Author: Kalashian Nyrie

UNION GENERALE ARMENIENNE DE BIENFAISANCE
ARMENIAN GENERAL BENEVOLENT UNION
Communiqué de l’UGAB France
11, square Alboni, 75016 France
Tél. : 01 45 24 72 75
Fax : 01 40 50 88 09
Email : [email protected]

_____

L’Etat Turc continue de nier le génocide Arménien. pourquoi ?

Conférence au Mémorial de la Shoah dans le cadre du 90ème anniversaire
du génocide arménien

Trois historiens de renom ont cherché hier à expliquer le génocide
arménien et sa négation à l’occasion d’une conférence remarquée à
l’auditorium Edmond Safra du Mémorial de la Shoah, à Paris. La
conférence était organisée par le Mémorial en partenariat avec l’UGAB
à l’occasion du 90ème anniversaire du génocide des Arméniens de
l’Empire ottoman, en 1915.

Organisée au lendemain de la diffusion du documentaire d’Arte
“Génocide arménien”, la conférence a attiré un public si nombreux
-environ 150 personnes- qu’en plus du grand auditorium Edmond Safra,
les organisateurs ont dû ouvrir une deuxième salle d’où l’on a pu la
suivre par écran vidéo interposé.

Les débats étaient présidés par Yves Ternon, historien, spécialiste
des génocides et docteur en histoire à l’Université de Paris
IV-Sorbonne, Raymond Kevorkian, historien, directeur de recherches et
conservateur de la bibliothèque Nubar, et Hans Lukas Kieser,
historien, enseignant à l’Université de Zurich.

Dans la grande salle située sous le “Mur des Noms” consacré à la
mémoire des victimes de l’Holocauste, ils se sont attachés à analyser
l’idéologie qui a inspiré le génocide, les mécanismes de la décision
ainsi que la démarche de la négation.

Selon Hans Lukas Kiezer, ce n’est pas seulement l’ethno-nationalisme
-le turquisme- qui inspire les dirigeants turcs de 1915, mais aussi le
social-darwinisme qui oppose les “races” dans une lutte pour la
survie, ainsi que le culte de la raison d’Etat, dont la préservation
justifie l’extermination de ceux qui sont perçus comme une menace pour
sa survie.

Au-delà de l’idéologie des meurtriers se pose la question du passage à
l’acte : comment et quand fut-il décidé d’exterminer les Arméniens ?
Pour Raymond Kevorkian, la décision ne s’est pas prise en une fois,
mais, en gros, en trois étapes. Il fut d’abord décidé, début 1914, de
déporter les Arméniens. Ce n’est qu’après l’effondrement de l’armée
turque du Caucase face aux Russes, principalement dû au froid et aux
épidémies, à l’hiver 1914-1915, que la décision fut prise de les
éliminer. C’est enfin vers le milieu de 1916 que le gouvernement de
l’époque prend de nouvelles mesures pour compléter la tâche et
supprimer la plupart des 500 000 Arméniens survivant encore en
Syrie. C’est à cette époque aussi que l’on dissout le Patriarcat
arménien de Constantinople, sous prétexte qu’il n’y a désormais plus
d’Arméniens en Turquie.

“Il n’y a pas de génocide sans négationnisme” : Yves Ternon démontre
que la théorie du complot et la perception d’une menace vitale se
retrouvent dans tous les génocides et, particulièrement, dans le cas
arménien. La spécificité de la négation du génocide des Arméniens
réside dans le fait que c’est un Etat qui en est le principal auteur,
et qu’il déploie ses ressources au service de cette cause, y compris
celles de l’ordre judiciaire ou de l’enseignement. Au niveau de
l’argumentation, les autorités turques recourent principalement au
renversement de la culpabilité (“ce sont les Arméniens qui ont
massacré les Turcs”), renvoient face à face la “thèse arménienne” et
la “thèse turque”, ou encore recourent à l'”hypercriticisme”, qui
consiste à reculer sans cesse l’administration de la preuve, et à
d’autres procédés dilatoires. Un procédé en vogue consiste enfin à
gagner du temps par des offres de dialogue sur l’interprétation
historique- dialogue qui donne l’apparence de la bonne
volonté. “Imaginez, déclare Yves Ternon au public du Mémorial, que
l’Allemagne propose à Israël un dialogue pour discuter s’il y a eu ou
non un génocide pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale=85”

Si tous les orateurs conviennent qu’une véritable démocratisation de
la Turquie passera inévitablement par une remise en cause fondamentale
du “tabou arménien”, ils ne sont pas tous optimistes quant aux
perspectives de changement dans la position du gouvernment turc. Hans
Lukas Kiezer souhaite que les “amis de la Turquie” utilisent les
opportunités qu’offre le processus actuel d’adhésion de la Turquie à
l’UE pour y faire avancer le débat et met en garde contre
l’instrumentalisation du génocide arménien à des fins politiques. Mais
Yves Ternon, “n’a pas confiance”. Il ne croit guère à une remise en
cause spontanée, issue d’un débat en Turquie même.

————————————————————

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Pan Armenian News

NATO DID NOT DECIDE ON DEPLOYING FORCES IN SOUTH CAUCASUS

25.04.2005 03:57

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ NATO did not decide on deploying its forces on the
territory of either of the South Caucasian states, Special Representative
for the Caucasus and Central Asia Robert Simmons stated in Tbilisi. `NATO is
not going to commit troops in South Caucasus for the defense of a gas
pipeline or any other economic objects. However I do not rule out that the
issue may be discussed in future’, he stated in response to the reports of
some media on the alleged decision by NATO to deploy forces in Azerbaijan
for the defense of the Azeri sector of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline.

Pan Armenian News

CANADIAN MISSION IN ARMENIA TO GIVE NEW IMPULSE TO COOPERATION

25.04.2005 04:57

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Today Armenian President Robert Kocharian met with the
delegation of Canadian parliamentarians and representatives of the Armenian
community of Canada, RA President’s press service reported. During the
meeting the parties discussed the Armenian-Canadian relations and noted that
with establishing of Canadian diplomatic mission in Yerevan the economic
cooperation between the two states will considerably activate. According to
the representatives of the Armenian community of Canada, even though they
call on the historic homeland rather frequently they every time witness
changes, which testify of Armenia’s progress. They assured that the Armenian
community of Canada is ready to develop cooperation with Armenia. The
parties also touched upon the international recognition of the Armenian
Genocide.

ITAR-TASS News Agency
TASS
April 24, 2005 Sunday

French Armenians commemorate genocide anniversary

By Nikolai Morozov

PARIS

The French Armenian community, which is the largest in Europe,
commemorated the 90th anniversary of the beginning of Armenian
genocide by the Ottoman Empire in 1915.

There are meetings and marches throughout France. French Armenians
are demanding the Turkish recognition of the large-scale killings.

Churches prayed for the slaughtered Armenians, and a stone was laid
in the foundation of a memorial marking the genocide anniversary in
Marseilles, where about 80,000 French Armenians live.

On Friday French President Jacques Chirac and visiting Armenian
President Robert Kocharyan laid wreaths to the monument to Armenian
genocide victims in Paris.

According to Yerevan, the large-scale killings of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire in 1915-1917 claimed 1.5 million lives. France
recognized Armenian genocide by the then imperial authorities in
2001. The French Armenian community has about 500,000 members.

Pan Armenian News

LVOV: RALLY ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE 90-TH ANNIVERSARY

24.04.2005 07:19

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Some 1 thousand Lvov resident, mostly Armenians, rally in
the city center on the 90-th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in 1915.
The rally participants went along Lvov central streets to the monument to
Taras Shevchenko. Priests were in the forepart of the procession, whose
participants have red carnations and lighted candles in their hands. They
carry transparencies: `All those not censuring the genocide are its
participants,’ `Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Empire awaits for its
«Nuremberg»’, `Non-acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide cannot be
justified by any national interests.’ Honorary President of Akhtyur Armenian
Association of Lvov Karapet Bagratuni said those gathered demand that Turkey
and other countries of the world, which have not recognized the Armenian
Genocide, to properly acknowledge it. In his words some 3 thousand Armenians
live in Lvov. Militia does not hamper those gathered. It should be noted
that April 22 unknown people again wrote offensive expressions on the walls
of the Armenian church situated in the center of Lvov.

Agence France Presse
April 24 2005

Leaving Iraq to settle for separatist Karabakh — an Armenian story

24/04/2005 AFP

LACHIN, Azerbaijan, April 24 (AFP) – 4h29 – Turkish massacres of
Armenians which began 90 years ago on Sunday have a lot to do with
why a pretty 29-year-old from Iraq is now living on one of the most
contested chunks of land on earth in the Caucasus.

An ethnic Armenian whose grandparents fled to Baghdad when Ottoman
forces began their campaign against Armenians in eastern Anatolia,
Anakhit Petrosyan once dreamed of coming to Armenia to work in the
Iraqi embassy in Yerevan.

But when a US bomb killed her father last year her plans changed and
like her grandparents before her, she fled her birthplace to settle
in the Lachin district of Azerbaijan which is controlled by
pro-Armenian forces of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh republic.

“I didn’t know much about Karabakh, all I knew was that there had
been a war here and these were our territories, we hoped to get help
here,” Petrosyan said.

Armenians around the world mark April 24 as the day Ottoman Turks
began the genocide of their people in 1915, something Turkey denies
ever happened.

But the events of the early 20th century are today overshadowed by
Armenia’s ongoing conflict with its other Turkic-speaking neighbor,
Azerbaijan.

In 1994, Armenia and its proxies captured Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic
Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, as well as seven surrounding
Azeri regions, through a gruelling six-year war that cost 25,000
lives and displaced about one million people, 250,000 of them
Armenians.

Turkey closed its border with Armenia in solidarity with Azerbaijan,
dealing a crippling economic blow to the former Soviet republic from
which is has yet to recover.

But Azerbaijan still claims the territories and 750,000 Azeri
refugees remain in camps on the ready to return.

A shaky ceasefire is often punctuated by increasingly frequent
shootings that have taken at least a dozen lives this year.

The escalation prompted the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe (OSCE) which is charged with mediating the conflict to
express concern about the breaches as well as recent public
statements about the possibility of war.

Azerbaijan charges that Karabakh and Armenian authorities have put in
place an Israeli-style settlement plan in the occupied regions
outside of Karabakh itself, so that they can lay future claims to
them.

The Azeri claim is highlighted by cases like Petrosyan’s who like
other Armenians from the diaspora outside the former Soviet Union
settled in the territory.

The focus of those concerns has been the mountainous area in which
Petrosyan and her family now live, the strategically important Lachin
corridor, renamed Verdzor by the Armenians, which represents the only
land route between Karabakh and Armenia.

Unlike Karabakh, which had a 75-percent ethnic Armenian population
before the war, Lachin was predominantly Azeri.

A recent OSCE mission sent to the separatist republic to verify
Azerbaijan’s claims said in its findings that up to 12,000 people,
mostly Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan, had been resettled in the
area.

This is immediately obvious to any visitor to Lachin where the only
sign of it ever having been in Azerbaijan’s hands are the
eastern-style window portholes in some of its war-gutted
administration buildings.

Petrosyan, whose husband was wounded in the Iran-Iraq war of the
1980s and taken prisoner by US forces in the Gulf war in 1991 said
the possibility of another war with Azerbaijan would not deter her
from staying in Lachin.

“If we could fight for Iraq, then we can surely fight for our own
homeland,” she said.

Lachin’s authorities deny any “foreign” Armenians have settled in the
area, or in fact that any live there at all.

“We don’t see our job as settling as many people as possible, our aim
is to give the refugees a place to live and secure the corridor,”
said Gagik Kosakyan, the deputy head of Lachin’s administration.

Securing the corridor has meant rebuilding much of the area’s
infrastructure and housing, so much so that the area looks more
prosperous than the adjacent region within Armenia proper.

Armenian officials have said any settlement over Karabakh would have
to include an Azeri concession of Lachin, an area that saw some of
the heaviest fighting during the war because of its strategic
importance.

Kosakyan estimated that the separatist republic had invested one
million dollars (765,000 euros) a year to rehabilitate the region
since 1994, with many extra funds coming from Armenia’s influential
diaspora in the West.

And like many other refugees in the region informally polled by AFP
Petrosyan she said she was intent on staying. “They can say what they
want, but we know this is our land,” she said.

Pan Armenian News

ARMENIAN PRESIDENT CALLED TURKISH PREMIER’S LETTER `NOT ENCOURAGING’

24.04.2005 03:41

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Armenian President Robert Kocharian called the letter
received from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan from the point of
view of solution of the Armenian-Turkish relations. Yesterday in the air of
the Russian TV Company, specifically, in Zerkalo program, he noted that he
would like not to speak of the content of the letter in detail, however he
will answer the letter soon. Touching upon the question what the
acknowledgement of the Genocide means to Armenia Robert Kocharian
underscored Armenians do not have hatred, rather – bitterness. A person can
feel something like that when has lost a friend or a relative and the
culprit who did it is not punished. `The sensation takes the shape of an
all-national one and the vector is rather clearly specified. It is enough to
visit the Memorial Complex of Tsitsernakaberd to understand what Armenians
feel concerning that day,’ Robert Kocharian accentuated.

Providence Journal , RI
April 24 2005

John Avakian grapples with the Armenian Genocide, through art

BY BILL VAN SICLEN
Journal Arts Writer

For years, Massachusetts artist John Avakian ran from his past — ran
from the shadows and silences in his family’s history and from his
own memories of growing up as the only son of survivors of the
Armenian Genocide.

Now Avakian, who’s having a flurry of shows at Providence galleries
this spring, has embraced what he once tried to flee.

“I was in total denial,” he says during a phone interview from his
home in Sharon, Mass. “Deep down, I knew the truth. I knew that my
parents have lived through his horrible massacre. But I couldn’t
admit it to myself.”

Avakian says the turning point came in the mid-1990s, when his
then-girlfriend tricked him into visiting a private therapist.

“She told me the therapy sessions were for her, when they were really
for me,” he says. “She knew I’d never do it on my own. By the end of
the first session, I was crying like a baby. It all just poured out
of me.”

Since then, Avakian’s work has focused almost exclusively on the
Armenian Genocide, which began in 1915 and eventually claimed the
lives of more than a million Armenians. This year marks its 90th
anniversary.

“It’s amazing that it’s been 90 years, and we’re only just beginning
to talk about it,” Avakian says. “In my own case, it took years of
therapy before I could really discuss it. But as a society, we’re
still in denial.”

Avakian hopes his current work, which is on display at the Mathewson
Street Methodist Church through April 29 and in a group show at
Gallery Z on Atwells Avenue through May 28, will help spark greater
awareness of the tragedy.

A printmaking instructor at Northeastern University and the Boston
Museum School, Avakian specializes in one-of-a-kind prints known as
monotypes. Often his starting point is a photographic image copied
from a book or downloaded from the Internet. Typically, the
photographs show mass graves, hooded corpses and evidence of other
atrocities committed by Ottoman Turks against Armenians.

“Early in my career, I would have recoiled from using that kind of
imagery,” Avakian says. “It’s just too raw, too gruesome. But now I
think the world needs to see what happened. It needs to see the
horror.”

At the same time, Avakian admits that he tries to tone down the raw
immediacy of the images by adding splashes of color, bits of poetry
and other elements. The result, he says, is a mix of beauty and
barbarity.

“I come from a humanist background, where beauty is the ultimate goal
of art, even if the subject matter is ugly,” he says.

Both the Mathewson and Gallery Z shows feature works from an ongoing
series Avakian calls “Man’s Inhumanity to Man: If I Begin to Cry, I
Will Cry Forever.” The title for the series comes from a confession
Avakian made at one of his therapy sessions.

“At one point, I told the therapist that I felt like I was about to
cry,” he recalls. “The therapist said, ‘Then why don’t you?’ I
answered that I was afraid that if started crying that I would keep
on crying forever.”

“They shut me out”

Born in Worcester, Avakian grew up in a family where memories of the
Armenian Genocide were unspoken yet ever-present. He says his parents
rarely talked about their experiences, and when they did, they often
went to great lengths to make sure their son never understood what
they were saying.

“Every now and then, I’d stumble in while they were talking about
it,” Avakian says. “Immediately, they’d switch from speaking
Armenian, which I understood, to Turkish, which I didn’t. They shut
me out.”

By the time he graduated from high school, Avakian says he had
internalized his parents’ habit of not speaking about the past.
Though already active as an artist, he says he never considered
exploring his family’s history.

The silence continued at Yale University, where Avakian earned
undergraduate and graduate degrees in painting, and at Boston’s
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where he studied printmaking from
1990 to 1994.

Avakian says the first sign that something was amiss came when he saw
a photograph of an electric chair and couldn’t get the image out of
his mind.

“At the time, everything I was doing was totally abstract,” he
recalls. “No pictures or images of any kind. But once I saw this
picture, I just couldn’t shake it. I had no idea why it affected me
that way, but it did.”

Then came the therapy sessions with his girlfriend. Suddenly, the
picture of the electric chair made perfect sense.

“It was a symbol of state-sanctioned death,” Avakian says. “In a
sense, it crystallized all the feelings I’d learned to bury.”

Immersed in history

Since then, Avakian has immersed himself in Armenian history,
including the campaign of mass killings now known as the Armenian
Genocide or holocaust. Concentrated mainly in the Anatolian region of
present-day Turkey, the violence resulted in the death or expulsion
of an estimated 2 million people.

He’s also learned more about his own parents’ backgrounds, including
the horrific story of how his mother, as a child, had been forced to
watch as Turkish soldiers slaughtered most of her family.

“No wonder she didn’t want to talk about it,” Avakian says. “The pain
must have been overwhelming.”

Note: In addition to the Gallery Z and Mathewson Street Church
exhibits, Avakian is also the focus of two other Providence-area
shows. From May 4 to 3, his prints will be on display at the Jewish
Community Center at 401 Elmgrove Ave., and from May 19 to June 30 at
the Hunt-Cavanagh Gallery at Providence College.

APRIL 24 NOT ONLY DAY OF COMMEMORATION OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE VICTIMS,
BUT ALSO DAY OF AWAKENING OF ARMENIAN PEOPLE’S SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS: USD
LEADER

YEREVAN, APRIL 22. ARMINFO. April 24 is not only a day of
commemoration of the Armenian Genocide victims, but also a day of
awakening of the Armenian people’s self-consciousness. Leader of the
Union Self Determination party Paruyr Hairikyan said at a
press-conference today.

He said that in 1965 the Armenian people for the first time remembered
its rights, demanding not only to mark at the state level the Day of
genocide, but also to release the seven political prisoners and to
return the Armenian lands seized by Turkey after the Genocide. A year
later in 1966 the party Union Self Determination currently headed by
P.Hairikyan was formed which was fighting and still fights for the
rights of every citizen of the country. In connection with the
aforementioned, it is not clear to Hairikyan how can high ranking
officials state that the process of Genocide recognition must be stage
by stage – at first recognition, then condemnation, and then
compensation to the victims and only after this the return of the
territories can be in question. It must be a package solution and
everything must be returned and compensated at once, as in 1915 not
only the Armenians but also the Armenian statehood were killed,
Hairikyan thinks. Hairikyan himself is a successor of the genocide
victims, the brother of his grandfather Abraham Hairikyan was killed
by Turks in 1915.

TURKEY: A Nation at the Crossroads

If not now, when?

INTERNATIONAL PEN
Writers in Prison Committee
April 22, 2005

Laws affecting Freedom of Expression

On 6 February 2002, Law No. 4744 – the ‘Mini-Democracy Package’ – was
adopted by the Turkish government. This changed some of the laws that
had previously seriously curtailed freedom of expression, but the
changes were not always positive. Many of the laws are still being
modified. The Human Rights Association of Turkey, evaluating the first
three months of 2003, recently concluded that these amendments were
‘partial’ and their piecemeal nature still rendered the ‘constitutional
and legal system of Turkey’ not fully democratic. It called for ‘radical
democratic change and transformation’.

The association in particular reported that certain radio and TV
stations had been subjected to 180-day suspension orders, that journals
had been temporarily closed down, and that fresh cases against
individuals for having ‘expressed their thoughts’ numbered 50. It cited
the Anti-Terror legislation along with Articles 312 and 159 of the
Turkish Penal Code as continuing to give rise to many unjust prosecutions.

The culprit laws cited by the Turkish Human Rights Association outlaw
the following activities, in vague, over-broad language:

* Producing ‘separatist propaganda’: Turkey’s Anti-Terror
legislation, specifically Article 8, remains a major stumbling block for
any writers wishing to explore the issue of Turkey’s ethnic minorities.
Support for the Kurds, particularly if using words such as ‘Kurdistan’
can result in imprisonment for ‘separatist propaganda’.
* ‘Incitement to hatred on the basis of class, religion or race’ if
such incitement endangers the ‘public order’, or ‘insulting a segment of
the population or people’s honor’: Article 312.2 of the Turkish Penal
Code has again been used against those writing about Turkey’s ethnic
minorities.
* ‘Insulting the Turkish nation’: Article 159 of the Turkish Penal
Code prohibits statements deemed insulting to the State or its organs –
whether the military, the judiciary, or government offices. Those
criticizing alleged human rights abuses committed by the army, or
critiquing the legal system, can find themselves on the wrong side of
this law.

More information on the campaign and how you can take action can be
accessed by clicking on the links below.

Please contact [email protected] if you have any questions.