Protest Reuters

Dear Friends,

The Reuters news agency has a tradition of misrepresenting the Armenian Genocide as a debate between Armenia and Turkey, instead of a well-documented, accepted historical fact that is being denied by the Turkish government. The news service did it again on Monday, in an article about Turkish-Armenian relations, saying "Yerevan says that 1.5 million ethnic Armenians died at the hands of Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1923. Turkey strongly denies the accusations and says that both Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died in the fighting."

Please send Reuters your feedback, urging them to correct their approach to articles about the Armenian Genocide. Your message should be short and simple. It's important that your feedback arrive at Reuters quickly.

Here's the link to the feedback page (click on "Contact Our Editors"):

http://reuters-en.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/reuters_en.cfg/php/enduser/home.php

Ideas for feedback:

- The Armenian Genocide must not be characterized as a legitimate debate between Armenia and Turkey.

- The Armenian Genocide is recognized unequivocally by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, as well as all respected genocide and Holocaust studies institutes and historians.

- Respectable editors would never allow the Holocaust to be described as a an event which the Jews say was true, but that some deny (the government of Iran, neo-Nazis)

- It is not a proper journalistic practice to simply state two sides of an argument without giving readers more information about the extent of the evidence.

- Genocide denial, revisionism, and Turkish government propaganda should not be bolstered by Reuters news service.

- Urge Reuters to refer to the Armenian Genocide in a more journalistically correct, fair, and truthful way, to tell it like it is.

Here's the link to the article and the article itself:

http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKL2187027320080721

Armenian leader calls for better ties with Turkey

Mon Jul 21, 2008 1:19pm BST

YEREVAN, July 21 (Reuters) - Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan called on Monday for closer ties with Turkey, 15 years after the two nations severed diplomatic relations over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

They are also at odds over the question of whether ethnic Armenians killed by Ottoman Turks during World War One were victims of genocide. Armenia and Turkey broke off diplomatic links in 1993, when Ankara closed the border and backed Azerbaijan during its war with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, a mainly ethnic Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan.

"The improvement of ties between Armenia and Turkey is mutually beneficial," Sarksyan told a news conference on Monday. "I think we should improve our relations."

"The important thing is that in relations between Armenia and Turkey a trend is taking shape for being ready to start a healthy discussion of the existing problems," he said.

Sarksyan said earlier this month he had invited his Turkish counterpart, Abdullah Gul, to visit Yerevan and watch a football match in September.

"The visit of Gul to Armenia could turn this trend into a stable and positive movement," Sarksyan said, adding that Armenian diplomats had recently met Turkish colleagues.

Armenian forces control the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Armenia and Azerbaijan are involved in a long-running peace process but are still officially at war over the mountainous area.

The tiny ex-Soviet republic of Armenia is sandwiched between Turkey and Azerbaijan in a region that is emerging as an important transit route for oil exports from the Caspian Sea to world markets, though Armenia has no pipelines of its own.

Armenia also wants Turkey to recognize what it calls a systematic genocide during World War One. Yerevan says that 1.5 million ethnic Armenians died at the hands of Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1923.

Turkey strongly denies the accusations and says that both Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died in the fighting. (Reporting by Hasmik Mkrtchyan, writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Tim Pearce)

http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKL2187027320080721

Armenian National Committee
San Francisco - Bay Area
51 Commonwealth Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94118
Tel: 415-387-3433
Fax: 415-751-0617
mail@ancsf.org
www.ancsf.org

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