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Armenian genocide, is about to land at the Eurovision song contest #armeniangenocide

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Turkey is not going to like the Eurovision this year.(AP Photo/ Photolure, Hayk Badalyan)

Turkey is not going to like the Eurovision this year.(AP Photo/ Photolure, Hayk Badalyan)

This year’s edition of Europe’s top kitsch-fest, which will be held in Vienna May 19-23, had already promised plenty of intrigue, with Ukraine withdrawing from the contest, Russia organizing a competing event (while still going for a Eurovision win), and the decidedly non-European nation of Australia planning to make its contest debut. Report http://qz.com

Now comes word that Armenia will present a song evoking the aftermath of the Armenian genocide.

This year’s Eurovision contest roughly coincides with the 100th anniversary of the Ottoman empire’s decimation of its Armenian minority. More than 1 million people who were living in what’s now Turkey were killed. Others scattered, seeding the modern Armenian diaspora.

The genocide, which began in April 1915, is still denied by the Turkish government; a trial underway in the European Court of Human Rights Court will test whether outlawing its denial is a violation of free speech.

Armenia will take part in Eurovision with a song evocatively titled Don’t deny, by Genealogy. The group will be comprised of artists from the Armenian diaspora—one each from Africa, America, Asia, Australia, and Europe—who will be joined on stage by an Armenian performer.

Armenian news agency Armenpress reports that the meaning behind the choice to have performers from five different parts of the world is to symbolize unity and peace.

The number goes along with the five petals of the Forget Me Not flower, and another participant will join the group and bring the “petals” together.

According to the Eurovision official website:

The idea is to unite a new generation of Armenians on stage whose families once spread all over the world in the year 1915.

The performers reportedly will include French-Armenian Essaï, who recently released Je n’oublie pas (I don’t forget), a song he dedicates, in the video, to “the 1.5 million Armenians, victims of the 1915 genocide.”
This is not the first time Eurovision has been tied to Armenian politics. In 2012, Armenia withdrew from the contest after the organizers selected Baku, Azerbaijan, as the host city of the event. Armenia and Azerbaijan had gone to war over the disputed South Caucasus territory of Nagorno-Karabakh in the 1990s, without ever getting to a resolution.

MARSEILLE Provence devoted an issue of its magazine Armenians Provence

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Marseille reception, La Provence

Marseille reception, La Provence

Reception at the headquarters of La Provence in Marseille for the launch of the magazine

Wonderful initiative of the newspaper La Provence in Marseille. The daily has published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide a special issue of its magazine “Armenians of Provence” (136 pages) on newsstands since Friday, February 13 (3.50 €). Thursday, February 12, on the eve of the launch of the magazine, the management of Provence had invited its drafting few dozen members and leaders of associations, political and cultural development of the Armenian community of Marseille. These discovered previewed this particularly rich number on the Armenians with sixty articles including “the roots of uprooted”, “Provence of the archives,” “a hundred years of memory”, “Faces of yesterday and today “and” address books “. Note also the interview with Charles Aznavour. “Armenians of Provence” according to La Provence is a “dive in the heart of a community that has been able to regain hope after the 1915 genocide and exile of the 1920s.” This tool will help Provençaux discover the intimacy of some 150,000 Armenians around them every day in the region.

Krikor Amirzayan in Marseille, text and photo report

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France: Grand International Symposium: The genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in the Great War

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Paris, Grand International Symposium,

Paris, Grand International Symposium,

Wednesday, March 25th – 16.30 / 8:30 p.m.

Grand Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne 76 rue des Ecoles – 75005 Paris

Address by the President of the French Republic, FRANÇOIS HOLLAND

Messages of support

Address by the Rector of the Academy of Paris, FRANÇOIS WEIL

Address by the President of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

SIR PETER CYRILLE HAUTCOEUR

Inaugural Conference of MR YVES TERNON historian, member of the Scientific Council of the Holocaust Memorial, president of CSI

Thursday 26 March, 9h30-19h00,

Shoah Memorial

17 rue Geoffroy The Asnier, 75004 Paris

First Panel: 10.00-12.30

Space-time, the steps of the genocidal process

Chair: Catherine Nicault, historian, University of Reims. Discussant: Stephan Astourian, historian, UC Berkeley

Interventions:

1. The legacy of Abdülhamid II. Janet Klein, Historian, University of Akron.

2. The Ottoman opposition, the Committee of Union and Progress and 1908. Erdal Kaynar Revolution, historian, Polonsky Academy of the Van Leer Institute, EHESS.

3. The “European Concert” and reforms in the eastern provinces, 1878-1914. Claire Mouradian, historian, CNRS.

4. The Special Organization. Cetinoglu known historian, Free University of Ankara.

5. The entry of the Ottoman Empire in the war, from 1914 to 1915. Mustafa Aksakal, historian, Georgetown University.

12h30-13h30: lunch

Second Panel: 13.30-15.00

Perpetrators, Victims, Rescuers

Chair: Richard Hovannisian, historian, UCLA.

Discussant: Vincent Duclert, historian, EHESS.

Interventions:

1. The first phase of the Destruction: Deportations and Massacres (April-August 1915). Raymond Kevorkian, historian, University of Paris VIII.

2. The second phase of the genocide. KM-historian, Rutgers University.

3. Forced conversions. Umit Kurt, historian, Sabancı University.

15.00-15.15: Pause

Third Panel: 15h15-16h20

Witnesses

Chair: Wolfgang Gust, journalist. Discussant: Ara Sarafian, historian, Gomidas Institute.

Interventions:

1. European and American Witnesses. Hans-Lukas Kieser, historian, University of Zurich.

2. Armenian Witnesses. Amatuni Virabyan, historian, State Archives of Armenia.

16h20-16h30: pause

Fourth Panel: 16h30-19h00

Other minorities Empire

Chair: Gérard Chaliand, geostrategist. Discussant: Laurent-Olivier Mallet, historian, University of Montpellier.

Interventions:

1. The Jews of the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century. Georges Bensoussan, historian, the Holocaust Memorial.

2. The complexity of the genocide of the Assyrian-Chaldeans. David Gaunt, a historian, Centre for Baltic and East European University of Soedertoern.

3. Ottoman Greeks. Sia Anagnostopoulou, historian, University of Athens.

4. Kurdish-Yezidi-Armenians, many facets of a community in exile (s). Estelle Amy of Bretèque, anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, CNRS.

Day 2: Friday, March 27, 9h30-20h30

EHESS

Amphitheatre Furet

105 Boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris

Fifth Panel: 10.00-12.30

Logic of war, economic, ideological.

Chair: Joël Kotek, a political scientist, historian, University of Brussels. Discussant: Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, historian, EHESS.

Interventions:

1. Logical ideological, demographic and economic genocide. Hamit Bozarslan, political scientist, historian, EHESS.

2. The logic of pre-genocidal massacres. Vincent Duclert, historian, EHESS.

3. The evolution of the Caucasian front. Peter Holquist, historian, University of Pennsylvania.

4. The mechanisms of decision making of the Young Turk leadership (1913-1915). Erik-Jan Zürcher, historian, University of Leiden.

5. The spoliation of property during the Armenian genocide. Mehmet Polatel, historian, Koç University.

12h30-13h30: lunch

Sixth Panel: 13h30-16h00

International relations and criminal law

Chair: Peter Mertens, lawyer, Sociology of Literature Centre, Free University of Brussels.

Discussant: Vincent Nioré, lawyer and president of the Institute of Criminal Law.

Interventions:

1. The trial of Constantinople (1919-1920). Mikaël Nichanian, historian, National Library of France.

2. breaking the consensus. The Perinçek case, the Armenian genocide and international criminal law. Sevane Garibian, lawyer, Universities of Geneva and Neuchâtel.

3. The status of Armenian stateless refugees and international action of the League of Nations and the International Labour Office. Dzovinar Kevonian, historian, Institute for Political Social Sciences, University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

4. Raphael Lemkin, the extermination of the Armenians and the invention of the word genocide. Annette Becker, historian, University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

5. Lemkin and the Armenian genocide, a legal play. Olivier Beauvallet, international judge.

16h00-16h15: Pause

Seventh Panel: 16h15-18h20

Historiography, a new research field

Chair: Michel Marian, philosopher, Institute of Political Studies in Paris. Discussant: Edhem Eldem, historian, Boğaziçi University.

Interventions:

1. The historiography of the Armenian genocide, a new field of research. Gaïdz Minassian, journalist and political scientist, Institute of Political Studies in Paris.

2. Reflections on Ottoman historiography (years 1960-1990) about the role of non-Muslims and the Ottoman Armenians in commerce and the urban economy. Stephan Astourian, historian, University of Berkeley.

3. The Ottoman governors opposed to deportations and massacres of Armenians. Ayhan Aktar, historian, Bilgi University.

4. The speech of Turkey on the Armenian genocide. Jennifer Dixon, political scientist, Villanova University.

18h20-18h30: Pause

Eighth Panel: 18h30-20h30

Perspectives on clearing trails or the Armenian ghost.

Chair: Patrick Donabedian, art historian, University of Aix-Marseille. Discussant: Antoine Spire, journalist, vice president of Lycra.

Interventions:

1. The permanent traces of the 1915 genocide in the Armenian memory; role of politics in their registration or erasure. Janine Altounian, essayist, translator of Freud.

2. The confiscation and destruction of wealth and property of Armenians and genocide. Dickran Kouymjian, historian, California State University.

3. Photographing after. Pascaline Marre, photographer and Anouche Kunth, historian, CNRS.

Aram Andonian 4. The Nubar library and the creation of a heritage in exile after the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. Boris Adjemian, historian, Library Nubar AGBU.

3rd Day: Saturday, March 28, 9h30-19h30

National Library of France Quai François Mauriac, 75013 Paris

Ninth Panel: 10.00-12.30

Storage, transmission, history, negation

Chair: Henry Rousso, historian, CNRS. Discussant: Claude Mutafian historian.

Interventions:

1. The sacrifice, witness and forgiveness: The Candidate Zareh Vorpouni. Marc Nichanian, professor of philosophy, Sabancı University.

2. Gender, genocide survival. Islamized Armenians again working memory. Ayşe Gül Altinay, anthropologist, Sabancı University.

3. Teaching genocide: European examples. Alban Perrin, historian, the Holocaust Memorial, Institute of Political Studies in Bordeaux.

4. The Founding Myths of Turkish denial. Büşra Ersanli, political scientist, University of Marmara.

5. The memory of the genocide in Turkish Armenians. Hira Kaynar, historian, EHESS.

12h30-13h30: lunch

Tenth Panel: 13.30-15.00

Specificities and comparatismes, I

Chairman: Jean-Pierre Chrétien, historian, CNRS. Discussant: Meir Waintrater journalist.

Interventions: 1. Genocidal thinking: a comparative perspective. Dominik Schaller, historian, University of Heidelberg.

2. Genocide of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks by the Ottomans. Roger Smith, historian, College of William and Mary.

3. The Armenian Genocide in the light of a general theory of genocide. Bruneteau Bernard, Professor of Political Science, University of Rennes I.

15.00-15.15: Pause

Eleventh Panel: 15h15-17h00

Specificities and comparatismes, II

Chair: Claire Mouradian, historian, CNRS. Discussant: Yves Ternon, historian, member of the Scientific Council of the Shoah Memorial.

Interventions:

1. Uniqueness of the Holocaust. Christian Ingrao, historian, CNRS.

2. Singularity of the famine in Ukraine. Nicolas Werth, historian, CNRS.

3. Uniqueness of the Tutsi genocide. Helene Dumas, historian, EHESS.

17h00-17h15: pause

Closing Conference: 5:15 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. President: Gaïdz Minassian, journalist and political scientist, Institute of Political Studies in Paris.

Interventions: 1. Report of the symposium. Raymond Kevorkian, historian, University of Paris VIII.

2. 1915 and the social sciences. Taner Akcam, historian, University of Clarke.

3. Turkism and pan-Turkism. Erik-Jan Zürcher, historian, University of Leiden.

4. The contemporary denial and its defenders. Richard Hovannisian, historian, UCLA.

5. The outlook from the perspective of international justice. Nicholas Koumjian, prosecutor at the international courts.

6. The issue of research on the Armenian genocide in Turkey. Ragıp Zarakolu, editor.

Practical information

Registration by mail in the number of places available

colloquecsi@gmail.com

http://centenaire.org/fr/espace-scientifique/colloquesseminaires/le-genocide-des-armeniens-de-lempire-ottoman-dans-la-grande

Adana, 1909: New book on Genocide published in Turkey

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Adana, massacres of 20,000 Armenians 1909

Adana, massacres of 20,000 Armenians 1909

A book providing a fresh insight into the history of the Armenian Genocide has been published in Turkey to introduce witness testimonies depicting the massacres of 20,000 Armenians.
Entitled “1909 Adana Pogroms: Three Reports”, the book comprises three major documents which gained importance after wide-ranging debates in Ottoman Empire and worldwide. It sheds light on the pogroms that started from Adana and later expanded to Kilis and Zeytun. Ari Shekerian has translated the book from the Ottoman language. It also contains photos taken in more than 40 regions.

The author of the preface is Turkish historian Tener Akcam. The reports by Karapet Chalian, Artin Aslanian and Hakob Papikian were published 106 years after the mass killings.
The authors’ biographies add interest to the historic records.

Papikyan, who was in a fact-finding mission dispatched to Adana after the pogroms, passed away in rather suspicious circumstances a day before the report was made public.

Chalian, who was considered a founder of Ittihat ve Teraki (secret society established as the Committee of Ottoman Union), was killed in 1920. Aslanian rejected to give any testimony and later fled to Egypt, where he wrote the report.

report tert.am

Time to Unite time to #deturkification of Washington

Azerbaijan in hysterics over Armenia’s Eurovision pick, “Don’t Deny”

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188271At Eurovision 2015 song contest, Armenia will be presented by artists from five continents.

On the occasion of the Armenian Genocide centennial – musicians from Europe, Asia, America, Africa, Australia will symbolize its emblem – the flower of forget-me-not. The idea behind performance is to unite a new generation of Armenians on stage whose families once spread all over the world in the year 1915.

The project called Genealogy will sing “Don’t Deny” in Vienna.

Armenia’s entry, however, caused hysterics in Azeri media outlets who were quick to come up with accusations of politicizing the event.

Thus, Azerbaijan’s Public Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (ITV) issued a statement saying, “this contest can’t be a victim of any country’s political ambitions and converted into a political arena. The Public Television and Radio Broadcasting Company state that if the news is confirmed, we will also take appropriate steps in the contest.”

Source: PanARMENIAN.Net
Related links:

Тренд: Азербайджан поступит адекватно, если Армения превратит «Евровидение» в политическую арену
Report.az: Официальный представитель “Евровидения” прокомментировал ситуацию с армянской песней

Bundestag president says entire Europe is aware of Armenian Genocide

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Georgian diocese, Armenian Church met with the president of Bundestag president,

Georgian diocese, Armenian Church met with the president of Bundestag president,

The head of Georgian diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church met with the president of Bundestag, Professor Norbert Lammert on Friday.

The meeting was held on the initiative of the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Mr. Ortwin Hennig, at the Embassy of Germany in Georgia.

High-ranking clergymen representing Georgian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, German Lutheran and Evangelical Baptist Churches, Chief Rabbi of Jewish community, the spiritual leader of Yazidi community and, of course, the Primate of the Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church in Georgia, His Grace Bishop Vazgen Mirzakhanyan, attended the meeting.

The president of Bundestag and other high-level guests inquired about the religious tolerance in Georgia and the mutual cooperation among Christian, Islamic, Jewish and other religious communities.

The Primate of the Diocese presented the history of the Armenian Church and Diocese in Georgia and raised main concerns of the Church and community.

The Primate highlighted that despite difficulties, the mutual cooperation among religious communities continues. As for the cooperation with Georgian government – the Diocese anticipates to resolve the issue of restitution of its historical churches.

Professor Norbert Lammert asked the Primate about the mutual relations between Armenian and Islamic communities and between Armenians and Turks in Georgia in view of the approaching 100th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. The president of Bundestag noted that the entire Europe is aware of the genocide against Armenians committed hundred years ago and carefully observe Armenian-Turkish relations; all the Armenian communities plan to hold commemorative events related to the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. High-level guests also inquired about how many refugees Georgia accepted during the genocide

His Grace thanked Professor Norbert Lammert for his attention to the great pain of Armenian people and said that despite historic events, Armenian and Islamic communities in Georgia coexist peacefully. He noted that nearly one third of Armenians in Georgia are the descendants of the Armenian genocide victims; Armenian community plans to hold events dedicated to the 100th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide and thus to speak out for justice. The primate also thanked Georgian authorities and all religious communities, who always support Armenian community and share its grief.

The statistic data on mixed ethnic marriages and multicultural cooperation was discussed as well.

The Middle East That Might Have Been the region’s borders right.

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By Nick Danforth February 13, 2015

Nearly a century ago, two Americans led a quixotic mission to get the region’s borders right.

How the King-Crane Commission envisioned the Middle East map

How the King-Crane Commission envisioned the Middle East map

In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson dispatched a theologian named Henry King and a plumbing-parts magnate named Charles Crane to sort out the Middle East. Amid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, the region’s political future was uncertain, and the two men seemed to provide the necessary combination of business acumen and biblical knowledge. King and Crane’s quest was to find out how the region’s residents wanted to be governed. It would be a major test of Wilson’s belief in national self-determination: the idea that every people should get its own state with clearly defined borders. published on http://www.theatlantic.com

After spending three weeks interviewing religious and community leaders in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and southern Turkey, the two men and their team proposed that the Ottoman lands be divided as shown in the map above. Needless to say, the proposals were disregarded. In accordance with the Sykes-Picot Agreement Britain and France had drafted in secret in 1916, Britain and France ultimately took over the region as so-called mandate or caretaker powers. The French-administered region would later become Lebanon and Syria, and the British region would become Israel, Jordan, and Iraq.

The King-Crane report is still a striking document—less for what it reveals about the Middle East as it might have been than as an illustration of the fundamental dilemmas involved in drawing, or not drawing, borders. Indeed, the report insisted on forcing people to live together through complicated legal arrangements that prefigure more recent proposals.

Among other things, the authors concluded that dividing Iraq into ethnic enclaves was too absurd to merit discussion. Greeks and Turks only needed one country because the “two races supplement each other.” The Muslims and Christians of Syria needed to learn to “get on together in some fashion” because “the whole lesson of modern social consciousness points to the necessity of understanding ‘the other half,’ as it can be understood only by close and living relations.”

But the commissioners also realized that simply lumping diverse ethnic or religious groups together in larger states could lead to bloody results. Their report proposed all sorts of ideas for tiered, overlapping mandates or bi-national federated states, ultimately endorsing a vision that could be considered either pre- or post-national, depending on one’s perspective. In addition to outlining several autonomous regions, they proposed that Constantinople (now Istanbul) become an international territory administered by the League of Nations, since “no one nation can be equal to the task” of controlling the city and its surrounding straits, “least of all a nation with Turkey’s superlatively bad record of misrule.” Although the authors had been tasked with drawing borders, it seems that once they confronted the many dilemmas of implementing self-determination, they developed a more fluid approach to nationhood and identity.

Disagreement among the region’s residents about their own future certainly helped the commission reach this conclusion. The commissioners traveled from city to city accepting petitions and taking testimony, compiling a rare record of Arab popular opinion from the period. This early polling exercise captured a wide range of views—some overlapping, some irreconcilable.

Some 80 percent of those interviewed favored the establishment of a “United Syria”—an outcome that, far from settling the question of what self-determination would look like, forced the commission to wrestle with the crucial issue of what should happen to minorities. Many of the Christians living in this hypothetical future state, particularly those in the Mount Lebanon region, spoke out forcefully against being part of a larger, Muslim-dominated entity. Many called for an “Independent Greater Lebanon,” whose territory would be roughly equivalent to that of the modern state of Lebanon.

The commissioners’ proposed solution was to grant Lebanon “a sufficient measure of local autonomy” so as not to “diminish the security of [its] inhabitants.” But their explanation for why this autonomy should fall short of complete independence seems to challenge the logic of self-determination: “Lebanon would be in a position to exert a stronger and more helpful influence if she were within the Syrian state, feeling its problems and needs and sharing all its life, instead of outside it, absorbed simply in her own narrow concerns.”

Ultimately, the King-Crane proposal relied on European or American supervision, through the mandate system, to fudge different degrees of sovereignty and ensure minority rights in multi-national states. Placing different mandates under the same mandatory power became an easy way to separate peoples while maintaining an administrative link between them: Syria and Mesopotamia, for instance, could both be under British supervision, while Turkey and Armenia could both be overseen by the United States. There is a telling condescension to the commissioners’ insistence on foreign administration as the best way to implement “self-determination,” but it wasn’t that different from the widely shared belief at the time that oversight from a supra-national body like the League of Nations would also be necessary to ensure minority rights in the new nations of Eastern Europe.

In some ways, it also wasn’t that different from the British and French belief, evident in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, that continued imperial rule was necessary to manage local differences. There are echoes of this conviction in the anti-nationalist imperial nostalgia that exists in some quarters today. Indeed, part of the reason the British and French felt so comfortable drawing “arbitrary” borders was that they believed they would remain in a position to manage relations across them. In this sense, Anglo-French imperialism relied on controlling borders and suppressing self-determination within the region, while the King-Crane commission was more interested in trying to find a balance between them.

This balance has yet to be achieved. Today, some people argue that Iraq would be better off divided into smaller states, and that Syria might split up on its own, while others—including ISIS—have insisted that the solution is to do away entirely with borders like the one between Iraq and Syria and to create a much larger entity. But both solutions, along with the countless alternative maps proposed for the region, remain focused on redrawing borders rather than transcending them. And for what it’s worth, neither a subdivided Syria nor a union between Syria and Mesopotamia were outcomes that many locals campaigned for when King and Crane came to visit.

All of this suggests a need to look beyond the current paradigm of borders. The people of Scotland, for example, recently decided that their preferred relationship with London involved a mix of dependence and independence rather than leaving the U.K. altogether or allowing England to have total sovereignty over their affairs. And in Syria, a federated arrangement that parcels out control of the country’s territory without breaking it apart could be a faster route to peace than complete victory by any one side.

Of course, recognizing the limitations of nation-states, in the Middle East or elsewhere, does not imply that with a little more foresight the Arab world could have transitioned directly from Ottoman imperialism to post-national European modernity. Historical forces worked against implementing more flexible alternatives to the nation-state system then, and they still do today. But the current regional uncertainty may require the same kind of imagination the King-Crane commission brought to its analysis. A century later, it’s clear that the question of what political arrangements can help people “get on together in some fashion” remains just as difficult as ever.

  • Nick Danforth is a doctoral candidate in Turkish history at Georgetown University. He writes about Middle Eastern history, politics, and maps at midafternoonmap.com.

“Hidden Armenians” family secret, state secret “crypto-Armenians,”

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By Ariane Bonzon Reporter

Armenian Church on Akdamar Island in Lake Van. REUTERS / Umit Bektas.

Armenian Church on Akdamar Island in Lake Van. REUTERS / Umit Bektas.

During the 1915 genocide, tens of thousands of Armenians, women and children were kidnapped, converted and married by force. Many Turks are now discovering that one of their grandmother was Armenian. published on slate France

U n state secret, the existence of these “hidden Armenians”. The talk is undermining the national myth of “the Turkish and Muslim identity” foundation of the Turkish Republic. The first time I heard of “crypto-Armenians,” I did not really believe elsewhere. Published on slate France

It was the early 2000s, Mesrob II Mutafyan , Patriarch of Turkish Armenians, received the solemn setting and slightly kitsch of his residence in Kumkapi on the Golden Horn in Istanbul. Carrying the cross and the ecclesiastical dress, copy the holding of its predecessors for five centuries -whose long series of portraits, not always endorsements, adorned the murs- His Beatitude evoked touring Anatolian. He recounted his visit to the village of “Cibinli near Urfa where Armenians fled in 1915 had abandoned their girls, teenagers from 12 -14 years.”

Mesrob II Mutafyan it had spoken to a man and many grandchildren from forced marriages contracted by these young girls with Turks.

The historian Ara Sarafian estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 Armenian women and children escaped death or deportation in the desert during the genocide of 1915. The hidden one -by “Righteous” Turkish – others kidnapped, adopted or espoused. To speak of these survivors, the Ottomans used a chilling phrase: “the remains of the sword.” But for years, Turkish and Armenian historians have said not a word of these “crypto-Armenians.”

My research crypto-Armenians

“Until there is 10-15 years, it was a kind of taboo, confirms the researcher Bared Manok. Matter of dignity for the Armenians; mistrust and contempt converted by the Turks. On both sides, it did not evoke this disturbing reality. “” It is not known but it is thought that it was not as important and perhaps we would not know either, “recognizes the French philosopher of Armenian Michel Marian. Because admit that there may be Muslim Armenians is very disconcerting for those in the diaspora whose identity was previously closely related to Christianity.

Shortly after my conversation with Mesrob II Mutafyan, I went to Hrant Dink, who led the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, founded five years earlier, in 1996 -it was assassinated in 2007. The page of ads from Agos meets a great success. It allows members of the Armenian diaspora to launch a “wanted poster” to try to find a distant relative who still live in Turkey and whose ancestors have survived the genocide.

I explained my project to Hrant Dink: go to Anatolia to find them and shoot Islamized Armenians. It was not very encouraging. According to him, it would be very difficult to find these “crypto-Armenians” who absolutely do not want to reveal. They will never accept to talk on camera, for fear of reprisals, he warned me.

He himself had not dared to publish Agos in its investigation of Sabiha Gökçen , the adopted daughter of Mustafa Kemal, the founder of the Turkish Republic, an Armenian who had lost their parents during the genocide. A state secret, like the still supposed Christian roots of President Abdullah Gul , an Islamic-conservative, whose grandmother was, too, Armenian.

Armenians who go to the mosque

“An Armenian convert, suggests the university Etienne chips, one of the best connoisseurs of Turkish nationalism is seen as a traitor since it is the epithet that sticks to the Armenians. “Insult” Ermeni Dolu “(” seed of “Armenian”) is common. “Given the contempt contained in this insult, says Etienne chips, it is certain that if it turned out that a significant part of the Turkish population is descended from Armenians (converted or not), this would be a shock, a hardly acceptable truth. “

A bit like a common ethnic lie of apartheid in the 90s, when it was so difficult to white Afrikaners to recognize that they also had black blood, that of the employee of the farm seduced by the grandfather for example.

After wiping tens of refusal, I was finally able to pull this off in 2007. For the first time, an Islamized Armenian family spoke openly on camera. As seen in this video , nothing distinguishes these “hidden Armenians” other villagers same baggy pants, even scarf on the hair for women, even food.

They do not even speak Armenian, Turkish and barely above Kurdish. They go to the mosque, their children attending schools in the Republic of Turkey and their dead are buried in Muslim cemeteries. But sometimes their graves desecrated, not to mention stubborn jealousy vis-à-vis this family of “infidels”, richer than others.

“The remains of the sword”

As an extension of this singular history, other Islamized Armenians began to speak. In the remains of the sword (Thaddeus Publishing, 2012), French journalist Laurence Ritter investigates. Portraits and stories she has collected finally break the silence, the “basic rule of survival” in which these hidden Armenians were walled up. While in the center of the book, photos of Max Sivaslian give a face to the memory, lived or transmitted genocide.

Turks and Armenians still compete on the number of victims in 1915: 300,000 dead, say the first, more than a million, say the latter. Should we count the survivors, the ancestors of these crypto-Armenians? And if so, where, in which category?

“The dead” since they are recognized nowhere suggests the Turkish sociologist Ayse Gül Altinay in the afterword of the book Small children (Actes Sud, 2011). The one missing? Forced Islamization comes she strengthen the thesis of genocide? Or otherwise mitigate? Sensitive issues that explain why these family secrets have become a state secret.

Another question: in 2012, how much are these Muslim Turks who have Armenian roots, sometimes even without knowing it? In Turkey, at least 10 million, according to a series of historians cited by Bared Manok:

“Encryption is all the more difficult as the Islamization did not only Armenians […] [and that] Muslim minorities, Arabs, Kurds and Alevis, turn have undergone imposed turkification. […] The official discourse in Turkey is that there is one people, characterized by Islam and Sunni. All others had to go one way or another in this context “

One of the son of the Armenian family hidden that I filmed in 2007 no longer lives in the village but in Istanbul. In the anonymity of the big city, he decided to “convert” to Christianity. Which would be impossible, too risky for his life remained in the Anatolian countryside.

“The number of” re-conversions “increased,” confirms me Luiz Bakar, Turkish-Armenian lawyer who lives in Istanbul. It calls for these converted Armenians resume Armenian names keeps their own language, their religion and can thus revive their identity openly in Turkey.

Ariane Bonzon

Independent journalist. Works on Turkey, the Middle East and Southern Africa where it was relevant for 20 years. Written sometimes on France. His blog (in English): http://arianebonzon.fr

 

Ugur Üngör Turkish Intellectuals Who Have Recognized The Armenian Genocide

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By:Hambersom Aghbashian

Professor ugur-umit-ungor

Professor ugur-umit-ungor

Uğur Ümit Üngör was born in 1980, in Erzincan, Turkey and raised in Enschede , in the Netherlands. Currently, he is Assistant Professor at the Department of History at Utrecht University and at the *NIOD, which is an Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam.. He specializes in genocide, mass violence and ethnic conflict. Dr. Üngör gained his Ph.D. in 2009 (cum laude)** at the University of Amsterdam. In 2008- 2009, he was Lecturer in International History at the Department of History of the University of Sheffield, and in 2009-10, he was Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for War Studies of University College Dublin. His main area of interest is the historical sociology of mass violence and nationalism and his most recent publications include “Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property” (New York/London; Continuum 2011) and the award-winning “The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950” (Oxford; Oxford University Press 2011).(1)(2)
“Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property” by Ugur Ungor and Mehmet Polatel is the first major study of the mass sequestration of Armenian property by the Young Turk regime during the 1915 Armenian genocide. It details the emergence of Turkish economic nationalism, offers insight into the economic ramifications of the genocidal process, and describes how the plunder was organized on the ground. The interrelated nature of property confiscation initiated by the Young Turk regime and its cooperating local elites offers new insights into the functions and beneficiaries of state-sanctioned robbery. By drawing on secret files and unexamined records, the authors demonstrate that while Armenians were suffering systematic plunder and destruction, a range of properties were assigned to ordinary Turks for the purpose of their progress.(3)
Uğur Üngör’s book “The making of modern Turkey. Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950” is a study which highlights how two successive Turkish-nationalist regimes, from 1913 to 1950, subjected Eastern Turkey to various forms of nationalist population policies aimed at ethnically homogenizing the region and including it in the Turkish nation state. Moreover, it examines how the regime used technologies of social engineering such as physical destruction, deportation, spatial planning, forced assimilation, and memory politics, in order to increase ethnic and cultural homogeneity within the nation state. The province of Diyarbakir, the heartland of Armenian and Kurdish life, became an epicenter of Young Turk population policies and the theater of unprecedented levels of mass violence. These violent processes of state formation often destroyed historical regions and emptied multicultural cities, clearing the way for modern nation states(4). The book was the winner of the Erasmus Research Prize (Praemium Erasmianum – 2010) and of the Keetje Hodshon Prize, awarded by the Royal Netherlands Society of Sciences and Humanities. Besides, he was awarded by the 2012 Heineken Young Scientist Award in History by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. (5)
In his article entitled “Prolific Young Scholar on Armenian Genocide in Holland”, Aram Arkun wrote in “The Armenian Mirror-Spectator”, Feb. 7, 2012, Ugur Ümit Üngör is one of a new generation of scholars emerging from Turkey who deal forthrightly with the Armenian Genocide. Üngör was led to his interest in the Armenian Genocide by reading about the Holocaust, and in particular, “Rethinking the Holocaust”, a book by Yehuda Bauer , and he made comparisons with other genocides, including the Armenian one. Despite his own family origins in the same region as this genocide, Üngör said, “I had never heard about such an event and it sparked my curiosity. When I did my research, I was amazed by the difference between the denial of official histories in Turkey versus what the ordinary population in Eastern Turkey knew about the Genocide. I traveled around Eastern Turkey and did many interviews with old people, who openly spoke about the Armenians as having been massacred by the government.”(6)
“Turkey Has Acknowledged the Armenian Genocide” is Uğur Üngör article in The Armenian Weekly ( April 27, 2012), where he wrote “Turkey denies the Armenian Genocide” goes a jingle. Yes, the Turkish state’s official policy towards the Armenian Genocide was and is indeed characterized by the “three M’s”: misrepresentation, mystification, and manipulation. But when one gauges what place the genocide occupies in the social memory of Turkish society, even after nearly a century, a different picture emerges. Even though most direct eyewitnesses to the crime have passed away, oral history interviews yield important insights. Elderly Turks and Kurds in eastern Turkey often hold vivid memories from family members or fellow villagers who witnessed or participated in the genocide. There is a clash between official state memory and popular social memory: The Turkish government is denying a genocide that its own population remembers.(7)
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*NIOD: Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam , Neterlands, is an organization which maintains archives and carries out historical studies into the Second World War. The institute was founded as a merge of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (Nederlands instituut voor oorlogs documentatie, NIOD) and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS).
**Cum laude is an honor added to a diploma or degree for work that is above average. (with honor).

1- http://www.niod.nl/en/staff/ugur-%C3%BCng%C3%B6r
2- http://armenianweekly.com/2011/04/22/confiscation-and-colonization-the-young-turk-seizure-of-armenian-property/
3- http://www.amazon.com/Confiscation-Destruction-Seizure-Armenian-Property/dp/162356901
4- http://www.niod.nl/en/projects/making-modern-turkey-nation-and-state-eastern-anatolia-1913-1950
5- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U%C4%9Fur_%C3%9Cmit_%C3%9Cng%C3%B6r
6- http://www.mirrorspectator.com/2012/02/07/prolific-young-scholar-on-armenian-genocide-in-holland
7- http://armenianweekly.com/2012/04/27/ungor-turkey-has-acknowledged-the-armenian-genocide/

Turkey: 1909 Adana Massacre tells the insider witnesses

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1909-adana-massacareAras Publishing, began in Adana in April 1909, and then emitted in Kilis and Zeitun and more than 20 thousand Armenians were killed in the massacre island to witness the behind the scenes sheds light, brought together by a very important book reader. Agos news Report

Ari’s Şekeryan compiled and translated from the Ottoman ‘1909 Adana Massacre: Three Report titled book, which was immediately followed by three important reports pen Ottoman massacre major impact in the world and brings together. In the book, offered more than 40 photographs of the period.

Çalyan weirdness of the ‘Island of the case and accountable’, Artin Arslanian ‘How was convicted in Adana Justice?’ and Hagop Babigyan the ‘Adana’ Report consisting of the report and until released by Taner Akcam’s preface to the book, Calvin and Arslanian, in their report on the insiders of events 106 then transports the reader for the first time in Turkish. The Babigyan’s report contains important observations about the destruction of responsibility and government officials across the province.

Biography of the writer, reports makes it even more interesting. After the massacre of Deputies-located Edirne deputy of the first investigative commission sent to Adana by the Deputies Babigy, presenting the book with the reports in Parliament suspiciously lost their lives in the day before; While Calvin is one of the founders of the Union and Progress Party in Adana in 1920 and have been involved in the defense of pilgrims were killed after the fall of the city. Arslanian also rejected the request to testify about the massacre fled to Egypt and there he wrote the report.