Deutsche Presse-Agentur
September 23, 2005, Friday
14:47:17 Central European Time
Loophole allows Armenian genocide conference to go ahead in Turkey
ANKARA
An academic conference in Istanbul looking into the events of 1915
during which hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed is set to
go ahead despite a court injunction, after organizers discovered a
legal loophole in the court order on Friday.
The injunction bans the conference venue but not the meeting itself,
which is now to take place Saturday at a new location.
The events of more than 90 years ago are still a sore topic in
Turkey. Armenian historians claim that as many as 1.5 million
Armenians were killed when they rose up in revolt against the
crumbling Ottoman Empire during the First World War and that the
massacres constituted genocide. The official Turkish line is that
while many Armenians may have died in the struggle it was not
genocide.
More than a dozen European countries have passed resolutions
specifically stating that the events of 1915 did constitute a
genocide and that Turkey should accept this and make appropriate
apologies.
In a decision blasted by the Turkish government and E.U. officials,
the Istanbul 4th Administrative Court, acting on a request from a
nationalist group called the Lawyers Union Foundation, ordered that
the conference be cancelled.
But it emerged on Friday that the order only applied to Istanbul’s
Bogazici and Sabanci universities where the conference was to take
place and not other universities in Turkey.
Bilgi University, also in Istanbul, later announced it would allow
the conference to take place on its campus on Saturday, a day later
than originally planned.
“The court decision has not only trampled upon academic and
university autonomy as it is universally understood but also
trespassed very strongly on freedom of expression … as well as the
Turkish constitution itself,” Halil Berktay, a member of the
organizing committee told reporters Friday.
This week’s postponement is the second delay to hit the conference.
Organizers cancelled the original May 25 date after Justice Minister
Cemil Cicek described the gathering as a “stab in the back”.
Cicek has since tempered his comments and on Friday said that the
conference could go ahead but told NTV television that he didn’t
regard the timing as appropriate.
The controversy comes two weeks after prosecutors filed charges
against Turkey’s internationally famous author Orhan Pamuk for
“denigrating the country” when he told a Swiss news magazine that “a
million Armenians were killed”. Pamuk faces up to three years
imprisonment if found guilty.
The conference organisers expect protests from ultra-nationalists and
the gathering is likely to take place under tight security. dpa cw sr