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This is sure to irk the Turk. From AZG Armenian Daily, with thanks to Anthony:
The International Association of Genocide Scholars, president Robert Melson, vice-president Israel Charny, collectively edited and sent a letter to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the 6th session of the IAGS in Boca Raton, Florida, on June 6. Below we present the letter.Dear Prime Minister Erdogan:
We are writing you this open letter in response to your call for an "impartial study by historians" concerning the fate of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
We represent the major body of scholars who study genocide in North America and Europe. We are concerned that in calling for an impartial study of the Armenian Genocide you may not be fully aware of the extent of the scholarly and intellectual record on the Armenian Genocide and how this event conforms to the definition of the United Nations Genocide Convention. We want to underscore that it is not just Armenians who are affirming the Armenian Genocide but it is hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades. The scholarly evidence reveals the following:
On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens – an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. Another million fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years.
The Armenian Genocide was the most well-known human rights issue of its time and was reported regularly in newspapers across the United States and Europe. The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented by thousands of official records of the United States and nations around the world including Turkey’s wartime allies Germany, Austria and Hungary, by Ottoman court-martial records, by eyewitness accounts of missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by decades of historical scholarship.
The Armenian Genocide is corroborated by the international scholarly, legal, and human rights community:
1) Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he meant by genocide.
2) The killings of the Armenians is genocide as defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
3) In 1997 the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an organization of the world’s foremost experts on genocide, unanimously passed a formal resolution affirming the Armenian Genocide.
4) 126 leading scholars of the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer placed a statement in the New York Times in June 2000 declaring the "incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide" and urging western democracies to acknowledge it.
5) The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Jerusalem), the Institute for the Study of Genocide (NYC) have affirmed the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide.
6) Leading texts in the international law of genocide such as William A. Schabas’s Genocide in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2000) cite the Armenian Genocide as a precursor to the Holocaust and as a precedent for the law on crimes against humanity.
We note that there may be differing interpretations of genocide - how and why the Armenian Genocide happened, but to deny its factual and moral reality as genocide is not to engage in scholarship but in propaganda and efforts to absolve the perpetrator, blame the victims, and erase the ethical meaning of this history.
We would also note that scholars who advise your government and who are affiliated in other ways with your state-controlled institutions are not impartial. Such so-called "scholars" work to serve the agenda of historical and moral obfuscation when they advise you and the Turkish Parliament on how to deny the Armenian Genocide.
We believe that it is clearly in the interest of the Turkish people and their future as a proud and equal participant in international, democratic discourse to acknowledge the responsibility of a previous government for the genocide of the Armenian people, just as the German government and people have done in the case of the Holocaust.
Posted by Robert at June 28, 2005 6:45 AM
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I have met Armenian-Americans and Assyrian-Americans whose relatives died at the hands of the Turks in the early part of the 20th century. The Turkish lobby in the US is very powerful (lots of cash and funding of Chairs at universities)and they successful continue to block major academnic studies and resolutions by lawmakers to acknowledge their genocides. I have read that the yellow star that the Germans made the Jews wear on their sleeves was inspired by the Turkish practice of forcing their Jewish citizens to wear yellow clothing. According to the author, Bat Ye'or, Jewish in the Middle East wore yellow to designate their dhimmi status, dhimmi Christians wore blue clothing, and Samaritans wore red. I believe that the Taliban in Afghanistan revived the yellow color for dhimmis, forcing the few non-Muslims under their control to identify themselves by colored clothing.
Posted by: maryrose![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at June 28, 2005 7:44 AM
"I have read that the yellow star that the Germans made the Jews wear on their sleeves was inspired by the Turkish practice of forcing their Jewish citizens to wear yellow clothing.."
No. The yellow identifying mark originates with Arabs, with the wonderful, Arabian-Nightesque court of Haroun al-Raschid. The Christians got to wear a blue zunnar, or belt. Other kinds of identification, on both clothing and dwellings, can be found throughout the history of Muslim conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims.
Under the Taliban, and until quite recently, Hindus in Afghanistan (yes, until recent decades, and certainly before World War II, both small communities of Hindus and Jews managed to live in Afghanistan, and specialized in certain kinds of goods and products -- see Byron, "The Road to Oxiana")had to wear yellow-orange garb.
The reason given by the Muslims was "to protect them." To protect them from what? Well, if they behaved in a manner that Muslims were not allowed to behave in, they might be physically harmed, unless it was clear that they were NOT Muslims.
Go ahead --- believe that explanation. It will make you sleep better, won't it?
Posted by: Hugh at June 28, 2005 9:04 AM
The issue here is at the heart of Western values. In the last 100-some years, we have submitted ourselves to the judgment of history.
By this I mean the way we write history in the West. It is not history written by the winners, but rather the analysis of one who looks at both sides, and sometimes, becomes far-too-infatuated by the other side.
We suffer the simultaneous blessing and curse of being able to respectfully understand both sides of a question. This is why we flog ourselves over past cultural sins and have become timid about judging other cultures.
We of the West are the Best. We are perhaps the first genuinely mature civilization, one that has chosen not to commit suicide, but rather wears its morals on its shoulder and attempts to seduce the rest of the world while exercising great forebearance.
Posted by: Loxias at June 28, 2005 9:22 AM
I forgot to mention the Armenian Genocide. The Turks find it politically impossible to admit this historic fact. The Japanese are equally uneasy about their cultural culpability in WWII. They are not Western yet.
Compare this to how Americans, North and South, celebrate the US Civil War, or that silly re-enactment of the Battle of Trafalgar (today, 28 June, I think). Europe has Viking re-enacters, just as we American has Civil war re-enactors.
The Western bit is to take history warts and all, truthfully.
Posted by: Loxias at June 28, 2005 9:26 AM
In my local paper there is an account of the atrocities which were committed BEFORE the WWI 1860 0nwards.
This account is 3000 words and published in 1897 it is the entire speech of a public address by an MP regarding the plight the Cretan people faced at the time, the Concert Of Europe were about to evict the Greeks from Crete and allow the Turks in as 'Police'.
It states the alarm of a sizable part of the British population, it admits that all the ambassadors had signed up to a denunciation of the Turkish leader of the day saying ' He was totally responsible ' for all the carnage, it also admitted that the 'facts' were withheld from the 'British people' lest they become incenced and unmanageable by the outrages which were being committed on the Armenians.
Posted by: breadwinner
at June 28, 2005 3:15 PM
"the analysis of one who looks at both sides, and sometimes, becomes far-too-infatuated by the other side."
--- from a posting above
Robert Frost defined a "liberal" as someone who "always takes the other fellow's side in a quarrel." There's a lot to be said for crackerbarrel wisdom, especially when it is fake-crackerbareel and the man in the rocking chair has written "Provide, Provide."
at June 28, 2005 3:56 PM
In the meantime Turkish goverment is promoting agressively an Ottoman revival as a solution for Europes problems and even as a solution for the Armenian genocide. Because if the Armenians and the greeks didn't obstruct the empire nothing would happened. In Holland the Turkish embassy approached a debate center in Amsterdam to organize a debate about the Armenian genocide while making a public debate about the same topic in their own country impossible. They were going to finance it and journalistic freedom was guaranteed on the condition that they put forward one member of the panel: the honorable professor and revisionist of international relations at the university of Ankara, Turkayya Ataov. His conclusions are: the Turkish were the biggest victims and in the Ottoman empire everything was perfect.
In a OSCE conference on antisemitism in Cordoba two weeks ago, minister of state mehmet Aydin also was promoting the Ottoman millet system as the guarantee against antisemitism
and discrimination
Here an idiotic groupie interview with Ataov
http://www.tallarmeniantale.com/ataov-interview.htm
speach of Mehmet Aydin you can download as pdf on
http://www.osce.org/item/9735.html
at June 28, 2005 4:20 PM
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