Erdogan Urges France To Drop Armenian Genocide Recognition
by YeReVaN » Mon Jun 20, 2005 1:00 am
To Honor the 50th Anniversary of the U.N. Genocide Convention
We Commemorate the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and Condemn the Turkish Government's Denial of this Crime Against Humanity. On April 24, 1915, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic, premeditated genocide of the Armenian people -- an unarmed Christian minority living under Turkish rule. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. Another million fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years.
The Armenian Genocide was the most dramatic human rights issue of the time and was reported regularly in newspapers across the U.S.. The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented by Ottoman court-martial records, by hundreds of thousands of documents in the archives of the United States and nations around the world, by witness reports of missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by eight decades of historical scholarship.
After 83 years the Turkish government continues to deny the genocide of the Armenians by blaming the victims and undermining historical fact with false rhetoric. Books about the genocide are banned in Turkey. The words "Armenian" and "Greek" are nonexistent in Turkish descriptions of ancient or Christian artifacts and monuments in Turkey. Turkey's efforts to sanitize its history now include the funding of chairs in Turkish studies -- with strings attached -- at American universities.
It is essential to remember that ... --When Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1944 he cited the 1915 annihilation of the Armenians as a seminal example of genocide. --The United Nations, the European Parliament, the Association of Genocide Scholars, the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Jerusalem), and the Institute for the Study of Genocide (NYC) have reaffirmed the extermination of the Armenians by the Turkish government as genocide by the definition of the 1048 United Nations Genocide Convention.
Denial of genocide strives to reshape history in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators. Denial of genocide is the final stage of genocide. It is what Elie Weisel has called a "double killing." Denial murders the dignity of the survivors and seeks to destroy remembrance of the crime. In a century plagued by genocide, we affirm the moral necessity of remembering.
We denounce as morally and intellectually corrupt the Turkish government's denial of the Armenian genocide. We condemn Turkey's manipulation of the American government and American institutions for the purpose of denying the Armenian genocide. We urge our government officials, scholars, and the media to refrain from using evasive or euphemistic terminology to appease the Turkish government; we ask them to refer to the 1915 annihilation of the Armenians as genocide.
This statement has been signed by more than 150 distinguished scholars and writers, including:
K. Anthony Appiah Michael Arlen James Axtell Ben Badikian Houston Baker Peter Balakian Mary Catherine Bateson Yehuda Bauer Robert N. Bellah Norman Birnbaum Peter Brooks Robert McAffee Brown Christopher Browning Frank Chalk Israel W. Charny Ward Churchill Rev. William Sloane Coffin Vahakn Dadrian David Brion Davis James Der Derian Marjorie Housepian Dobkin Jean Bethke Elshtain Kai Erikson Craig Etcheson Helen Fein Lawrence J. Friedman William Cass Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Carol Gilligen Langdom Gilkey Daniel Goldhagen Vigen Guroian Geoffrey Hartman Seamus Heaney Judith Herman Raul Hilberg Richard G. Hovannisian Kurt Jonahsson Alfred Kazin Steven Kepnes Ben Kiernan Robert Jay Lifton Deborah E. Lipstadt Norman Mailer Eric Markusen Robert Melson W.S. Merwin Arthur Miller Henry Morgenthau III Joyce Carol Oates Grace Paley Harold Pinter Robert A. Pois Francis B. Randall Nicholas V. Riasanovsky Leo P. Ribuffo David Riesman Nathan A. Scott Christopher Simpson Susan Sontag Roger Smith Max L. Stackhouse Charles B. Strozler Rose Styron William Styron Ronald Suny Raymond Tanter D. M. Thomas John Updike Kurt Vonnegut Derek Walcott Cornel West Howard Zinn
And in 2000, 126 Holocaust scholars signed a similar petition published in the Jerusalem Post, shown above
We Commemorate the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and Condemn the Turkish Government's Denial of this Crime Against Humanity. On April 24, 1915, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic, premeditated genocide of the Armenian people -- an unarmed Christian minority living under Turkish rule. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. Another million fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years.
The Armenian Genocide was the most dramatic human rights issue of the time and was reported regularly in newspapers across the U.S.. The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented by Ottoman court-martial records, by hundreds of thousands of documents in the archives of the United States and nations around the world, by witness reports of missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by eight decades of historical scholarship.
After 83 years the Turkish government continues to deny the genocide of the Armenians by blaming the victims and undermining historical fact with false rhetoric. Books about the genocide are banned in Turkey. The words "Armenian" and "Greek" are nonexistent in Turkish descriptions of ancient or Christian artifacts and monuments in Turkey. Turkey's efforts to sanitize its history now include the funding of chairs in Turkish studies -- with strings attached -- at American universities.
It is essential to remember that ... --When Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1944 he cited the 1915 annihilation of the Armenians as a seminal example of genocide. --The United Nations, the European Parliament, the Association of Genocide Scholars, the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Jerusalem), and the Institute for the Study of Genocide (NYC) have reaffirmed the extermination of the Armenians by the Turkish government as genocide by the definition of the 1048 United Nations Genocide Convention.
Denial of genocide strives to reshape history in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators. Denial of genocide is the final stage of genocide. It is what Elie Weisel has called a "double killing." Denial murders the dignity of the survivors and seeks to destroy remembrance of the crime. In a century plagued by genocide, we affirm the moral necessity of remembering.
We denounce as morally and intellectually corrupt the Turkish government's denial of the Armenian genocide. We condemn Turkey's manipulation of the American government and American institutions for the purpose of denying the Armenian genocide. We urge our government officials, scholars, and the media to refrain from using evasive or euphemistic terminology to appease the Turkish government; we ask them to refer to the 1915 annihilation of the Armenians as genocide.
This statement has been signed by more than 150 distinguished scholars and writers, including:
K. Anthony Appiah Michael Arlen James Axtell Ben Badikian Houston Baker Peter Balakian Mary Catherine Bateson Yehuda Bauer Robert N. Bellah Norman Birnbaum Peter Brooks Robert McAffee Brown Christopher Browning Frank Chalk Israel W. Charny Ward Churchill Rev. William Sloane Coffin Vahakn Dadrian David Brion Davis James Der Derian Marjorie Housepian Dobkin Jean Bethke Elshtain Kai Erikson Craig Etcheson Helen Fein Lawrence J. Friedman William Cass Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Carol Gilligen Langdom Gilkey Daniel Goldhagen Vigen Guroian Geoffrey Hartman Seamus Heaney Judith Herman Raul Hilberg Richard G. Hovannisian Kurt Jonahsson Alfred Kazin Steven Kepnes Ben Kiernan Robert Jay Lifton Deborah E. Lipstadt Norman Mailer Eric Markusen Robert Melson W.S. Merwin Arthur Miller Henry Morgenthau III Joyce Carol Oates Grace Paley Harold Pinter Robert A. Pois Francis B. Randall Nicholas V. Riasanovsky Leo P. Ribuffo David Riesman Nathan A. Scott Christopher Simpson Susan Sontag Roger Smith Max L. Stackhouse Charles B. Strozler Rose Styron William Styron Ronald Suny Raymond Tanter D. M. Thomas John Updike Kurt Vonnegut Derek Walcott Cornel West Howard Zinn
And in 2000, 126 Holocaust scholars signed a similar petition published in the Jerusalem Post, shown above
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YeReVaN - Contributor
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by YeReVaN » Mon Jun 20, 2005 7:04 am
Click on the link below and find Taner Akcam's interview (turkish hitorian) about the Armenian Genocide. Turkey is ridiculous. It's about in the middled of the page.
http://turkishdenial.com/
http://turkishdenial.com/
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YeReVaN - Contributor
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by Saint Jimmy » Mon Jun 20, 2005 8:20 am
Some 'Ben MacIntyre' guy wrote this article for last Saturday's Times, and I thought it might interest some of you:
What's the Turkish for genocide?
If Turkey wants to join the EU, it must confront a bloody past and admit the massacre of the Armenians
Historians have become the moral accountants of our time, poring over the archives to establish, as nearly as possible, the unpaid debts still owed by the present to the past.
In China there have been violent demonstrations demanding Japan's penitence for its wartime aggression. In Mississippi, an elderly white man and reputed Klansman has gone on trial accused of murdering civil rights workers more than four decades ago. The Argentine Supreme Court this week opened the way for a full inquiry into the crimes of the 'dirty war' between 1976 and 1983. Even France, for so long in denial, has begun to adress the unquiet ghosts of Vichy and Algeria.
The process of historical self-examination is neither simple nor easy. In the wrong hands, history becomes a weapon of recrimination and revenge, intercepted by bigots who would use old battles to stoke new ones. Yet historical introspection is crucial to democracy. The fledgeling South African democracy bravely sought to cauterise a traumatic past through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Bloody Sunday inquiry may have been expensive and lengthy - seven years, £155 million and 1,700 witness statements - but it was a necessary step towards freeing Northern Ireland from the locked grip of competing histories. Postwar Gremany has confronted its demons in a conscious and continuing act of national catharsis.
The alternative of self-delusion. Treat the past as self-serving myth and it forms a canker of moral equivocation.
Amid the debate over Turkish membership of the EU, there is one matter that has hardly been raised, and that is Turkey's bitter and blinkered refusal to make peace with its past.
In Turkish history, no event is more divisive and explosive than the "Armenian question", the long-disputed massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the First World War. Armenia claims that, as the Ottoman Empire crumbled in 1915, Turkish soldiers and Kurdish tribesmen were unleashed in a deliberate act of genocide that killed 1.5 million Armenians.
Turkey has refused steadfastly to accept that version of events, declaring that the Armenian death toll was far lower, and that the dead perished mainly through civil war, hunger and disease. This, the Turks insist, was not a systematic slaughter, but a bitter partisan and ethnic conflict in which Armenians sided with the invading Russians against Ottoman rule, leading to the deaths of at least 350,000 Turkish Muslims.
This month, historians at Bosphorus University scheduled a conference to debate the tragic events of 1915-16. Turkish natinalists reacted with fury. Cemil Cicek, the Justice Minister, described the planned conference as "treacherous" and accused the historians of "preparing to stab Turkey in the back". With govenment pressure mounting and nationalist students threatening to converge on the university campus, the conference organisers buckled. The event was cancelled.
The argument, which continues to poison relations between Turkey and Armenia, and destabilise the region, boils down to a single, intensely emotive word. As Caroline Finkel writes in her excellent forthcoming book Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923: "The Armenian question today has come to focus exclusively on whether the massacres constituted genocide... and all other aspects of this acutely sensitive matter tend to be scrutinised for their value in clarifying this central point." But clarity is impossible in a debate that evokes such violent emotions. The Turkish Foreign Minister has dismissed the term genocide as "pure slander", and when the celebrated Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk dared to declare this year that a million Armenians had been murdered in Turkey, he received three lawsuits for "damaging the State" and a volley of death threats.
To complicate matters further, much of the killing in 1915 appears to have been carried out by Turkish secret societies, whose records have disappeared and whose relationship to the Ottoman authorities is unclear. Turks point out that there is no official document ordering the killing of Armenians. Armenians allege that the archives have been purged.
The parliaments of 17 countries, including France and Russia, have already passed resolutions recognising the Armenian genocide. Britain and America have held back, wary of angering a powerful and important ally. But staying silent isnot the act of a friend, and it is hard to see how Turkey can join hte EU - an organisation founded on a determination to avoid repeating the mistakes of history - without first acknowledging its own bloody past.
The precise numbers of dead, and the meaning of the term genocide, can be debated for ever, but of this there is no doubt: hundreds of thousands of innocent Armenians perished as a consequence of Turkish actions. Most historians outside Turkey now agree that what happened after 1915 constituted "ethnic cleansing", for which the Ottoman Government was ultimately responsible. Acknowledging this, while genuinely encouraging the widest and most dispassionate debate on the subject, would establish Turkey's commitment to freedom of speech and democratic ideals in the run-up to accession talks in October.
So far, British officials have sidestepped the issue, insisting that the Armenian issue is a matter for historians. As a country with its own ghosts, Britain has a responsibility to encourage Turkey to see its own history beyond confining notions of treachery or loyalty. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, while reiterating his belief that the genocide never happened, has called for a joint commission to look into the Turkish archives. But a far more emphatic demonstration of openness would be to revive the conference at Bosphorus University and open it to the widest possible range of scholarly opinion.
"Who today, after all, remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?" Thus spake Adolf Hitler, reassuring his generals that the Jewish Holocaust would be forgotten in the glow of Nazi victory. Ninety years after the killing, the Armenians remember one way, and the Turks another. The passage of time has calcified these rival histories, but Turkey's desire to enter the EU represents an opportunity for genuine historical reconciliation. The Armenian question may yet be answered, if Turkey can be persuaded to ask it.
What's the Turkish for genocide?
If Turkey wants to join the EU, it must confront a bloody past and admit the massacre of the Armenians
Historians have become the moral accountants of our time, poring over the archives to establish, as nearly as possible, the unpaid debts still owed by the present to the past.
In China there have been violent demonstrations demanding Japan's penitence for its wartime aggression. In Mississippi, an elderly white man and reputed Klansman has gone on trial accused of murdering civil rights workers more than four decades ago. The Argentine Supreme Court this week opened the way for a full inquiry into the crimes of the 'dirty war' between 1976 and 1983. Even France, for so long in denial, has begun to adress the unquiet ghosts of Vichy and Algeria.
The process of historical self-examination is neither simple nor easy. In the wrong hands, history becomes a weapon of recrimination and revenge, intercepted by bigots who would use old battles to stoke new ones. Yet historical introspection is crucial to democracy. The fledgeling South African democracy bravely sought to cauterise a traumatic past through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Bloody Sunday inquiry may have been expensive and lengthy - seven years, £155 million and 1,700 witness statements - but it was a necessary step towards freeing Northern Ireland from the locked grip of competing histories. Postwar Gremany has confronted its demons in a conscious and continuing act of national catharsis.
The alternative of self-delusion. Treat the past as self-serving myth and it forms a canker of moral equivocation.
Amid the debate over Turkish membership of the EU, there is one matter that has hardly been raised, and that is Turkey's bitter and blinkered refusal to make peace with its past.
In Turkish history, no event is more divisive and explosive than the "Armenian question", the long-disputed massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the First World War. Armenia claims that, as the Ottoman Empire crumbled in 1915, Turkish soldiers and Kurdish tribesmen were unleashed in a deliberate act of genocide that killed 1.5 million Armenians.
Turkey has refused steadfastly to accept that version of events, declaring that the Armenian death toll was far lower, and that the dead perished mainly through civil war, hunger and disease. This, the Turks insist, was not a systematic slaughter, but a bitter partisan and ethnic conflict in which Armenians sided with the invading Russians against Ottoman rule, leading to the deaths of at least 350,000 Turkish Muslims.
This month, historians at Bosphorus University scheduled a conference to debate the tragic events of 1915-16. Turkish natinalists reacted with fury. Cemil Cicek, the Justice Minister, described the planned conference as "treacherous" and accused the historians of "preparing to stab Turkey in the back". With govenment pressure mounting and nationalist students threatening to converge on the university campus, the conference organisers buckled. The event was cancelled.
The argument, which continues to poison relations between Turkey and Armenia, and destabilise the region, boils down to a single, intensely emotive word. As Caroline Finkel writes in her excellent forthcoming book Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923: "The Armenian question today has come to focus exclusively on whether the massacres constituted genocide... and all other aspects of this acutely sensitive matter tend to be scrutinised for their value in clarifying this central point." But clarity is impossible in a debate that evokes such violent emotions. The Turkish Foreign Minister has dismissed the term genocide as "pure slander", and when the celebrated Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk dared to declare this year that a million Armenians had been murdered in Turkey, he received three lawsuits for "damaging the State" and a volley of death threats.
To complicate matters further, much of the killing in 1915 appears to have been carried out by Turkish secret societies, whose records have disappeared and whose relationship to the Ottoman authorities is unclear. Turks point out that there is no official document ordering the killing of Armenians. Armenians allege that the archives have been purged.
The parliaments of 17 countries, including France and Russia, have already passed resolutions recognising the Armenian genocide. Britain and America have held back, wary of angering a powerful and important ally. But staying silent isnot the act of a friend, and it is hard to see how Turkey can join hte EU - an organisation founded on a determination to avoid repeating the mistakes of history - without first acknowledging its own bloody past.
The precise numbers of dead, and the meaning of the term genocide, can be debated for ever, but of this there is no doubt: hundreds of thousands of innocent Armenians perished as a consequence of Turkish actions. Most historians outside Turkey now agree that what happened after 1915 constituted "ethnic cleansing", for which the Ottoman Government was ultimately responsible. Acknowledging this, while genuinely encouraging the widest and most dispassionate debate on the subject, would establish Turkey's commitment to freedom of speech and democratic ideals in the run-up to accession talks in October.
So far, British officials have sidestepped the issue, insisting that the Armenian issue is a matter for historians. As a country with its own ghosts, Britain has a responsibility to encourage Turkey to see its own history beyond confining notions of treachery or loyalty. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, while reiterating his belief that the genocide never happened, has called for a joint commission to look into the Turkish archives. But a far more emphatic demonstration of openness would be to revive the conference at Bosphorus University and open it to the widest possible range of scholarly opinion.
"Who today, after all, remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?" Thus spake Adolf Hitler, reassuring his generals that the Jewish Holocaust would be forgotten in the glow of Nazi victory. Ninety years after the killing, the Armenians remember one way, and the Turks another. The passage of time has calcified these rival histories, but Turkey's desire to enter the EU represents an opportunity for genuine historical reconciliation. The Armenian question may yet be answered, if Turkey can be persuaded to ask it.
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Saint Jimmy - Regular Contributor
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by garbitsch » Mon Jun 20, 2005 1:35 pm
YeReVaN wrote:Oh I forgot your country is 86.5% literate, as opposed to Armenians who are 98.6% literate.
Congrads!!! 3 million Armenians can well be compared to 70 million Turks. If you are more literate, so please do not ask any economic help from Turkey. We all know why you want the border to be opened.
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garbitsch - Regular Contributor
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by demetriou_74 » Mon Jun 20, 2005 2:12 pm
magikthrill wrote:i know what you meant but denying the armenian genocide is like denything the holocaust.
there are many people that dont believe either happened.
what people are these. did they arive by space-ships? it happened it was a fact. the nazis even said they did? what more evidence did they need?
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demetriou_74 - Regular Contributor
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by brother » Mon Jun 20, 2005 6:29 pm
We are talking about Armenia here not cyprus, but when you can't answer you turn to answering a question with a question but i ask again the Armenians commited atrocities and then occupied Azeri lands, when do you plan to leave the illegally occupied lands and when do you plan to make apologies for the atrocities that you have commited?
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brother - Main Contributor
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