Armenian News... A Topalian... 8 editorials

Public Radio of Armenia

May 20 2019

Armenian ex-President's case sent to Constitutional Court 

A court in Yerevan has halted proceedings in the trial of former President Robert Kocharyan, ex-Defense Minister Seyran Ohanyan, former Deputy Prime Minister Armen Gevorgyan and former CSTO Secretary General Yuri Khachaturov and sent the case to the Constitutional Court.

Kocharyan is charged with overthrowing constitutional order  during an unrest in March 2008 that saw 10 people killed in clashes between protesters and police following the presidential elections. 

Vahe Grigoryan, a lawyer for the legal successors of March 1 victims, has said the decision will be appealed.

Robert Kocharyan had been jailed for months, but was released from pre-trial detention on Saturday, after the incumbent and former Presidents of Artsakh appeared in court to vouch for him.

EurasiaNet.org

May 20 2019

Armenia: After ex-president released, premier opens conflict with judges and Karabakh leaders

Joshua Kucera,  Ani Mejlumyan  

The court’s surprise decision to let Kocharyan go precipitated both a domestic and international crisis.

Following the surprise release of former Armenian president Robert Kocharyan from jail over the weekend, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has accused both his country’s judicial system and the de facto leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh of conspiring against him and his government. 

On May 18, a court ordered Kocharyan to be released. He had been on trial for charges related to the violent breakup of March 2008 protests against fraudulent elections. Kocharyan,  also a former de facto president of Nagorno-Karabakh, was released to the personal guarantee of two other leaders of the territory – one former, another current. 

In response, Pashinyan – who has placed a high priority on Kocharyan’s prosecution – called on his supporters to surround court buildings and block people from entering and exiting. 

Pashinyan has long accused the judiciary of taking orders from the former government. But the fact that he took dramatic action immediately after a judge issued a verdict which he opposed led many to accuse the prime minister of inappropriately politicizing the judicial system. Kevork Oskanian, a political scientist at the University of Birmingham, said in a tweet that it was an “unacceptable affront to the independence of the judiciary.”

Armenia’s human rights ombudsman, Arman Tatoyan, issued a statement criticizing Pashinyan’s appeal. “There are problems in the court system, including its independence … but these problems must be solved using exclusively legal means,” Tatoyan said. “Therefore, the prime minister’s statement … is extremely dangerous for the security and stability of the country's legal system.”

On May 20, about 1,100 people heeded Pashinyan’s call at 11 court buildings around Yerevan, according to one count. At the Constitutional Court, about 150 people gathered. “It’s ridiculous that the executive is revolutionary while the judiciary remains controlled by the old regime,” one of them, Artur Petrosyan, told Eurasianet. 

“The judicial branch will become legitimate,” said another supporter of the blockade, Henrik Sergoyan. “Pashinyan knows how to make the government and the judiciary free. He knows how to fight corruption. We trust him.” 

Later in the day, Pashinyan elaborated on his appeal in a live, televised speech. “The Armenian people perceive the judiciary as a remnant of the former corrupt system, where conspiracies are constantly being designed and carried out against the people,” Pashinyan said. He also laid out a plan to reform the judiciary, including publicizing each “judge's political connections, family background, [and] property status” and asking those with connections to the former government to quit. 

In perhaps an even more consequential move, Pashinyan also implicated the authorities of Nagorno-Karabakh in the conspiracy, accusing them of plotting to hand over some Armenian-controlled territory to Azerbaijan and place the blame on him. “I consider this to be treason against the state and as prime minister of Armenia, the guarantor of Artsakh’s security, and the supreme commander-in-chief of the armed forces, I will take the toughest measures to eradicate these conspiratorial intentions,” he said in the speech. (Artsakh is the Armenian name for Karabakh.)

He also said the parliament should set up an investigative commission to “study the circumstances around the April 2016 war [a brief flareup in fighting with Azerbaijan] and to get answers to a number of questions that are of concern to us all.” He did not elaborate on what the questions were. 

Pashinyan has been facing opposition, occasionally public, from the authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh, who were closely allied to the former government in Armenia. Pashinyan visited Karabakh on May 9 and was asked about opposition to his government there. "If someone tries to make Karabakh a hotbed of counterrevolution, the people will make it a hotbed of revolution," he said.  

One of the most prominent Pashinyan critics in Stepanakert has been Vitaliy Balasanyan, the secretary of Nagorno-Karabakh’s national security council. On May 19, police stopped Balasanyan’s car in Yerevan and demanded to search it for weapons, according to a Facebook live broadcast by Hrant Melik-Shahnazaryan, a hawkish Armenian analyst who was with Balasanyan. Balasanyan refused to allow the search without a warrant, and police later issued a statement saying that Balasanyan was not the target of the search. 

“After the revolution in Armenia [in April 2018], there was an attempt in Karabakh [to follow suit] but the authorities [in Yerevan] – perhaps because of fear of war – held back,” said Petrosyan, the protester at the Constitutional Court. “As a result, in a year Nagorno-Karabakh has become the center of counter-revolution.”

The event that set off the crisis, Kocharyan’s release, followed a week-long court hearing that riveted Armenia. Kocharyan stood accused of “overthrowing the constitutional order” in connection with the 2008 events, in which eight protesters and two police officers were killed. The hearing, to determine where Kocharyan would be detained while he waited for his trial, began on May 13. During the course of the hearing Kocharyan also was accused of taking a $3 million bribe, which he denied. "This charge was invented to extend the detention as much as possible, there is no other explanation," he told the court. 

Some of Pashinyan’s allies publicly called on the judge to deny Kocharyan bail. Hayk Sargsyan, a member of parliament from the ruling “My Step” alliance, wrote a Facebook post calling on people to go to the court and protest to “force the judge to make a fair decision,” prompting a protest from Kocharyan’s lawyers. (Sargsyan subsequently deleted the post.)

The current de facto leader of Nagorno-Karabakh, Bako Sahakyan, as well as a former leader, Arkadi Ghukasyan, personally appeared at the trial to guarantee Kocharyan’s bail at 500,000 drams (about $1,000) each. Each gave Kocharyan a warm hug in the courtroom, enraging his many detractors. As Sahakyan and Ghukasyan left the court, protesters shouted “Shame!” at them. 

The trial did not get into the events of 2008, however. “There are no facts about people’s deaths, about Kocharyan’s participation in all of this, in general there is nothing,” wrote analyst Hrant Mikaelian. “Pashinyan’s supporters, especially from ‘civil society,’ are blaming it all on the judge and want to carry out a renovation of the justice system, but it is pure legal nihilism. In addition, in recent weeks hateful propaganda has been running at full steam, the government is mobilizing people to carry out supposedly spontaneous protests against Kocharyan’s release.”

“The danger in post-revolutionary Armenia was always that Pashinyan, lacking the ability to transform the country quickly or sustainably, would fall back on the populism that got him into power. Here we are,” tweeted Nate Schenkkan of U.S. human rights organization Freedom House. 

With additional reporting by Peter Liakhov

 

Bloomberg

May 20 2019

Armenia Premier Demands Courts Purge as Ex-President Freed

By Sara Khojoyan

 

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan called for sweeping changes to the judiciary as protesters blocked courts at his urging over a judge's order to free a former president from detention ahead of a controversial trial.

All judges must undergo vetting and those ``who can't change should resign'' as part of reforms to root out corruption, Pashinyan told lawmakers and officials at a televised meeting Monday. He gave parliament two months to prepare laws for improving public confidence in the courts and said he's willing to change the constitution if necessary.

Pashinyan acted after he condemned a ``puppet court'' for releasing ex-President Robert Kocharyan on Saturday from pre-trial detention, saying in a Facebook post the next day that it showed the need for judicial reform as ``the Armenian revolution's second most important stage.''

Kocharyan, who was president for a decade until 2008, was arrested after Pashinyan swept to power in Armenia's ``Velvet Revolution'' that forced former Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan to resign in April last year amid protests over corruption and poverty. Kocharyan faces prosecution for allegedly undermining constitutional order over his decision to order police and troops to disperse opposition protests at the end of his presidency, resulting in the deaths of 10 people. He denies wrongdoing.

`Personal Hatred'

Pashinyan later called on supporters to end the court protests, saying they had demonstrated public distrust in the judiciary and the need for ``irreversible'' changes. The Caucasus nation's human rights ombudsman, Arman Tatoyan, criticized the blockades as ``dangerous for the security and stability'' of the court system.

Pashinyan helped lead the 2008 protests and was later jailed. He's rejected accusations from Kocharyan, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, that the prosecution was being driven by Pashinyan’s “personal hatred” of him.

The revolutionary leader's My Step alliance won a landslide victory in December parliamentary elections that wiped out the former ruling party and consolidated Pashinyan's hold on power. 

Under Armenia's revised constitution that came into force shortly before the revolution, authority is concentrated in the prime minister's hands with the president a largely ceremonial figure.

President Armen Sarkissian urged Armenians ``to maintain peace and calm, to comply with the Constitution and laws'' in a website statement Sunday,  after Pashinyan called for the court protests.

Today Online

May 21 2019

Armenia told to refrain from pressuring judges

TBILISI - Parliamentarians from the Council of Europe, the continent's chief human rights watchdog, warned Armenia on Tuesday to refrain from pressuring its judiciary.

 

The statement came after hundreds of protesters briefly blocked access to the ex-Soviet nation's courts on Monday heeding a call from Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.

 

"Political stakeholders must refrain from actions and statements that could be perceived as exerting pressure on the judiciary," Yuliya Lovochkina and Andrej Sircelj, co-rapporteurs of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) for the monitoring of Armenia, said in a statement.

 

"The independence of the judiciary is a pre-requisite for the rule of law," added the organization, which can only make recommendations to other bodies.

 

Pashinyan, who came to power in a peaceful revolution last year after protests against corruption and cronyism, had called for the demonstrations on Sunday after a court ordered ex-president Robert Kocharyan freed on bail from pre-trial detention.

 

Kocharyan, who was president from 1998 to 2008, has been charged with acting unlawfully by introducing a state of emergency in March 2008, following a disputed election. At least ten people were killed in clashes between police and protesters.

 

"The time has come to carry out a surgical intervention in the judicial system," Pashinyan said in a televised address on Sunday, urging the vetting of all judges.

 

PACE said it recognized the public reaction to Kocharyan's freeing on bail showed the low trust in the judiciary.

 

"Judicial reforms remain a priority and we welcome Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan's stated desire for far-reaching reform of the judicial system," the co-rapporteurs said. REUTERS

 

 

The Times, UK

May 17 2019

The vicious ethnic war behind Mkhitaryan's Europa League absence

by  Tom Parfitt, Moscow

The roots of Henrikh Mkhitaryan's probable absence from the Europa League final

at the end of this month lie in a vicious ethnic war, fought more than a quarter of a century ago.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, chunks of it made bids to break away from larger territories.

At least 30,000 people died in Nagorno-Karabakh between 1991 and 1994 when the mountainous Armenian-dominated region seceded from Azerbaijan and proclaimed an independent republic.

The conflict has flared up occasionally ever since. In 2016, shells flew across the border into the tiny hamlet of Talish in northeast Nagorno-Karabakh, ploughing into homes, the wall of a kindergarten and the roof of the village administration.

An Azerbaijani ground incursion followed and the bodies of an Armenian couple in their late 60s and the man's 92-year-old mother were later found in their home. They had been shot dead and allegedly had their ears sliced off.

The facts of the conflict - other atrocities are claimed on both sides - and the control of territory remain questions of bitter dispute between Baku and Yerevan.

The region's independence has not been recognised by a single country, and no lasting settlement was ever reached.

Recently, there have been encouraging signs. Since the former journalist, Nikol Pashinyan, became prime minister of Armenia last year, he has met President Aliyev of Azerbaijan four times, and discussed moves to peace. Ceasefire violations have decreased.

Yet, fears of a random act of violence would likely remain if the Armenian Mkhitaryan was to go to Baku, where the Europa League final between Arsenal and Chelsea is to be played.

One example of the passions the conflict can provoke was the murder in 2004 of Gurgen Margaryan in Budapest. The Armenian army lieutenant was asleep in a dormitory when Ramil Safarov, an Azerbaijani officer, broke in and killed him with an axe.

Both men had been attending English-language courses in Hungary organised by Nato's Partnership for Peace programme. Under interrogation, Safarov said Margaryan had insulted him, and thoughts of the Nagorno-Karabakh war had spurred him on. "I regret that I hadn't killed any Armenian before this," he said.

After serving eight years in prison in Hungary, Safarov was transferred to Baku to serve out his life sentence, only to be immediately pardoned by President Aliyev, and promoted.

When Mkhitaryan, 30, did not travel to Baku for a match with Qarabag in October, the Azerbaijani team's coach, Gurban Gurbanov, said Arsenal had "tried to save" the player and were "afraid" of him appearing in front of a 68,000-capacity crowd at the city's Olympic Stadium.

Azerbaijan's foreign ministry indicated last week that Mikhitaryan would get a visa for the final

, saying other Armenian sportsmen had taken part in events there, and "sports and politics are separate".

But the midfielder has never played in the country, also missing a fixture in Azerbaijan when he was at Borussia Dortmund, and it will be no surprise if he is left out now.

The Economist

May 21 2019

The footballer caught up in Armenia’s conflict with Azerbaijan

A reminder that relations between the two countries are still tense

HENRIKH MKHITARYAN is no ordinary Armenian. At 30 years of age, he has won the “Armenian Footballer of the Year” award a record eight times. He captains his country’s national team, and has played for some of Europe’s biggest clubs.

Yet, despite such credentials, “Micki” (pictured above) finds himself caught up in Armenia’s ongoing conflict with Azerbaijan, its neighbour. He will not play in the Europa League final on May 29th, when his current team, Arsenal, play another London side, Chelsea, in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital. Both club and player made the decision, seemingly due to fears over his safety. Arsenal said the club had not received “acceptable guarantees” from UEFA, the governing body of European football, that it would be safe for Mr Mkhitaryan to travel, and they have now taken matters into their own hands.

That Arsenal seems to have felt it has no option but to pull its player out of the final has angered the club and its fans, who were already incensed with UEFA’s decision, after a bidding process by member states, to host the event in Azerbaijan. Baku is further east than Baghdad, and the club, like Chelsea, is being allocated just 6,000 tickets for a stadium that holds more than 68,000 people. But Mr Mkhitaryan’s situation is also a reminder that a little-known political rivalry is still tense. 

The conflict centres on control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which declared independence from Azerbaijan in 1988 as the Soviet Union started to break apart. After the Armenians sided with Nagorno-Karabakh, a full-scale war broke out—in which some 30,000 people had died by 1994. The region has been under Armenian control ever since, but this has failed to bring a lasting peace. There have been frequent skirmishes along the Azeri-Armenian border. Some 200 people were killed in a “four-day war” in April 2016. What started as a dispute over territory has become “an interstate rivalry”, says Thomas De Waal, a senior fellow with Carnegie Europe, a think tank. 

Recently there have been a few encouraging signs. The so-called velvet revolution in Armenia last year saw Nikol Pashinyan become prime minister and set up a democratic government. Mr Pashinyan has since met Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, several times and made positive public statements, breathing some life into the peace process. However, Mr De Waal notes there has not been much indication of compromise on either side yet.

Elkhan Mammadov, the general secretary of Azerbaijan’s football association, points out that Armenians have competed in sporting events in Baku before. Four years ago 25 Armenian athletes competed in the European Games there, though they were booed by local fans. Mr Mammadov also says that the country’s government had issued guarantees for Mr Mkhitaryan’s “protection and safety”. 

But this public reminder of the conflict with Armenia could overshadow the final. On such a huge occasion, Azerbaijan would have hoped to present itself as a “welcoming” and “accommodating” country, says Simon Rofe of London University's School of Oriental and African Studies. Its hosting of other sporting events, such as an annual Formula 1 Grand Prix, has also been criticised as an attempt to deflect criticism from its poor human-rights record.

That an Armenian sportsman did not feel safe travelling to Azerbaijan reflects poorly on the two countries’ relations, but also on UEFA. The organisation said it had developed a “comprehensive security plan” in conjunction with authorities in Azerbaijan, and showed it to Arsenal. UEFA describes Mr Mkhitaryan’s absence as a “personal decision”. “Micki” has missed less important matches in Azerbaijan in the past, but this is different, he says. He wrote on Twitter: “It's the kind of game that doesn't come along very often for us players and I must admit, it hurts me a lot to miss it.”

New Statesman

May 21 2019

Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Azerbaijan, and having an Armenian surname

Arsenal losing its Armenian player for the Europa League final in Baku is about much more than conflict in the Caucasus.

By Anoosh Chakelian

Every Sunday morning until I was 15, I went to an Armenian school held in a west London high school near where I grew up. Among the memories of boredom, grappling with an eccentric alphabet that came to its scholar in a dream, and excessive catering of barbecued lamb, I remember a map each teacher would unfurl every year. 

It was a map of the Caucasus. After showing us how Armenia had been consistently shrunk over the centuries of empire, pogroms and genocide (happy Sunday!), they’d invariably point out Artsakh – a region within one of Armenia’s unfortunate selection of big-boy neighbours, Azerbaijan. 

It’s a slice of mountainous territory known to the world as Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh is the old Armenian name) and is disputed by the two countries. It’s a conflict with historic roots, but Soviet divide-and-rule machinations ensured it’s the tinderbox it is today.

In practice, it’s Armenian. The population is 95 per cent ethnic Armenian and it has strong ties to Armenia (it uses the same currency, for example). It’s a self-declared republic, but de jure part of Azerbaijan. War followed its declaration of independence in 1991, and skirmishes continue despite a ceasefire in 1994. In the meantime, Azerbaijan tries to erase Armenian cultural heritage – from destroying churches to tracking down citizens who dared vote for Armenia in Eurovision. 

This limbo means no diplomatic relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan – an elaborate way for saying they are technically at war. I remember being taught that, because of this, even if you had a British passport but an Armenian name, you couldn’t get into Azerbaijan. 

At the time it felt a bit strange that just because I have “ian” at the end of my surname I could somehow be denied a trip somewhere, but it’s not like I had immediate plans to summer in Baku as a pre-teen anyway. 

Plus, that little lump of land seemed very distant to a bunch of kids in Acton whose parents, like my father, hadn’t even been born in Armenia – scattered around the world as they are because of the Armenian genocide during World War One.

Now suddenly those obscure-seeming history lessons have become a reality to me. Because the London media’s kicking off about it. Arsenal midfielder Henrikh Mkhitaryan, who is Armenian, won’t be playing in the Europa League final against Chelsea because it’s in Azerbaijan. And visas have been denied for fans with “ian” or “yan” surnames (usually an Armenian tell, but apparently even Cornish Trevelyans don’t make it into the country). 

Identification by your surname alone is poignant for Armenians. A history of oppression and sprawling diaspora means we are extra proud to be recognised as Armenian from our surviving “ian” or “yan” (even if you only made the link because of the Kardashians). And in a similar vein to modified Jewish surnames, there are Armenian families whose ancestors lopped off the ending for protection (the tennis player André Agassi, for example).

So it’s particularly galling that Uefa hasn’t managed to sort this out. Although it claims it worked with the Azeri authorities to come up with a security plan for Mkhitaryan, it’s clear from his and his family’s decision that his safety was not sufficiently guaranteed. 

This is pretty obvious anyway in a rather threatening statement from Azerbaijan’s UK ambassador:

“My message to Mkhitaryan would be: you’re a footballer, you want to play football? Go to Baku you are safe there, if you want to play the issue then that’s a different story.

“What I can guarantee is that the Azerbaijan government will do everything what needs to be done and provide safety and security for every fan, player and staff member coming to this game.”

It’s a grim demonstration of football’s pact with oil money that the match is still going ahead in Baku. Surely Arsenal and Chelsea should pull out, or agree a different location for the cup final? 

Or if Uefa cared equally about its member states (which include Armenia), it wouldn’t have chosen Baku in the first place – at least not until hostilities softened. If an Armenian club somehow reached the Europa League final (I know just enough about football that this is very unlikely, but bear with me), the location would’ve been impossible. 

But of course, in the world of football as in…well, the world in general, Armenia and countries like it are not equal to oil-rich behemoths like Azerbaijan. The latter want to whitewash their global reputations by sloshing money into everything, and the West likes the sound of that sloshing. 

Armenia, with little financial standing, is the opposite. Imagine if Mkhitaryan were a top player from another country with greater influence. If Azerbaijan had a perpetual ethnic conflict with, say, Portugal, would football’s powers-that-be allow Cristiano Ronaldo to miss a cup final? 

It may be that you don’t care about the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. But it should matter to everyone when football puts money and hobnobbing authoritarian regimes above the safety of a player – whatever your surname. 

Anoosh Chakelian is senior writer at the New Statesman.

The National Herald

May 20 2019

Israeli Scholars Say Turkish Genocides Wiped Out Armenians, Greeks, Christians

By TNH Staff 

The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924 by Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi. Photo: Amazon

Putting the lie to repeated claims by Turkey it didn’t engage in genocides, two Israeli academics said they have documented the slaughter of Armenians, Greeks and Christians over a 30-year period from 1894-1924, including under the direction of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish Republic.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, about claims in their book The 30-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of its Christian Minories, Professors in Middle Eastern Studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev Benny Morris Dror Ze’evi detailed the systematic slaughter by Turkish leaders that eliminated some 90 percent of the Christians.

Turkey has kept saying that their lives weren’t taken by planned massacres but in the fog of war and the chaos of the time that also took many Muslim lives but the scholars said the killings were designed to eliminate all Christians and nearly succeeded.

They wrote in a column in the paper that during the period they studied that the number of Christians in Asia Minor fell from 3-4 million to just tens of thousands, from 20 percent of the area’s population to under 2 percent.

“Turkey’s Armenian, Greek and Assyrian (or Syriac) communities disappeared as a result of a staggered campaign of genocide beginning in 1894, perpetrated against them by their Muslim neighbors. By 1924, the Christian communities of Turkey and its adjacent territories had been destroyed,” they wrote, contradicting Turkey’s claims.

It was no mere opinion piece but the result, they said, of 10 years of researching archives from Turkey, the United States, British and French archives as well as some Greek materials and the papers of the German and Austro-Hungarian foreign ministries.

They said they were thus able to prove “a strikingly consistent pattern of ethno-religious atrocity over three decades, perpetrated by the Turkish government, army, police and populace,”  against Christians, which Turkey has denied, particularly the Armenian genocide which the scholars wrote was a “concentrated slaughter” from 1915-16.

They said it was driven by religion and aided by other groups of Muslims, including Kurds, Circassians, Chechens and Arabs with the purpose of a Holocaust-like Final Solution to kill every Christian in the region, murdering some two millions.

It was, they added, organized by three successive governments, those of the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II, the Young Turks and, finally, Atatürk. Besides the mass murders, some 1.5-2 million Christians were expelled, mostly to Greece.

Ze’evi, reached by The National Herald earlier, recounted how arduous the task was to find the material by poring over voluminous records for years in an effort to get at the truth, which they said verified Christian claims of the genocides and planned mass extermination efforts.

They said the killings conformed to the United Nations definition of what constitutes genocide but Turkey has fiercely resisted any such depiction as the scholars said the killings were accompanied by mass rapes of tens of thousands of Christian women and their forced conversion to Islam, as well as those of children whose parents were killed.

“So pervasive was the sexual violence and kidnapping that many of today’s Turks, whether they know it or not, can trace at least part of their ancestry to these abducted Christians,” they added in an ironic twist of how trying to wipe out Christians in a way perpetuated their blood in Turks for generations.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has continued the line there were no genocides and in April wrote to the Armenian Patriarch of Turkey to “offer my sincere condolences” to the grandchildren of “the Ottoman Armenians who lost their lives under (the) harsh conditions of the First World War” and to urge him “to avoid helping those who seek to create hatred, grudge and hostility by distorting our common history.”

The tragedy began during 1894-96, when Sultan Abdulhamid II authorized massacres of against the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian minority, fearing that they threatened the integrity of his realm, the academics said.

Some 200,000 people, almost all Armenians, were killed by Turkish soldiers, villagers, townspeople, officials and police as well as Kurdish tribesmen, they said the documents showed, finding a grisly pattern.

“At each site, alongside the pillage and murder, many thousands of Armenian women were raped or abducted. Some would eventually be killed; many more were forced into Muslim households and converted, serving for the rest of their lives as wives, concubines or servants,” they said, history that Turkey wants covered up.

The evidence came from eyewitnesses as well, they said, including in January 1896, in the southern Turkish town of Palu, where an American missionary reported that the Turks “continue to carry off girls and women, keeping them a few days and then returning them with their lives blasted.”

THROUGH MISSIONARY EYES

In August that year, another missionary in Mardin wrote: “We saw girls not a few who returned from the hands of their captors weeping bitterly, shrieking and crying: ‘We are defiled! No one will take us in marriage.’”

The record of horror was also backed by even by Germany, which was allied with Turkey in World War I. On July 7, 1915, the German Ambassador in Constantinople, Baron Hans von Wangenheim, reported Armenians being deported from the city of Erzurum were being ambushed by Kurdish bands, with “the men and children…butchered and the women carried away.”

On July 27, a German engineer on the Baghdad railway reported that a Turkish sergeant “abducted 18 women and girls and sold them to Arabs and Kurds for 2-3 Mejidiehs,” a coin that was a fifth of a Turkish pound, the historians said they had also found.

There were slave markets during the war in the Syrian cities of Aleppo and Damascus and several Anatolian towns, selling off Armenian girls for trivial amounts, destined for sexual slavery or domestic service or marriage to Muslims,  their lives otherwise valueless.

in which Armenian girls who had been corralled by Turkish troops were sold for a pittance.

War between Turkey and Greece from 1919-22 saw Ataturk conduct a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Turkish Greek communities along the Black Sea and the Aegean coast.

“Claiming that Ottoman Greeks were assisting the invading Greek army, the Turks took the opportunity to murder hundreds of thousands of them, as well as expelling more than a million Ottoman Greeks to Greece,” said Morris and Ze’evi.

It was especially seen in the destruction and burning of Smyrna, with navies from the Allied powers victorious in WWII offshore doing nothing to stop it, watching the fires and murders from onboard.

The American Consul General in Smyrna, George Horton, reported that one of the “outstanding features of the Smyrna horror” was the “wholesale violation of women and girls,” in mass rapes to go along with pillage and slaughter.

In 1924, the British Foreign Office said it estimated that “not less than 80,000 Christians, half of them Armenians, and probably more” were still being detained in Turkish houses, “many of them in slavery.”

The research was said to have found that that tens of thousands of Christian women suffered rape, abduction and forced conve  rsion during the 30 year reign of terror, along with the mass murder and expulsion of their husbands, sons and fathers.

Drawing a parallel to Germany recognizing the atrocities of the Third Reich during World War II to Turkey’s denial of the genocides and slaughters, the historians said there’s also been no remorse. “Every Turkish government since 1924—together with most of the Turkish people—has continued to deny the painful history we have uncovered,” they said.