Hurriyet Daily News, Turkey
Nov 22 2014
The sense of the Perinçek v Switzerland case
by MAXIME GAUIN
The hearing for the Perinçek v. Switzerland case, in front of the
Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), will take
place in January 2015, and so will coincide with the centennial of the
1915 events. After the decision of the French Constitutional Council
in February 2012, finding the Boyer bill in contradiction with the
Declaration of Human Rights (1789), the ruling of the ECHR was a major
blow for Armenian nationalism. The Court found a violation of DoÄ?u
Perinçek’s freedom of speech, and rejected the accusation of `racism.’
The ECHR `shares the opinion of the Turkish government, who claims
Holocaust denial is the main driving force of anti-Semitism today. In
fact, it judges that this is still a current phenomenon, which the
international community must be firm and vigilant against. One cannot
affirm that the dismissal of the description of `genocide’ for the
tragic events that occurred in 1915 and the following years might have
the same repercussions.’ The Court added, even more remarkably, that
`the present case is clearly distinct from cases bearing on the denial
of Holocaust crimes,’ because the Holocaust deniers `had not only
contested the simple legal description of a crime, but also denied
historic facts,’ and because these facts `had been judged to be
clearly established by an international jurisdiction,’ with `a clear
legal basis, i.e. Article 6, paragraph C), of the Statutes of the
International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.’
This distinction is crucial and, indeed, well substantiated. For the
Armenian case, the only attempt of an international tribunal, by the
British government in Malta, totally failed. More than two years of
investigation (1919-1921) were not sufficient to find any evidence
against any of the 144 Ottoman ex-leaders interned in Malta; the
seized Ottoman documents explicitly warned against measures
susceptible to lead to massacres and ordered the protection of the
relocated Armenians. If any evidence of `genocide’ had existed, it
would have been found by the British. These Ottoman documents seized
by the British army and published more than 35 years ago by Salâhi
Sonyel include:
`Armenian Deportations: A Reappraisal in the Light of New Documents,’
Belleten, January 1972 and `The Displacement of Armenians: Documents,
Ankara, 1978.’ Nobody has ever been able to find a satisfactory
explanation to conciliate the `genocide’ charge with these orders.
`Furthermore, the Court considers, with the applicant, that `genocide’
is a well-defined legal concept ¦ It is thus a very strict legal
concept, which is, moreover, difficult to prove. The Court is not
convinced that the `general consensus’ to which the Swiss courts have
referred, to justify the conviction of the applicant, can bear on
these very specific points of law.’ In other terms, the ECHR noticed
an obvious but fundamental fact: There is no consensus on the
`Armenian genocide’ charge. Indeed, since its emergence in the public
debate, in 1965, these accusations have been challenged, with
documentation, by respectable historians such as Edward J. Erickson,
Bernard Lewis, Guenter Lewy, Stanford Jay Shaw and Gilles Veinstein.
The ECHR’s ruling is an unprecedented demolition of the core of the
Armenian nationalist claims. Not surprisingly, there was huge pressure
on the Swiss government, who violated its tradition of neutrality and
accepted filing a poorly substantiated application to the Grand
Chamber. Currently, there are unbelievable pressures on the Grand
Chamber itself, both from Armenia and from the diaspora.
However, the re-examination of this case offers a new opportunity to
see what Armenian activism is. Among the third parties, there are the
Switzerland-Armenia Association (ASA) and the Coordination Council of
France’s Armenian Associations (CCAF). The ASA was established in 1992
by James Karnusian, who had also established, two decades before, the
Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), a
terrorist, racist and anti-Semitic organization. Correspondingly, the
co-chairmen of the CCAF are Jean-Marc `Ara’ Toranian, a former
spokesman of the ASALA, and Mourad Papazian, author of vitriolic
articles supporting Armenian terrorism during the 1980s.
The Grand Chamber now has the choice between freedom of speech and
those who defend a totalitarian conception of justice in the name of
`democracy.’
Maxime Gauin is a researcher at the Center for Eurasian Studies (AVIM)
and a PhD candidate at the Middle East Technical University history
department.
November/22/2014
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