Author: Kanayan Tamar

States News Service
April 16, 2015 Thursday

HELSINKI COMMISSION TO HOLD HEARING ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

WASHINGTON

The following information was released by the Commission on Security
and Cooperation in Europe (the Helsinki Commission):

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as
the Helsinki Commission, today announced the following hearing:

A Century of Denial: The Armenian Genocide and the Ongoing Quest for Justice

Thursday, April 23

2:00PM

Rayburn House Office Building

Room 2175

On the 100th anniversary of the first genocide of the modern era,
Armenians are still fighting for recognition of the genocidal nature
of the massacres that began in 1915 and resulted in the death of as
many as 1.5 million people. The government of Turkey continues to deny
the genocide and actively punishes those who recognize it.

The hearing will examine denialism by the Government of Turkey and the
decades-long effort to seek accountability. The hearing will also
provide an opportunity to assess potential countercurrents in Turkish
society that could move the Government of Turkey toward recognition,
and explore what the United States and other countries can do to help
bring about recognition and eventually, reconciliation.

The following witnesses are scheduled to testify:

Dr. Taner Akam, Professor of History, Robert Aram, Marianne Kaloosdian
and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies, Clark
University

Mr. Kenneth V. Hachikian, Chairman of the Armenian National Committee of America

Mr. Van Z. Krikorian, Co-Chairman, Board of Trustees of the Armenian
Assembly of America

Dr. Elizabeth H. Prodromou, Visiting Associate Professor of Conflict
Resolution, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

Additional witnesses may be added.

Media Contact: Stacy Hope

202.225.1901

WGME – CBS
April 19 2015

Observing 100 years since mass killings

PORTLAND (WGME) — A century ago nearly 1.5 million Armenians were
massacred during what some call genocide. It happened in what’s now
Turkey and the country’s leaders refuse to describe it as genocide.

On April 24, Armenians worldwide will observe what happened. On
Saturday, Armenian-Americans in Portland remembered the victims at a
ceremony.

Gerard Kiladjian is the Armenian Cultural Association of Maine
President. He said, “They killed the men, women and the children by
just marching them into the desert to their death.”

“The Turks killed my grandmother and grandfather over there,” said
Portland resident, John Malconian.

Historians say there were mass killings starting in 1915 of Armenians
living in what’s now turkey by leaders of the Ottoman Empire. Turkish
officials claim the deaths were the result of civil war and famine.

“The Armenian genocide was never recognized by the government of
Turkey. They’ve continued to deny for many, many years,” said
Kiladjian.

The debate is now political. In his first presidential campaign,
President Obama said the genocide was a matter of fact, he’d formally
recognize it if elected and use the word genocide to describe it. Six
years later that hasn’t happened. Turkey previously warned the United
States recognition would affect the relationship between the two
countries.

“It upsets me that he doesn’t recognize what’s true history,” said Malconian.

Meanwhile, last Sunday Pope Francis did refer to the killings as
genocide. Kiladjian attended the mass where the Pope spoke about what
happened. He said, “We’re very proud of his stepping forward.”

Now Armenians want more people to follow in his footsteps.

MUSIC COMMEMORATES ARMENIAN GENOCIDE CENTENNIAL

San Francisco Classical Voice
April 17 2015

By Janos Gereben,

April 17, 2015

April 24 is considered the first day of the Armenian genocide in 1915,
when during the final days of the Ottoman Empire, an estimated one
million people were slaughtered.

Political/historical debates continue as long as Turkey — successor
state to the empire — refuses to acknowledge the thoroughly documented
events, but most of the world mourns the enormous loss of innocent
lives and observes the anniversary.

The major musical event in San Francisco will be “Witness and Rebirth:
an Armenian Journey” at the Palace of Fine Arts, beginning at 5 p.m.

on April 26.

Fresno, with its large population of ethnic Armenians, will be
represented at the event. Theodore Kuchar’s Fresno Philharmonic,
Fresno Master Chorale, and Fresno State Concert Choir, directed by
Anna Hamre, will perform the world premiere of Cantata for Living
Martyrs by Grammy-nominated composer Serouj Kradjian.

Kuchar, who is leading the Philharmonic for the 13th season, is also
music director of the Janacek Philharmonic in the Czech Republic,
the Orquesta Sinfonica de Venezuela, and the Reno Chamber Orchestra
in Nevada. He previously served as music director of the Ukrainian
National Orchestra in Kiev and the Boulder Philharmonic in Colorado.

Soloists are famed Armenian-American mezzo-soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian
and baritone Eugene Brancoveanu (not from Armenia, but long active
in Fresno in addition to San Francisco and elsewhere). Also on the
program: the late Soviet-Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian’s Violin
Concerto, with Catherine Manoukian as soloist.

Other events:

* A free concert at San Francisco’s Union Square, beginning at 5 p.m.

on April 21, with Sebu Simonian of the indie-pop band Capital Cities,
Anna and Anaïs Duo (Anna Garano and Anaïs Alexandra Tekerian), and
visual artist Kevork Mourad. The concert is presented by the Armenian
Genocide Centennial Committee.

* “Memory of Trees,” at the SOMarts Cultural Center through April
22 (gallery hoursnoon to 7 p.m.), features the work of photographer
Kathryn Cook as she traces the memory of the Armenian Genocide across
Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Armenia, Israel, and France.

* The Armenian National Philharmonic’s touring “Concert of Remembrance”
will be performed at 7:30 p.m. May 12, at Los Angeles’ Walt Disney
Concert Hall. Conducted by Eduard Topchjan, the program includes
Khachaturian’s Spartacus Suite from his acclaimed ballet,
Tigran Mansurian’s Violin Concerto, with Anush Nikoghosyan as soloist,
and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5.

WILL THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE ENTICE OBAMA TO FINALLY CALL IT GENOCIDE?

Center for Research on Globalization, Canada
April 17 2015

By Joachim Hagopian

As America’s foremost ally on the geopolitics chessboard bridging
Europe, the Middle East and Asia, both Turkey and President Obama are
coming under increasing pressure as the 24th of April, 2015 approaches
marking the official 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide.

Twenty-two nations that include most all of South America, much
of Europe, Russia, Canada and all but six US states have already
officially recognized the Armenian genocide. Greece, Cyprus and
Switzerland have even made it a crime in their countries to deny the
Armenian genocide.

Last Sunday Pope Francis called the slaughter of Armenians by the
Ottoman Empire “the first genocide of the 20th century,” urging the
entire international community of nations to follow suit in officially
recognizing it as such. Possessing a sense of admiration toward the
Armenian people, the pope acknowledged Armenia as the very first
nation state to declare Christianity as its state religion way back
in 301 AD. The Armenians trace their roots back to Noah’s great great
grandson Haik, declaring him their ancient Armenian patriarch.

Legendary stories abound even to this day of Noah’s ark still lodged
amidst the icy slopes of Mount Ararat located just inside the Turkish
border with Armenia. Archeological expeditions have been outlawed in
recent decades by Islamic Turkey, unwilling to risk enabling Armenians’
to reclaim their ancient Christian past with any substantial scientific
verification.

Italian journalist and author Franca Giansoldati was recently
interviewed about her new book entitled The March without Return:
The Armenian Genocide. Stressing why it’s so overdue and important
to recognize the last century’s first genocide, she states:

… Those million and a half persons did not die of cold. Sometimes
the statistics become cold, but let’s try to put before our eyes
a million and a half faces of children, of raped women, of mothers
who overwhelmed threw their children into the rivers because they
couldn’t see them die of hunger anymore. Let’s try to imagine this
infinite cruelty… perhaps a trembling comes to one’s conscience.

In spite of the recent trend of more nations recognizing the Armenian
genocide, still holding out in official denial remain just two Muslim
nations, the guilty genocidal perpetrator Turkey that borders Armenia
to the west and its cohort Armenian hater Azerbaijan that borders to
the east. As the nation that last fought and lost a costly war against
Armenia just over two decades ago, to this day Azerbaijan engages
in near daily violent skirmishes with the Armenian military over the
disputed lost territory Nagorno-Karabakh. After the 1994 ceasefire,
hundreds have been killed on both sides in raids and shootouts,
which have substantially increased since last summer.

In the West’s constant war drumming rush towards World War III
against nations of the East Russia and China, having aligned with
its powerful regional neighbor Russia, Armenia lies squarely in the
US Empire’s crosshairs. The Empire’s longtime imperialistic agenda
has been to weaken Russia’s regional prowess and influence over its
bordering neighbors Armenia, Belarus and Kazakhstan and eroding their
Eurasian Economic Union. A recent visit to Armenia, Azerbaijan and
Georgia in February by neocon regime changer herself Victoria Nuland
(instrumental in 2014’s Ukraine coup) drew speculation she was merely
marking off territory as her next victim(s).

Pope Francis is not the first Vatican leader to speak out as back in
2000 the then popular Pope John Paul II co-wrote with the Armenian
Church patriarch that “the Armenian genocide, which began the
century, was a prologue to horrors that would follow.” Even back
when it began in 1915, then Pope Benedict XV wrote two letters to
the Turkish figurehead of the Ottoman throne Sultan Mohammed V to
stop the violence but to no avail. But the genocidal-minded Young
Turks party had gained control over the Ottoman Empire government,
bent on executing their ambitious plan to exterminate all Armenians.

After the current pope’s condemnation of Turkey for its continued
denial last Sunday, the Turkish government retaliated immediately by
recalling its ambassador to the Vatican and issuing a stern statement
calling the pope’s claims inflammatory, unfounded and spreading
hatred. In response to the pope’s allegations, Turkish Foreign Minister
Mevlut Cavusoglu tweeted, “The pope’s statement, which is far from
historic and legal truths, is unacceptable. Religious positions are
not places where unfounded claims are made and hatred is stirred.”

Despite virtually a unanimous worldwide consensus of historians
in agreement that during the First World War and beyond the Turks
massacred up to a million and a half Armenians in the century’s
first genocide, the Turkish government still insists that no genocide
occurred, maintaining that the death toll is an inflated false count
and that not just Armenians suffered and perished but also Turks,
Assyrians and Greeks lost their lives during what Turkey refers
to as mere civil war unrest within the larger world war. The Turks
maintain that up to half million Turks also died, equaling the number
of admitted Armenian casualties during the “civil strife” that brought
the Ottoman Empire to its bloody end.

With the Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and prominent Armenian
church leaders attending the St. Peter’s Basilica Mass on the first
Sunday after Easter, Pope Francis chose the occasion to honor the
innocent men, women and children who were “senselessly” murdered by
the Ottoman Turks, believing it was his moral duty to call out Turkey
for its continual denial. Francis asserted, “Concealing or denying
evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it.”

The pope cited similar massacres still ongoing today with the
beheadings of Christians in Iraq and Syria (including Armenians living
in and near Aleppo, Syria) by the US-Israel-Turkey’s secret ally and
fake enemy the Islamic State. In the strongest words yet by a pope,
the leader of one billion Catholics around the world is urging the
entire international community to openly accept the killing of up to
75% of all Armenians at the time as a genocide.

Hearing Pope Francis’ heartfelt convictions on their behalf last
Sunday, many Armenians attending the mass were moved to tears. The
head of the Armenian Apostolic Church Aram I who was present at
basilica expressed gratitude for Francis’ clear condemnation and
called the Armenian genocide a crime against humanity that warrants
reparation. Though Armenian President Sargsyan acknowledged the
reparation issue, he said “for our people, the primary issue
is universal recognition of the Armenian genocide, including
recognition by Turkey.” Sargsyan rejected past feeble offers from
Ankara calling for joint research looking into the historic matter,
stating emphatically that scholars and commissions alike have collected
overwhelming, irrefutable proof that the Turks committed genocide
against Armenians.

Defined by the United Nations Convention in 1948 as “deliberate
killing and other acts intended to destroy a national, ethnic,
racial or religious group,” aside from Turkey there are still other
nations that have balked at actually classifying the Armenian deaths
a genocide. For instance, to this day the United States nor Obama
have called the spade a spade, dancing around the issue by placing
geopolitics of Turkey’s significant global location more important
than honesty and moral principle. Obama’s succumbed to Turkey’s
relentless pressure lobbying other nations with millions in bribes
to prevent official recognition of the Armenian deaths as genocide.

Every April in years past Armenian Americans have advocated for
Obama to step up to the plate and finally do what’s right. Among
the mounting pile of broken promises Obama has never kept while he
campaigned for president was his vow to use the word “genocide” to
acknowledge the annual April day of recognition. But with two key US
military bases located inside strategic NATO member Turkey’s borders,
global Empire dominance necessitates that virtually every US president
submit to Turkish pressures to remain silent.

As a senator and presidential candidate back in 2008, Obama righteously
admonished then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for recalling US
Ambassador to Armenia for daring to use the g-word:

The Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or
a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an
overwhelming body of historical evidence. The facts are undeniable. An
official policy that calls on diplomats to distort the historical
facts is an untenable policy.

Yet since becoming president every year geopolitics and Empire
hegemony win out over personal honor and integrity that conveniently
never fail to take a shameful backseat. But this year the president’s
under the most heat ever with the genocidal centenary next week. Even
the Los Angeles Times is optimistic, “It is also a period of the
Obama presidency, its twilight, in which the president has shown a
greater boldness on core issues of principle as he begins to consider
his legacy.”

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the same president who once also
promised that he would be the most open and transparent president in
US history to ever embrace and uphold ethics over politics. Funny how
both the current Secretary of State and Vice President when they were
senators likewise were all boldly principled in calling it Armenian
genocide. But like their spineless boss, every April 24th, they
too lost their previously held “strong moral compass.” As they say,
power has a way of corrupting a once moral compass from all sense of
righteous direction.

Meanwhile, a fellow Democrat in DC representing Glendale, California –
the one US city with the highest concentration of Armenians at near
half the population of 200,000 – Congressman Adam Schiff is sponsoring
a US congressional resolution finally recognizing last century’s mass
killings officially a genocide. He stated that he hopes the pope’s
strong sentiments “inspire our president and Congress to demonstrate
a like commitment to speaking the truth about the Armenian genocide
and to renounce Turkey’s campaign of concealment and denial.”

On Wednesday the European Union parliament weighed in on the issue,
releasing a proclamation also pushing for Turkey to recognize the
Armenian genocide for what it really is as a giant redemptive step
toward “a genuine reconciliation” between Turkey and Armenia. But
holdouts to the end, even prior to the EU’s vote on the resolution,
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the EU’s decision in
Brussels would not change his country’s official position of denial.

The EU resolution calls for both nations to ratify:

The protocols on the establishment of diplomatic relations, opening the
border as well as improve their relations, with particular reference
to cross-border cooperation and economic integration.

Sounds like more wishful thinking for Turkey and Obama to actually do
the right thing. As further encouragement, the EU acknowledged last
year’s April 23rd offer of condolences and recognition of atrocities by
Turkish President as a much needed initial step in the right direction.

A couple months ago a Turkish member of parliament, Kurdish politician
Ahmet Turk publicly apologized to Armenians, admitting that “our
grandfathers have blood on their hands,” and calling for his government
to do the same.

Two famous half Armenian American women from the entertainment industry
have publicly supported the Armenian cause. Thirteen months ago Cher
joined the Save Kessab campaign to generate international support
for the northern Syrian town populated by Armenian Christians.

Both Cher and Kim Kardashian have sought to bring awareness to the
plight of Christians in war torn Iraq and Syria who have become
victims persecuted and murdered by US backed brutal Islamic
State extremists. Cher also assisted Armenians after the 1988
earthquake that ravaged the Soviet outer state just prior to its
1991 independence. After attending the Armenian Genocide Memorial
in Yerevan, as an activist last Sunday Kim met with Armenia’s Prime
Minister Hovik Abrahamyan to discuss this year’s 100th Remembrance Day.

One may naively wonder what the big deal is about, attaching such
significance to tragic events that happened a whole century ago and
the importance of Turkey and world leaders today acknowledging the
atrocities with the word “genocide” to describe them. The answer lies
in the world apparently already forgetting the Armenian genocide barely
a decade and a half after it ended when Adolf Hitler uttered to Reich
Marshall Hermann Goering on the eve of the Polish invasion and start
of World War II, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation
of the Armenians?”

Three out of four of all Armenians were wiped off the face of the
earth in a matter of a few years, starting on April 24th, 1915 with
the roundup in Constantinople of all the Armenian intellectuals,
professionals, editors and religious leaders who were summarily
executed. Many Armenian victims were savagely slaughtered by Ottoman
Turks or died of starvation during their forced deportation en
route to the Syrian desert. Only a half million Armenians survived,
forced to flee into Russia, the United States, other Middle Eastern
countries and every continent in a vast Armenian diaspora estimated
currently to be a little more than 10 million, 7 million more than
live in Armenia itself.

Some 60,000 Armenians remain in Turkey today, mostly in the Istanbul
metropolis. However, during the genocide thousands of mostly Armenian
children were assimilated and Islamized into the Kurdish culture within
southeastern Turkey. As Moslems they interbred with Kurds and fearing
further persecution, the tens of thousands still living in Kurdish
Turkey today have been unable to openly embrace their Armenian roots.

Every Armenian on the planet regardless of location has family lineage
linked to the Armenian genocide. The emotional significance attached
to formally recognizing the genocide a century ago has everything to
do with honoring our parents, grandparents and great grandparents
who were directly impacted and suffered lifelong trauma from the
egregious atrocities. There is especially a sense of urgency on this
100th anniversary to acknowledge as a genocide those long ago sad
events before the very last of the genocide survivors die off. Very
few are still alive today.

My father died a year and a half ago as a centenarian who lived on this
earth for one century, one month, one week and one day as an Armenian
genocide survivor. As the youngest member of his family, he was the
only American born Hagopian living in Springfield, Massachusetts in
1913. His parents and four older brothers and sisters all arrived from
eastern Armenia just four years prior to the genocide back in their
homeland. My father’s earliest recollections were hearing about the
horrible fate befalling his family relatives back in the old country.

The importance of honestly calling the genocide what it is and was
pays tribute to our ancestors, and remembering that their lives still
matter to us keeps alive our scared bond and connection to them as
our Armenian descendants. This is what it means to be Armenian in 2015.

Let us never forget. But most of all, let us eradicate the scourge
of genocide that unfortunately still grips the planet even today
in places like eastern Ukraine, Gaza, Iraq, Somalia, the Central
African Republic, Nigeria and Myanmar. And as long as we’re at it,
true evolutionary progress of the human species can come only after
all wars are abolished and both humans and nations have finally
learned to resolve conflict through peaceful means.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer.

He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience
entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses
on US international relations, leadership and national security
issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in
Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental
health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on
his writing and has a blog site at http://empireexposed. blogspot.

com/. He is also a regular contributor to Global Research and a
syndicated columnist at Veterans Today.

TURKEY: EU’S ARMENIA GENOCIDE RESOLUTION IS NULL AND VOID

North Africa Post
April 17 2015

Three political parties namely the ruling Justice and Development
Party (AK Party), the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP)
and the opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) have signed a
joint declaration stating that the resolution voted by the European
parliament for Turkey to recognize that it committed genocide on the
Armenians as an “inappropriate and unacceptable” decision that is
“null and void.” The vote which took place on Wednesday could be an
obstacle to Turkey’s effort to join the European Union.

Armenians were killed during the last years of the Ottoman Empire
and the EU wants Ankara to admit that it was “genocide.”

The statement lamented that European Union disregarded Turkey’s
point of view for “dialogue” over the matter rather than a “biased
approach.” It added that Armenians refrain from discussing the issue
impartially and scientifically. The signatories to the statement
alleged that the European Union is an institution with its main
objective “contrary to the idea of creating peace and tolerance and
a common future instead of war and clash.”

European Parliament President Martin Schulz told Turkish Prime Minister
Ahmet Davutoglu on Thursday that he “understands” Ankara’s reaction
to a vote calling the 1915 mass killing of Armenians a genocide,
sources in the prime minister’s office said.

CHP leader Kemal Kılıcdaroglu told reporters after a meeting with
European Union member countries’ ambassadors that all the political
parties “share the same views” and a joint declaration will be
released. During the meeting, Kılıcdaroglu said the European
countries were reminded that they “have great knowledge of the
universal law and acknowledge the description of ‘genocide'” and
“how severe the repercussions of the EU’s description of [the 1915
events as] ‘genocide’ would be.”

THE HISTORY OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

U of M News Service, Michigan
April 17 2015

Apr 16, 2015
Contact William Foreman

When people think of genocide, what often comes to mind is the
Holocaust, Rwanda and the killing fields of Cambodia. Few might be
aware of what happened to the Armenians during World War I in the
country now known as Turkey.

Part of the problem is that Turkey continues to deny the
state-sanctioned murder, rape and mass deportation of Armenians. At
least 1 million people died.

But the Turkish authorities will likely come under new pressure to
change their position when the centenary of the genocide is marked
on April 24.

Ronald G. Suny, a professor of social and political history at the
University of Michigan, has spent much of his career researching
the genocide. He has also played a key role in getting Turkish and
Armenian scholars to begin discussing the genocide among themselves.

Suny met with Global Michigan to discuss the genocide and his new
book, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of
the Armenian Genocide.” Here are edited excerpts from the discussion:

Q: Who were the Armenians and how did they end up living together
with the Turks?

Suny: The area where the genocide largely took place was eastern
Anatolia or eastern Turkey today. Armenians think of it as historic
Armenia–a mountain plateau, which was occupied by Armenians from
the 5th century B.C. They were an ancient people who in the early
4th century A.D. converted to Christianity. It was one of the
oldest Christian civilizations. But that area of Armenia was also
a crossroads of many empires: the Persians, Byzantines, Romans,
Russians and the Ottomans.

Q: What were the general sources of tension between the Armenians
and Turks?

Suny: In the 11th century, Turks began to come from Central Asia.

First the Seljuk Turks, under the leader Seljuk, and later the Ottoman
Turks, under their leader Osman and others that followed. Eventually,
the Ottomans created an empire the stretched from the walls of Vienna,
down through the Middle East, through what had been historical Armenia,
all the way through Palestine and North Africa, taking Egypt as
well. It was a huge empire, which lasted until World War I. So the
period we’re talking about is the crisis of that empire. During WWI,
a group called “The Young Turks” who were ruling the Ottoman Empire
decided that the Christian Armenians in their midst were treacherous
and that they were allied with Armenians who lived across the border in
the Russian Empire and that they preferred the Russians to the Ottoman
Turks, so they had to be eliminated. So that’s the general source of
what became this massive killing that we call the Armenian genocide.

Q: What kind of social status did the Armenians have during the
Ottoman Empire?

Suny: The Ottoman Empire was an empire and that means some groups
rule over others. It’s certainly an unequal relationship. Muslims in
the empire were more privileged, generally, than non-Muslims, so the
Armenians being non-Muslims had an inferior status. Yet Armenians did
well in the Ottoman Empire, becoming the middle class in the city of
Istanbul. But most Armenians were peasants, workers or artisans in
eastern Anatolia. This relationship was uneven. Everyone knew that
Muslims stood above the gavur–the unbelievers or infidels.

In time, the Armenians were known as the ‘loyal millet’ because
other non-Muslims–such as Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks–had revolted
against the Ottoman Empire and eventually formed their own states in
the Balkans.

The Armenians did not do that. They were generally loyal to the
Ottoman Empire and believed they would stay within the empire if the
empire reformed and gave them a degree of autonomy or self rule. And
they would often petition European powers and the Russians to try
to help them in reaching their goal of a degree of autonomy in the
Ottoman Empire. The Turks saw this as a treacherous move, dealing
with foreigners, and accused the Armenians of being separatists.

Q: The Turks have accused the Armenians of forming their own armies
and threatening the empire. Was this a real threat?

Suny: The bulk of Armenians were peasants in eastern Anatolia who
daily met with vicious attacks from Kurds and other nomadic people
who would rob cattle, sometimes steal their women and land. And the
Turkish state did relatively little about this. So Armenians formed
their own self-defense groups, which tried to defend Armenians against
these predations. That only led to further accusations of resistance,
insurrection, betrayal, treason and separatism.

Eventually, the Ottoman government decided during WWI that the
Armenians were an existential threat to the empire and that they needed
to be removed from the area. Hundreds of thousands were massacred. Some
women and children, perhaps several hundred thousand, were assimilated
or Islamized into Kurdish, Turkish and Arab families.

So the genocide, which is the elimination of the Armenian population
in what had historically been their homeland, was accomplished by
three methods: dispersion, physical massacre and assimilation or
Islamization by force.

Q: Can you tell us about your new book about the genocide?

The book is called “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else.”

That’s a quote from Talaat Pasha, one of the architects of the
genocide. The subtitle is “A History of the Armenian Genocide.”

When I thought about writing this book and went back to the sources
and other books written about the genocide, I realized no one has
ever told the story as a historical narrative: What happened and when,
then what happened, and how one thing led to another and how a certain
mentality was created. I wanted to tell the story internally as a
product of Ottoman history and the ambitions of the Ottoman government,
including the Armenians who were also involved in trying to improve
their lives and gain a degree of self rule. I also wanted to describe
the international context. What was Britain, France, Germany and Russia
doing? They all had ambitions in this area. No one told that story in
all its detail as an analytical narrative–a story that explains and
interprets why this terrible tragedy happened. The book is a work of
social science but it is told as a historical narrative.

Q: What are the chances Turkey will ever acknowledge the genocide
anytime soon?

Suny: We now know better than we did 15 years ago what actually
happened. We have a number of explanations. Many of the scholars we’ve
worked with–Turks and Kurds–have accepted that this is certainly
a genocide. At least that’s a foundation.

The Turkish government still officially denies the genocide. It
doesn’t want to face up to the fact that its ancestors could commit
such colossal crimes–crimes on which the current Republic of Turkey
is founded.

There is some movement in this centennial year–the 100th anniversary
of the genocide. The Turkish government is slightly shifting its
position. Last year, on April 23, the day before the Armenians
commemorate the anniversary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan–who was prime
minister and is now president–offered condolences to the Armenians.

Now, if the Armenians had in fact been traitors, insurrectionists,
separatists, a threat to the empire, you wouldn’t offer them
condolences. But if they had in fact been unfairly treated, innocent
victims of repression at the hands of the Turks, then you might think
about offering condolences. So you can see already a kind of shift
in the Turkish dialogue. And there have been many other moves by
the government. They won’t use the G word, they won’t say genocide,
but there is a little bit of an opening.

Q: The official policy of the U.S. is not to acknowledge the
genocide. Why?

Suny: The U.S. is a close ally of Turkey. It’s a NATO partner. We have
bases in Turkey. We need them in the Middle East. We’re partnering
with them in the war in Syria. Through the whole Cold War, the whole
anti-Communist crusade, now in the crusade against terrorism and
radical Islam, America needs the Turks who are strategically located
in that part of the world. Therefore, they’re afraid of offending them.

So President Obama, Bill Clinton and Bush–while they were campaigning,
they talked about the Armenian genocide. But as soon as they got into
office, they refused to use the word “genocide.” Obama has gone the
furthest. He uses the Armenian word “Mets Yeghern,” which means the
“Great Catastrophe.” Obama even said when he was in Turkey: “I don’t
change my mind. I know what it is. We’re just going to use this word
instead of genocide.” So that might be a way of easing up to the Turks,
but as a social scientist, I use the word genocide.

THE CENTENNIAL OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

Rudaw, Kurdistan Iraq
APril 17 2015

By DAVID ROMANO yesterday at 07:07

The approaching centennial of the Armenian genocide has led to
a flurry of activity commemorating the event. The key date of a
process that took place over several years is April 24, 1915, when
Ottoman authorities arrested some 200 Armenian community leaders in
Istanbul and deported them to central Anatolia – where most were then
executed. The event marked a transformation of the previous decades’
distrust, discrimination, repression and occasional murders and
massacres of members of the Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire.

In times of instability and war, minorities suspected of sympathizing
with the enemy – as many Armenians did – often suffer such depravities.

The arrests of April 24, however, seemed to indicate a new, more
organized and methodical government plan to eliminate the Armenians
entirely. Armenian leaders in Istanbul were not armed or engaged in
insurrection against the Ottomans, yet they were deported and killed.

At the same time, an Armenian uprising on the other side of the empire
in Van – described by Armenians as a defensive reaction to abuses
and depredations of Ottoman officials there – led to the government’s
siege of the city and the targeting of the whole Christian population
of Eastern Anatolia. Hundreds of thousands of Armenian men, women and
children were rounded up and forcibly marched – without provisions and
subject to continuous attacks by mostly Kurdish tribes – hundreds of
miles towards Deir el-Zor, a dusty town in eastern Syria hardly able
to feed its own population at the time. Only some 15,000 survived
the march and the continued starvation in Deir el-Zor.

The final death toll is the subject of dispute between Turkish sources,
who estimate around 500,000 Armenian dead (roughly equivalent to the
number of Muslim Ottoman citizens killed during the World War One
in Eastern Anatolia) and Armenian sources, who hold to a figure of
one and half million Armenian victims. Western scholarly sources I
examined mostly cite a figure of at least one million Armenian dead
from the events of 1915 and 1916. Of a pre-1915 population of roughly
two million Ottoman Armenians, less than 400,000 remained in 1917 –
mostly in Istanbul and the European side of the empire. That number
would be further whittled down in subsequent years.

Today, Turkey completely rejects the term “genocide” to describe
what occurred. Ankara’s view has always been that the Armenians,
along with a large number of Muslims, died during the fighting in
the region that was part of World War One. They insist that there
was no calculated plan on the part of the Ottoman government to
eliminate the Armenian community of Anatolia. When Pope Francis this
week used the term “genocide” in his commemoration, Prime Minister
Davutoglu reacted by claiming the Pope had joined an “evil front”
against Turkey aiming to unseat his government.

Your humble columnist is not a historian, of course, and is in no
position to definitively settle contrasting accounts of history. This
column represents no more than my considered opinion. Having been
to eastern Turkey more than a few times, however, I can never help
wondering: “If this was not a genocide, then where are all the
Christians who were once a plurality in provinces like Van?” We call
what the United States and Canada did to the native inhabitants
of their lands a genocide, yet it remains a good deal easier to
find Iroquois, Cherokee, Navaho, and other aboriginal peoples in
most parts of North America today than it is to find an Armenian,
an Assyrian or a Nestorian in Anatolia.

The Ottoman Empire of the 15th and 16th centuries was at its height
and could afford to be magnanimous and tolerant of various groups,
even taking in Jews fleeing the Inquisition in Spain. The crumbling
empire of the early 20th century, on the other hand, was weak and
desperate, seeing enemies anywhere and everywhere – including hundreds
of thousands of passive Christian civilians who had lived in their
villages for centuries, and who wanted nothing more than to live their
lives and avoid the dangerous politics a few of their countrymen had
gravitated towards.

Genocide scholar Helen Fein identifies four principle motivations
for the act of genocide, all of which were present to some degree
in a declining Ottoman Empire, whose elites were newly acquainting
themselves with European ideas about nationalism and cultural
homogeneity. The four motivations are: Eliminating a real or potential
threat, spreading terror among real or potential enemies, acquiring
economic wealth, and implementing a belief or ideology.

Unfortunately, similar reasoning still seems all too common today, as
Yezidis reflect on the past year, as Iraqi and Syrian Christians seek
shelter from the Islamic State, and a month after Kurds commemorate
Halabja and the Anfal genocide.

David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He is the Thomas
G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State
University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006,
Cambridge University Press) and co-editor (with Mehmet Gurses) of
Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East (2014,
Palgrave Macmillan).

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do
not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.

EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT CALLS KILLINGS OF ARMENIANS ‘GENOCIDE’

The Jurist
April 16 2015

Thursday 16 April 2015 at 12:12 PM ET

[JURIST] The European Parliament [official website] approved a
resolution on Wednesday calling [press release] the massacre of
Armenians during World War I a “genocide,” while urging Armenia and
Turkey to reconcile their diplomatic relations. The resolution comes
days after Pope Francis instigated outrage [BBC report] by using the
same term in Turkey. Members of the European Parliament commended
the statement of the Pope, “honoring the century of the Armenian
genocide in a spirit of peace and reconciliation.” The Parliament has
asked Turkey to “conduct in good faith an inventory of the Armenian
cultural heritage destroyed or ruined during the past century within
its jurisdiction.” The Parliament also proposed an “International
Remembrance Day for Genocides,” so as to remind all people, and all
nations, of the right to peace and dignity.

In recent years Armenian nationals have fought with the international
community to recognize the killing of 1.5 million Armenian citizens as
genocide [JURIST news archive]. Turkey has long disputed the numbers,
alleging the killings were a result of a civil war that took place
after the collapse of the Ottoman empire. In December 2009 the European
Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled [JURIST report] that prosecutions
for denying that the killing of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in
1915 was a genocide are an attack on freedom of expression.

In 2009 Turkey and Armenia signed [JURIST report] a landmark accord
in Switzerland to normalize relations between the two countries and
open up borders. In 2010 a spokesperson for the US State Department
stated that the Obama administration opposed a vote [JURIST report]
before the House of Representatives on a resolution [HR 252 materials]
branding the World War I-era killings of Armenians by Turkish forces
as genocide. In September 2014 the Parliament of Greece ratified a bill
that criminalizes the denial of the Armenian Genocide [JURIST report].

PROFESSOR GIVES TALK RECOGNIZING THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE ANNIVERSARY

The Emory Wheel, Atlanta, Georgia
April 16 2015

By Emily Lim Apr 16, 2015

“In 1939, Hitler said to his army: ‘Who, afterall, speaks of the
annihilation of the Armenians?'” Bedross Der Matossian, assistant
professor of modern Middle East history at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln, said to open his lecture in White Hall on Wednesday
evening. “Well, here we are today, remembering the Armenian Genocide.”

Der Matossian’s talk, “The Armenian Genocide and Historiography on
the Eve of the Centennial: From Continuity to Contingency” served
as a remembrance of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide,
which began on April 24, 1915.

Widely recognized as one of the first modern genocides, the Armenian
Genocide was a campaign of systematic extermination that included
deportation and mass murder carried out by the Ottoman Empire against
its minority Armenian subjects. It is estimated that up to 1.5 million
Armenians were massacred, according to a History Channel article.

Addressing an audience of more than 70 students and faculty members,
Der Matossian began by giving a brief historical background of what
he described as the three main phases leading up to the genocide.

The first phase, according to Der Matossian, included the Hamidian
massacres from 1894 to 1896, in which Ottoman officials killed
between 200,000 and 300,000 Armenians, who had led an uprising against
over-taxation.

As for the second phase, Der Matossian cited the Young Turk Revolution
of 1908, in which a group of reformers overthrew the Sultan Hamid
and established a modern constitutional government.

The third phase, according to Der Matossian, was the 1909 Adana
massacre, in which Islamic theological students and the Ottoman
military led a counter-coup against the government that led to the
deaths of between 15,000 and 30,000 Armenians, who were blamed for
supporting the new constitution.

Der Matossian also discussed the development of the historiography
on the Armenian Genocide by scholars, which has become increasingly
publicized despite the Turkish government’s refusal to recognize
the killings.

“The prohibition by the Turkish government of speaking about the
genocide is crumbling,” Der Matossian said.

Der Matossian listed arguments that provide interpretations as to why
the genocide took place, such as the significant role of religious
conflicts between Muslims and Christians and the growth of Armenian
nationalism.

He also discussed the Ottoman Empire’s demographic engineering and
assimilation of minority groups. For example, in the 1912 Balkan Wars,
the Ottoman Empire lost 90 percent of its European territories and
deliberately relocated Muslim populations in Armenian regions in an
attempt to neutralize ethnic differences.

The increasingly nationalist Turkish ideology at a time when its
empire was crumbling called for extreme security measures to preserve
the Ottoman Empire, according to Der Matossian.

Der Matossian’s areas of interest include the ethnic politics in the
Middle East, inter-ethnic violence in the Ottoman Empire, Palestinian
history and the history of the Armenian Genocide, according to his
profile on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln website.

Aside from Der Matossian, Distinguished Emory Professor of the
Liberal Arts and Sciences Sander Gilman and Visiting Distinguished
Professor of History at the Georgia Institute of Technology Nikolay
Koposov also gave brief talks on the genocide. Walter Kalaidjian,
the English department chair, moderated the lecture.

Gilman stressed the importance of literature in remembering the past.

“It is poets who capture the memory of the past,” Gilman said. “It
is literature that remembers and memorializes the Armenian Genocide.”

Gilman discussed the importance of preserving historical memory by
giving examples of historical works like Franz Werfel’s 1933 novel The
Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which is based on events that took place in
the Armenian Genocide, and Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber,
which depicts the Holocaust in Nazi Germany from the perspective of
a German.

Associate Professor of Russian Studies Juliette Stapanian-Apkarian,
who helped organize the lecture and whose father was a survivor of
the Armenian Genocide, said that, although Der Matossian was invited
to speak because of the centennial anniversary of the genocide,
the implications of the event resonated far into the modern day.

“How can violence be understood when it is so tied to other aspects of
national consciousness?” Apkarian said. “We continue to be challenged
by the recognition of certain incidences of violence, for instance
against the Native [Americans] and against the African American
population.”

The lecture is relevant to modern times because of the ongoing
political challenge to recognize the historic past and the question
of how to address historical cases of mass violence, Apkarian said.

“How can we move forward without remembering history accurately?”

Apkarian asked. She added that the Armenian Genocide does not receive
enough attention because of contemporary politics.

“History is often something which is utilized, packaged, reconfigured,”
Apkarian said. “The question is how to address national constructions
of history to find a truth.”

Since Turkey has been a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally
since 1952 and is a strategic partner for United States foreign policy
interests in the Middle East, Apkarian noted that the United States
government has been reluctant to recognize the Armenian Genocide.

“Obama had said [prior to becoming president] that he would recognize
the genocide, but he has not,” Apkarian said. “This is because politics
and history often go together.”

The lecture was co-sponsored by the Emory Russian, East European
and Eurasian Studies Program (REES); the Tam Institute for Jewish
Studies; the Departments of Russian and East Asian Languages and
Cultures (REALC), History and Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies
(MESAS); the Institute for Liberal Arts (ILA) and the initiative in
Intercultural Studies.

College freshman Becky Lebeaux said that while the lecture was
informative, she would like to have seen a more balanced argument.

“It was informative, especially about the historical, political
and economic background of what is known as the Armenian Genocide,”
Lebeaux said. “However, I felt it was a one-sided presentation on
the violence as a genocide. I felt it would have been interesting to
discuss the opinions of the denialists.”

Kate Cyr, a College senior, described the lecture as one of the best
ones she’d attended at Emory.

Cyr wrote her undergraduate thesis on Turkish policy toward Kurds,
the largest ethnic minority in Turkey and will be travelling to Turkey
on a diplomatic mission next year.

“I really liked how [the lecture] discussed the Armenian conflict
from a historical, literary and legal standpoint,” Cyr said. “I am
very interested to see how the past and the influences of history
impact Turkey today.”

— By Emily Lim

KILLING FIELDS OF THE YOUNG TURKS

The Spectator, UK
April 16 2015

On the centenary of the Armenian genocide, Justin Marozzi is appalled
by how this great catastrophe has been almost entirely buried,
through neglect or denial, until now Books

Justin Marozzi 18 April 2015

They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian
Genocide Ronald Grigor Suny

Princeton, pp.520, £24.95, ISBN: 9780691147307

Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide
Thomas de Waal

OUP, pp.259, £20, ISBN: 9780199350698

For most of us, the centenary of the Great War means recalling the
misery and sacrifices of the Western Front: Ypres, the Marne, Arras,
Verdun, Passchendaele, the Somme. Few of us give as much thought to
the Eastern Front and, apart from regular studies of the ever-popular,
self-mythologising Lawrence of Arabia, fewer still dwell on the first
world war in the Middle East. This was the theatre that hosted the Arab
Revolt, famously dismissed by Lawrence as ‘a sideshow of a sideshow’.

The Great War centenary brings renewed attention to another neglected
tragedy of the conflict. Starting in 1915, the Turks embarked on a
process that culminated in the systematic extermination of the Armenian
people. By the end of the war between 600,000 and one million had been
killed, according to the more conservative estimates (the historian
Bernard Lewis reckoned the true figure was 1.5 million).

That equated to the annihilation of 90 per cent of Ottoman Armenians.

In recent years it has come to be known by most of the world as the
Armenian genocide, a term hotly contested by the Turkish authorities.

They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else tells the fiercely
disputed story of what happened to the Armenians in the aftermath of
the Battle of Sarikamish in early 1915, when Ottoman defeat by the
Russians triggered a punitive response from the Young Turks against
what was seen as Armenian treachery. The killing fields stretched
1,000 miles east from Istanbul. Armenian soldiers were disarmed,
demobilised and killed. Armenian intellectuals and politicians in
Istanbul followed them to their graves. Of the survivors, hundreds of
thousands of Christian women and children suffered forced conversion
to Islam and joined the families of Arabs, Turks and Kurds.

A typical eyewitness account, from an American missionary, recorded how

they gathered all the men into one place and carried them out in
companies of about 25 each to be shot down in cold blood. Others
were tied with their heads sticking through the rungs of a ladder
and decapitated, others hacked to pieces or mutilated before death.

Needless to say, the mass extermination of a people had its
accomplices, by turn willing and unwilling, carefully orchestrated and
out of control far from the centre of authority. Yet the administration
set the tone. Talat Pasha, the Young Turk leader who branded Armenians
‘enemies of the state’, and Enver Pasha, his minister of war, were
arguably the architects of the massacres. Cemal Pasha, the last of
the ‘three pashas’ triumvirate who ruled the Ottoman empire during
the Great War, who was no shrinking violet when it came to hanging
Arab nationalists, was decidedly less keen on erasing the Armenians
from history.

Ronald Grigor Suny, an Armenian-American whose great-grandparents
fell victim to the genocide, has written a tremendously powerful,
scrupulously balanced, rigorous and humane account of a tragedy that
still casts a shadow over the modern state of Turkey. It is likely to
become the definitive reference book on the subject for years to come.

The context of war and invasion, he argues, created ‘a mental and
emotional universe’ that included ‘perceived threats, the Manichean
construction of internal enemies, and a pervasive fear that triggered a
deadly, pathological response to real and imagined immediate and future
dangers’. The view grew among the Young Turks, in power from 1908, that
all Armenians were a dangerous fifth column allied to the Russians.

There have long been two defining narratives surrounding the events
of 1915, lined up like opposing armies, bombarding each other with
accusations and denials. The traditional Turkish case argues that
the measures taken against the Armenians during a time of crisis
were a rational and reasonable government response to the rebellious
behaviour of a traitorous minority. The Armenian counterpart to this
line has often held the Turks to be inherently bloodthirsty and bent on
extermination, the Armenians as entirely blameless amid the maelstrom
of a collapsing Ottoman empire.

Suny has little truck with the cultural demonisation of the Turks,
be it Armenian or western European. Exhibit A for the latter is
Gladstone’s notorious description of the Turks as ‘the one great
anti-human specimen of humanity’ who left ‘a broad line of blood’
wherever they went.

Within the crumbling empire, the Armenians were by no means alone
in revolutionary intent. From the 1890s, there was fierce, sometimes
militant, opposition to Sultan Abdulhamid II from both Macedonians and
Young Turks, not to mention Arabs, Albanians, Circassians and Kurds.

It is important to remember that for centuries before 1915, Armenians,
alongside other minorities, were integrated into a multinational
Ottoman empire, albeit as second-class citizens. One thinks of the
Abbasid caliphate headquartered in Baghdad for half a millennium from
the late eighth century, a cosmopolitan affair of Muslims, Jews and
Christians thriving together.

Terminology is critical. Today many of us find it bewildering
that British government ministers, the BBC and other media
routinely describe the terrorists of Daesh as ‘Islamic State’,
unintentionally conferring religious and national legitimacy on a
self-declared caliphate whose absurdity would be amusing if it were
not so disgustingly blood-soaked. Suny is right to conclude that
although controversies still rage over the Armenian genocide, and
will continue to do so, the weight of scholarly opinion has shifted
dramatically in the 21st century toward the view that ‘the Ottoman
government conceived, initiated and implemented deliberate acts of
ethnic cleansing and mass murder, targeted at specific ethno-religious
communities’. In a word, genocide.

At one level, official Turkish denial in the face of all this evidence
makes little sense. Yet at another it is eminently understandable. The
destruction of the Armenians, together with the ethnic cleansing and
population exchanges of the Anatolian Greeks, was the ‘foundational
crime’ that facilitated the formation of ‘an ethno-national Turkish
republic’. One followed the other.

Commemorating the centenary of the genocide in a no less moving
account, Thomas de Waal’s Great Catastrophe brings to bear a very
personal focus, through history informed by reportage and travelogue.

De Waal, a journalist and scholar based at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, is as interested in the ‘history of the history’
as in the genocide itself: how it has been remembered and denied over
the decades.

Both Suny and de Waal write of the Turkish thaw in coming to terms
with the events of 1915, a process that is not without its dangers.

Take the story of Hrant Dink, a Turkish Armenian activist who had
devoted himself to improving understanding between Armenians and Turks
through Agos, the newspaper he founded and edited from the late 1990s.

Less interested in the question of denial or acknowledgment —
he opposed foreign governments’ genocide resolutions — he argued
that the real problem was a lack of comprehension on the part of
Turkey. Only democracy would allow that. In 2007, Dink was shot dead
by a 17-year-old Turkish nationalist.

Armenian activism unquestionably has helped force the issue
of historical scrutiny and political accountability. As the
Armenian-American writer Leon Surmelian proclaimed in his essay
‘Mourning is not Enough’, published in 1965 on the 50th anniversary of
the atrocities, there was a responsibility to stand up and be counted.

‘For too long now we have been the forgotten people of the western
world. And we deserve to be forgotten forever if we take no action
now.’

It has been a long, fraught process. Starting in 2000, the Workshop
for Armenian/Turkish Scholarship, brainchild of Suny and another
colleague, brought Turkish and Armenian scholarship together in joint
endeavour for the first time. In 2011 its contributors published A
Question of Genocide, helping establish an academic consensus on the
slaughter. There is an instructive comparison to be made here with
Germany after the Holocaust, a war crime that triggered a level of
soul-searching as yet unmatched in Turkey.

Both books offer painful reading, compelling for the general reader,
cathartic for Armenian and Turk alike. For a century since the
massacres, one people has been haunted by silence, the other by
denial. The walls of both have now started to come tumbling down. As
an Armenian from the eastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir, an epicentre
of the atrocities that was once more than half Christian, puts it:
‘For the Turks 100 years is too soon, for us it is too late.’

‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’, £21.95 and ‘Great
Catastrophe’, £18 are available from the Spectator Bookshop, Tel:
08430 600033. Justin Marozzi is the author of Baghdad: City of Peace,
City of Blood.

This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator
magazine, dated 18 April 2015