Genocide Articles in the Foreign Press‏

The Economist
Feb 28 2010
Extract from The Week Ahead

¢ A VOTE by the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday March 4th
threatens to sour relations between America and Turkey. The
congressional committee will consider whether to label the mass
slaughter of Ottoman Armenians by Turkish forces in 1915 as a
genocide. Previous similar resolutions never made it to a vote in the
House of Representatives for fear of damaging relations with an
important ally in the Middle East. But a House vote is more likely
this time after Barack Obama's election pledge to recognise the
episode as genocide.


Arutz Sheva, Israel
Feb 28 2010
US Congress to Vote on Armenian Genocide Resolution
Reported: 06:46 AM - Feb/28/10

(IsraelNN.com) An American congressional panel is expected to vote
this week on a resolution that would recognize the World War I-era
killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide. Prior to his
election, United States President Barack Obama said that he considered
the killings to be genocide but the American president has recently
been tight-lipped concerning the upcoming vote. The congressional
resolution is seen as diplomatically controversial as it could
alienate Turkey, a NATO ally crucial to America's foreign policy goals
in the Middle East.

Previous US administrations have defeated similar resolutions through
public cajoling about US national security interests and
behind-the-scenes lobbying but so far the Obama administration has
taken no public position on the measure. Aides to senior Democratic
and Republican lawmakers on the House of Representatives Foreign
Affairs Committee claim that there has been no White House pressure
against the resolution. Ankara has made clear on several occasions
that the issue could dramatically alter Turkish relations with the
United States.


Robert Fisk: Armenian Orphans were `Turkified', Nazi-Style
2010/02/27 | 11:22

Here's a piece from the notebook of Robert Fisk that appeared in the
February 27 edition of The Independent.

I am back in Beirut. A Sunday, and Missak Keleshian, an Armenian
researcher - actually, he's in love with film and photographs and is a
technician by trade - is showing an original archive movie on the
Armenian genocide.

It was made by German cameramen in 1918 and 1920. Never before shown.
I sit at the back of the big Armenian hall in the Beirut suburb of
Dbayeh and the camera tracks across a terrible wasteland of dry hills.
Southern Turkey - or western Armenia, depending on your point of view
- just after the 1915 genocide of one and a half million Armenians at
the hands of the Ottoman Turks. And a woman comes into focus.

She is sitting in the muck and holding her child - alive or dead, I
cannot tell. She is weeping and wailing and there before our eyes is
the 20th-century's First Holocaust - which our precious US President
Barack Obama dare not even call a genocide lest he offends Turkey.

Literally moving proof. Later footage shows 20,000 Armenian orphans in
Beirut, 30,000 in Aleppo. Where are their parents? Ask not Obama.

In one extraordinary scene, the orphans of the First Holocaust are
sitting at a breakfast table two miles in length. I am both mesmerized
and appalled. They smile and they laugh at the camera.

Dr Lepsius, a German working for Near East Relief - how swiftly the
good Germans who cared for the Armenians turned into more dangerous
creatures - holds the children in his arms.

Outside an orphanage, other children plead for help. Then there is a
picture of an orphanage run by the Turks in Beirut in 1915, in which
the children, Nazi-style, were `Turkified', given Muslim names to
eradicate their identity.

Enough. This will be a big report in The Independent. But there is a
long, panning shot across Beirut.

It is Lebanon, 1920; there are tents for the Armenians but the sweep
of film shows the port. There are steam ships and sailing ships and
the long coast which I see each morning from my balcony.


CBS News
Turkey and Armenia's Battle over History
Bob Simon Reports on the Longtime Feud Between Turkey and Armenia
over Genocide

28.02.2010

(CBS) Wars are fought over oil, land, water, but rarely over history,
especially about something that happened nearly 100 years ago.
But that's what Turkey and Armenia are still fighting over: what to label
the mass deportation and subsequent massacre of more than a million
Christian Armenians from Ottoman Turkey during World War I.

Armenians and an overwhelming number of historians say that Turkey's
rulers committed genocide, that its actions were a model for what Hitler
did to the Jews. The Turks, meanwhile, say their ancestors never carried
out such crimes, and that they too were victims in a world war.

Ever since, this battle over history has not only ensnared the two nations
but even the White House and Congress, where resolutions officially
recognizing the genocide are currently moving through the House and
Senate.

But our story begins where the lives of so many Armenians ended, far
from Istanbul, in the desert.

"60 Minutes" and correspondent Bob Simon took a drive into what is
now Syria, to the barren wilderness, to what amounts to the largest
Armenian cemetery in the world.

"As many as 450,000 Armenians died here," author Peter Balakian
told Simon.

Balakian is an Armenian American who has written extensively about
what happened in this desolate place.

According to Balakian, 450,000 Armenians died in this spot in the
desert. "In this region called Deir Zor, it is the greatest graveyard of
the Armenian Genocide," he explained.

Deir Zor is to Armenians what Auschwitz is to Jews. The most ghoulish
thing about the place is that 95 years later the evidence of the
massacres is everywhere.

Just a short distance from the banks of Euphrates there's a dump. It's
also the site of a mass grave. It has never been excavated. All we had
to do was scratch the surface of the sand to collect evidence of what
had happened here.

Under the surface was evidence of bones. "It's the hill full of bones,"
said Dr. Haroot Kahvejian, an Armenian dentist who showed Simon
around.

"Nobody bothered to dig them up until now?" Simon asked.

It was extraordinary standing on a mound where perhaps thousands
of people lie entombed. There is no record of who they were or where
they could have come from.

"Look at that. There are kids who know exactly where they are. They
are finding them by the dozen," Simon observed.

"Evidence comes in many forms. It comes in photographs, it comes in
texts and telegrams," Balakian said. "And it also comes in bones."

So just how did all these bones end up here?

In 1915, the First World War was raging and the Ottoman Empire was
crumbling. The Armenians were a Christian minority who were
considered infidels by the ruling Muslims -- a fifth column who sided
with the enemy in the war.

The fact that they were prosperous didn't help, says Balakian, whose
great uncle survived the genocide and wrote about it in a memoir
Armenian Golgotha.

"Like the Jews of Europe the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire had
a dominant role in commerce and trade, they were highly educated,
many of them," Balakian.

And he said they were highly resented.

Asked what happened next, Balakian said, "What happens from the
spring of 1915 on through the summer is a well orchestrated project of
government planned arrests and deportations."

Some were forced to buy round trip tickets for train journeys from which
they never returned. They ended up in box cars; the rest, mostly women
and children were forced on death marches for hundreds of miles. Many
perished from starvation, disease or brutal killings. The survivors ended
up in concentration camps hundreds of miles from Istanbul, out of sight.

At the time of the deportations, American diplomats in the region sent
dispatches to Washington detailing what they had seen and heard. Just
weeks after the arrests had begun, Henry Morgenthau the U.S.
ambassador, sent off this one: "Deportation of and excesses against
peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports of
eyewitnesses it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in
progress…"

To this day the Turks vigorously deny there was any such campaign.
When we spoke to Nabi Sensoy, he was Turkey's ambassador to
Washington.

"We were in Syria, sir, and we scratched the sand and came up with
bones. How can you argue with that?" Simon asked the ambassador.

"Well bones you can find anywhere in Turkey, you know. There have
been a lot of tragedies that have happened in those lands," he replied.

"Excuse me, sir. We dug up these bones in a place called Deir Zor,
which Armenians say is their equivalent of Auschwitz," Simon pointed
out.

"Well, I don't think that it was anything to comparable to Auschwitz.
This was only deportation. And things happened on the road," Sensoy
replied.

"But the deportations ended in massacres, didn't they?" Simon asked.

"No, it did not," the ambassador insisted.

"Weren't there massacres, mass executions and death marches of the
Armenians?" Simon asked.

"There was no death marches of Armenians. There was deportation
and tragic things happened. Many people perished under the deprivations
of the First World War," Sensoy said.

But did what happen in 1915 amount to genocide? The UN defines it as
the intent to destroy a racial, ethnic or religious group.

"The most important thing is the intent. The killings are something else.
It happened on both sides. But whether it constitutes genocide is another
matter. It is a legal word and it should not be lightly used," Sensoy explained.

"But you're saying there was no intention of the Turkish government…,"
Simon said.

"There was no intention of annihilating in all or in part the Armenian
population," Sensoy said.

Bishop Sarkin Sarkissian is convinced that the massacres were intended
and meticulously executed. He showed us one of the caves into which he
said untold numbers of Armenians, women and children were thrown.

It was, the Armenians believe, a primitive gas chamber.

According to the bishop, they lit fires at the mouth of the cave.

"And the people inside couldn't breathe anymore?" Simon asked.

"Exactly. And there is no other way to escape out," Bishop Sarkissian
replied. e Ottoman Turks developed a template, which according to genocide
scholars, was later adopted by the Nazis.

"Most dramatically we have Adolf Hitler saying eight days before invading
Poland in 1939, 'Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the
Armenians?' Hitler was inspired by the Armenian extermination. You know,
it made him think, 'Well, sure you know, you can get rid of a hated minority
group and if you're powerful and your side wins, that event will never get
recorded,'" Balakian explained.

The Turks dispute the evidence that Hitler ever uttered those words or was
inspired by the events of 1915. Nonetheless, when the Ottomans were swept
from power, and the modern Turkish state was founded, all memory of what
happened to the Armenians was erased. Records were destroyed, a new
alphabet was adopted and ever since, the massacres have not been taught
in schools.

The use of the word genocide is regarded as an insult to Turkish nation; it
is a jailable offense.

Hrant Dink, who edited an Armenian newspaper in Turkey, was prosecuted
three times for insulting the Turkish nation. He also received thousands of
death threats from extremists, but kept on writing.

His daughter Delal recalls the Turkish authorities telling her father they couldn't
protect him.

"They were kind of warning my father about what might happen. And the days
following that, nationalists groups came in front of Agos [her father's newspaper]
... in front of the newspaper shouting that he's their target. And he's their enemy.
And one day they will come for him," Delal Dink remembered.

Days later, as he stepped outside that same office, he was shot at point blank
range.

Dink is viewed as a martyr now, in Armenia, where he is seen as the latest
victim of the genocide. His picture emerges from the wall of flowers on a hillside
outside the capital Yerevan, where every April hundreds of thousands attend
a memorial to remind the Turks, and the world, of what they went through. They
pay homage to those who died nearly a century ago. It's as if the entire country
turns out for what is emotionally a funeral, a burial the victims never had.

And on the same day, in Times Square, thousands of Armenian Armenians
gather to demand that Congress pass a resolution recognizing the genocide.
Two years ago, before a resolution was to be put to a vote in the House,
Turkey recalled Ambassador Sensoy in protest. Its president warned of "serious
troubles" and its top general said that military ties with the U.S. would never be
the same. To limit further damage, the Bush administration and eight former
secretaries of state then weighed in to kill the bill. It worked.

"Eight former secretaries of state rallied behind Turkey to defeat that resolution,"
Simon told Ambassador Sensoy. "Why do you think that was, Sir?"

"Well, I think it's the importance of Turkey for the United States. We have a long
list of positive agenda between us," he replied.

And the items on that list, Sensoy says, are far more important than the Armenian

issue: Turkey is, after all, a regional superpower and an essential broker between

the U.S. and the Muslim world. It has the second largest army in NATO and the

U.S. relies on the country's Airbases for its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Seventy percent of American supplies to those wars go through Turkey, which is

also a crucial conduit for oil.

Which is probably why no U.S. president has uttered the word genocide.

During his presidential campaign, Candidate Obama promised that, if elected,

he would use the word. "The Armenian genocide," he said, "is a widely

documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence."

But when President Obama made his first overseas trip to Turkey, he never

mentioned the word.

Late last year, the U.S. brokered an agreement between Turkey and Armenia

to establish diplomatic relations, with one key condition: that a historical

commission be formed to rule on whether a genocide took place. Nearly six

months later, the deal appears to be unravelling. The battle over the use of the

word is far from over.