Turkey has decided to change its official name after its negative links to the animal or a “silly person”.

The European country will now be known as Türkiye at the United Nations from now on, after it agreed to a formal request from Ankara.

The rebrand comes partly because the word is commonly associated with the bird usually eaten at Christmas or Thanksgiving.

In the Cambridge English Dictionary, one definition of ‘turkey’ is “something that fails badly” or “a stupid or silly person”.

The UN has since come out and said it made the change “as soon as possible” after the country sent of a request last week, the BBC reports.

Several international bodies will be asked to make the name change as part of a rebranding campaign launched by the Turkish president late last year.

In December Recep Tayyip Erdogan said: “”Türkiye is the best representation and expression of the Turkish people’s culture, civilization, and values.”

Most Turks already know their country as Türkiye, but the anglicised Turkey is widely used, even within the country.

The new re-branding will see all exported products have the “Made in Türkiye” logo plastered on them, similar to a “Hello Türkiye” tourism scheme that was launched at the beginning of the year.https://get-latest.convrse.media/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mirror.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fworld-news%2Fturkey-rebrands-officially-changes-name-27133638&cre=center&cip=14&view=web

The change has been met with mixed emotions from Turkish people.

While government officials support the decision, many have labeled it an “ineffective distraction” as the president heads into elections next year, amid the ongoing economic crisis.

Turkey is following suit from many other countries that have decided to change their names.

In 2020, The Netherlands decided to drop it’s well-known Holland name in a rebranding move.

By Aris Janigian,

When it comes to crimes against humanity, we must admit, that geopolitics and the great games between empires and their proxies determine who will be rescued, who will be prosecuted, who will get to properly bury their dead, whose memory will be safeguarded and whose will be left to forget. This “selective” memorialization is incontrovertible, the Armenian case perhaps being the chief example. Starting in the late 1890s, Ottomans set in motion a series of massacres, culminating in the 1915 genocide that shocked the world. Within decades, the world drifted into either indifference or denial. A bulwark against communism, Turkey was too precious an asset to upset. In the US, one presidential contender after another promised to recognize the genocide. Once they had secured Armenians’ votes and were safely in office, each drifted into muteness or euphemisms to protect America’s relationship to Turkey. Yet last year, on April 24, President Biden finally uttered the purported calamity-causing phrase — The Armenian Genocide — and Turkey and NATO went about its business as usual.All the while, historians like Bedross Der Matossian, Associate Professor of Modern Middle East History in the Department of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, have been patiently doing their work. The Adana Massacres of 1909, nearly unknown outside of Armenians circles, has been the subject of scant English language research. With The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century, Der Matossian, has given us an extraordinary account of this extraordinary period of paranoia, tribalism, and violence. This book, a kind of harrowing sequel to his earlierShattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire, deepens our understanding of the darkest 25 years — 1896 to 1921 — in Armenia’s 2,500-year-old history.Der Matossian also gives us a master study in massacres: the way that history is twisted, how the future is painted as dangerous and uncertain; how central governments turn a blind eye, allowing facts on the ground to be darkly narrated. He shows how all this and more allows a vortex of hate to gather and generate the unthinkable. It was with all this in mind that I came to this interview, conducted with Der Matossian via email over a period of three days.¤

This article was published on April 23, 2022 in Los Angeles Review of Books. Click here to read the entire interview / conversation that author Aris Janigian had with Bedross Matossian about his latest publication by Stanford University Press titled: The Horrors of Adana – Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century. https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/where-is-humanity-a-conversation-with-bedross-der-matossian/ Aris Janigian is the author five novels, and co-author, along with April Greiman, of Something from Nothing, a book on the hilosophy of graphic design. For his first novel, Bloodvine, Janigian was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as a “strong and welcome new voice,” and over the course or four subsequent novels, he has plumbed the American experience, from the struggle of 1920s immigrants to the neurosis and decadence of contemporary culture. This Angelic Land, set during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, was called “today’s necessary book” by critic D. J. Waldie, and Janigian’s Waiting for Lipchitz at Chateau Marmont, about a screenwriter who goes from riches to rags, spent 17 weeks on the Los Angeles Times best-seller list. In his recently released Waiting for Sophia at Shutters on the Beach, Janigian broaches sexual politics and “rape culture,” one of the most heated issues of our times. Aris Janigian has pursued a three-pronged life and career, as a writer, academic, and following in his father’s footsteps, as a wine grape packer and shipper in Fresno California, where he currently lives. Holding a PhD in psychology, Janigian was Senior Professor of Humanities at Southern California Institute of Architecture, and a contributing writer to West, the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine. He was a finalist for Stanford University’s William Saroyan Fiction Prize and the recipient of the Anahid Literary Award from Columbia University. Bedross Der Matossian is the vice-chair, associate professor of Modern Middle East History, and Hymen Rosenberg Professor in Judaic Studies at the Department of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is also the president of the Society for Armenian Studies (SAS). Born and raised in Jerusalem, he is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He completed his Ph.D. in Middle East History in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University in 2008. From 2008 to 2010, he was a Lecturer of Middle East History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has been appointed as the Dumanian Visiting Professor in the University of Chicago for Spring 2014. He is the author and co-editor of multiple books including the award-winning book Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2014).

On a remote hillside, far from the swinging 60s, garrulous shepherds exasperate the police in this elegant parable about power and the state

By Peter Bradshaw

If there was ever an Armenian new wave or maybe an Armenian absurdist wave, then this sprightly and bittersweet 1969 movie – now revived by the Klassiki streaming service as part of a season of Armenian cinema – would be at the vanguard. It was adapted by the Armenian writer Hrant Matevosyan from his own novel and directed by Henrik Malyan. It’s an elegant, elusive parable of a movie about power and the state.

The deadpan coup de cinéma that opens the film is rather brilliant: a frenzied montage of all the exciting things that are happening in the 1960s – pop music, dancing, sports. But all of it is suddenly snuffed out with a hard cut to the silent rural world of the Armenian highlands where four shepherds are living the same tough, unsexy existence as their forefathers: droll, dyspeptic Ishkhan (Frunzik Mkrtchyan), truculent Pavle (Khoren Abrahamyan), melancholy widower Avag (Azat Sherents) and university graduate Zaven (Armen Ayvazyan), whose habit it is to slaughter sheep while invoking the words of Shakespeare’s Othello: “… in Aleppo once, / Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk / Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, / I took by th’throat the circumcised dog / And smote him, thus … ” These are lines that resonate among Armenians who presumed to traduce the Soviet state.

Bitterly cold and hungry one night, Ishkhan finds some stray and apparently ownerless sheep and slaughters them to provide a welcome barbecue for him and all his fellow shepherds shivering on the hillside. But then another shepherd, Revaz (Artavazd Peleshian), comes along, asking if anyone has seen his stray sheep. With a mixture of mockery, defiance and embarrassment, Ishkhan and the others tell the furious Revaz they have eaten his sheep and give him an inadequate amount in payment and Revaz furiously storms off.

The next day, an officious police inspector (Sos Sargsyan) is round at Ravez’s house and is bemused and infuriated at Ravez’s refusal to press charges. This policeman makes it his business to solve the crime and bring the wrongdoers to book: he will not tolerate this primitive world of chaotic hearsay among shepherds and will impose the rational technocratic might of the Soviet state – often grumpily breaking out in Russian as he does so. But he needs clear statements from all four, clear descriptions of the crime, clear confessions or clear witness statements.

However, it is quite impossible. The shepherds are evasive, garrulous and sarcastic and the inspector, like a colonial governor gradually going native, is less and less inclined to press the point. Finally, at a mock trial involving the five men up on the mountains they air their grievances at a Soviet state that takes their labour and their produce – in this case, sheep – and which regards any deviance as a kind of ideological theft.

There is a sly wit and philosophical humour in this film, a kind of Zen satire at the expense of the forces of law and order. The officer is also obsessed with a case in which a man who was accused of stealing his wife’s wedding ring to pay for his boozing was sent to a labour camp: there is no such thing as private marital business where the Soviet state is concerned, and even to insist on such a thing is a serious offence. And finally, those sheep themselves are an ambiguous symbol: do they stand for the conformism that the authorities require? Or are they wild, untameable and unmanageable? This is a shrewd political pastoral.

We and Our Mountains screens on 10 May at the Cine Lumiere, London, and is on Klassiki from 10 May.

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Regal LA Live Theater 1000 W. Olympic Boulevard  Los Angeles, CA.

Join in the screening of the director’s cut of the documentary ‘Lethal Nationalism: Genocide of the Greeks’. The film chronicles the genocide of the indigenous Hellenic Christian population at the hands of the Ottoman and Nationalist Turks. This catastrophe also set the course for the elimination of Armenian and Assyrian people in what is now Turkey.   

Click Here to Order Your Tickets in Advance

For more information visit www.hellenicresearchcenter.org

By Harut Sassounian,

Ever since Archbishop Sahak Mashalian became the Armenian Patriarch of Turkey in 2019, he has made a series of questionable statements on the Armenian Genocide and bestowed lavish praise upon Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for his denialist remarks.

It is understandable, to a degree, why Armenians in Turkey, especially those in leadership positions, are forced to go along with the Turkish government’s denials of the Armenian Genocide since they are hostages in Turkey. However, there are red lines that no Armenian, let alone a clergyman, should cross regardless of circumstances or locality.

However, we should not ascribe all of the Patriarch’s declarations to threats or pressures from the Turkish government. He has made many subservient statements of his own free will in order to get elected as Patriarch or endear himself to the authorities.

The Patriarch’s most recent controversial statement came in a lengthy sermon he delivered in Armenian and Turkish on April 24, the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide at Istanbul’s Kumkapu Sourp Haroutioun Church. While I welcome his desire to commemorate the Armenian Genocide, I question the accuracy of some of his statements. In my humble opinion, the Patriarch would have been better off giving a short sermon, simply expressing his sympathies to those who lost their lives in 1915. Given his mixed messages, he risked alienating both Armenians and Turks.

Let us now turn to the Patriarch’s sermon. He started by saying that April 24 commemorates Armenians who were killed during World War I. The Patriarch is thus copying the denialist words of Pres. Erdogan who misrepresents the Armenian dead as victims of war, not genocide. The Patriarch also capitalized on the fact that in 2015, Catholicos Karekin II declared all victims of the Armenian Genocide to be “saints,” which led the Patriarch to qualify April 24 as “no longer a day of mourning,” but “a day of remembrance for the consecrated saints.”

The Patriarch then came up with the following strange explanation: “The immortality of the victims of the Meds Yeghern began on the day of their death. We simply awoke to this truth after a hundred years of mourning!” He accused all those who continue to commemorate the Armenian Genocide of wanting “to sink in and remain forever in the inescapable nightmare of labyrinths of the Yeghern.”

While the Patriarch falsely represented the genocide as resulting from war, he also made some accurate assessments regarding the consequences of “Meds Yeghern” on the Armenian people, particularly the loss of their homes and lands:

“Today is April 24. It is the infamous day of remembrance of the terrible tragedy of our nation a century ago; a miserable date that symbolizes the start of one of the darkest chapters of our history…. which is familiar to us as ‘Meds Yeghern.’ …A nation was torn from its centuries-old settlements as a result of a policy cultivated and developed for reasons incomprehensible to us. The word deportation is embossed on our Armenian identity in its most painful shades. This unfortunate practice has led to the emptying of monasteries, the desolation of places of worship, the deprivation of schools of teachers and students, and in general, the settlements from their inhabitants. Families were left to mourn the loss of their parents and children. Men and women, old men and boys, young men and virgins were forced to follow a deadly path. In other words, a negative situation as a result of which hundreds of thousands of people were forced to bear in their wounded hearts the pain of irreversible and irreparable losses.”

The Patriarch continued his mixed messages by condemning the denial of the genocide, while criticizing its recognition by foreign parliaments, describing their actions as “provocations by distant countries.” On the positive side, he dared to use the term genocide once in Armenian and Turkish in his sermon: “It should be noted that the denial of the pain experienced by the Armenians on these lands wounds the conscience. We should also mention that we find contrary to moral principles the efforts that tend to use the pains of our fathers on the international stage as politicized theses against Turkey. Neither the denial nor the genocide resolutions adopted by the parliaments of various countries will bring honor to the pains suffered or to the people who lived through them on these lands. On the contrary, angry and defensive sides, by augmenting the shadows of the past, cause the peoples’ hopes to reconcile and develop natural relations to be dimmed and to block the present and future of the neighboring peoples.”

The Patriarch then suffered from a massive spell of amnesia by falsely describing “the events of the past 107 years… as a painful exception to the millennial common history” of Armenians and Turks. The Patriarch conveniently forgot the centuries of oppression suffered by Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the Hamidian massacres of the 1890’s that caused the deaths of 300,000 Armenians, and the Adana massacre of 1909 that resulted in the killing of 30,000 Armenians.

The Patriarch, however, did not forget to praise Pres. Erdogan as the “unique figure” who issued sympathetic statements on April 24. The fact is that Erdogan’s statements should be condemned, not praised, for distorting the truth about the Armenian Genocide.

The Patriarch ended his sermon by supporting the ongoing diplomatic efforts for “rapprochement” between Armenia and Turkey. He must realize that without acknowledging the truth and establishing justice, there can be no reconciliation.

The leader of the Turkish nationalists called on the deputy of Armenian origin Garo Paylan to leave Turkey, Evrensel reported.

Touching upon the bill on Armenian Genocide recognition submitted by Garo Paylan, leader of the Turkish Nationalist Movement Devlet Bahceli said: “He should either say that Turkish Parliament is not his parliament or the Turkish Parliament leadership should remove him from it. Let him go where he wants. Let him establish ties with the Armenian diaspora. I advise him to go to America.”

By Harut Sassounian,

Pres. Joe Biden issued a written statement on April 24, officially recognizing the Armenian Genocide for the second year in a row.

Here is an excerpt from Pres. Biden’s acknowledgment: “On April 24, 1915, Ottoman authorities arrested Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thus began the Armenian genocide — one of the worst mass atrocities of the 20th century. Today, we remember the one and a half million Armenians who were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination, and mourn the tragic loss of so many lives…. Today, 107 years later, the American people continue to honor all Armenians who perished in the genocide.”

In his statement, Pres. Biden used the word ‘Genocide’ four times and once ‘Meds Yeghern,’ an Armenian term used to describe the mass killings, before Raphael Lemkin coined the term Genocide in the 1940’s. Pres. Biden also identified ‘Ottoman authorities’ as perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide.

While Armenians appreciate the sympathetic words of Pres. Biden, he must be reminded that a similar danger of extinction is looming today over Artsakh. He should not have approved military aid to Azerbaijan, a country that is intent on wiping out both Artsakh and Armenia.

Pres. Biden should turn his moral acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide to actionable foreign policy by pressuring Turkey to recognize its crime, compensate for the mass murders committed by its predecessor regime, and return the occupied Western Armenian lands. Recognition without restitution is meaningless!

Just as Western countries rose to the defense of Ukraine with massive military and humanitarian assistance, so should they protect Artsakh. During the 2020 war, Artsakh was subjected to a brutal attack by Azerbaijan, Turkey, and imported Jihadist terrorists, committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. But the world remained silent. There should be no favoritism for the suffering of one people over another. All human beings deserve the same protection.

In addition to Pres. Biden’s declaration on the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, statements were issued by the Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, Vice President of Argentina Cristina Fernandez, President of Cyprus Nicos Anastasiades, President of Greece Katerina Sakellaropoulou, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and several other leaders. However, the United Kingdom, Australia and Israel are some of the countries that are still afraid of Turkey to acknowledge the truth about the mass murders of 1.5 million Armenians.

Turkey, the perpetrator of the genocide, and its vassal state, Azerbaijan, continue to deny the Armenian Genocide. Armenians around the world and all people of goodwill continue to hold protests, exposing their lies and remind the world of the mass murders.

This year, on April 23, when Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was in Montevideo, Uruguay, a group of Armenians protested his visit. Cavusoglu mocked the gathered Armenians by flashing the threatening hand gesture of the Turkish terrorist group, Gray Wolves. Mehmet Ali Agca, who shot and wounded Pope John Paul II in 1981, was a member of the Gray Wolves. Imagine if a German Foreign Minister showed the Nazi insignia to Jewish Holocaust survivors. The President of Uruguay condemned the Turkish Foreign Minister’s undiplomatic gesture and the Uruguayan Foreign Ministry summoned the Turkish Ambassador to explain the Turkish Foreign Minister’s inappropriate behavior.

Nevertheless, Turkish President Rejep Tayyip Erdogan is beginning to realize the futility of his denials of the Armenian Genocide. After years of threatening the United States if it recognized the Armenian Genocide, Erdogan turned into a mouse after Pres. Biden recognized it last year. Erdogan had arrogantly announced that he will complain to the U.S. President about his recognition of the Armenian Genocide. However, when the two met last June, he did not dare to say a word to Biden about it. Afterwards when the Turkish press asked Erdogan if he complained to Biden about the Genocide, he absurdly said, “No, Biden did not bring it up.” Erdogan was thoroughly humiliated.

In a message to Armenians who had gathered at the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul to commemorate the Armenian Genocide on April 24, Erdogan wrote to Armenian Patriarch Sahak Mashalyan: “I believe that we should build the future together, inspired by our deep-rooted unity of up to a thousand years, instead of magnifying the suffering.” Rather than acknowledging the Armenian Genocide, Erdogan claimed that Ottoman citizens (both Armenians and Turks) died as a result of World War I, without distinguishing between the victims of genocide and war.

Furthermore, the Turkish Foreign Ministry announced that it rejected the statements made on April 24 by various countries: “This includes today’s unfortunate statement by U.S. President Biden, repeating the mistake he made in 2021. We reject such statements and decisions that distort historical facts with political motives, and condemn those who insist on this mistake.” This is coming from the Turkish Foreign Minister who made a terroristic hand gesture in Uruguay.

Meanwhile, the Governor of Istanbul banned the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, which had been held annually since 2010, except for the last two years due to covid.

Finally, Garo Paylan, the Armenian member of the Turkish Parliament, submitted a bold resolution to the Parliament last week demanding that it recognize the Armenian Genocide, identify those responsible, remove their names from public places, and grant Turkish citizenship to the victims and their families. Paylan came under vicious attacks from Turkish officials. The Speaker of Parliament rejected his motion. The spokesman of AKP, the ruling party, demanded an apology from Paylan and threatened to sue him. Furthermore, Pres. Erdogan condemned Paylan and urged the Parliament “to deal with him.”

If Turkish leaders don’t mind to be humiliated and exposed to the world for denying that their country committed genocide, Armenians will continue to expose them as supporters of barbaric actions. The sooner they come to their senses, acknowledge the Genocide and make amends, the sooner they will stop being disgraced.