A US religious freedom watchdog is urging the State Department to name four additional countries to its list of the worst religious liberty offenders.

In its 2021 annual report, released Wednesday (April 21), the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom said India, Russia, Syria and Vietnam should be considered “countries of particular concern.” Those nations have been found to have engaged in or permitted ongoing, systematic and egregious religious freedom violations, The Washington Post reported. 

USCIRF also recommended 12 countries for the State Department’s Special Watch List (SWL) for religious freedom, including nations like Azerbaijan and Turkey. The report acknowledged serious concerns about “the preservation and protection of Armenian places of worship and other religious sites” in Nagorno-Karabakh, following Azerbaijan’s aggressions against Armenia last Fall. USCIRF connected this conflict to concerns regarding anti-Armenian Christian rhetoric used by Turkish officials and throughout Turkish society, in a pattern of persecution against Christians living in the country. However, USCIRF failed to mention the severe religious freedom violations of the Grey Wolves, a harmful Turkic nationalist group that targets Christians.

Conventional wisdom suggests the more Israel’s relations with Ankara and Erdogan deteriorate, then the more likely the Knesset will recognize the Armenian genocide. There’s just one problem: It’s not true

Eldad Ben Aharon

There’s been growing attention given to Israel’s policy on the Armenian genocide over the last two decades. Scholars, practitioners, journalists, activists and the general public are trying to map the different reasons and grievances framing Israel’s firm position: not to recognize the Armenian genocide.

Conventional wisdom points to dictums such as “Israeli relations with Turkey are too important” or that “Israel prefers Azerbaijan to the Armenians.”

However, those reasons are too sweeping to explain a more complex phenomenon: which of Israel’s state institutions refuse recognition, and why.

I would argue that it is quite understandable why both consecutive Israeli governments, and the wider political and cultural spectrum represented in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, hold what appears to be a wholly pragmatic stance despite it being counter-intuitive to normative and liberal democratic considerations, including the specific historical experience of the Jewish people.

Why does the Knesset fail to pass the Armenian genocide bill time and time again, and how static or fluid is this stance for the future?

First of all: What does “recognition of the Armenian genocide” actually mean? In academic circles, despite the lack of a widely accepted cross-disciplinary definition, the term ‘recognition’ is generally understood  as a normative expression of the acknowledgement of a valuable human need: in this case, the understanding that the Ottoman Armenians experienced a genocide in 1915 and the countering of historical revisionism and denialism.

The legislative act of recognition contributes not only to commemoration, and to preserving Armenian historical heritage, but can also trigger an officially-sanctioned Memorial Day, even a state-backed national commemorative museum. This step is of critical importance to Armenian diaspora communities. Thus, the struggle for recognition is significant for three parties: the Armenians, the Turks (who oppose it), and the countries debating whether to recognize the Armenian genocide.

• Erdogan’s take on the Holocaust is cynical, selective and self-serving
• The Jews who befriended Turkey and became genocide deniers
• Recognizing the trauma of the Armenian genocide doesn’t diminish the Holocaust
• Disunited by genocide: How Armenia’s relations with Israel have come to a dead end

It is also a step that endorses the values of liberal democracy, by affirming core values such as the protection of human rights, justice and the protection of minorities against discrimination and violence. It also boosts international institutions dedicated to those values, such as the Internal Criminal Court and the UN’s Responsibility to Protect, a 2005 commitment to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

So, if recognition is a normative step that bolsters liberal democracy, there doesn’t seem an obvious obstacle for Israel. But there are two further, major, factors: Turkey, and the Holocaust.

Despite the cold diplomatic winds blowing between Ankara and Jerusalem for a number of years now, Israel maintains significant economic and strategic ties with Turkey. But if we examine the recognition policy of other states with far deeper engagement with Turkey, we see that there is no longer such an immutable correlation between ties with Ankara and genocide recognition – and the contrast with Israel becomes even more striking.

Take, for example, the legislatures of three NATO members: the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands. Just like Israel, they have been Ankara’s traditional allies since the early 1950s, and just like Israel, they were reluctant to recognize the Armenian genocide for more than 40 years. Their key reason was not to imperil Turkey’s key strategic role in the NATO alliance.

But between 2016 and 2019, something changed: the parliaments of all three countries formally recognized,  the Armenian genocide. And their status quo-defying decisions were neither hesitant nor ad hoc.

What had happened? The core trigger was a statement made by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. 

On 23 April 2014, the 99th anniversary of the genocide, Erdogan noted the deaths of the Ottoman Armenians who had perished alongside millions of people of “all religions and ethnicities” in 1915, describing the tragedy as “our shared pain.”

Although Turkey’s president was finally acknowledging some basic historical facts, and offered his condolences to the Armenians, his message was really a sophisticated form of denial. There was no genocide, and the Ottomans’ successor state, Turkey, had nothing to apologize for.

But despite the obfuscation, his speech opened the door for some countries who wanted to alter their position. Ironically, Erdogan had effectively normalized the process of Armenian genocide recognition.

There were other factors, too, that broke the recognition taboo. There was the crumbling relations between Turkey and its three allies, and the the related progressive weakening of NATO. The process of introspection and eventual acknowledgement of those countries’ own role in the perpetuation of Turkey’s denial. And growing scrutiny of Erdogan’s policies, especially towards the Kurds. Hence, the recognition legislated by Germany, the Netherlands and the United States were a form of normative statement.

So what of Israel? Every April 2th, since 1989, the left-wing Meretz party has attempted and failed to pass the Armenian genocide bill through the Knesset. Erdogan’s 2014 statement made no significant change to their fortunes.

In May 2018, Turkey expelled Israel’s ambassador, Eitan Na’eh, in the wake of the deaths of  61 Palestinians by the IDF in protests following Donald Trump’s recognition of  Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Erdoğan’s harsh rhetoric included the accusation that the “terrorist state” of Israel was itself perpetrating “genocide” against the Palestinians. But even this crisis didn’t move the dial in the Knesset.

So if changing geopolitical circumstances impacted the three NATO allies, why did it not affect Israel? Because there’s a basic, fixed issue, far less influenced by outside parties and events, but one that uniquely influences Israeli policy in regard to recognition of the Armenian genocide: the memory of the Holocaust as “unique.”

In Israel, there is a commitment to “never again,” a watchword in Israeli society, politics, and diplomacy ever since the birth of the State of Israel. But it has been embraced in its particularist form: “never again” to Jewish vulnerability in the face of murderous antisemitism, rather than the “never again to anyone,” the form in which it is widely understood in, for example, the liberal American Jewish community.

That same particularism works retroactively, too. Analogies to the Holocaust are often slammed as the “trivialization” of Jewish suffering. That anathema to “sharing” the idea of being genocide victims, or the fear of competing genocide commemorations, has a specific locus.

The date of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed according to the Hebrew calendar, but it generally falls in the second half of April or early May. If the Knesset recognized the Armenian genocide, its April 24 Memorial Day would fall in close proximity, actualizing the threat of “competition” over genocide commemorations.

Despite these significant considerations weighing against recognition, there is still a chance to change Israel’s calculus. The tipping point is less likely to depend on a deterioration of relations with Turkey, or pressure from Azerbaijan, but rather on a strengthening of Israel’s own fractured democratic processes.

That there are problematic checks and balances between Israel’s legislative and executive branches is embodied in the unrestrained power the executive wields over the Knesset.

And because of the peculiarities of Israeli political culture and its unwieldly coalition governments, the executive enforces strict coalitionary discipline for many votes that in other legislatures would be free votes of conscience, or would better reflect the diversity of opinion within political parties.

This is an essential factor in the issue of passing an Armenian genocide bill: because coalition unity takes superiority over the freedom of action of Knesset members, there is very little room for manoeuvre.

With more stable governments giving coalition members more autonomy (a pipe-dream at present) it is likely the Armenian genocide recognition legislation would pass in the plenary, not least if legislators are lobbied by those liberal and younger Israelis who want to amplify the universalistic lessons of the Holocaust. For now, this modest hope will have to suffice.

Dr. Eldad Ben Aharon is a Minerva Fellow and Associate Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) and a lecturer at Leiden University. His research focuses on Israel’s diplomatic history, Turkey’s foreign policy, intelligence history and counter-terrorism, Jewish and Armenian transnationalism and memory of the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. Twitter: @EldadBenAharon

In 2015 the Catholicosate of Cilicia (headquartered in Antelias, Lebanon) filed a lawsuit against the government of Turkey seeking the return of its historic seat in Sis, Turkey (present-day Kozan district of the Adana Province), which was confiscated in 1921.

The Catholicosate had initially filed its lawsuit directly with the Constitutional Court of Turkey because the claim raised issues of historical property rights that lower courts would not have jurisdiction over. At the urging of the Justice Ministry, the Constitutional Court referred the lawsuit to a lower court. The Catholicosate then appealed the ruling to the European Court of Human Rights in 2016. The European Court rejected the Catholicosate’s 900-page lawsuit in 2017, finding it inadmissible because it had not first exhausted all local legal remedies, such as the lower courts in Turkey.

Therefore, the Catholicosate refiled its lawsuit in 2019, this time with a lower Turkish court in Kozan (Sis). After two postponements due to the coronavirus pandemic, a pre-trial hearing finally took place on March 30, 2021 in the Kozan Civil Litigation Court to decide whether a viable cause of action existed to proceed to trial.

The Catholicosate’s lawsuit against the Municipality of Kozan and the Turkish government’s Treasury Department is being defended by a group of international law experts, as well as Turkish lawyer Jem Sofouoghlu and Turkish Armenian lawyer Setrag Davouthan, who is serving as a consultant.

The Istanbul-based Jamanak Armenian newspaper reported that according to attorney Sofouoghlu the March 30 hearing was intended to clarify the applicant’s qualifications and authorizations and the possibility of the expiration of the statute of limitations. The Municipality of Kozan and the Treasury Department presented their counter-evidence claiming that the applicant does not have standing — is not a legal entity — and is a foreign litigant. The defendants also stated that, before the hearing could proceed, the applicant as a foreign entity must provide a letter of guarantee corresponding to 15% of the demand’s value, as required by the Turkish legal system. Sofouoghlu was quoted by Jamanak telling the Judge that the Catholicosate had already submitted the required documents to the court. The Judge agreed to go ahead and consider the substance of the lawsuit, meaning that the court rejected the objections raised by the Municipality and Treasury Department, and ruled that the lawsuit could definitively proceed. The next hearing is scheduled for May 6, 2021. Sofouoghlu said that he considers this a very positive development.

Now the trial will go through several presumable phases. Sofouoghlu anticipates that the court will first assemble the evidence presented by the Catholicosate of Cilicia. For this purpose, the corresponding work will be carried out through the official archives and property registers at governmental bodies. The investigative-exploratory phase then follows the collection of evidence. According to Sofouoghlu, the court, most probably later on, will reach the conclusion that it will be necessary to appoint an expert to carry out this task. Such experts are usually academics from one of the universities in the Adana region. Even though the courts always have the authority to carry out this work on their own, they prefer to appoint an expert.

At the end, should the Catholicosate’s lawsuit be rejected, as expected, by the lower Turkish Court, it will then be appealed to the Constitutional Court of Turkey and after its probable rejection there, a new, and this time proper, appeal could be filed in the European Court of Human Rights which hopefully will not dismiss it because of a technicality.

Even though this lawsuit is filed by the Catholicosate of Cilicia to recover its historic seat, it is in fact much more significant than this particular case. The lawsuit is related to the Armenian nation’s larger efforts to pursue its legal demands for the return of all properties and assets confiscated by the Turkish government during the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923. As Catholicos Aram I has rightly pointed out: “This is the time that we move from the stage of [Genocide] recognition to reparation.” He told the New York Times in May 2015: “After 100 years, I thought it was time that we put the emphasis on reparation. … This is the first legal step. This will be followed by our claim to return all the churches, the monasteries, the church-related properties and, finally, the individual properties.”

By Anya Zoledziowski

“If a group decided to call themselves ‘the Young Nazis’, and pitched themselves as a disruptor news outlet, people would be rightly outraged.”

Armenians in the U.S. are renewing their calls for the popular left-wing news show The Young Turks to change its name, saying it acts as a painful reminder of the Armenian Genocide.

The genocide, which officially took place in Turkey under the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923, resulted in the deportation, rape, and murder by starvation, torture, massacre, and death marches of about 1.5 million Armenians. Most of the Armenian diaspora today exists because of genocide, which was planned and executed by a nationalist offshoot of the Young Turks movement.

“Many of our community members who have been protesting The Young Turks through social media have made a fair equivalence between the Young Turks and Hitler Youth,” said Alex Galitsky, a communications director with the western region for the Armenian National Committee of America.

“If a group decided to call themselves ‘the Young Nazis’, and pitched themselves as a disruptor or anti-establishment news outlet, people would be rightly outraged,” he told VICE News.

Other Armenians have equated The Young Turks refusal to change its name to sports teams with racist mascots and names that evoke Indigenous stereotypes or trivialize Indigenous cultures.

The new demands to change the name come as Armenia is embroiled in warwith Azerbaijan over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, which sits within Azerbaijan but is led and populated by ethnic Armenians. Azerbaijan is supported by Turkey, the perpetrator—and now denier—of the genocide. Many Armenians around the world see the conflict as an extension of it.

The Young Turks bills itself as the “largest online news show in the world.” While its primary audience is on YouTube, it’s available on iTunes, Hulu, and other platforms.

The Young Turks did not respond to VICE News requests for comment. But the site defines a Young Turk as a “progressive or insurgent member of an institution, movement, or political party” and a “young person who rebels against authority of societal expectations.”

“The selection of this name does not refer to any specific, historical incarnation of the Young Turks,” the site says.

In a Twitter exchange, one of the show’s hosts, Ana Kasparian, who is also Armenian, condemned the critiques.

“We’ve explained the name a billion times. You know what it means, and you know the type of coverage we do,” Kasparian tweeted. “To perpetuate the same lies over and over again, which of course directs harassment and disinformation toward me, is an odd move. Especially right now.”

Galitsky said the justification, which he’s heard hosts Cenk Uygur and Kasparian repeat over time, doesn’t acknowledge historical context. “You can’t truly be a progressive insurgent if you’re sanitizing a term that causes so much pain and trauma to the Armenian community,” Galitsky said.

Los Angeles-based Armenian-American organizer, Sophia Armen, responded to Kasparian by saying that while she admires TYT’s content, the show’s name inevitably keeps Armenians from engaging with it.

Armen told VICE News, “The Young Turks massacred and deported my entire family.” She said until the show changes its name, it will always remind Armenians of their painful shared history.

“The name is very personal,” she said.

Razmig Sarkissian’s grandfather was 5 years old when he had to hide under corpses to evade capture during the Armenian Genocide. He then escaped the region, but the rest of his family was killed, said Sarkissian, an L.A.-based activist and law student.

“It is exactly that traumatic history that is evoked in our minds every time we see (the show’s) name,” Sarkissian told VICE News. “For a show to signal so many progressive values yet fail to apply those very principles to themselves, to me, is unconscionable.”

U.S.-based Armenian activist and scholar Kohar Avakian told VICE News when you Google the Young Turks, search results are flooded with information about the show—not the historical party or genocide. That’s a problem because it prevents education about recent historical events, Avakian said.

Avakian acknowledged that the show’s hosts have stood with Armenians against genocide denialism in the past, but said the decision to keep the show’s name is telling.

“A name is a statement…we cannot stand by idly, especially not while our relatives are still being killed on their ancestral land as we speak,” Avakian said. “It is time to change the name.”

By David Boyajian,

Suppose the U.S. built and operated a military base in Germany on property confiscated from Jews during the Holocaust. America, Jewish Americans, Germany, and Israel would have reached a principled resolution years ago.

Now consider Incirlik (EEN-jeer-leek) Air Base in Turkey. American taxpayers and the Army Corps of Engineers built it 67 years ago. Its 3,320 acres are home to the U.S. Air Force’s 39th Air Base Wing, B-61 nuclear weapons, thousands of American military personnel, and American businesses.

Turkey stole many of those acres from Christian Armenian families during the 1915-23 Armenian Genocide. Relatives of such Armenian families fled to the U.S. and settled in cities like Fresno.

Yet the U.S. State Department has habitually shielded Turkey from accountability in this and related instances.

The air base knows its past, though. In 2007, then base commander, Col. Murrell Stinnette, held a “Town Hall meeting [on Congress’s] Armenian Genocide Resolution.” The base encourages visits to Levonkla, a nearby 12th century Armenian castle.

Turkey committed genocide against 1.5 million Armenians and seized nearly everything they owned in cities and towns such as Incirlik: homes, businesses, ancient churches and monasteries, farms, schools, personal property, valuables, antiquities, and bank accounts.

In Los Angeles Federal Court in 2010, Americans Alex Bakalian, Anais Haroutunian, and Rita Mahdessian sued Turkey, its Central Bank, and Ziraat Bank for confiscating their relatives’ Incirlik property (122 acres) during the genocide.

The plaintiffs sought over $65 million based on the land’s market value, plus a portion of Incirlik rent that Turkey had collected from the U.S. as of 2010.

Days earlier, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had upheld California Law 354.4. Modeled after California’s Holocaust claims statutes, the law extended through 2016 the period during which Turkey could be sued.

In 2019, however, the same court decided against the plaintiffs: the lawsuit was “time-barred” due to statute of limitations guidelines.

Similar lawsuits have yielded mixed results.

Many Armenians bought life insurance from New York Life, AXA France, and Germany’s Victoria Versicherung AG before the genocide. But the companies shamefully avoided paying surviving family members. In 2004-5, NY Life and AXA France settled out of court for $40 million.

The German firm evaded responsibility even though Germany — Turkey’s WWI ally — facilitated the Genocide.

In 2006, Armenian Americans sued Germany’s Deutsche and Dresdner banks. Each had seized Armenian accounts and assets post-Genocide. These institutions, too, dodged accountability.

Congress, particularly the House’s bipartisan, 126-member Armenian Caucus, could help the foregoing cases with legislation similar to the California law, but which courts couldn’t override.

Recall that Congress recognized the Armenian Genocide in 2019 with near unanimity.

Congress has often facilitated recovery of property stolen during the Holocaust, including $1.25 billion in Jewish assets appropriated by Swiss banks.

American relations with Turkey have deteriorated due to President Erdogan’s 17-year record of bellicose conduct against the U.S., NATO, and Israel.

Turkey’s internal repression, corruption, support for ISIS, threats against Greece, Cyprus, and Armenia, far-fetched claims over Mediterranean Sea resources, aggressive neo-Ottoman/pan-Turkic policies, purchase of Russian S-400 missiles, and threats over Incirlik haven’t helped relations.

In 2016, demonstrators burned American flags and demanded that the U.S. leave the base. In 2017 and 2019, Turkey threatened to cut off American access to Incirlik.

In 2018, Turkish lawyers wanted to raid the base and arrest U.S. Air Force officers.

Alarmed and appalled, the U.S. has explored moving some Incirlik assets to Greece.

The U.S. could use the Armenian American Incirlik facts to achieve additional leverage over Turkey while also gaining a measure of justice. Resolute diplomacy would be required.

American companies such as Starbucks and Colorado-based Vectrus Systems Corp., as well as the University of Maryland Global Campus, are air base tenants. They must be informed that they occupy stolen property.

Incirlik’s restless ghosts may yet rise to obtain redress and advance American interests and values.
Read more here: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/op-ed/article250783979.html?fbclid=IwAR3ZxctCzOldhGtA0O8U_YAu8F5NlMjhw8VBIO1WTQYbTOAz7wS7hAgNVzY#storylink=cpy

WASHINGTON – In commemoration of Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day on April 24, Bishop David J. Malloy of Rockford, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Committee on International Justice and Peace highlighted the tragic loss of so many Armenians in what has been called the first genocide of the 20th century.

Bishop Malloy’s full statement follows:

“April 24 is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, marking the 1915 start of a campaign that resulted in the death of as many as 1.2 million Armenian Christians — victims of mass shootings, death marches to distant camps, torture, assaults, starvation, and disease. Thousands of Armenian children were torn from their families and forcibly converted. This horrific tragedy was intended to eliminate the Armenian people and their culture in what has been called the ‘first genocide of the 20th century.’

“But Armenia and the Armenian people survived and endured despite their suffering and persecution. I echo the prayers of our Holy Father, Pope Francis when he offered his prayers for justice and peace following a trip to Armenia in 2016: ‘A people that suffered so much throughout its history, and faith alone, faith has kept this people on its feet. The fact that [Armenia] was the first Christian nation is not enough; it was the first Christian nation because the Lord blessed it, because it had its saints, it had its holy bishops and martyrs…’

“As we rejoice in the Resurrection during this Easter season, may all people of good will join together on this solemn day of recollection to pray and work for justice and peace and remember anew that eternal life in Christ reigns supreme and forever.”

Bishop Malloy’s statement echoes the concern and solidarity the Catholic Church has long held with the Armenian Church. In a November 2000 joint statement, Pope John Paul II and His Holiness Karekin II, Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians, affirmed their common faith and mutual respect for one another.

The U.S. bishops have provided support for pastoral renewal projects and through Caritas Armenia for social services to assist children and the vulnerable as well as to encourage parish social ministry programs. In 2003, Cardinal William Keeler led a delegation of U.S. bishops and staff to Armenia at the invitation of the Catholicos. The delegation came away deeply impressed and inspired by the resilience of the Christian faith of the Armenian people in the face of adversity. 

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