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New musical about Armenian genocide still needs work

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musical about Armenian genocide

Photo: Optimum Exposure Photography

By Steve Barnes,

ALBANY — “Some People Hear Thunder” is an overambitious mess.

There was a moment during Friday’s opening of this would-be epic musical, set during the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, when I was so flabbergasted by what was happening on stage that I looked around to see if audience members were laughing at what seemed to me surely a “Forbidden Broadway”-style parody. Somehow — and I am at a loss to explain this precisely — the Greek god Atlas becomes part of the story and bellows the song “The Sky Is Falling” from upstage while cast members flutter wide swaths of fabric to evoke waves or, perhaps, clouds. I felt slightly less than sane during that moment.

Given the problems evident throughout “Some People Hear Thunder,” an independent production that is renting Capital Repertory Theatre for the musical’s world-premiere run, it’s hard to believe that the show has been in development for more than a decade, or that it was workshopped two years ago by director and co-star Kevin McGuire. Did no one in all that time tell the creative team of Gerson Smoger and Jeffrey Sorkin, who are co-credited with the book, music and lyrics, that the business with Atlas really doesn’t belong, and that the second-act tap number feels as clichéd as the ballets that used to get stuffed into 19th-century operas?

This is all unfortunate, because the show is receiving a thorough, accomplished production from McGuire, his creative team and cast. They give us a fully realized, believable world in which the story of one of the worst but least-acknowledged atrocities of the 20th century is told through the eyes of a young American reporter and the Armenians he meets in what is present-day Turkey. The show has compelling characters, a few affecting songs and dynamic performances, but the overall result feels dissatisfying and unfinished. And the lyrics’ rhymes are often so obvious that you could make a game of predicting them.

Alex Prakken brings a fresh-faced vitality and bright, strong tenor voice to the young journalist, Jason Karras, who is dispatched by his Manhattan-based newspaper to cover Europe at the beginning of World War I. He leaves behind a disconsolate girlfriend (Rachel Rhodes-Devey) whom he updates via letter, and eventually makes his way to southwest Turkey. There he is welcomed by the family of Zoravar del Kaloustian (McGuire), an Armenian recently returned from Paris with his French wife, Angelique (Joan Hess), to settle matters of his estate.

Source: http://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-features/article/New-musical-about-Armenian-genocide-still-needs-11127682.php

New French leader Macron on the Genocide, Karabakh issue, Armenian community

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Prior to being elected French president on Sunday, May 8, Emmanuel Macron had weighed in on the Armenian Genocide, the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, as well as the Armenian community in France.

In April 2017, former economy minister, EnMarche! movement leader Macron pledged to fight for the international recognition of the Armenian Genocide.

He visited the Komitas Monument and Armenian Genocide Memorial in Paris on April 24 to pay tribute to the memory of the 1.5 million victims of the killings.

Macron also expressed support for including April 24 in the French Republic’s calendar.

Speaking about the Karabakh conflict, then-candidate Macron stated that France’s efforts alone are not enough to solve the issue.

“In case I become the president of France, I will make every effort to settle the conflict,” he said then.

Macron also expressed his admiration for the Armenian community of France, which sets an example of integration, as well as conservation of historic roots and culture.

The centrist was elected French president on Sunday, with a business-friendly vision of European integration, defeating Marine Le Pen, a far-right nationalist who threatened to take France out of the European Union.

The Last Brick in the Denialist Wall: Akçam Speaks with the Armenian Weekly on His Latest Discovery

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Akçam: ‘My Argument is that Based on the New Documents, it is Now Very Difficult to Deny the Armenian Genocide’

Special for the Armenian Weekly

WATERTOWN, Mass. (A.W.)—As Armenian communities around the world marked the 102nd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, a recent revelation by Turkish historian Dr. Taner Akçam has become a central topic of discourse, covered by major news outlets and publications. Akçam—aptly named the “Sherlock Homes of the Armenian Genocide” in a recent New York Times article—has been studying the genocide for years by compiling documents from around the world to combat the Turkish states’ denial.

According to Akçam, his recent discovery—which is he refers to as the “smoking gun” and one of the “last bricks in the denialist wall”—proves the Ottoman government’s awareness of and involvement in the annihilation of the Armenian population. The discovery of these documents was made after they were believed to have vanished following World War I .

The document, acknowledged as authentic by the postwar Ottoman government, helped convict its author, Behaeddin Shakir, one of the founders of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), as one of the masterminds of the Armenian Genocide.

On May 11, the Armenian Museum of America and the National Association of Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) will present “The Story Behind: ‘The Smoking Gun’,” a presentation of these never-before-seen-documents by Akçam. For the first time, this and other documents will be discussed in public.

The Armenian Weekly recently caught up with Dr. Akçam ahead of his Boston-area talk, to discuss his recent discovery and its significance in combating the Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide.

Below is the interview in its entirety.

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Dickran Khodanian: You have called the discovery of the telegram “the smoking gun,” one of the “last bricks in the denialist wall.” What makes this piece of evidence more significant than other proofs that were available in the past?

Taner Akçam: This evidence enhances the evidence that has been compiled over the years. One of the most important sources of the Armenian Genocide is the military tribunal records in Istanbul. Historian Vahakn Dadrian has used these tribunals to break through Turkey’s denialist wall and has used them extensively. However, the evidences from the Court were constantly criticized because they were not the originals.

In fact, when Guenter Lewy published his book entitled The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide, he discredited court martial materials with the argument that we do not have the originals since they don’t exist.  In the book, he writes, “the most serious problem affecting the probative value of the 1919–20 military court proceedings is the loss of all documentation of these trials. This means that we have none of the original documents, sworn testimony, and depositions on which the courts based their findings and verdicts,” (p. 80).

And now we have the original documents with official letterheads that have been deciphered with a certain coding system. The coding system allows for us to authenticate letters that are either related to the killing or the killing operation. It is a major blow to the denialist argument. I will continue to publish more of these kinds of documents from court martial tribunals because it is a very strong addition to the existing scholarship.

D.K.: You have mentioned that you uncovered the document from the nephew of an Armenian Catholic priest, Krikor Guerguerian. Can you provide some background on this? How were you able to finally secure the document?

T.A.: The document is in the private archive of Armenian Catholic priest Krikor Guerguerian in New York. The original document is in Jerusalem Armenian Patriarch’s archive and Guerguerian had visited this archive in the 1960s and had filmed all the materials.  It is a very well known document and has been published several times in the form of quotations. In the main tribunal of Istanbul in 1919-1921, it was quoted extensively! Dadrian personally visited Jerusalem and was in contact with Guerguerian; he used this specific telegram and made references to Guerguerian and Jerusalem Archive in his footnotes.

More importantly, the Armenian Assembly microfilmed the entire Guerguerian archive in 1983. These archives have been available since 1983, but nobody could look extensively because there was no proper cataloging system. There were maybe hundred of rolls of microfilm and it would have been almost impossible to go through each roll to find this document. The existence of Guerguerian Archive and copies in the Assembly was public knowledge among scholars. When I first came to the United States in 2000, I approached Guerguerian’s nephew and asked for his permission to look at the originals that are held by him in New York. He rejected, since the materials were all microfilmed in Washington. In 2015, I called the nephew again to ask for permission to see the original materials and this time he allowed me.

D.K.: Could there be more materials to discover?

T.A.: There are still a lot of other materials to discover. This will be one of the main issues I will address in my presentation on May 11. We have several original materials from the Istanbul Tribunal that we know ended up in the archives in Jerusalem and Guerguerian’s personal archives.

In the 1940s, while Krikor Guerguerian was doing research on the extermination of the religious clergy during the Armenian Genocide for his Ph.D in Cairo, he met a former Ottoman judge who was a member of the Istanbul military court tribunal following WWI. The judge told Guerguerian when he was the presiding judge of the court martial, the Armenian Patriarchate was the official representative of the Armenians during the trial. They were given legal rights to have access to the court material and as a result he allowed them to take the court material.

The judge also told Guerguerian that in 1922 Zaven [Der Yeghiayan] Patriarch in Istanbul transferred the materials to Europe, first to Marseilles, then to Manchester, Britain, and then eventually ending up in the Jerusalem archives. So in the 1960s, Krikor Guerguerian went there and took pictures everything.

D.K.: What has made your discovery different? You have mentioned to other publications that you do not believe that this latest discovery will lead to any immediate changes in Turkey’s stance on the issue. Why do you think that is?

T.A.: The important discovery I made is the coding system as well as revealing that the document has an Ottoman letterhead. The Turkish authorities will not be able to claim that it is not authentic. The coding system on the telegram is irrefutable and shows the authenticity of this document.

Today, in the Ottoman Archives, there are hundreds of documents, mainly in the form of telegrams coming from provinces to Istanbul. These are all coded in Arabic numbers. Four or five digit numbers denote each word or plural endings or suffixes. When these coded telegrams arrived Istanbul, the officials wrote the equivalent words or endings on top of each number groups. This is how we are able to read these documents today. I compared the coding system in Bahaettin Şakir’s telegrams with those in the Ottoman archive and I found a match.

Just to give one example: the term for deportation is coded with “4889” on Shakir’s telegram; if you check the Ottoman materials coming to the central government from the provinces in the same period, which have four digit numbers like Shakir’s telegram, you will see that all have the code “4889” for deportation.

Nobody could claim that this telegram is not authentic. Now, the Turkish government has to find an explanation because this argument of “show the original” is not valid. We have the original. They have cornered themselves with their own argument.

I am sure they will continue to deny the genocide because denialism has nothing to do with academic research; it is a political problem. My argument is that based on the new documents, it is now very difficult to deny the Armenian Genocide. The arguments that they have been bringing up over the years will no longer work. Therefore, they will have to resort to something new.

D.K.: Are historians not allowed to research at the archive in Jerusalem?

T.A.: Yes, scholars do not have access. I was declined over the years several times. I had wanted to check Krikor Guerguerian’s material to see whether he really filmed everything. I couldn’t get access. And they have a standard answer: “We are in the process of cataloging,” I am not sure whether this is true. There is no specific reason to my knowledge for why historians do not have access to the archives in Jerusalem. I don’t want to speculate on this.

D.K.: You will be in Watertown, speaking at the Armenian Museum of America on May 11. Tell us a little about what you will be covering during your talk.

T.A.: My presentation on May 11 will mainly be about the contents of Krikor Guerguerian’s archives that are related to the materials of the Istanbul military tribunal. There are a lot more materials in the archives but I will only focus on the tribunal and the materials that were collected during this time.

***

Taner Akçam is the Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University.

He is the author of The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide, with Ümit Kurt (Berghahn Books, 2015), The Young Turk’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton University Press, 2012), Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials with Vahakn Dadrian (Berghahn Books, 2011), A Shameful Act: Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (Metropolitan Books, 2006), and From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (Zed Books, 2004).

He has also authored other works in German and Turkish, including most recently Naim Efendi’nin Hatıratı ve Talat Paşa Telgrafları: Krikor Gergeryan Arşivi [Naim Efendi’s Memoir and the Talat Pasha Telegrams: The Krikor Guerguerian Archive] (İletişim, 2016), forthcoming in English translation.

Akçam will present his talk at the Armenian Museum of America on May 11, at 7 p.m. Click here for further details about the presentation

Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors slams Trump for not recognizing Armenian Genocide

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The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has urged the White House to recognize the Armenian genocide.

Supervisor Kathryn Barger recommended sending a letter to President Donald Trump, mynewsla.com reported.

She noted that Trump, like past presidents, stopped short of describing the 1915 events as “genocide”.

Supervisor Hilda Solis said officials should not be “intimidated by the threats that are made by the Turkish government,” which has long denied that a genocide occurred.

The board will also urge the county’s congressional delegates to support House Resolution 220, sponsored by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Burbank, which would formally recognize the genocide.

Representative of the Armenian community Peter Darakjian, told the board there were no local survivors left to share the horror of the genocide, now that a 101-year-old woman had died.

“History seems to repeat itself if it goes unrecognized. Genocide seems to do the same,” Darakjian said. “Enough already, after 102 years.”

Los Angeles County is home to more than 200,000 Armenians.

Armenians in Zakho in Iraqi Kurdistan mark anniversary of genocide

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Armenians residing in the Kurdish city of Zakho, near the border with Turkey, massively mobilized to commemorate the 102nd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. They themselves came from the families of the displaced and deported dispersed in the Ottoman Empire by the Turkish authorities of the time and who found refuge in these mountainous regions populated mainly by Kurds and confining with the Autonomous Kurdistan of Iraq . There are currently some 200 Armenian families in the town of Zakho, who feel safe in this town about 200 km north-west of Erbil, the capital of autonomous Kurdistan, which in recent years has hosted a large number Christians, including Armenians, but also members of other religious minorities, such as the Yezidis, who had to flee the persecution and massacre perpetrated in other parts of Iraq by the jihadists of the Islamic state. “We are only a handful in Kurdistan. But thanks to God, we enjoy most of our rights, “said Ishkhan Milko, an Armenian member of the Duhok Provincial Council.

The Armenians have a seat in this Regional Council and a seat in the Parliament of Autonomous Kurdistan. Although Armenians are few in number, they still hold the painful memory of a history marked by the genocide of 24 April 1915. “The Armenians emigrated from Bitlis, Erzurum, Van, Mush, And other localities in Northern Kurdistan [in Turquoise], “said Dr. Hogir Mohammed, a Kurdish researcher on the Armenian genocide, referring to the fate of the inhabitants of the Turkish cities to the east and South-eastern region of Turkey, a region more commonly referred to as Kurdistan than Armenia by the Kurds. “They have traveled on different roads, some passing through the Syrian desert, and some of them have chosen to settle in Syria, others to Jordan and Egypt. Some others came to settle in Iraqi Kurdistan, where the city of Zakho was the gateway, “said the Kurdish researcher who recalled that Zakho has an Armenian school, which was founded in 1969.” Many Muslims frequented The school of the Church. We were studying alongside the Armenians, and then they came here, “said Fahmi Ahmad, the director of the Armenian school, talking nostalgically about the time when the Armenians and Muslims were studying side by side. Islam, Muslims to Christianity “.

Tuesday, May 2, 2017,
Gari © armenews.com

Film The Promise Targeted for Exposing the Armenian Genocide

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‘The Promise,’ a $90 million epic drama, bluntly tells of Christians slaughtered during WWI

by Zachary Leeman,

Starring Christian Bale and Oscar Isaac, “The Promise” is a film you likely should be aware of — but it’s doubtful you or many others have even heard of it. Out for nearly two weeks already, the picture hasn’t even managed to earn $10 million at the box office.

Based on a story  about the Armenian genocide during World War I, “The Promise” was a controversial movie from the beginning. The calculated slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire is something the Turkish government (the modern-day state of the Ottoman Empire) and many politicians refuse to officially acknowledge.

“Promise” director Terry George has said that many films had been attempted in Hollywood about the dark period in history during which Christian Armenians were slaughtered — but government forces worked in the shadows to stop them.

“The attempts to tell the story of the Armenian genocide by Hollywood are quite fascinating,” George told Deadline. “There were two serious attempts to do it in the ’50s, to make a film of a book called ‘Forty Days of Musa Dagh,’ which, in the ’40s, had become a bestseller across Europe and America. It was written by Franz Werfel. MGM or one of the other studios tried to put it together. The Turkish government leaned on the State Department and the U.S. government at the time, who then leaned on Hollywood, and the film was stopped.”

He continued, “Sylvester Stallone tried to make the same book in the ’70s and had the same thing happen. There was a current that was like, ‘The studio doesn’t want to make this.’ The Turkish government had become involved, and the sense that I got, and the research seems to show, [that] Turkey has enormous, disproportionate power and influence because of its strategic position. In the ’50s and ’70s, it was the Cold War and where they were on the border, and their situation with Israel. Today, clearly, they’re just as influential.”

This influence is why George chose to create his movie without major publicity. “We deliberately flew under the radar,” he said.

Thus, “The Promise” accomplished something other films about the Armenian genocide never could: It was finished and released.

“We deliberately flew under the radar.”

However, the final product has faced hurdles that many speculate have come from the Turkish government and Armenian genocide-deniers.

The New York Times reports that Daniel Giménez Cacho — an actor from “Promise” — said he was contacted by a Turkish ambassador before filming started. The ambassador wanted to emphasize that the genocide of 1.5 million Christians had never happened.

“The Promise” also walked into theaters with strangely bad buzz. The movie racked up over 50,000 one-star ratings on the website IMDB. This was before the film ever hit theaters and had only premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival; there, only a few thousand people actually saw it.

Worse still is the release of a competing film entitled, “The Ottoman Lieutenant,” a movie starring Josh Hartnett that was reportedly backed by Turkish investors. The similarities between “Ottoman” and “Promise” are strangely close; yet each film holds a very different view about the slaughter of Christian Armenians.

Both movies follow love triangles set during the disputed events during World War I. “The Promise” follows three Armenians caught up in the genocide, while “Ottoman” follows a handsome, heroic Turkish officer who is in love with an Armenian woman and saves Armenians through the course of the movie.

“It’s a sort of mirror image of our film, but with a totally denialist perspective,” George told The New York Times. He said he thought the Turkish government and president had a deliberate hand in the making of the film as a way to undercut and draw attention away from George’s movie.

“Ottoman” faced troubles during its creation because Turkish producers had complete rights to the work and reportedly took over editing duties — they protested some of the violence in the movie committed by Turkish people.

“Joe [Ruben, the director] was so enraged by their version [the Turkish producers’ version] of events he attempted to take his name off the film, but he realized contractually he was obliged to remain silent,” the film’s first assistant director, Michael Steele, told The New York Times. Ruben has done no publicity for his movie.

“Ottoman” has already opened in Turkey, while most people doubt “The Promise” will ever get a release there.

Before his death in 2015, entrepreneur and Armenian descendent Kirk Kerkorian pledged the entire budget of “The Promise” to filmmakers. This meant “The Promise” was able to bypass the struggles and hurdles other filmmakers had to endure when trying to make films about the Armenian genocide.

However, big stars and a big budget didn’t mean they could outrun the power and influence of governments that would like to sweep the mass slaughter of a group of people under the rug. “The Promise” received little publicity for this reason and clearly faced deliberate attempts to stall its potential popularity.

So the film may not bring in hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office — but it has accomplished something so much greater by simply being made. It exists forever, and that is something no government body or frightened bureaucrat will ever be able to stop. And if the film ever does earn a profit, producers have guaranteed they will donate that money to humanitarian charities.

The story of a shameful episode of world history has now been made into an expensive drama headlined by popular and talented actors. “The Promise” will live on and find an audience, especially since the world is slowly beginning to learn of the Armenian genocide on a bigger scale than ever before — and that’s putting an unusual amount of pressure on Turkey and politicians that deny the genocide ever happened.

A documentary entitled, “Architects of Denial” is about Armenian genocide deniers and will be released in October, with the backing of producers like Dean Cain. The recently released trailer showed filmmakers confronting U.S. politicians and putting them on the spot, forcing them to admit their denial of the events during World War I.

“The genocide is burned into the soul of the Armenian diaspora,” George told The Times. “Until they get some kind of recognition, it’s not going to go away.”

Source: http://www.lifezette.com/popzette/film-targeted-for-exposing-armenian-genocide/

Princess Dina Mired of Jordan visited the Armenian Genocide Memorial

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Princess Dina Mired of Jordan who is also the President of the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) visited on Saturday Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex to pay tribute to memory of the victims of the Armenian Genocide.  Accompanied by the deputy head of the Genocide Museum-Institute Suren Manukyan, the Princess placed flowers near the eternal flame perpetuating the memory of the Genocide victims.

Afterwards, the Princess planted a fir tree at the Memory Park of the Memorial, toured the Genocide Museum-Institute and made an inscription in the Book of Honorary Guests of the Museum-Institute.

“As a non-political figure, as an advocate of the fight against cancer with a mission to save lives, by visiting the Genocide Museum, I remember the war brutalities, wherever they occur,” the Princess wrote, referring to the violence against the civilian population throughout the world where women and children are the primary victims.

To remind, the Princess of Jordan attended on Friday the demonstration of The Promise film narrating about the Armenian Genocide. The movie was created at the Survival Pictures of the legendary Kirk Kirkorian by the Oscar winner film director Terry George.

Park in Cyprus in memory of genocide victims

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In Paphos city of Cyprus, Armenian Genocide Park will be opened.

The park project, that will be opened with a ceremony on April 30, was launched with the initiation of Vartkes Mahtesian, representative of Armenian society in Cypriot Parliament.

Speaking to Agos, Mahtesian said that Armenian Genocide Park was suggested in 2016 and then turned into a project. Accepted unanimously by Paphos Municipal Council, the project was launched with the approval of Mayor of Paphos Phedonas Phedonos. Deputy Mahtesian said, “This green area crossing the streets of Charalambos Mouskos and Evagoras Pllikarides is named as ‘Armenian Genocide Park” for commemorating and honoring 1.5 million innocent people who were killed in 1915 Genocide.” Also, a cross-stone (khachkar), which is in UNESCO cultural heritage list and considered as a symbol of Armenian land, will be put in the park. Mahtesian also said, “This park will also be the symbol of friendship and mutual respect of Armenian and Greek societies in Cyprus.”

New Evidence of the Armenian Genocide

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For over a century, Turkey has denied any involvement in the organization of the Armenian massacre in what historians have long accepted as a genocide that began in 1915, while World War I spread to continents. The Turkish discourse of negation revolves around the argument that the original documents concerning the courts after the war, which condemned the instigators of the genocide, could not be found.

At present, Taner Akçam, a Turkish historian at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, who has been studying genocide for decades by compiling documents from around the world to establish the state’s complicity in the massacres, says he has Discovered an original telegram relating to the trials, in the archives held by the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

“Until recently, the smoking gun was missing,” says Akçam, “It’s the smoking gun”. He described his discovery as an “earthquake in our domain,” and said he hoped to remove the last stone from the wall of Holocaust denial.

The story begins in 1915 in an office in the Turkish city of Erzéroum, when a high-ranking official of the Ottoman Empire wrote a coded telegram to a colleague on the ground, asking for details on deportations and executions. Armenia, in eastern Anatolia, the most eastern part of contemporary Turkey.

Later, a deciphered copy of the telegram helped condemn the leader Behaeddin Shakir for planning, an act that researchers have long referred to and which Turkey has long denied: the planned massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by the leaders Of an Ottoman empire on the decline, an atrocity widely recognized as the first genocide of the 20th century.

And afterwards, without knowing how, most of the original documents and testimonies under oaths of trials disappeared, forcing researchers to rely only on the abstracts available in Turkish official journals.

Mr. Akçam said he had little hope that his new discovery would immediately change things, given Turkey’s fossilized policy of negation, at a time of political unrest, while its President Recep Erdogan leans Even more towards the nationalist. But Mr. Akçam’s whole life’s work consisted in denouncing, after fact, document by document, the negations of Turkey.

“My firm belief as a Turk is that democracy and human rights in Turkey can only be established by confronting history and acknowledging its misdeeds,” he said.

The shaken and abandoned interior of an Armenian monastery, north of Dyarbakir, Turkey, which, according to the inhabitants, is now used as a stable. Credit Bryan Denton for the New York Times

He developed his thesis that most of the chaos that seizes the Middle East today results from a mistrust between communities born of historical misdeeds, which no one wants to confront.

“The past is not the past in the Middle East,” he said. “This is the biggest obstacle to peace and stability in the Middle East.”

Eric D. Weitz, a history professor at City College in New York and an Armenian Genocide expert, called Mr. Akçam “the Sherlock Holmes of the Armenian Genocide.”

“He has accumulated evidence on evidence,” Professor Weitz added.

Where was the telegram for all these years, and how Mr. Akçam found it, is a story in itself. With the Turkish nationalists about to take power in 1922, Armenian leaders in Istanbul sent 24 boxes of hearings to England for their preservation.

The recordings were kept there by a bishop, then taken over in France and later in Jerusalem. They remained there until the 1930s, in the midst of an enormous amount of archives, mostly inaccessible to researchers, for reasons that are not entirely clear. Mr. Akçam said that he had tried for years to access these archives, but without succeeding. Instead, he found a photographic record of the archives from Jerusalem to New York; Held by the nephew of a now deceased Armenian monk who had survived the genocide. While investigating the genocide in Cairo in the 1940s, monk Krikor Guerguerian met a former Ottoman judge who presided over the post-war trials. The judge told him that many of these boxes had failed in Jerusalem, and so Mr. Guerguerian went there and took photographs of everything.

The telegram was written under the Ottoman heading and coded in Arabic characters: the groups of four-digit numbers were the words. When Mr. Akçam compared it with the known codes of the then Ministry of the Interior, found in an official archive in Istanbul, he realized that they corresponded, reinforcing the likelihood that many other telegrams Post-war trials can be verified in the same way.

For historians, trials were only one piece of evidence that emerged over the years – including the reports in several languages ​​of diplomats, missionaries and journalists who witnessed the events under their care Eyes – this establishes the historical fact of the massacres and called it genocide. Turkey has long resisted the word genocide, saying that the sufferings of the Armenians had taken place in the chaos of a world war, a war in which Turkish Muslims also underwent trials.

Tripods erected for hanging during the Armenian Genocide which began in 1915. Credit Culture club. Getty Images

Turkey also maintained that the Armenians were traitors, and had plans to ally themselves with Russia, an enemy of the Ottoman Empire.

This position is deeply entrenched in Turkish culture – it is a norm in school courts – and polls have shown that a majority of Turks share the government’s position.

“My approach is that whatever evidence you put before Holocaust deniers, Holocaust deniers will remain Holocaust deniers,” Bedros Der Matossian, a historian at the University of Nebraska and author of “Shattered dreams of Revolution; From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire [Fragmented Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence at the End of the Ottoman Empire] “.

The genocide is commemorated every year on 24 April, the day of 1915 when a group of Armenian notables from Istanbul were regrouped and deported.

This was the beginning of an enormous massacre, which involved forced marches in the Syrian deserts, summary executions and rape.

Two years ago, Pope Francis spoke of the massacre as a genocide and had to face a storm of criticism from inside Turkey. Many countries, including France, Germany, and Greece, have recognized the genocide, causing the breakdown of diplomatic relations with Turkey every time.

The United States avoided the use of the word “genocide” in an effort not to alienate Turkey, an ally of NATO and a partner in the fight against terrorism in the Middle East. Barak Obama had pronounced this word as a candidate for the presidency, but he did not do so during his term of office.

This year, dozens of leaders at the congress signed a letter urging President Trump to recognize the genocide.

But he is unlikely to do so, as Trump recently congratulated Erdogan on his victory in a referendum that critics say is fraudulent. Mr. Shakir, the Ottoman leader who wrote the incriminating telegram discovered by Mr. Akçam, had fled the country when the military court found him guilty and sentenced him to death in absentia.

A few years later, he was shot down in the streets of Berlin by two Armenian killers described in an article in The New York Times as “thin men, stretched thin and swarthy, carpet in a porch.”

By Tim Arango

The New York Times

22 April 2017

Colorado Legislature passes Armenian Genocide resolution

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The Colorado State Legislature unanimously passed a resolution recognizing the 102nd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, thedenverchannel.com reported.

The resolution states:  “We express support for efforts toward constructive and durable relations between the country of Armenia, the homeland for the Armenian people, and its neighbors, based upon acknowledgment of the facts and ongoing consequences of the Armenian genocide, and a fair, just, and comprehensive international resolution of this crime against humanity.”

“Our Colorado Advocacy Day was a great success! We appreciate the Centennial State’s legislators’ support of the Armenian American community, as manifested in their unanimous approval of the annual Armenian Genocide resolution, and the time they took to learn about current issues impacting the Armenian homeland, as well as US-Armenia relations,” Armenian National Committee Western Region said in a statement.

Armenians of Colorado began with a group of 15 Armenian members around 1980. At least 125 families are involved in the organization today.