Armenian Genocide News

Azg Daily, Armenia
April 14 2010
TURKISH ACTRESS RECEIVES DEATH THREATS OVER PRONOUNCING
GENOCIDE

Turkish actress Pelin Batu pronounced the word genocide when speaking
about 1915 events carried out in the Ottoman Empire at a
Haberturk-aired program, bringing the program co-authors Murat
Bardakchi and Erhan Afyoncui into fury.

The Turkish actress appeared to be in hazard due to her expression,
Hurriyet reported. Batu said, she received death threats over
pronouncing the word genocide. Note that with her mother being of
Albanian decent, Pelin Batu is the daughter of a resigned Turkish
diplomat and former parliamentarian Inal Batu.


Azg Daily, Armenia
April 17 2010
HAIM ORON TO INITIATE DEBATE ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE IN KNESSET
APRIL 28

Chairman of Meretz bloc and member of the Israeli Knesset Haim Oron,
who is the main supporter of the Armenian Genocide recognition, will
submit a debate on the issue on April 28. However, according to him,
his expectations are more than skeptical.

As April 24, when this date is commemorated worldwide, is Saturday,
Oron is going to offer this delicate issue for a discussion on April
28, after the parliamentary vacation, PanArmenian.net reports.

"I stay in touch with Armenian organizations, but this year the
government will bury this issue sooner than last time," Izsrus portal
quoted Oron as saying. "Currently Yerevan and Ankara are in a process
of negotiations, and many people do not recommend interfering. I do
not see any connection between the events which happened 95 years ago
and current geopolitics of the region, but these are the realities."

According to the source, after the appointment of Ze'ev Elkin of Likud
party to the post of chairman of the coalition, Oron has lost his ally
in the struggle for the Armenian Genocide recognition. "Earlier, he
was the leader of Israel-Armenia parliamentary friendship group,
however, now we shall wait to see what pressure will be exerted on him
by the coalition fellows. I will talk to him soon¦ Despite sharp
cooling in the Turkish-Israeli relations and many people's desire to
do a bad turn to Turkey, I have skeptical expectations," said Oron.

news.am, Armenia
April 17 2010
John McCain on Armenian Genocide

11:31 / 04/17/2010On April 15, the former presidential nominee, U.S.
Senator John McCain reiterated his opinion that Armenian Genocide was
perpetrated in Ottoman Empire.

`U.S. and Turkey have been friends and allies for years. Turks fought
beside U.S. troops in many wars and I hope we will do our utmost to
maintain relations,' McCain said in the interview with Voice of
America.

According to him, Armenian Genocide should not become an everlasting
issue in Turkish-Armenian relations.

`I am confident, what happened was genocide, but I state it was
perpetrated in other times and under another government. This should
be considered by all parties.'

TURKEY'S 95 YEARS OF DENIAL
Toronto Star
April 17 2010
Canada

As other countries apologize for atrocities, the 1915 Armenian massacre
remains taboo

Some were thrown into the Black Sea and drowned, while thousands
of other men, women and children were forced to march through the
blistering Syrian desert without food or water, dying en route to
concentration camps.

The 1915 killings of up to 1.5 million Armenians by extremists in the
Ottoman Empire's "Young Turk" movement during the turmoil of World War
I has been exhaustively documented by scholars, diplomats, journalists
and the testimonies of survivors. Henry Morgenthau, the U.S.

ambassador to the empire, cabled Washington about a "systematic plan
to crush the Armenian race."

After the war, a Turkish court held war crimes trials and concluded
that the leaders of the massacre were guilty of murder - though they
were never jailed.

Ninety-five years after the onset of what has been labelled the 20th
century's first genocide, Turkey has not come to terms with the dark
event, whose ghosts still haunt relations with neighbouring Armenia.

The months-long massacre is marked on April 24, the date when hundreds
of Armenian intellectual leaders were deported and killed.

"Turkey has a different perspective on history," says Fadi Hakura,
a Turkish expert at Chatham House in London. "It believes no genocide
took place: many Armenians were expelled for security reasons or
killed by the ravages of war."

Turkey maintains that local Armenians supported the invading Russian
army during the war, and rose up treasonously against Ottoman
authorities. And many Christian Armenians were killed along with
Muslims in what amounted to a civil war. Deportations occurred,
but no organized attempt to destroy the Armenian population.

Hence, no genocide.

Nearly a century later, everyone linked with the massacres is dead,
along with the Ottoman Empire. Turkey is an ally of the West, a global
trading partner and a candidate for European Union membership.

But Ankara's efforts to wall off the past run counter to those of other
countries with clouded histories. A German president has apologized
for the Holocaust to the Israeli parliament and a former South African
leader asked forgiveness for the pain and suffering of the viciously
racist apartheid system. Last week, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir
Putin acknowledged the Soviet role in the slaughter of 22,000 Poles
at Katyn during World War II.

But Turkey still considers the subject of Armenian genocide taboo. So
international moves to recognize it continue to outrage Ankara.

When the U.S. House of Representatives foreign affairs committee
recently voted to recommend Washington recognize the genocide, Turkey
recalled its envoy and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip said the bill
"accuses the Turkish nation of a crime it has not committed."

Canada is among 21 countries to have recognized the genocide, although
more than 150 others have been reluctant to anger Turkey by formally
acknowledging it.

After nearly a century, why is Ankara so intent on suppressing the
grim events?

"Turkey has a duality in the way it's governed," says George Shirinian,
who heads the International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights
Studies in Toronto.

"There is a democratically elected government that runs its day to
day affairs. But there is a power behind the scenes known as the `deep
state,' which consists of self-appointed protectors of the old ways,
mostly military and senior civilian bureaucrats."

Turkey, he says, was founded on the ashes of the old Ottoman Empire
by the military, which plays a prominent role in economic as well as
security matters. It wants to avoid any aspersions on the historic
military figures of a past that is "not as glorious as it appears."

While the country has modernized in a "very visible way," says
Turkish expert Henri Barkey of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania,
"there has never been a democratic culture in Turkey."

But there has been progress in the past decade, he adds. The rights
of the Kurdish minority, whose existence was once denied, is now an
acceptable topic of conversation.

The Armenian killings have remained under wraps for longer, and public
discussion was repressed.

After the 2007 shooting of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink - who
called the killings genocide - protests broke out and the prosecution
of outspoken intellectuals waned, although they are still taken to
court by nationalists who lodge damaging civil suits. Writers and
publishers have been charged with "insulting Turkishness" and jailed,
or forced to pay sizeable fines.

But Turkey's young population, with an average age of 27, is more
progressive than its parents. And although the establishment is slow
to liberalize its views, the new generation is catching up quickly.

The government, meanwhile, has signed an historic agreement with
neighbouring Armenia to launch diplomatic relations and open the
borders. But the shadow of the genocide still hangs over the two
countries. Turkey says only that it would agree that a committee of
historians could investigate the events of 1915.

That is unacceptable to many Armenians, who remember the missing
family members whose fates are still unknown: of two million Armenians
in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of World War I, fewer than 400,000
remained by 1922.


Azg Daily, Armenia
April 14 2010
DADRIAN-AKCAM BOOK ON THE TURKISH COURTS-MARTIAL
NOW IN ITS THIRD EDITION
Genocide Research Zoryan Institute

Despite being based on a taboo topic that is subject to legal
restriction in Turkey, the Dadrian-Akcam book on the Turkish
Courts-Martial titled, "Tehcir ve Taktil:" Divan-ı Harb-i Ã-rfî
Zabıtları. Ittihad ve Terakki'nin Yargılanması, 1919-1922 is now in
its third edition, indicating remarkable interest in the topic of the
Armenian Genocide there. First published some sixteen months ago by
Bilgi University Press in Istanbul, this 732-page volume is a detailed
reconstruction, plus a historical and legal analysis of the post-WWI
Turkish military tribunals prosecuting the perpetrators of "crimes
against the Armenians" during the war, and is based on original
Ottoman sources. Jointly compiled and edited by Professors Vahakn N.
Dadrian, Director of Genocide Research at the Zoryan Institute, and
Taner Akcam, Kaloosdian/Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at
Clark University, this compendium is ushered in by a 125pp extensive
introduction by Prof. Dadrian. It explores the criminal prosecution in
the 1919-1921 post-war period of the perpetrators of the wartime
Armenian Genocide. Supported by a succession of post-war but
pre-Kemalist Turkish governments, Turkish Military Tribunals spent
months gathering incriminating evidence as part of their pre-trial
interrogations. As a result, the Mazhar Inquiry Commission was able to
amass, classify and catalogue a wealth of evidence attesting to the
deliberate and planned nature of the wholesale liquidation of the
targeted Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. Witness
testimonies included disclosures by high-ranking military officers,
governors of several ranks, and Young Turk Ittihad party leaders,
including the extensive affidavit supplied by wartime Third Army
Commander, General Mehmet Vehip.

Several aspects of these trials, unprecedented in Ottoman-Turkish
history, render the resulting documentation of the centrally organized
mass murder invaluable. Foremost among these is the nature of the
evidence-in-chief, involving secret and top-secret official ciphers
issuing from Talat Pasha, Interior Minister, party chief and the prime
architect of the Armenian Genocide. Equally important, all these
ciphers were authenticated by competent officials from both the
Justice and Interior Ministries before being introduced as prima facie
evidence. Moreover, the defendants were confronted with these
documents asking them to verify the authenticity of their signatures
at the end of these documents.

An English language edition of this very important book is set to be
published by a major American University Press, hopefully before the
end of the year.