Assyrian International News Agency AINA
May 18 2013
Conference on Assyrian, Armenian and Greek Genocides Held in Chicago
Posted GMT 5-18-2013 15:32:8
Skokie, IL — The largest academic conference ever held focusing on
the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Genocides concluded on Saturday, May
11, after two days of presentations by over a dozen scholars from
Armenia, Australia, England and across North America. Attended by over
120 participants each day, the conference was filled to capacity with
an enthusiastic and inquisitive audience.
The conference, entitled The Ottoman Turkish Genocides of Anatolian
Christians: A Common Case Study, was organized by the Armenian
National Committee of Illinois, the Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic
Research Center and the Assyrian Center for Genocide Studies, and was
held at the prestigious Illinois Holocaust Museum and Educational
Center in Skokie, IL, on May 10 and 11, 2013. The assessments of the
conference, both by the presenters and the attendees, were
overwhelmingly positive.
“We were very pleased by the new and exciting material presented by
our scholars,” stated George Mavropoulos of the organizing committee.
“After listening to these remarkable presentations, it has become very
clear for many of us that the Genocides of the Armenians, Greeks and
Assyrians were coordinated and can be viewed as one — organized by
the same individuals, using similar methods and pursuing the unified
goal of eliminating the native Christian population from Anatolia,” he
continued.
The conference was opened by Master of Ceremonies John Davis, Emmy
award winner and long-time reporter and anchorman for CBS affiliate
WBBM-TV in Chicago. In his introductory remarks, Davis thanked the
many sponsors, volunteers, scholars and participants for their
contributions and for making the conference a reality. He then
introduced Skokie Mayor George Van Dusen, who spoke about the
significance of the conference being held at the Holocaust Museum.
Mayor Van Dusen was followed by Greek Consul General Ionna
Efthymiadou, who congratulated the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek
communities for coming together to organize the conference, and
encouraged the scholars to continue their research into the Ottoman
Genocides.
Davis then introduced conference moderator George Shirinian, Executive
Director of the Zoryan Institute of Toronto, Canada. Shirinian’s
introductory remarks focused on the importance of these types of
conferences in the advancement of genocide research, and provided an
outline of how the conference would proceed. He then opened the first
session of the conference by introducing Dr. Paul Baltrop, the
Director of the Center of Judaic, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies at
Florida Gulf Coast University. Dr. Baltrop presented the topic
“Considering Genocide Testimony: Three Case Studies.” During his
presentation, Prof. Bartrop discussed the importance of survivor
memoirs as a historical resource, presenting examples from an
Armenian, an Assyrian and a Greek survivor. He noted that while
historians sometimes view survivor accounts as unreliable due to
trauma and bias, they often contain valuable details about massacres,
and sometimes are the only accounts available of particular events.
Following Dr. Bartrop was Stavros Stavridis, PhD candidate and
Historical Researcher at the Australian Institute of Macedonian
Studies, who joined the conference via Skype. Stavridis presentation
was titled “The Assyrian Issue 1914-1935: Australian Documents and
Press.” He reviewed how the Assyrian Genocide was reported on in the
Australian press as well as how the thoughts and actions of various
government and private individuals impacted policy based on
documentation he had researched in the National Archives of Australia
and the collections at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
The final speaker of the opening session was Dr. Anahit Khosroeva,
Senior Researcher at the Institute of History at the Armenian National
Academy of Sciences, who spoke on the topic “The Assyrians in the
Ottoman Empire and The Turkish Official Policy of their
Extermination”, discussing the massacres of Assyrians, and Christians
in general, as a continuum from the time of Abdul Hamid to the Young
Turks and into the Republican period, with the purpose of eliminating
the Assyrian, Greek and Armenian populations from Anatolia.
The Friday afternoon session was opened by Dr. Hannibal Travis,
Associate Professor of Law at Florida International University College
of Law. During his presentation, entitled “Cultural and Symbolic
Reparations of the Ottoman Christian Genocide: From Memorials to
Restitution of Historic and Sacred Sites,” Dr. Travis discussed the
destruction of the culture of the victim group that accompanied the
physical killing inherent in the Ottoman Genocides. As part of his
discussion of restitution of cultural monuments, Dr. Travis contrasted
the approaches and outcomes of the renovations of the Holy Cross
Church in Aghtamar and the St. Giragos Church in Diyarbekir.
The next speaker was Dr. Robert Shenk, Professor of English at the
University of New Orleans. Speaking on the topic “American Women,
Massacres, and the Admiral: Deep in Anatolia during the Turkish
Nationalist Revolution,” Dr. Shenk described the devastating role
American Admiral Mark Bristol played in the post-war period as
America’s chief diplomat in the area, and how despite pleas from
numerous female American missionaries and even his own officers, he
placed the interests of American commerce ahead of protecting the
remnants of the Christian populations in Anatolia from ongoing
destruction, censoring reports of massacres from information relayed
back to Washington. Dr. Shenk praised the women missionaries for their
bravery, working in a foreign and often savage land, with no
guarantees for their physical safety.
Thea Halo, author of the book Not Even My Name, then spoke on the
topic “The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks 1913-1923: Myths and Facts.”
Halo challenged some common assumptions often used to discount the
brutal treatment of the Greeks during the period of the Great
Catastrophe and offered valuable alternative views regarding Greek
irredentism based on the Megali Idea, and the role of King Constantine
I in protecting Greeks under Ottoman rule. Prof. Ellene Phufas, then
closed out the first day of the conference by sharing an excerpt from
her translation, along with Aris Tsilfidis, of These Are the Turks:
First-Hand Accounts from the Slaughter of Nicomedia, the first book of
Greek Genocide survivor accounts which was collected by journalist
Kostas Faltaits and published in Greek in 1921.
The second and final day of the conference began with Master of
Ceremonies John Davis opening the program with welcoming remarks,
after which he invited Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA)
National Board Chairman Ken Hachikian to address the conference. In
his comments, Hachikian emphasized that in the ANCA has been able to
make important strides in its lobbying activities because “we have the
truth on our side.” He added that research like that being presented
at the conference played an important role in helping to make that
truth better understood. Following Hachikian’s comments, Davis asked
Conference Moderator George Shirinian to take the podium and open the
third session of the program.
After brief comments Shirinian introduced Georgia Kouta, a PhD
candidate at King’s College in London, England, to present her paper
titled “Redeeming the Unredeemed: The Anglo-Hellenic League’s Campaign
for the Greeks in Asia Minor.” Kouta discussed the role of the
Anglo-Hellenic League in London in shaping western public opinion and
British policy on the Ottoman government’s treatment of its Greek
minority. She described how The League, which was composed of both
Greek and British members, collected valuable documentation on the
atrocities through Greek and non-Greek eye-witness reports, church and
newspaper accounts, and published pamphlets to raise awareness of the
atrocities.
Kouta was followed by Steven L. Jacobs, Associate Professor and Aaron
Aronov Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Alabama.
Prof. Jacobs made an interesting presentation about the writings of
Raphael Lemkin, the author of the word genocide and the father of the
UN Genocide Convention. He described Lemkin’s incomplete and
unpublished three volume history of genocide, and described Lemkin’s
treatment of the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Genocides.
The Saturday morning session was concluded with a presentation by Dr.
Tehmine Martoyan on “The International Legal Qualification and
Liability of Smyrna’s September Tragedy.” In her presentation,
Martoyan examined the possibilities of applying the legal term
“genocide” to the destruction of Smyrna in September,1922.
The fourth and final session of the conference opened with Dr. Gevorg
Vardanyan of the Armenian Genocide Museum & Institute in Yerevan,
Armenia, presenting his topic “The Ottoman Genocide of the Armenians
and Greeks: The Similarities and Structural Peculiarities.” Dr.
Vardanyan pointed out that there were many common elements to the
Genocides of Greeks and Armenians, including the methods used for
organizing the massacres and the organizers themselves.
Prof. Dikran Kaligian of Worcester State University spoke on the
“Security and Insecurity in the Ottoman Armenian and Greek
Communities, 1908-1914.” Prof. Kaligian described how the restoration
of the Ottoman Constitution had provided a brief period of hope and an
improvement in the personal security for the Armenians and Greeks
living in the empire. He then traced various events that began to
endanger those reforms, including the impact of the counter
revolutionary uprisings, the Balkan Wars, and the evolution of the
Young Turk movement from its liberal Ottomanist orientation toward a
chauvinistic pan-Turanist direction.
The final presentation of the conference was provided by Dr. Suren
Manukyan, a Fulbright Scholar on Sociology of the Armenian Genocide at
Rutgers University and Deputy Director of the Armenian Genocide Museum
& Institute, Yerevan, Armenia. Dr. Manukyan’s topic was “Cultural
Preconditions and Process of Social Indoctrination:
Socio-Psychological Dimension of the Ottoman Genocides.” Noting that
the ability to participate in mass murder is not an inherent human
characteristic, he described how the state conditioned the Ottoman
Muslim population to be able to murder the Christians through
propaganda via the mosques, by altering the legal system, and other
methods. He contrasted the Armenian Genocide with the Holocaust,
pointing out that many Armenians met violent deaths, sometimes at the
hands of their neighbors, rather than the more industrial process
encountered in Nazi concentration camps.
Following Dr. Manukyan’s presentation, Moderator George Shirinian
invited all of the presenters to the stage for a final question and
answer period from the audience before concluding the conference with
his final remarks. The conference proceedings will be published in the
near future.
The Armenian National Committee of Illinois is a grassroots public
affairs organization which works in coordination with a nationwide
network of offices, affiliated organizations and supporters to inform,
educate, and actively advance the concerns of the Armenian American
community on broad range of issues.
The Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center was founded to
research, preserve, and disseminate information concerning the history
of the tragic expulsion of the Greeks from their ancestral homeland in
Asia Minor.
The Assyrian Center for Genocide Studies is dedicated to the study of
the Seyfo, or the Assyrian Genocide, and works to support research in
the broader area of genocide studies and to promote awareness about
the crime of genocide.
http://www.aina.org/news/20130518103208.htm
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