arpa Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aratta-Kingdom Posted November 14, 2008 Report Share Posted November 14, 2008 Turkey's Historical Commission Touted at Columbia University Asbarez.com 11/14/08 In yet another public relations ploy aimed at dissuading the US government from recognizing the Armenian Genocide, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan Thursday reiterated calls on Armenia to open its archives on the genocide for 'study' by a historical commission, a move widely seen as an attempt to bolster Turkish claims that a commission to investigate the events of 1915 should be established. "We have opened our archives and Armenians should open their archives too. We have studied over 1 million documents so far," he said during a conference in New York's Columbia University, entitled "Turkey's Role in Shaping the Future." Turkey's archives on the period, although ostensibly open, are under strict censorship, with scholars studying the genocide subject to close surveillance and intimidation by Turkey's security services, according to academics who have attempted to research the Armenian Genocide in Turkey's archives. "Our offer is still on the table. Let's leave it to historians," he said, adding that Turkey and Armenia should abide by the final decision of historians following these studies. "Erdogan's tired refrain calling for a historical commission on the Armenian Genocide is universally dismissed as just one more tactic in Turkey's long-standing campaign of genocide denial," said Aram Hamparian, the executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America. "The request is even more disingenuous, given Turkey's Article 301 laws that make honest discourse of the Armenian Genocide a prosecutable offense in Turkey. Earlier on Monday, Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian described Turkey's proposal to form a commission of historians to investigate the veracity of the Armenian Genocide as unnecessary. "It [the commission] is absolutely not necessary. We do not think that anything can be achieved with it. We want to establish diplomatic relations between the two countries, open the borders without any preconditions; afterward, through an intergovernmental process, we can discuss all issues pertaining to the neighboring countries. We do not consider the recognition of the Genocide by Turkey as a precondition to establish relations. We desire the latter, but not at any cost. In the past the European countries too have not established historical commissions in order to develop normal relations. Such an initiative could also mean an attempt to mislead the international public, especially when it is a years-long process," Sarkisian said said in an interview published Monday in the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily. The Turkish government's position, echoed during various international visits in recent months, "makes it clear that the multi-million dollar Turkish lobby and threat apparatus is revving up its engine yet again to pressure the American government into not recognizing the Armenian Genocide," said Andrew Kzirian, the executive director of the Armenian National Committee-Western Region. The Turkish government has also become intensely focused on Sen. Barack Obama's victory in the US presidential election, he said, explaining that the Turkish press has been feverishly producing 'news' opposing US genocide recognition, depicting any attempt to correctly categorize the genocide as a death sentence to 'budding' Armenia-Turkey relations. Kzirian noted that this is a troubling development, demonstrating that Turkey is hurrying to establish relations with Armenia, in large part, to prevent recognition of the Armenian Genocide in the United States. "I sincerely congratulate Barack Obama and his team who won the elections," Erdogan said. "Turkey and the United States are two allies that have very strong relations, supporting each other for more than half a century. Earlier this year, Erdogan bashed Sen. Obama, calling him "an amateur in politics" for issuing statements on the Armenian Genocide. Despite that, however, the Turkish Prime Minister was reported earlier this week to have requested a meeting with President Elect Obama while he is in Washington Friday attending an Economic Summit in the White House at the invitation of President George W. Bush. "Turkey is resolved to maintain multilateral and close cooperation with the new U.S. administration led by Mr. Obama. Naturally, we particularly expect the new U.S. administration to take into consideration Turkey's sensitivities on matters which have vital importance," Erdogan said, hinging regional peace and security to US complicity toward Turkey's denial of the Armenian genocide. "Preservation of a strategic partnership between Turkey and the United States is not only important for the national interests of the two countries but for global peace and stability as well," Erdogan said. According to the Turkish Prime Minister, Turkey-US relations underwent a 'negative period' as a result of 'Armenian allegations' of genocide in 2007. He added that this 'negative period' could be overcome, "through common political will and endeavors." "Turkey and the United States experienced a negative period regarding terrorist attacks stemming from Northern Iraq and Armenian allegations regarding the 1915 incidents in 2007. However, this period could be overcome," Erdogan said, describing the campaign for US recognition of the Armenian Genocide as 'not fair.' "I hope the new U.S. administration would take into account Turkey's efforts. It is not fair to make a judgment upon such cheap political lobbying," he said. The grassroots movement of Armenian Americans and human rights activists is based on the concerns of United States citizens--constituents that have contributed to the unique and democratic fabric of this free country by advocating that the US recognize the Armenian Genocide--and put an end to genocide everywhere, Kzirian noted. "Frankly, the real problem we face as Americans is that an external player - Turkey - hires multiple powerful lobbying and public relations firms - sometimes in an illegal manner as evidenced by the Vanity Fair piece on former House Speaker Denis Hastert and improper Turkish influence - to carry out denialist work in Washington, DC." 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Aratta-Kingdom Posted January 6, 2009 Report Share Posted January 6, 2009 Turkish Historical Society Falsifies Start of Debate on Genocide ANKARA (Combined Sources)--The Noyan Tapan news agency, quoting a Turkish Historical Society representative from Hurriyet, reported Monday that some Armenian and Turkish historians have begun discussing "the events of 1915." "In March or April we are preparing to hold discussions about the events of Adana, with the participation of Armenian experts Ara Sarafian, Garabet Moumjian and Khatchig Mouradian," announced Historical Society representative Prof. Kemal Cicek, who added that during a recent visit to the society, Sarafian allegedly said that the word genocide would not be used to characterize theevents of 1915. "It is not true," said Sarafian in an email to Asbarez in response to inquiries about the veracity of the Hurriyet report. In a similar inquiry by the Asbarez Daily of Los Angeles, Mouradian said "the report that appeared in Hurriyet and was also circulated by the Noyan Tapan News Agency does not correspond to the truth." "Earlier this month, I did receive an invitation for an academic conference organized by the Turkish Historical Society in Ankara," he said. "I did not, however, accept the invitation." The Turkish Historical Society called the recent "I apologize" campaign launched by Turkish scholars "a new obstacle aimed at weakening recent efforts for dialogue by both sides." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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