The three Armenian candidates’ bid to run for Turkey’s parliament makes the upcoming elections slightly different others, an Armenian Turkologist said, attributing the trend to the Genocide issue.
Speaking to Tert.am, Ruben Melkonyan, a deputy dean at the Yerevan State University’s Oriental Studies Department, noted no Armenian candidates had won seats in the country’s chief law making body since 1960.
The parliamentary elections in Turkey are slated for June 7.
The expert said he sees that the internalization of the Genocide issue in politics and the media gives the Armenians in Turkey a higher political weight.
“With the exception of the Nationalist Movement Party, all the rest – both the ruling and opposition Kemalist parties, as well as the Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party – have nominated Armenian candidates,” he said, pointing out to a high likelihood of several candidates’ success in the polls, judging by their ranking on the election lists.
“The important thing is that the ruling party’s candidate, Margar Yesayan, is known for pro-government views; he is a journalist who, over the course of his professional career, backed Erdogan and his administration. Hence naturally, election to the parliament will add only a new trait to – instead of changing – Yesayan’s image: he will be not only a journalist lauding the Turkish authorities’ general policies but also a lawmaker forming part of and implementing those policies,” Margaryan said, adding that he doesn’t thus expect a revolutionary move by that candidate.
The orientalist said he finds that the same applies also to the opposition Kemalist Party’s candidate, who is thought to have low chances of election.
“The only interesting candidate is Karo Pailian, the People’s Democratic Party’s nominee, who always raises the problem of Armenian schools and brings the Armenian community’s burning issues to the agenda. In case of being elected, he will maintain his image, so we can expect the Turkish parliament to have a member whose statements will differ from the scenarios outlined by the Turkish authorities; they will focus more on the Armenian community in Istanbul,” Melkonyan added.
The expert said he thinks that the Armenian candidates, if elected, will have two main functions in Turkey’s legislative: they will give the Turkish authorities the trump card of looking tolerant to European structures and serve as the Turkish authorities’ tool at critical moments, making statement on their behalf as “messages” to the world.
Commenting on possible speculations over the Genocide as part of the pre-election campaign, the Turkologist said he sees that the issue has simply become part of the country’s political rhetoric. “The question was high on the agenda during the presidential polls. As for the parliamentary elections, it is relatively passive. Only the Kurdish party raises it, but it too, at times avoids the issue as it sees a serious threat of losing votes,” he added.
Prosperous Armenia: Azerbaijan’s European mercenaries should be pilloried
YEREVAN. – The Armenian delegations in European parliamentary organizations are fighting in every way against the Azerbaijanis’ attempts to bribe their colleagues with Azerbaijani caviar.
Opposition Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) Chairperson Naira Zohrabyan, who also heads the PAP National Assembly (NA) Faction, stated the above-said at the NA on Wednesday.
In her words, the “caviar diplomacy” actively works at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), and the Euronest (European Union+Eastern Partnership countries).
“I see its result. Such people should be put in a pillory, called disgraceful caviar-eater. But this still does not give its result.
“What is our MFA [i.e. the Ministry of Foreign Affairs] doing? One single fight strategy should be made, including with participation by the ministry, and the [Armenian] diaspora should be invited,” Naira Zohrabyan noted, in particular.
Belgium confirms its position on Armenian Genocide
Armenpress Report the prim minister of Belgium Charles Michel reconfirmed the position of the official Brussels in the Armenian Genocide recognition issue. Mr Michel stated about it in the interview to La Libre. Our position on the issue has always been clear. what happen to the Armenians was a Genocide and no other opinion can exist in this issue,
The visit of the Armenian Prime Minister in Tbilisi confirmed the good relations between Armenia and Georgia
The visit by Prime Minister of Armenia Hovik Abrahamyan on May 17 in Tbilisi was intended to reaffirm the good relations between Armenia and its neighbor Georgia, which have strengthened their cooperation since the departure of Georgian President Saakashvili. During his working visit for a day in the Georgian capital, Hovik Abrahamyan met with his Georgian counterpart Irakli Garibashvili, with whom he discussed the prospects of enhancing bilateral cooperation, especially in the economic field, as well as several issues of regional and international order.
The stated objective of this brief visit was to address the Georgians, and especially the supporters of the Georgian opposition, as well as Armenians and other peoples of the region, a clear message about the state of relations between the two countries who intend to remain excellent despite the diplomatic discomfort caused by the recent meeting between the President of the Armenian Parliament, Galust Sahakyan, and Anatoly Bibilov, his counterpart from the breakaway region of South Ossetia, which has, like Abkhazia, the political and military support of Russia recognized the independence of both territories in August 2008.
The meeting took place on the sidelines of the visit Mr. Bibilov had at the beginning of the Nagorno-Karabakh as part of the mission to observe the parliamentary elections that took place there. This had earned a reprimand from the Ambassador of Armenia in Georgia Yuri Vardanyan, the Georgian Deputy Foreign Minister Gigi Gigiadze, which had expressed “deep concern” about the meeting in Tbilisi which authorities Armenian had however indicated that it was a “private” character. The Georgian Foreign Ministry had said in a statement that the meeting was against the spirit of friendship which traditionally governs the relations between Georgia and Armenia, and that it violated the bilateral relations.
Similarly, Armenia did not appreciate that his Georgian neighbor does not participate in the ceremonies of the centenary of the Armenian Genocide in Yerevan, the Georgian Parliament has also rejected a resolution on the recognition of this genocide. These incidents do not contribute to facilitate relations between the two neighbors, who chose divergent political and economic policies, Georgia have signed an association agreement with the European Union while Armenia has waived its European Integration rally since January 1st Eurasian Economic Union led by Russia, with which Tbilisi is still latent conflict because of its support for South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The two countries pledged to strengthen their cooperation within the limits of their respective integration processes.
Tuesday, May 19, 2015,
Gari © armenews.com
Gari © armenews.com
Japanese children send lanterns to Armenia in memory of Armenian Genocide victims
Children from the YMCA Hiroshima Center, Japan, have sent handmade Japanese lanterns to Armenia in memory of the victims of the Armenian Genocide.
On Monday, representatives of Hikari Center, YMCA and Japan’s Embassy in Armenia visited the Armenian Genocide Memorial Tsitsernakaberd. They paid tribute to the Armenian Genocide victims at the memorial complex.
The lanterns were set afloat, according to an old Japanese tradition.
Armenian Church Leader Speaks on Suit to Reclaim Seized Property
A lawsuit in Turkey filed by the Armenian Church to recover its ancient headquarters, seized a century ago during the Armenian genocide, is the “first legal step” of a goal to reclaim all Armenian property seized by the Turks, a worldwide leader of the church said Monday.
The leader, Aram I, Catholicos of the Holy See of Cilicia, also said that if the Turkish legal authorities rejected the lawsuit, it would “deepen the divide” between Turkey and the 10-million-member Armenian diaspora.
Aram I spoke in an interview at The New York Times while on a visit to diaspora communities in the Northeast after having participated in genocide centennial events in Washington.
He is a leading advocate of the effort to increase global recognition of the 1915-23 killings of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks as a genocide, a description embraced by Pope Francis, the European Parliament and legislatures of more than 20 nations but angrily rejected by Turkey’s government, which calls it a distortion of history.
Legislatures of many American states also have called the killings a genocide. The White House has yet to do so, but Aram I said, “I am sure President Obama, in his heart, knows that this was genocide.”
On April 27, lawyers for the church filed a suit with the Constitutional Court of Turkey asserting that the headquarters of the Catholicosate in Sis, part of the Kozan district in southern Turkey’s Adana Province, was wrongly seized and should be returned.
The headquarters, which dates to 1293 and included a cathedral and monastery, was once the epicenter of Armenian Christian life. It was among the tens of thousands of Armenian properties commandeered and plundered during the last days of the Ottoman Empire and the scattering of Armenian survivors. The headquarters was re-established in 1930, in Antelias, Lebanon.
Aram I, who at 68 is the first Lebanese-born leader of the Catholicosate of Cilicia, said he had decided to proceed with a lawsuit after having consulted with 30 legal experts, including some from Turkey. While the church’s efforts to achieve an international acknowledgment of the genocide were important, “after 100 years, I thought it was high time that we put the emphasis on reparation,” he said.
“This is the headquarters of the church,” he said. “This is the first legal step. That will be followed by our claim to return all the churches, the monasteries, the church-related properties and, finally, the individual properties. We should move step by step.”
There has been, as yet, no response by the Constitutional Court to the suit, and the Armenian Church leader speculated that its judges may be ignoring it. But the mayor of Kozan, Musa Ozturk, signaled within days of the suit that the church would have a fight on its hands.
“Not even an iota of land is to be handed over to anyone,” Mr. Ozturk said in remarks quoted by Turkish news media. The mayor said the church had no proof of ownership.
Aram I acknowledged that the church did not have deeds, but said he considered that level of proof to be absurd considering the obvious nature of the properties. “The ownership is clear,” he said. “They are Armenian. Nobody can question the ownership or identity or history of those properties.”
The church’s lead international lawyer in the suit, Payam Akhavan, a McGill University professor and legal expert on genocide issues, said in a recent telephone interview that he planned to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights if the Turkish court rejects it. Under the European convention on human rights, all domestic remedies must be exhausted before such a case could be heard.
Mr. Akhavan said the lawsuit had been carefully framed to avoid antagonizing the Turkish authorities over the genocide issue. “We have a property claim,” he said. “We’re not asking for recognition of the Armenian genocide. We have a very pragmatic claim.”
Aram I said he had never been able to visit the ancient headquarters and feared that the local authorities had made efforts to erase its Armenian identity. He also expressed impatience with a view that the church’s confrontational stance, as seen in the lawsuit, is inconsistent with the principle of forgiveness, a basic Christian value.
“Forgiveness comes when there is confession, repentance, acceptance of sin,” he said. “Reconciliation is part of our human faith and values, but first of all, Turkey must reconcile with its own past.”
Knight Templars ink protocol on Genocide in Yerevan
Around 30 Templars from 10 countries worldwide inked a protocol on recognition of the Armenian Genocide on behalf of the Order of Knight Templars.
As the Great Commander of the Great Command of Armenia of the Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem Bagrat Lalayan stressed, “our brothers and sisters came to Yerevan to pay tribute to the memory of the innocent victims.”
As he noted, the Armenian Order of Knight Templars is a public organisation which continues to protect the Chiristian faith, and support the statehood along with the Church of Armenia.
As the Great Commander noted, the number of Templars worldwide totals 25000, with Armenia home to around 100.
The Templars visited the memorial to the victims of the Armenian Genocide, where the protocols were signed, with the ceremony followed by planing a tree in the alley of memory.
Turkey: ONE HUNDRED YEARS Commemoration of Armenian slaughterhouses sites in eastern Anatolia
Armenian slaughterhouses sites in eastern Anatolia
A group of about sixty people, from all backgrounds, commemorated the centenary of the genocide on two major slaughterhouses Armenian sites, one 50 km from Harput, near a village called Tchunguch, and the other near Batman (Sasun region), in south-eastern Anatolia. These celebrations were sponsored by the municipality of Diyarbakir and local branches of the Organization for Human Rights in Turkey (IHD), and organized by the Gomidas Institute of London
Canadian Senate reaffirms recognition of Armenian Genocide
The Canadian Senate reaffirmed its recognition of the Armenian Genocide by reiterating support for Motion 44, first approved in June 2002, according to Horizon Weekly.
“By formally recognizing the Armenian genocide, Canada lives up to the principles that we have promoted throughout the world. Any country that desires to suppress its past, any country that does not confront its past head on, seriously risks a failure to liberate itself from its own history,” stated Sen. Thanh Hai Ngo in his declaration.
On the heels of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide he added that “this heinous crime remains unanswered, since Turkey refuses to recognise it. The Senate of Canada has not been indifferent to the atrocities committed during the Armenian genocide. We have to promote justice, human rights, tolerance, and peaceful co-existence between nations because it is the right thing to do. It is my honor to speak before this Chamber on the Centennial Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, and to reaffirm our strong commitment towards Motion 44, as passed in June 2002.”
Speaker of the Senate, Honourable Leo Housakos marked the solemn occasion of the Armenian Genocide and greeted the Ambassador of Armenia Mr. Armen Yeganian and members of the Armenian Community sitting in the Gallery, at the opening of the session. Other Senators joined their colleagues reaffirming the Upper Chamber’s commitment towards human rights, international justice and peace.
The reaffirmation of this historic motion was realized through the collective effort of the Armenian Genocide Centennial Committee of Canada.
The Role of Historians of Turkey in the Study of Armenian Genocide
On the occasion of the centenary of the Armenian genocide someone like me, who sees himself as a historian of Turkey in the twentieth century, has to speak out.
In the first place, there are moral and ethical reasons why this is so. Historians of the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey in the twentieth century have a special responsibility, because we have been part of the fabric that maintained the silence for so long. We cannot allow a situation to continue such as I knew it when I was a student and a young university teacher in the nineteen seventies and eighties, when –in spite of the fact that outside our field the genocide had been an object of historical research for 50 years– we were barely aware of what had happened in 1915. Our textbooks only mentioned it as a footnote to history, if at all, and never defined it as a genocide. Our teachers never discussed it.
I felt the effects of this silence clearly in my own research. In 1984, I published the book that would form the basis for my academic career. It was called The Unionist factor. The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement (1908-1925). The dates in the title are significant, because the most important thesis of the book was that the national resistance movement in the Ottoman Empire after the World War I, out of which the Republic of Turkey emerged, was in fact the creation of the Young Turk Committee of Union and Progress that had been in power during the World War I. It was also this Committee that launched Mustafa Kemal, the later Atatürk, as a leader.
The book was well received, but a friend of mine translated a review in an Armenian journal for me. That, too, was appreciative of my work, but it also voiced a criticism. According to the reviewer my story seemed to play out in an empty landscape, as if the elimination of the Armenians had not taken place. At the time my reaction was: ‘Yes, that may be true, but my book was not about that.’ It was only 20 years later, when I started to involve myself more with the Armenian question in the context of the pioneering Workshop on Armenian Turkish Scholarship (WATS), that I realised that I had been wrong. Even the continuity of the political leadership between the Unionist period and the Kemalist republic, the subject of my book, cannot be studied without taking into account the fact that this leadership had been formed in the crucible of 1915-16 and that the national resistance movement that brought forth the republic was in so many ways a continuation of World War I –politically, ideologically and personally. It is true, of course, that the top political and military leaders of the World War I era had fled the country in 1918 and that most of them were killed by Armenian agents in the following years, but still: quite a few of the people involved in the genocide held high office in the republic, and the shared experience of 1915-16 undoubtedly created group solidarities.
Involving oneself with the issue of the genocide is not just a moral issue, however. Historians of Turkey also have something specific to offer. Now that the outlines and many of the details of the genocide have been so well established by historical research based on original documents and eye-witness accounts, there are, I think, two areas where historians of Turkey can contribute significantly to a better understanding of it, on the basis of Turkish sources. The first area is that of the causes and motives. At this point in time we have come to recognise that both longer-term developments (the popularity of social Darwinism, militarism, the issue of reforms and land disputes, mass migration of Muslim refugees) and short-term ones (the Ottoman loss of the Balkan War, the outbreak of the World War I, the Ottoman defeat at Sarıkamış the British landings at Gallipoli and the rebellion at Van) played a role.
Looking for causes and motives is important because it helps us better to understand what happened. It does not affect the issue of genocide, and the fear of some Armenian scholars that analysing the causes and motives is necessarily apologetic, is groundless. What is important for the definition of genocide is intent, the intent to destroy an ethnic or religious group wholly or in part. The motive behind this intent is not relevant, that is why the denialist argument that what happened in 1915 cannot be genocide because Armenians formed a threat is nonsense, even if this contention were founded in fact.
The other issue is the way in which modern Turkey, as it emerged after World War I was shaped by the Armenian genocide. I have looked at the personal and ideological continuities between the Committee of Union and Progress and the Kemalist republic, which are considerable. More can certainly be done in this field, but the issues that now require attention (and increasingly are also getting it, in Turkey as well) are the transfer (or theft) of Armenian property and the conversion of Ottoman Armenians. The first, together with the more regulated takeover of Greek properties, laid the basis for the emergence of a Turkish bourgeoisie during the republic and quite a few major corporations of Turkey have their roots in this process. I am not a lawyer and I have no idea about the validity of legal claims after a century has passed, but for a better understanding of Turkey we need to know more about the transfer of property, for instance through access to the still closed cadastral archives.
The conversion to Islam of large numbers of Armenians during World War I is the other big issue that needs to be addressed. As in any nation-building process, homogenising the population has been a key feature of modern Turkish history. This has obscured the fact that many Turks today have some Armenian roots. Nobody knows exactly how many Armenian women and children were taken into Muslim families in 1915-16, but even if we assume a relatively low number of 100,000 and project on that the demographic trends of Turkey in the twentieth century, that would mean that something like 2.5 million Turks have at least one Armenian grandparent. Rediscovering these roots has become popular among progressive Turks in recent years.
In other words: the Republic of Turkey not only carries the legacy that it was founded and ruled to a considerable extent by people who had been involved in the genocide, it also carries a material and a personal legacy of the Armenians themselves.
I am happy to say that not only in the world of Turkish studies in general, but also among Turkish historians in Turkey the number of those who are genuinely interested in finding the truth and discussing it openly, is increasing constantly. Both the ground breaking conference at Bilgi University in 2005 and the demonstrations following the murder of Hrant Dink in 2007 have been milestones. At the many conferences that have been held at the centenary of the genocide, Turkish scholars have played an important role.
This new openness is a hopeful sign that reconciliation between Turks and Armenians is a possibility. That reconciliation cannot be built on denial, that is obvious, but it also cannot be built on compromise. Compromise is a politician’s tool and it serves to solve current issues, but it has nothing to do with an enquiry into historical truth. People cannot be slightly murdered. Nor can reconciliation be built on the notion, heavily promoted by the current Turkish government, that all those who suffered in the horrible years of the World War I in Turkey should be commemorated together. Many more Germans died in the World War II than Jews (although some of the Germans were Jews and some of the Jews Germans) but Chancellor Merkel would not dream of claiming that these should be remembered equally as victims of their time and circumstances. ‘Respectfully agreeing to disagree,’ a solution proposed by some semi-official spokesmen in Turkey, is no solution either. It implies that recognition and non-recognition of the genocide are morally and academically equivalent positions. They are not.
Acceptance of the historical truth will take time, even though the circle of Turkish historians actively promoting it is increasing. Younger generations of Turks (which means the vast majority of them as this is a young country), having been exposed to nationalist state rhetoric in school, during military service and in the media, are genuinely convinced that the story of the genocide is a lie. Unlike the first generation of the republic they no longer consciously deny a truth they know only too well. Instead, the younger generations of Turks often place the ‘Armenian lies’ in the context of the conspiracy theories that are so prevalent in Turkey – they see them as a weapon used by the West to denigrate and harm the country.
That makes the task of re-educating the Turkish public and opening up the debate huge. But the door has been opened and it cannot be closed. Among Kurdish intellectuals and politicians, too, we see a completely new readiness to discuss the events of 1915 with an open mind, not only in Istanbul and Ankara but also, even primarily, in the southeast.
A broader realisation in Turkey and beyond that genocide is a personal crime, in other words: that persons can be accused and convicted of genocide, but not nations or states, might also make the discussion easier. The current Turkish state and society can rightfully be accused of denying the genocide, but not of the crime itself. Its perpetrators are long dead.
Recognition is important not just for the Armenians, but also for Turkey itself. As Taner Akçam has argued long ago, the genocide needs to be faced if Turkey is to develop into a more relaxed, more democratic, more humanist society. Discussion and recognition can act as a catalyst to remove the blanked of narrow and increasingly religiously tainted nationalism that lies over this society. So, let us hope that the centenary is the opening of a new page in the story of facing the historical truth, in the interest of Turks as well as Armenians.
Professor Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkish Studies, Leiden University
Please cite this publication as follows:
Zürcher, E. (May, 2015), “The Role of Historians of Turkey in the Study of Armenian Genocide”, Vol. IV, Issue 5, pp.12-17, Centre for Policy and Research on Turkey (ResearchTurkey), London, Research Turkey. (http://researchturkey.org/?p=8775)
Editor’s Note:
Centre for Policy and Research on Turkey (Research Turkey) encourages pluralism and opposing views to be discussed. Anyone who would like to contribute as a response to this article could send their pieces to editor@researchturkey.org. All publications of Research Turkey are peer reviewed. No view in the articles could be considered as the institution’s official views.