Armenian News - See also attached Armenian Genocide article in the Welsh Press

Belfast Telegraph
Grandfather was 'genocide' victim
16 February 2015 

A Northern Ireland man who believes his grandfather was killed and
buried in an Armenian mass grave has called on the British and Irish
governments to recognise the deaths as genocide.

Paul Manook said his grandfather was lined up alongside other men
in a village in modern-day eastern Turkey by Ottoman Turkish soldiers
a century ago. He was never seen again.

Turkey denies Armenian claims that up to 1.5 million people died in
an act of genocide during the First World War when troops targeted the
Christian minority.

Dr Manook said: "Because of the geopolitics of the region the UK does
not want to touch this. Ireland is a small country, probably they will follow
the UK because they are a small country and there are quite a lot of
links together."

Turkey has resisted widespread calls for it to recognise as genocide the
1915-16 killings, which followed mass deportations, but apologised for
the deaths.

According to the UN, genocide involves acts intended "to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group".

The dispute about whether deaths caused by the Ottomans represented
genocide centres on the degree to which the killings were orchestrated.

The most notorious example of genocide is the Nazis' attempted
extermination of the Jews. This year's Holocaust Memorial Day was
marked across Britain and Ireland.

Mr Manook, 64, from Millisle in Co Down, said his grandfather Manook
Dishchekenian was removed from his village along with many other
men. "They lined them up and took them."

He said his father was then aged six.

"My grandmother realised immediately, she just took my dad and four
aunts and they escaped the village. My father was a survivor of the
genocide."

He said the fate for men left behind was grim.

"I have a strong feeling that they must have killed them and buried t
hem in mass graves."

Armenians mark the date April 24 1915 as the start of what they regard
as genocide.

In Turkey public debate on the issue has been stifled, using the law to
prosecute writers who highlight the mass killings.

However last month Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu, said:
"Having already underscored the inhumane consequences of the
relocation policies essentially enforced under wartime circumstances,
including that of 1915, Turkey shares the suffering of Armenians and,
with patience and resolve, is endeavouring to re-establish empathy
between the two peoples.

"Our 23 April 2014 message of condolence, which included elements
of how, primarily through dialogue, we may together bring an end to
the enmity that has kept our relations captive, was a testament to this
determination.

"Only by breaking taboos can we hope to begin addressing the great
trauma that froze time in 1915. For its part, Turkey has transcended
this critical threshold and relinquished the generalisations and
stereotypical assertions of the past."

Edward Horgan, a former UN soldier from Ireland and peace activist,
said a group of politicians from the Dail in Dublin was being created
to lobby on the issue.

"Clearly it is an issue of language but the fact is that the Turkish
government, who were not involved in the genocide, has consistently
denied and prosecuted people in Turkey for highlighting and proclaiming
it was a genocide, that does need to be addressed."

Last year previous Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
speaking on the eve of the 99th anniversary, offered condolences for
the first time for the mass killings of Armenians under Ottoman rule.

Turkey has said the number of deaths was much smaller than Armenian
estimates.

A spokesman for the London embassy said: "Turkey is legitimately
challenging the Armenian views of history. This is based on documents
in archives, many scholarly studies as well as the memory of millions
of people in Turkey.

"I would like to highlight that genocide is a clearly defined crime with
specific conditions of proof. There is no verdict given by a competent
court or whatsoever, labelling the events of 1915 as genocide."

Argentina, Belgium, Canada, France, Italy, Russia and Uruguay
recognise the conflict as genocide. The UK, US, Israel and others use
different names.

Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) said: "While the
terrible suffering cannot be forgotten and we must continue to remember
and honour the victims of the past, we believe the UK's priority today
should be to promote reconciliation between the peoples and
governments of Turkey and Armenia and to find a way for these two
countries to face their joint history together."


arminfo.am
URUGUAY DECLARES ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AS 'ISSUE OF 

SPECIAL INTEREST'
by Nana Martirosyan
Monday, February 16
The central board of Uruguay's national administration for public
education declared the first genocide of the 20th century perpetrated
by the Ottoman Empire "an issue of special interest" in 2015, the year
when the 100th anniversary of this crime against humanity is marked,
according to the Ð~BmenianGenocide100.org. The decision was made due
to the motion submitted by the Armenian Genocide Centennial commission
claiming to declare the Armenian Genocide a topic of special interest
and to include it in the academic curriculum of 2015, the website of
the National administration for public education reports.

Furthermore, the central board also discussed the declaration by
the joint parliamentary committee of Mercosur (a sub- regional bloc
comprising Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela and
associate countries like Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru)
to recognize the Armenian Genocide. The declaration was passed on
November 17, 2007.

Uruguay was the first country to recognize the Armenian Genocide.

Genocide of Armenians has been recognized by 43 United States as
well as by 21 countries, including Canada, Argentina, Switzerland,
Uruguay, Russia, Belgium, France, Poland, Slovakia, the Netherlands,
Greece, Cyprus, Vatican, Sweden, Lithuania.. The European Parliament
passed a resolution recognizing the fact of Armenian Genocide in the
Ottoman Turkey on June 18 1987 and demanded the Council of Europe
to exert pressure on Turkey in order that country recognizes the
Armenian Genocide. Turkey still denies the genocide of 1,5 million
Armenians in 1915-1923. 

armradio.am
JERUSALEM SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA CONCERT TO 

COMMEMORATE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE CENTENNIAL
17 Feb 2015
Siranush Ghazanchyan

The Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra will hold a special concert on March
5 in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

Titled "With you, Armenia," the concert at the Henry Crown Hall will
feature works by Komitas (Melodia), Stepan Rostomyan (Symphony No. 4),
Aram Khatchaturian (Ballet Suite from Spartacus), William Weiner
(Melody in memory of the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust)
and Beethoven (Symphony No. 3, Eroica).

Andres Mustonen (violin) will be the conductor and soloist of the
concert.


End of the Ottoman empire
February 13, 2015 3:49 pm
Mark Mazower
The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 

1914-1920,
by Eugene Rogan, Allen Lane, RRP£25, 512 pages, 

published in the US in
March by Basic Books 

How the decision to enter the first world war led to political
collapse, bloodshed and the birth of the modern Middle East

before the first world war, the term "Middle East" was virtually
unknown. The Ottoman empire had ruled for centuries over the lands
from the Sahara to Persia but did not refer to them as part of a
single region. Coined in the mid-19th century, the phrase became
popular only in the mid-20th. It reflected the growing popularity of
geopolitical thinking as well as the strategic anxieties of the
rivalrous great powers, and its spread was a sign of growing European
meddling in the destiny of the Arab-speaking peoples.

But Europe's war changed more than just names. In the first place,
there was petroleum. The British had tightened their grip on the
Persian Gulf in the early years of the new century, as the Royal Navy
contemplated shifting away from coal. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company
opened the enormous Abadan refinery in 1912. The British invasion of
Basra -- a story of imperial hubris and cataclysmic failure that Eugene
Rogan weaves superbly through The Fall of the Ottomans -- thus marked
the beginning of the world's first oil conflict.

Second, there was the British turn to monarchy as a means of securing
political influence. The policy began in Egypt, which British troops
had been occupying since 1882. Until the Ottomans entered the war,
Whitehall had solemnly kept to the juridical fiction that Egypt
remained a province of their empire. After November, that was no
longer possible and the British swiftly changed the constitutional
order: the khedive Abbas II, who happened to be in Istanbul at the
time, was deposed and his uncle, Husayn Kamil, was proclaimed the
country's sultan. In this way the British unilaterally declared an end
to almost four centuries of Ottoman rule in favour of a puppet who
would allow their continued control of the Suez Canal.

This was not the only way the British could have taken over: Cyprus,
for instance, they simply annexed. But the Egyptian strategy was less
of a slap in the face to the local population and this kind of
imperial improvisation became the template for the region after 1918,
when Hashemite princes were placed in charge of one new kingdom after
another for no very good reason other than their likely subservience
to British wishes. A fine system it was most of the time too, at least
for the British, and it is not surprising that when the Americans took
over in the region during the cold war, they did their best to keep it
going.

Rogan, director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony's College,
Oxford, and author of The Arabs: A History (2009), has written a
remarkably readable, judicious and well-researched account of the
Ottoman war in Anatolia and the Arab provinces. The Fall of the
Ottomans is especially good on showing the fighting across multiple
fronts and from both sides of the lines, and it draws effectively upon
the papers, memoirs and diaries of soldiers and civilians. The Basra
notable Sayyid Talib, the Armenian priest Grigoris Balakian and the
Turkish corporal Ali Riza Eti provide perspectives that rarely make it
into mainstream narratives of the first world war.

They depict fighting of extraordinary intensity -- from the trenches of
the Gallipoli peninsula, where Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) made his
name, to the mountains of the Caucasus, where thousands of Ottoman
soldiers froze to death. We see the plight of the Armenians in all its
grimness but also the starvation that swept across much of Syria as
the war ended. Between the fighting on multiple fronts, the deaths
from massacre and starvation, and the almost complete dislocation of
economic life across swaths of Anatolia and the Arab provinces, the
war that ended Ottoman rule also destroyed many of the institutions
that had sustained it.

In the second world war, Turkey made sure it remained neutral. Could
not the empire have done so in 1914? When hostilities broke out that
summer across Europe, the Young Turk triumvirate in Istanbul did stay
out of the conflict for a few months, holding back until deciding to
throw their lot in with the Central Powers.

This decision precipitated the disastrous campaigns -- along the Suez
Canal, in eastern Anatolia against the Russians, and in the
Dardanelles in defence of the capital Istanbul -- that nearly destroyed
the empire completely. By April 1915, the Russians had crushed Enver's
Third Army in the east and the British were landing thousands of
troops on the Gallipoli peninsula. It was at this moment of maximal
threat that the Young Turk leadership took the decision to massacre
Anatolia's Armenians, a story Rogan tells with sensitivity, insight
and judiciousness. 

The ongoing political controversy over the genocide -- Rogan
rightly deploys the word but does not make too much of the dispute,
consigning it to an excellent endnote -- has overshadowed some
critical historical questions . The basic point is that the war created
a crisis of legitimacy that was especially severe in the Ottoman lands.
Imperial tax-raising power was limited and the Ottoman bureaucracy did
not have the capacity to organise a proper rationing system. This
weakness forced it to rely much more than other states on political
intermediaries and thuggish, well-armed irregulars. At the same time,
the prospect of defeat made the Young Turk leadership ever more
suspicious of vast swaths of the population irrespective of religion --
Ottoman loyalists, refugees settled from Albania, Bosnia and all the
other lost lands of the Balkans, and, perhaps above all, the Arabs.

Rogan documents the wartime repression in greater Syria in particular,
which alienated so many notables. Meanwhile, starvation claimed a
staggering 300,000-500,000 lives in Syria and Lebanon alone. The sense
of social collapse is palpable and must have been intensified by
something that Rogan does not discuss -- the influenza of 1918-1919,
which may have cost Iran alone up to one-fifth of its population. The
losses in greater Syria and Iraq were probably just as devastating.
This story of the war's impact on social life across the region still
awaits its historian.

Territorially, the ending of the Ottoman empire created the present
Middle East. The new republic of Turkey eventually won independence
for itself, primarily in its Anatolian heartland. Elsewhere, the
former imperial provinces were handed over to the war's victors by the
new League of Nations and ruled under fictions of conditional
sovereignty that they called mandates. With the exception of the as
yet non-existent Israel, the map of the region that emerged in the
1920s looks much as it does today. Yet drawing boundaries round the
conference table was one thing; coping with the catastrophic
repercussions of four years of war was quite another. Helping us to
understand the difficulties the states of the Middle East have endured
since then, and the challenges they continue to face, Rogan's book
takes us back to the moment of their birth, a moment in which one
imperial order collapsed and gave way to another.


Mark Mazower is a professor of history at Columbia University and
author of 'Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews'
(Harper)