Armenian News...

OVER 90 PCT OF TURKS DENY GENOCIDE: POLL
The Daily Star, Lebanon
Jan 14 2015
Agence France Presse

ANKARA: Less than 10 percent of Turks believe their government should
recognize the mass killings of Armenians in World War I as genocide,
according to a survey published Tuesday.

On the 100th anniversary of the tragedy this year, the poll revealed
that only 9.1 percent of those questioned believe Ankara should
apologize for the deaths during Ottoman rule in 1915 and describe
them as genocide.

Another 9.1 percent were in favor of an apology without admitting
to genocide.

Turkey rejects calls to recognize the killings as genocide, saying
up to 500,000 Armenians died in fighting and of starvation after
Armenians sided with invading Russian troops. It claims a comparable
number of Turks were also killed.

Last year, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered an unprecedented
expression of condolence for the massacres when he was prime minister
but this did little to satisfy Armenians, who want the deaths of an
estimated 1.5 million people recognized as genocide.

The survey, which was carried out between November and December by
the Istanbul-based Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies,
was based on responses from 1,508 people. 


[Dr Rogan was one of the historians interviewed as an expert in the
BBC2 series on the Ottomans. His comments on the genocide were
at that time rather ambivalent.
In exchanges with the Armenian Legal Initiative Group UK, he
declared he had changed his mind and will call the events with their
correct name.
Let's see what the outcome is] 

Kirkus Reviews (Print)
January 1, 2015, Thursday
THE FALL OF THE OTTOMANS;
The Great War in the Middle East 

Rogan (Modern History of the Middle East/St. Antony's Coll., Oxford 
Univ.; The Arabs: A History, 2009, etc.) corrects Western assumptions 
about the "sick man of Europe."I n this well-researched, evenhanded
treatment of the Ottomans' role in World War I, especially in its
assessment of the Armenian genocide of 1918 , the author delineates 
the urgent internal and external causes spurring the crumbling Turkish 
empire to seek a defensive alliance with Germany and counter Britain, 
France and Russia when war broke out in 1914. The coalition of fiery 
Young Turks had risen against the aging autocratic sultan and demanded 
a restoration of the constitution in 1908, but during the tumult, they 
allowed Turkey's European neighbors to annex more territory. 

Russia's territorial ambitions were most feared, while Britain and 
France could not be trusted. The war became a "global call to arms" 
for all parties, with the Ottomans declaring a jihad in order to unite 
Muslims. Rogan walks through the "opening salvos" of the war, at 
Basra, Aden and Egypt, showing the vulnerability of the Ottoman 
defenses; yet the Ottomans showed enormous spirit and ingenuity 
against the Entente assault on the Dardanelles in February 1915. Rogan 
elucidates the Allied debacle at Gallipoli-although the lack of maps 
is frustrating-a reckless campaign he blames more on Lord Kitchener 
than on Winston Churchill and which provoked a government crisis back 
in Britain. The dire campaigns in Mesopotamia, Suez and Palestine were 
not a "sideshow" to be dismissed by the Allied planners in their hopes 
for a quick victory over a weak Ottoman Empire. Actually, they 
produced-through the Arab Revolt galvanized by T.E. Lawrence and the 
drafting of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration-an 
uneasy armistice and partition that promised to be deeply divisive for 
another century. An illuminating work that offers new understanding to 
the troubled history of this key geopolitical region. 

Publication Date: 2015-03-10 
Publisher: Basic 
Stage: Adult 
ISBN: 978-0-465-02307-3 
Price: $29.99 
Author: Rogan, Eugene 


The Australian
Geoffrey Robertson puts the case against Turkey for 1915
Armenian genocide
January 4, 2015
By LOUIS NOWRA 

The Australian - ON April 24, 1915, the day before the Anzacs landed 
at Gallipoli, the Turkish government in Constantinople rounded up 
hundreds of Armenian artists, intellectuals, academics, priests and 
community leaders and killed most of them. 

At the time there were 15 million Turkish Muslims and about two 
million Christian Arm-enians in Turkey (or Anatolia as it was then). 
The Armenians were better educated and wealthier than most Turks and 
because of that were envied and hated, so much so that the government 
instituted a program of ethnic cleansing. The Turks had had practice 
runs before. Between 1894 and 1896, 200,000 Armenians were massacred 
by soldiers and armed mobs. 

>From May to September 1915, up to two million Armenians were killed or 
expelled from the Ottoman Empire. The adult men were massacred or sent 
to death camps, while their families were sent on death marches 
through the desert. They were murdered, raped, drowned, burned alive 
and left to die of hunger and thirst. Churches, monasteries and 
schools were destroyed. All material goods were confiscated. Girls 
were made sex slaves and forced to convert. Up to 1.5 million died. 

Since then Turkish apologists have protested that only 600,000 died 
and that the deportations and massacres were merely unfortunate 
incidents in a civil war. In An Inconvenient Genocide, Australian 
lawyer Geoffrey Robertson sifts the evidence and details the reasons 
he considers the Turkish elimination of the Armenians a crime against 
humanity, a genocide. 

He doesn't spend much time on the history but presents witness 
accounts by diplomats, missionaries, journalists, doctors and 
soldiers. Some of the compelling accounts are by Australian prisoners 
of war. Even Turkey's German allies, especially diplomats, were 
horrified by what was happening and sent voluminous reports back to 
Berlin. 

Turkish law sanctions citizens who ''insult Turkishness'' by referring 
to the treatment of Armenians as genocide. Nobel prize-winning writer 
Orhan Pamuk was charged but his international fame kept him out of 
jail. This national-istic hypersensitivity cannot be over-estimated. 
In 2010, the BBC recorded a play I wrote based on the memoirs of a US 
vice-consul, Leslie Davis, who witnessed deportations, death marches 
and atrocities. Because Turkish actors were afraid news of their 
participation would travel back home, they dropped out or acted under 
assumed names. 

Robertson makes it clear that genocide is a matter for judges, not 
historians. He takes as his guide the International Court of Justice 
decree that genocide means acts committed with an intent to destroy, 
in whole or part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. In 
practice this means disrupting social cohesion (murdering leaders and 
intellectuals), destroying cultural institutions and prohibiting 
cultural activities, shifting wealth from the persecuted group to 
privileged nationals, depopulating areas inhabited by a group, 
interfering with the activities of churches catering to the persecuted 
group and reducing its numbers by starvation or murder. 

This book is a prosecutor's brief: brilliant, forensic and 
irrefutable, and on all counts Robertson finds the 1915 Turkish 
government guilty of genocide. The subtitle, Who Remembers the 
Armenians?, is a paraphrase of Hitler's remarks to his generals in 
1939, ordering them to show no mercy to the Poles: "Who, after all, 
speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'' 

Robertson is part of a growing global movement to have the Armenian 
genocide classed as a crime against humanity. Governments in Canada, 
France, Russia, Sweden and Poland have recognised the genocide, as 
have 43 of the 50 US states. The British and US governments have 
refused to do so; Turkey's pro-Western stance makes it an important 
ally. 

Led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a cynical populist, Turkey is 
doing all within its power not to confront its own past and also to 
stop the truth from being heard. This is of course not unusual 
(witness Japan's refusal to acknowledge its horrific crimes in World 
War II and Australia's deliberate amnesia about its treatment of 
Aborigines) but the evidence of the genocide is so overwhelming that 
the Turkish denial of what happened is breathtaking in its immaturity 
and lack of pity. 

In Australia's case, the NSW parliament recognised the genocide in 
2013, but the federal government has not done so. Foreign Minister 
Julie Bishop has gone so far as to deny it happened. Why is this? 
Well, the answer is quite simple: blackmail. She is afraid the Turkish 
government will stop Australians from visiting Gallipoli. She has good 
reasons for this, given the Turks have banned any member of the NSW 
parliament from attending this year's centenary memorial service at 
Anzac Cove. 

An Inconvenient Genocide should be compulsory reading for anyone who 
knows nothing about the Armenian genocide. It's also a vivid reminder 
that we must never forget such crimes against humanity. Very few books 
are necessary, but this is one. 


USC News - University of Southern California
Jan 5 2015
Rare testimonies of Armenian Genocide go online
USC Shoah Foundation adds emotional interviews to its
Visual History Archive
by USC staff
January 5, 2015 

n honor of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, the USC 
Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education is 
readying at least 40 of the nearly 400 Armenian testimonies it has 
secured from the Armenian Film Foundation for its Visual History 
Archive. 

The USC Shoah Foundation and the Armenian Film Foundation signed an 
agreement in April 2010 to digitize the interviews of the late J. 
Michael Hagopian, recorded on film between 1972 and 2005. The entire 
collection is expected to be integrated with the archive by the fall. 

Hagopian was an award-winning filmmaker who made 70 educational films 
and documentaries including 17 films about Armenians and the Armenian 
Genocide. 

This project will unveil a trove of film testimony about of a horrific 
chapter of human history that remains woefully under-examined. 

Karen Jungblut 

"This project will unveil a trove of film testimony about of a 
horrific chapter of human history that remains woefully 
under-examined," said Karen Jungblut, director of research and 
documentation at the institute. 

Variety of interviewees 

The interviews include not only survivors of the Armenian Genocide but 
also of other groups targeted by the Ottoman Turks, such as the 
Greeks, Assyrians and Yezidis. Also included are non-victim witnesses 
to the atrocities, such as Christian missionaries and Arab villagers, 
as well as descendants of the survivors and several renowned scholars. 

"The addition of these interviews to the Visual History Archive will 
provide broad access to a multilingual collection of material," said 
project adviser Richard G. Hovannisian, an expert in Armenian studies 
and USC adjunct professor of history. 

"It will help to bring sorely needed attention - and study - to this 
dark corner of human understanding," said Hovannisian, a UCLA 
professor emeritus. 

The interviews display a unique style and format, as they were 
conducted by a documentary filmmaker. A clapboard marks the start of 
each take. The interviews - about 15 minutes each - are much shorter 
than other testimonies in the Visual History Archive, which average 
more than two hours. Hagopian can be heard giving directions to crew 
members and interview subjects. 

Michael Hagopian generously gave us full access to his film dailies, 
which is akin to a diary in that they normally wouldn't be seen by the 
public. 

Hrag Yedalian 

"Michael Hagopian generously gave us full access to his film dailies, 
which is akin to a diary in that they normally wouldn't be seen by the 
public," said Hrag Yedalian, a program coordinator with the institute. 
"This lends a certain candor to these interviews, which are at times 
unsettling to watch, but poignant." 

Advance clips available 

The foundation has released two advance clips of the Armenian 
testimonies. One is a 1987 talk with Mihran Andonian, who was a boy 
when his family was deported from Isparta in western Turkey in 1916 
and lost eight family members. The other is a 1993 interview with 
Haroutune Aivazian, who tells of surviving because his mother left him 
at an orphanage. 

"Even those of us who did survive, we lost something very precious," 
Aivazian said. "Something which is the birthright of every person: 
childhood. We lost our childhood." 

The testimonies served as primary source material for Hagopian's 
documentaries about the Armenian Genocide, including The Forgotten 
Genocide, recipient of two Emmy nominations in 1976, and the Witnesses 
Trilogy: Voices from the Lake, Germany and the Secret Genocide and The 
River Ran Red. 

[Hagopian] understood the importance of recording the testimonies of 
aging eyewitnesses before their accounts were lost forever. 

Carla Garapedian 

"He understood the importance of recording the testimonies of aging 
eyewitnesses before their accounts were lost forever," said Carla 
Garapedian of the Armenian Film Foundation. "The voices of the people 
haunted by these atrocities will now be accessible to teachers, 
students, scholars and the general public on a global scale." 


If you want to refresh your knowledge for questions that may come
your way from non-Armenians 


Nearly 400 CUP officials implicated in the genocide of the Armenians 
are arrested, although most avoid justice. Cemal, Enver and Talat 
are tried in absentia by a Turkish military tribunal, found guilty of war 
crimes and sentenced to death. 


The tribunal substantiates the key charge of 
premeditated mass murder organised by the Central Committee of 
the CUP and carried out by the 'Special Organisation'. 

Click on:
http://www.moreorless.net.au/killers/pashas.html