Billings Gazette
Sept 25 2005
Turkish scholars look at Armenian question
ISTANBUL, Turkey – Scholars held the first-ever public discussions in
Turkey on Saturday about the early 20th-century massacre of
Armenians, choosing words carefully, avoiding emotional language and
picking apart history year by year at a gathering that nationalists
denounced as traitorous.
The academic conference had been canceled twice, once in May after
the justice minister said organizers were “stabbing the people in the
back,” and again on Thursday when an Istanbul court ordered the
conference closed and demanded to know the academic qualifications of
the speakers.
The Armenian issue stirs deep passions among Turks, who are being
pushed by many in the international community to say that their
fathers and grandfathers carried out the genocide.