Armenian News... A Topalian...6 editorials
RFE/RL Report
Armenia Marks Genocide Anniversary
April 24, 2019
Tens of thousands of people marched to the Tsitsernakabert memorial in Yerevan and laid flowers there on Wednesday as Armenia marked the 104th anniversary of the 1915 genocide of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey.
As always, the annual procession began with a prayer service held by Catholicos Garegin II, the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, by the eternal fire of the hilltop memorial overlooking the city center. The ceremony was attended by President Armen Sarkissian, Prime Minister Prime Minister Nikol and other senior state officials.
“It is the day to recall once again the tragedy of our compatriots who had suffered ferocities and had been expelled from the land of their ancestors … to tell the world once again about the Genocide -- the most hideous crime against humanity -- and to call for soberness and a fight against denial,” Sarkissian said in a written statement issued on the occasion.
“Impunity that followed the Armenian Genocide had opened the doors for other grave crimes against humanity and genocides: remember the Holocaust, the
tragedies in Cambodia and Rwanda,” he said.
A separate statement released by Pashinian noted not only the slaughter of some 1.5 million Armenians but also the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage in the Ottoman Empire.
“We were consistently deprived of the land on which Armenian culture and Armenian identity were formed and developed over thousands of years,” read the statement. “The cultural heritage that constitutes the Armenian identity -- thousands of schools, churches and monasteries -- was erased from the face of the earth.”
Pashinian also recalled the World War One-era massacres of hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Assyrians perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks. Armenia officially recognized them as genocide in 2015.
Both the president and the prime minister made clear that Yerevan will continue to seek greater international recognition of the Armenian genocide.
Turkey continues to deny a premeditated government effort to exterminate the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. Its vehement denials are dismissed
by most scholars outside Turkey.
“The historical record on the Armenian Genocide is unambiguous and documented by overwhelming evidence,” the International Association of Genocide Scholars said in 2007.
Pope Francis and his predecessor John Paull II prayed at Tsitsernakabert when they visited Armenia in 2016 and 2001 respectively. They both officially recognized the genocide, as did more than two dozen nations, including France, Germany and Russia.
[how to insult the memory of the victims and ensure that there cannot be any reconciliation with this view of history]
Bloomberg
April 24 2019
Erdogan Says Deporting Armenians Was ‘Appropriate’ at the Time
By Cagan Koc
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the deportation of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century was “reasonable” at the time.
Erdogan made the comment Wednesday at a symposium where he slammed France for marking the Ottoman campaign against the Armenians as a genocide.
“The relocation of the Armenian gangs and their supporters, who massacred the Muslim people, including women and children, in eastern Anatolia, was the most reasonable action that could be taken in such a period,” Erdogan said in a Twitter post in English. “We see that those who attempt to lecture us on human rights over the Armenian issue themselves have a bloody past,” he added, accusing the French of committing genocide in Africa.
Armenians say 1.5 million ethnic Armenians were killed from 1915 to 1923 in a deliberate campaign of genocide in Anatolia, the heartland of present-day Turkey. Ankara maintains the deaths occurred in clashes with Ottoman forces after Armenian groups sided with an invading Russian army. The conflicting narratives lie at the core of tensions between Armenia and Turkey, which have no diplomatic ties and face each other across a closed border.
Armenia marks April 24 as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, and earlier this year, France said it would do the same. President Donald Trump confined himself to using the Armenian name for the slaughter, Meds Yeghern, and paid tribute to “the memory of those who suffered in one of the worst mass atrocities of the 20th century.”
The Armenian population in Turkey today numbers in the tens of thousands.
“I remember with respect Ottoman Armenians who lost their lives under difficult conditions of World War I,” Erdogan said in a message to the dwindling ethnic Armenian community in Turkey.
— With assistance by Selcan Hacaoglu
[the letter is from the man who threatened to deport 100,000 Armenians when in one of his vengeful moods]. What a contrast his other speech!]
24.04.2019
Erdoğan commemorates Ottoman Armenians who died during WWI, 1915 events in letter to Patriarchate
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Wednesday penned a letter to Aram Ateşyan, acting patriarch of the Armenian Patriarchate, on the 104th anniversary of the tragic events of 1915, commemorating the Armenians killed in World War I.
Starting his letter with condolences to the Armenian community over the death of late Armenian Patriarch Mesrob Mutafyan on March 8, Erdoğan also offered his sincere condolences to the descendants of Ottoman Armenians who lost their lives in the harsh conditions of World War I, and commemorated with respect all the victims.
"As it was the case in the disintegration of other empires, the Ottoman Empire, too, witnessed many humanitarian crises inside its borders as well in neighboring geographies during its final stages.
I also wish God's mercy upon other Ottoman citizens who lost their lives due to epidemic diseases, mass migration and disruptive acts carried out by gangs and armed groups which escalated due to the weakening of state authority," Erdoğan wrote.
Acknowledging the Armenian community's great contributions to the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, Erdoğan reiterated that Armenians in Turkey still played important roles in every aspect of social, political and commercial life as equal and free citizens, as they did so in the past.
The president underscored that everyone shared one common goal: to heal the wounds of the past and further strengthen the bond between the two communities, who have experienced joyous moments and suffered through pain together throughout history.
Erdoğan vowed that Turkey will always stand by Armenians to help alleviate their pain and suffering and help them resolve their problems.
He also asserted that he would not allow a single Armenian to be discriminated against, alienated or marginalized, and underlined the "special importance" of the Armenian community's peace, security and happiness for Turkey.
"I believe that the way to build a common future together is by being one and united," Erdoğan said.
Calling on the Armenian community, Erdoğan added: "In this respect, I hope that you do not give opportunity to circles that try to distort our common past and infer hatred, grievance and animosity from history."
He also expressed his wishes for the new religious leader of the Armenian community to be elected as soon as possible and wished them success.
Turkey's position on the events of 1915 is that the deaths of Armenians in eastern Anatolia took place when some sided with invading Russians and revolted against Ottoman forces. A subsequent relocation of Armenians resulted in numerous casualties, added by massacres from militaries and militia groups of both sides. The mass arrests of prominent Ottoman Armenian politicians, intellectuals and other community members suspected of links to separatist groups, harboring nationalist sentiments and being hostile to the Ottoman rule were rounded up in then-capital Istanbul on April 24, 1915 is commemorated as the beginning of later atrocities.
Turkey objects to the presentation of the incidents as "genocide" but describes the 1915 events as a tragedy in which both sides suffered casualties.
Ankara has repeatedly proposed the creation of a joint commission of historians from Turkey and Armenia plus international experts to tackle the issue.
Pashinyan Slams Erdogan Who Said Armenian Deportations Were ‘Reasonable’
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan urged the international community to respond to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who said on April 24 that the deportation of Armenian during the time spanning the Armenian Genocide “was the most reasonable action that could have been taken.” Pashinyan called the Turkish leader’s remarks “extreme hate speech” and “justification of the murder of a nation.”
“The relocation of the Armenian gangs and their supporters, who massacred the Muslim people, including women and children, in eastern Anatolia, was the most reasonable action that could be taken in such a period,” said Erdogan, who also posted this message on his Twitter account.
“We see that those who attempt to lecture us on human rights over the Armenian issue themselves have a bloody past,” he added, accusing the French of committing genocide in Africa.
“Calling victims of the Armenian Genocide—the Ottoman Empire’s entire Armenian population, which was sent to death marches—‘Armenian gangs & their supporters,’ killing 1.5 million [people] and justifying it as a ‘most reasonable action’ is not just a new high in denialism, but justification of a nation’s murder,” said Pashinyan in a Twitter post in response to Erdogan.
“Above all, doing this on April 24 is an ultimate insult to the Armenian people and to humanity, extreme hate speech by Erdogan personally. The world must speak out,” Pashinyan added.
France 24, France
April 24 2019
France marks first national commemoration of Armenian genocide
France is marking its first "national day of commemoration of the Armenian genocide" on Wednesday, fulfilling a pledge by President Emmanuel Macron that has angered the Turkish government.
Macron announced the commemoration at a meeting with representatives of the country’s large Armenian community in February, honouring a promise made during his 2017 presidential campaign.
"France is, first and foremost, the country that knows how to look history in the face,” he said at the time, noting that France was among the first countries to denounce the World War I slaughter of Armenians by their Ottoman rulers.
France’s recognition of the massacre as a genocide was enshrined in law in 2001, following a lengthy struggle that has strained relations with Turkey.
For decades, Armenia and Turkey have been at odds over whether the World War I killings and deportations – which Armenia says left 1.5 million dead – should be described as genocide.
Turkey accepts that many Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were killed but denies that the killings were systematically orchestrated and constitute a genocide.
Macron’s announcement in February drew an angry response from Ankara, with a spokesman for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declaring: “No one can sully our history.”
Earlier this month, Turkey also chastised the Italian parliament for approving a motion to officially recognise the killings as genocide.
Armenians commemorate the massacres on April 24 – the day in 1915 when thousands of Armenian intellectuals suspected of harbouring nationalist sentiment and being hostile to Ottoman rule were rounded up.
[the reality in Turkey in contrast to Erdogan's posturing]
1915 Commemoration in Sultanahmet Prevented by Police - Pınar Tarcan
The ceremony to be held at the Sultanahmet Square in İstanbul today (April 24) to commemorate the ones who lost their lives in the Armenian Genocide of April 24, 1915 was prevented by the police.
The commemoration was to be held by the Human Rights Association (İHD) İstanbul Branch, Commission Against Racism and Discrimination at 12.00.
Though Eren Keskin, the Co-Chair of the İHD, negotiated with the police, they did not allow the commemoration to take place.
The İHD has decided to hold the commemoration and read out the statement for the press at the İHD İstanbul Branch Office in Beyoğlu.
Keskin announced the decision of the association in following words:
"Our April 24 genocide commemoration ceremony has been prevented by the police. Though a verdict of non-prosecution was given last year, the ceremony has been prevented again. We are condemning it and inviting you to our Human Rights Association."
HDP MP Paylan: A result of darkness in Turkey
Speaking to bianet regarding the prevention, Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) Diyarbakır MP Garo Paylan has stated the following:
"We held this statement for the press freely for years and did not encounter any prevention. But, this year, the statement for the press has been banned. It is a result of the democratic climate, the darkness in Turkey.
"For years, there was a will to confront the genocide, which took place 104 years ago. However, they have also taken a step back from this will of confrontation as well, I am really sorry. Every crime which is not confronted repeats itself and, unfortunately, this crime is also repeating itself today.
"The great brutality subjected to the Armenian people 104 years ago is being imposed on Kurdish people today.
"We demand that they confront the genocide so that this crime will not repeat itself once again. But, the government, which cannot confront the genocide, is causing other genocides today. We will never give up on this will of confrontation or the struggle for rights and law."
Commemoration prevented in 2018 as well
In last year's commemoration, the Governorship of İstanbul requested that the statement for the press to be read out not contain the word "genocide" and three members of the İHD carrying a banner were detained. The Association cancelled the commemoration upon this intervention.
Why is the commemoration held in Sultanahmet?
Arrested Armenians, especially Armenian intellectuals, were brought to a prison at the Sultanahmet Square in 1915. The building in question serves as the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts today. (PT/HK/SD)
For further statements by the Turkish organisers, click on
The Guardian
23 April 2019
Opinion
Anzacs witnessed the Armenian genocide – that shouldn’t be forgotten in our mythologising
James Robins
We have a chance to build a more honest and genuine tradition
“It is universally admitted,” the great psychologist Sigmund Freud wrote as the 19th century turned to the 20th, “that in the origins of the traditions and folklore of a people, care must be taken to eliminate from the memory such a motive as would be painful to the national feeling.”
In Australia and New Zealand, the most popular tradition of all is Anzac Day, perhaps the last truly unifying moment of national pride. Anzac Day has its own folklore, and that folklore has penetrated so deep that any citizen could automatically rehearse its liturgy: dawn storming of the beachhead, Chunuk Bair’s pinnacle, the waste of the Nek, Simpson and his donkey, trench life and periscope rifle, hardy lads seeing it through to the end.
We are told there is a Special Relationship: a close partnership forged between Australia, New Zealand, and Turkey since the 1980s around that sanguinary conflict at Gallipoli we commemorate every April 25th.
Looked at one way, the Special Relationship is a rare example to the world: former enemies can be reconciled. Veterans and families can mourn together. Memorials can be built and services held on each other’s soil. However the Special Relationship, and Anzac Day itself, has a seedy underside of ignorance and corrupted history.
Australians, New Zealanders, and Turks all date the birth of their nations to the First World War, ultimately to the cliffs of Gallipoli. The popular legend is one of miraculous emergence into the world by the efforts of great men. But this too is fraudulent, a distortion that obscures the real, much earlier origins of those countries: the extermination of their Indigenous peoples.
In Australia, the total usurpation of Aboriginal life. For New Zealand, the dispossession of Māori. Turkey’s formation was an abattoir of mud and blood that included the eradication of almost all ethnic and religious minorities, including the Armenians, Assyrians, and Ottoman Greeks between 1914 and 1923. It was, as the British sociologist Michael Mann says, “the most successful murderous cleansing achieved in the 20th century”.
Gallipoli, in fact, was the final trigger in the perpetrators’ decision to carry out unimaginable horrors. And further, Anzac Prisoners of War witnessed this genocide: the death marches and killing fields, the cattle trucks rammed with bodies, the concentration camps of Aleppo and Der Zor.
Gallipoli veterans Stanley Savige and Robert Nicol aided in the rescue of at least 45,000 Armenian and Assyrian refugees fleeing annihilation in 1918. Nicol sacrificed his life in the process. Civilians back home read gory details in the press, because the mass murder was (apart from the war itself) the story of the day.
When peace came, those same ordinary people participated in the world’s first international humanitarian relief movement on behalf of Armenian survivors. Australians and New Zealanders rallied to lend their care. Some even volunteered to give succour in ravaged places, like Isobel Hutton, John and Lydia Knudsen, and James Cresswell. The children born to the Genocide’s survivors found their way to Australasia, looking for a house of safety, and found it.
That successive Turkish governments, stretching back to the killers themselves, have denied the Genocide outright is well-documented: diplomatic extortion, millions spent on lobbying, the staining of academic study. Just last week, the Turkish Foreign Minister had the audacity to claim that “We are proud of our history because our history has never had any genocides. And no colonialism exists in our history…”
Imagine if Germany said something similar of the Holocaust, and we can begin to consider the injustice at work here.
Indeed, the Turkish government showed how little it cares for the Special Relationship or the “Anzac spirit” when, six years ago, it threatened members of the New South Wales state parliament that had reaffirmed a motion recognising the Genocide. To be quite clear, it is difficult not to believe that the Special Relationship is little more than a cover for Turkish leaders to assert their own mythology of nation-building, and to enforce their policy of genocide denial.
What is less known is that Australia and New Zealand’s governments have been complicit in this denial. Rather than acknowledge a historic crime or even recognise their own ancestors’ experience of that event, they stay quiet or warp the truth for fear of endangering the Special Relationship, for fear of disturbing their own national mythology.
Acknowledging another’s bleak past would mean acknowledging our own.
As Paul Daley recently wrote in these pages, it’s high time we reclaim our “national memory and narrative from the purveyors of a largely mono-dimensional Anzac story that comes at the expense of so much else”. And yes, revisiting and reconsidering the mythology of Anzac would be, as Freud said, “painful to the national feeling.” But in doing so, there is a chance to build a more honest and genuine tradition in its place.
James Robins is an award-winning journalist and historian. He is the managing editor of TheBigQ.org, and host of The Great Crime. His forthcoming book is When We Dead Awaken: Australia, New Zealand, and the Armenian Genocide.
[another Turkish pre-condition to frustrate negotiations with Armenia. The other one dictated by Azerbailan concerns Karabakh. The Turkish authorities do not comprehend that the genocide assessment has been researched in depth by literally swarms of historians and legal experts over decades. What archives will be held within a republic established three years after the commencement of the genocide?]
Arminfo, Armenia
April 23 2019
Turkish government warns Armenia: Yerevan will not be able to normalize relations with Ankara, making claims on the Armenian Genocide
Marianna Mkrtchyan
he Turkish government continues to insist that there was no Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire.
Thus, on the eve of the 104th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, the Turkish government made another statement, which is quoted by Azerbaijani Trend.
Thus, the Turkish executive authority publicly stated that allegedly they say Armenia is "afraid" to open its archives in 1915, because after that the whole world will receive evidence that the events of 1915 are not genocide, but "extermination and genocide of the Muslim population in the Ottoman empire by the Armenians. " At the same time, the Turkish government forgot that the documentary evidence of the Armenian Genocide is presented in the Genocide Museum Institute in Tsitsernakaberd, and anyone, including the Turks, can come and familiarize themselves with this documentation.
Turkey also complained that Armenia refused to set up a joint independent commission to investigate the events of that period. "Ankara addressed Yerevan in 2005 on the opening of the archives of 1915 and the creation of an independent commission. If the events of 1915 were really an Armenian genocide, Yerevan would be ready to open these archives," the Turkish government assured, justify the policy of denial pursued by Ankara for decades.
At the same time, the Turkish government went further and assured that all the claims of the Armenians regarding the events of 1915 do not have a legal basis. "In the archives of Turkey, there are thousands of facts about how Armenian gangs, with the support of external forces, killed civilians in the provinces of Agra, Kars, Erzrum, Van, as well as Turkish government officials during the Ottoman Empire," the Turkish government said, forgetting to mention as millions of Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks were brutally murdered or deported from their original places of residence.
For more convincing, the Turkish executive body stressed that, unlike Turkey, they say that there is still hostility and hatred towards the Turks in Armenia.
"While not a single Turk lives in Armenia, Armenians live in Turkey peacefully and without any problems. Multinationality is one of the main assets of Turkey," the Turkish government said, concluding by saying that all actions Armenian lobby against Turkey, in the first place, harm the interests of Armenians, who live in "poverty" in Armenia itself.
"The Armenian authorities, instead of thinking about the benefits of the genocide industry, should think about the future of their people. If the Armenian lobby believes that by influencing the parliaments of Western countries, it can somehow put pressure on Ankara, then it is greatly mistaken. Yerevan simply will not be able to normalize relations with Ankara, making claims of genocide, "concluded the Turkish government.
Armenpress.am
23 April, 2019
108-year-old survivor of Armenian Genocide to visit Yerevan memorial on April 24 remembrance day
108-year-old survivor of the Armenian Genocide Yepraksya Gevorgyan has expressed desire to personally visit the Tsitsernakaberd Armenian Genocide Memorial to pay tribute to the memory of the victims on April 24 in Yerevan, Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Deputy Director Edita Gzoyan told ARMENPRESS.
“A few days ago the grandchild of an Armenian Genocide survivor visited us and asked us to arrange his grandmother’s April 24 visit to the memorial. We are planning to welcome the woman and escort her on a wheelchair so she doesn’t appear in a big flow of visitors,” Gzoyan said.
ARMENPRESS also contacted the 108-year-old woman’s grandson, Arthur Karapetyan.
“In recent years she is thinking a lot about laying flowers at Tsitsernakaberd for the memory of the victims. I would like to fulfill her desire. She is recalling it all the time, telling about it,” he said, adding that his grandmother is from Kars, and is currently living in Armavir, Armenia.
Official documents of Yepraksya Gevorgyan mention 1914 as her year of birth, but according to her grandson she was actually born in 1911.
Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
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