940 News Radio, Canada
April 23 2005

Armenian rememberance
2005-04-23 11:55:30

This weekend marks the 90th anniversary of the Armenian genocide in
which a million-and-a-half Armenians were killed and tortured during
the 1915 genocide in turkey. At 7 Saturday evening, a special service
will take place at St. Joseph’s Oratory, to remember those who lost
their lives during the massacre. Religious leaders from Montreal and
a number of politicians are expected to attend the
multi-denominational mass. A number of the remaining survivors of the
genocide will also be in attendance.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Turkish Press
April 23 2005

Press Scan:

TURKISH PRODUCTS ON HEAVY DEMAND IN YEREVAN

VATAN- There are Turkish products in dozens of shops in Yerevan,
Armenia. Turkish products arrive in Yerevan from Georgia or Russia as
the Kars border is presently closed. Turkish electronics giant Beko
has a store in Yerevan.

Turkish Press
April 23 2005

Press Scan:

LETTER OF COMPROMISE

TURKIYE- Wexler and Whitfield, U.S. congressmen who are the members
of Turkish Friendship Group, sent a letter to other U.S. congressmen.
In their letter, Wexler and Whitfield asked U.S. congressmen to exert
efforts to persuade (Armenian President Robert) Kocharian to accept
(Turkish PM Recep Tayyip) Erdogan’s proposal to “open archives and
solve the problem”.

CBS2 Chicago, IL
April 23 2005

Armenians Protest 90th Anniversary Of Genocide

VIDEO: Alita Guillen reports.

CHICAGO (CBS 2) A somber anniversary was marked by emotional
demonstrations in Chicago Friday.

A group of Armenians protested outside the Turkish Consulate Friday
to mark the 90th anniversary of a conflict that left millions of
their ancestors dead and even more displaced.

The genocide of Armenians began 90 years ago this weekend.

Dozens of people protested today in front of the Turkish Consulate in
the names of their mothers, fathers and grandparents.

Some protested for relatives who perished.

`My grandfather and grandma, the Turks killed them in their village,’
said Hermin Kholamian.

Others spoke out for those who survived.

`My mother died here, but she escaped what was going on there,’
protester Maro Stathopoulos said tearfully.

Allegations include ethnic cleansing by the Ottoman Empire on their
Armenian neighbors in Eastern Turkey beginning in 1915. Photographs
captured images of mass graves and faces of refugees forced to flee.

99-year-old Matthew Klujian was forced from his home. His baby
brother died of starvation and his father was killed.

`They killed him with a hatchet,’ Klujian recalled.

The Turkish government admits Armenians were killed, but they said it
was not genocide, it was war.

`No Armenian was killed because they were Armenian and not for any
other reason,’ said Tuluy Tanc of the Turkish Embassy. `The reason
was a war.’

CBS 2 International Editor Marvin Zonis said whether war, or
genocide, the atrocities were real.

`Turkey bears the historical legacy of those days, and until Turkey
acknowledges that some mass slaughter occurred, this is not going to
go away,’ the historian said.

The Turkish government has recently reached out to the Armenian
government, suggesting they work together to research the event and
put an end to the disagreement.

Zonis believes this is a political move by the Turkish government,
which is trying to become a part of the European Union.

This has become a spiritual memorial for the Armenian people, and a
service will be held at Immaculate Conception at 4:00 p.m. on Sunday.
They expect nearly a thousand people at the service.

Video:

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Times Herald-Record, NY
April 23 2005

Rally marks genocide date

As a lawyer, Richard Sarajian’s job is to fight for justice.
Tomorrow, his fight will be personal.
Sarajian, an Armenian from Chestnut Ridge, formerly of Monroe,
will attend a rally outside Times Square with thousands of Armenians
in hopes that the world will recognize a mass killing by the Turkish
Army that occurred April 24, 1915.
Sarajian, chairman of the National Executive Council of the
Armenian Apostolic Church of America, will be going in memory of his
grandparents, three of whom survived the genocide.
Church services will be held in the city from 9 to 11 a.m. at St.
Vartan Cathedral Church, 2nd Avenue and 34th Street, and at St.
Illuminator’s Cathedral, 27th Street between 2nd and 3rd avenues.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Assa-Irada, Azerbaijan
April 23 2005

Azerbaijan to appeal to int’l organizations over prisoners

Azerbaijan will send direct appeals to the International Committee of
the Red Cross, OSCE, the Council of Europe and rights groups over
three Azeri prisoners withheld in Armenia, says Azay Guliyev, member
of the working group of the State Committee on Prisoners, Hostages
and Missing Persons.

Guliyev termed as utterly unfair the fact that the Azeri captives
have been withheld in captivity for about 70 days, accusing Armenia,
which occupies Azeri lands, of openly and blatantly violating legal
norms.

`The entire civil society should struggle against this unbearable
situation.’

Guliyev called on those defending Armenia to at least show plain
humanism. The Armenian soldiers taken captive over by Azerbaijan are
always released within a week of 10 days, he added.

IRNA< Iran
April 23 2005

Iran allows ethnic Armenians to mark alleged genocide Tehran, April
23, IRNA
Armenians-Rally-Iran

Iran Saturday gave green light to its Armenian community to mark the
90th anniversary of the alleged massacre of their ancestors by the
Ottoman Turks during World War I.

The authorization, issued by a commission which has representative
from the government as well as the Judiciary and the legislature,
will allow Iran’s Armenians, reportedly numbering around 250,000, to
commemorate the occasion along with the rest of their kins across the
world on Sunday.

Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kinsmen perished in
orchestrated killings between 1915 and 1917 as the Ottoman Empire,
the predecessor of modern Turkey, was falling apart.

Ankara counters that 300,000 Armenians and thousands of Turks were
killed in ‘civil strife’ during World War I when the Armenians rose
against their Ottoman rulers and sided with invading Russian troops.

Efforts by the Armenian community, which is represented by two MPs in
the Iranian parliament, have led nowhere so far while they have
pressed the government here to recognize the killings as genocide.

Tehran, however, enjoys close relations with Yerevan, with the two
neighbors having signed a deal for the transfer of the Iranian gas to
Armenia through a pipeline.

This has irked Shia-dominated Azerbaijan, the same dominant Muslim
faith in Iran, which has long-simmering tensions with Armenia over
the disputed enclave of Karabakh in the volatile Caucasus.

Armenia has controlled Karabakh and seven surrounding regions which
make up 14 percent of Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized
territory since the two former Soviet republics ended large-scale
hostilities with a ceasefire in 1994.

Financial Times (London, England)
April 22, 2005 Friday
London Edition 1

Turkey challenges genocide ‘fraud’ UK ARMENIA DOCUMENT

By VINCENT BOLAND

ANKARA

The Turkish parliament was yesterday preparing to ask the UK to
repudiate a historical document that is considered to form the basis
of the claim that Armenians were victims of genocide by Ottoman Turks
during the first world war.

The initiative comes on the eve of Sunday’s 90th anniversary
commemorations among Armenians of what they regard as the start of
the massacre of up to 1.5m people.

The move is likely to exacerbate the bitter dispute between Turks and
Armenians. Supporters of the Armenian cause, particularly in France,
are lobbying for the European Union to delay the start of Turkey’s
accession talks for EU membership until Turkey acknowledges a
“systematic extermination” in 1915.

Turkish MPs completed and signed a letter to both houses of the UK
parliament arguing that the document was “a fraud based on
fabrications, half truths and biased reports and perceptions” of what
happened and “a masterpiece of propaganda and tool of deception”.

The document, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire
1915-1916, was written by the British historian Arnold Toynbee and
included in a publication known as the Blue Book, by Viscount Bryce,
a British diplomat. It was an official Westminster document, which is
why the Turkish parliament wants the House of Commons and House of
Lords to act.

Turkey rejects the charge of genocide. It insists that the true death
toll among Armenians was about 600,000 and that many died from the
effects of civil war, starvation and deportation. It says the deaths
of hundreds of thousands of Turks at the time are overlooked.

The letter, which was made available yesterday by the Turkish
parliament in the original Turkish and in English translation, will
be sent to London imminently.

The letter says British propaganda in the first world war aimed to
portray the destruction of the Ottoman Empire as a key aim of the
war, to “render British colonialism in Anatolia and Mesopotamia
palatable”, and to encourage the US to join the Allied side. The
Ottoman Empire collapsed into many nations after the war. Its
Anatolian heartland is now Turkey.

The British embassy in Ankara declined to comment on the letter. Some
Turkish historians say the document has stood the test of time;
others say Mr Toynbee later distanced himself from its findings,
which were based on eyewitness accounts.

The official UK position is that the massacres were “an appalling
tragedy” but that the evidence is not “sufficiently unequivocal” to
categorise them as genocide under the 1948 United Nations Convention
on Genocide.

The letter is the initiative of Turkey’s main opposition People’s
Republican party, which has shaped Ankara’s longstanding opposition
to any official acceptance of the genocide claim. Diplomats said it
appeared to be an attempt to prevent the ruling Justice and
Development party from diverging from that policy.

Chicago Tribune

Editorial
April 23, 2005

Correcting a history of denial

Scarcely nine months into World War I, Turkey began the deportation of
hundreds of thousands of Armenian citizens to camps that supposedly
had been prepared for them in the Syrian desert.

There were no camps.

By the time the forced march into the desert and other atrocities were
over, an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were dead.

The courageous U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau shouted insistently
into Washington’s deaf ears about the ongoing slaughter. He called it
“race murder;” the term “genocide” would not be invented until the
1940s, by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew. “Persecution of Armenians
assuming unprecedented proportions,” Morgenthau cabled to
Washington. “Reports from widely scattered districts indicate
systematic attempt to uproot Armenian populations through arbitrary
arrests, terrible tortures, whole-sale expulsions and deportations
… accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage, and murder.”

Sunday is the 90th anniversary of the start of the Armenian
genocide–and also of one of the longest-running cases of national
amnesia in history. To this day the Turkish government insists no
genocide took place, that it was a mutual bloodbath in which many
Turks also died. As recently as April 14, the Turkish Parliament
issued a declaration denying, once again, Armenian charges of
genocide. However, some Turkish writers and academics have slowly
begun to recognize the validity of Armenian claims.

Unlike Germany’s admission of responsibility for the Holocaust, Turkey
continues a furious worldwide campaign to prevent governments from
using “Turkey” and “genocide” in the same sentence. Only a few
countries have officially condemned the genocide as such, including
Canada, France, Poland and Russia.

Ronald Reagan was the last American president to use the word genocide
in an annual statement about the events in Armenia. All other
presidents since have opted for “massacre” or “tragedy.” Now a letter
to President Bush, so far signed by 178 House members and 32 senators,
calls for the U.S. to officially recognize and condemn the Armenian
genocide.

Even if Turkey finally recognizes the genocide, it’s doubtful
Armenians will receive any compensation for something that happened 90
years ago. By now most Armenians probably just want an admission from
Turkey that a terrible evil was committed in its name in 1915.

Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune

Assa-Irada, Azerbaijan
April 23 2005

Iran scrutinizing history distortion case

The Iranian embassy in Baku has started scrutinizing the distortion
of Azerbaijani history in some history and geography textbooks
released in Iran that indicated Karabakh as Armenian territory, the
Iranian ambassador to Azerbaijan Afshar Suleymani told a news
conference on Friday.

The ambassador said that the distortion could have taken place,
although he has not seen the books. He added that he will receive a
reply to the relevant enquiry sent to Iran shortly.