Conference Taner Akçam to AGBU May 28 for his book “Judgment at Istanbul»

May 24, 2015 By administrator

AFAJA – NAZARPEK & AGBU Young have an interview with historian Taner Akçam on the occasion of the release of his book “Judgment at Istanbul,” co-written with Vahakn N. Dadrian.

Published in English and translated for the first time in French by Juliette Thin. Preface and Afterword Chaliand Alexandre and Stéphane Couyoumdjian Mirdikian.

On Thursday, May 28 at 20 pm at the Alex Manoogian Cultural Center AGBU: 118 rue de Courcelles 75017 PARIS (Metro Courcelles)

Translation ensured maintenance – Sales and dedication of the book. Free admission and Cocktail.

Judgment at Istanbul, originally published in English, is first translated into French.

This book – capital item of evidence of what is referred to as the Armenian genocide – recounts the trial of Young Turk leaders held in 1919-1920, when most of them had fled. In this remarkable work the authors, one Turkish, one Armenian, worked together on the archives and documents of the Ottoman era and restore the ambiguity of this pivotal period from 1919 to the victory of Mustafa Kemal.

In this year of commemoration of the centenary of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the French Association of Armenian Lawyers and Jurists (AFAJA), co-chaired by Alexandre Couyoumdjian and the Belgian association of lawyers and jurists Armenians (Abaja), chaired by Stéphane Mirdikian, took the initiative to translate this book.

This book will include support for numerous conferences scheduled in France, Belgium and Switzerland, on the theme of the Armenian Genocide, Holocaust denial and justice. In May 2015, the Turkish sociologist Taner Akcam will come in France at the first symposium organized within this framework. It will be held at the Maison du Barreau, Place Dauphine, under the aegis of the Bar Association of the Bar of Paris on 27 and 28 May.

Sunday, May 24, 2015,
Jean Eckian © armenews.com

Bulgaria MP: Our country recognized events of 1915

May 24, 2015 By administrator

Bulgaria, in fact, has recognized the events in 1915, said Bulgarian MP Yanaki Stoilov, speaking to Armenian News-NEWS.am.

In Stoilov’s words, actually, this fact is more important for the modern Bulgarians than the external formulation of the word “genocide.”

He recalled that on April 24, the Bulgarian parliament passed, with a majority of votes, a resolution on the Armenians’ large-scale slaughter in the Ottoman Empire.

The resolution is important as a confirmation of Bulgaria’s great contribution in saving thousands of Armenians in various phases of history,” Yanaki Stoilov added.

Edhem Eldem: Turkish Intellectuals Who Have Recognized The Armenian Genocide

May 23, 2015 By administrator

By: Hambersom Aghbashian

Edhem Eldem

Professor Edhem Eldem (born in Geneva in 1960) is a renowned Turkish historian who teaches at the Department of History at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. He completed his Ph.D. degree in 1989 at Provence University , (Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I, Institut de Linguistique Générale et d‟Études Orientales et Slaves), and worked as an associate professor at Boğaziçi University (1989- 91), Tenured associate professor (1991-98) then full professor. He was a visiting professor, Centre d’études du domaine turc, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (2001-08), then In (2011-2012) he was a fellow at The Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His research focus lies on the late Ottoman social and economic history, intellectual biographies and the history of archaeology.(1)

According to (http://www.esiweb.org), In September 2005, Prof. Halil Berktay, joined by fellow intellectuals Murat Belge, Edhem Eldem and Selim Deringil, organised a conference on the fate of the Ottoman Armenians. Justice Minister Cemil Cicek attacked the organizers in the Turkish parliament with the familiar charge of “stabbing the Turkish people in the back. And according to (The California Courier), June 2, 2005, ” Fearing that these scholars were about to disclose a version of history which was not in line with that approved by the Turkish government, the Governor of Istanbul called Ayse Soysal, the rector of Bogazici University, and ordered her to cancel the meeting. She declined. She also refused requests later that day from the Chief Public Prosecutor to hand over the texts of the papers to be delivered at the conference.”
In December 2008, two hundred prominent Turkish intellectuals released an apology for the “great catastrophe of 1915″. This was a clear reference to the Armenian Genocide, a term still too sensitive to use so openly. The signatories also announced a website related to this apology, and called on others to visit the site and sign the apology as well. The brief text of the apology is: ” My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them. Professor Edhem Eldem is one of the Turkish intellectuals who signed the apology. (5)
“Today’s Zaman”, wrote on September 26, 2014, “A group of academics, journalists, artists and intellectuals have released a statement condemning in the harshest terms what they define as expressions that include “open hatred and hostility” towards Armenians in Turkish schoolbooks, which were recently exposed by the newspapers Agos and Taraf. The two newspapers recently published reports on hateful remarks targeting Armenians in the textbooks used in history classes. A letter accompanying the text of the condemnation, written by historian Taner Akçam, notes that including such expressions as lesson material to teach children is a disgrace. The signees said textbooks in schools should seek to encourage feelings of peace, solidarity and living together over inciting hatred towards different religious and cultural groups. Edhem Eldem is one of the intellectuals who signed the statement.”(2)
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1- http://www.lisa.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/content.php?nav_id=3971
2- http://www.todayszaman.com/national_group-of-intellectuals-condemn-anti-armenian-statements-in-textbooks_359935.html

Yerevan: U.S. Embassy Helps Boost Security at Armenian Border

May 23, 2015 By administrator

U.S. Ambassador Richard M. Mills Jr. watches a presentation by Armenian Border Guard officers

YEREVAN—In a ceremony at the Armenia Border Guard headquarters, U.S. Ambassador Richard M. Mills Jr., joined by National Security Service Deputy Director Lieutenant General Arzuman Harutyunyan and Border Guard Troops Commander Major General Armen Abrahamyan, inspected equipment from the U.S. government that will assist the border guards in keeping weapons of mass destruction, biological hazards, and other threats from crossing Armenia’s borders. The equipment includes a multi-media lab that will be used in training Armenian border guards and other tools that will enhance the ability of border guards to control the flow of sensitive exports across the board and strengthen Armenia’s borders against transnational threats.

This assistance is part of the U.S. Government’s comprehensive nonproliferation programs that strengthen the ability of the Armenian Government to effectively counter transnational threats from international crime, arms smugglers, and risks from weapons of mass destruction. The United States and Armenia are working together toward common goals of democracy, security, and peace, both in Armenia and in the region.

Over the past ten years, the U.S. Embassy has partnered with various ministries and agencies to develop Armenia’s border security capacity. Leading the U.S. Embassy’s efforts in Armenia are the Export Control and Related Border Security (EXBS) program, the Defense Threat Reduction Office (DTRO), and Office of Defense Cooperation (ODC). “Our border security cooperation is robust, and we are committed to an open door partnership with Armenia,” said Ambassador Mills during his remarks.

The Guardian predicts Armenia’s victory at Eurovision 2015 (video)

May 23, 2015 By administrator

Britain’s The Guardian predicted Armenia’s victory at this year’s Eurovision song contest.

“Data behind Eurovision votes suggest some countries perform consistently well. We look at whether numbers can point us to who will triumph in Vienna,” The Guardian said.

“Here’s what’s probably going to happen:

• Viewers will be treated to a few out of the ordinary performances • Everyone will be complaining about regional voting blocs • Like most competitions that involve competing against other European nations (and doesn’t include the use of bicycles), the UK entry will flop.

But we’re going to be a bit bolder than that.

We’re having a shot at predicting who is going to follow in the footsteps of Conchita Wurst as the winner of the contest,” The Guardian said.

“Our model is not based on the quality of the songs (or the lack thereof), but on an average of votes each participating nation received over the past 12 years, which is then adjusted for factors that include present day geopolitics, form in more recent editions, past performance and tempo.

We have now spent the last two years tinkering with the model and hope the improvements we’re introducing mean that our projected winner will be the one to take it all.

So without further ado, the Guardian data prediction for Eurovision 2015 winner is… Armenia!

Genealogy’s controversial “Face the Shadow” references the mass murder of 1.5m Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915. It was originally called “Don’t Deny” – Turkey still contests that it was not a genocide, and this title was deemed too political by Eurovision organisers.

Other countries our model expects will make the top 10 include Serbia, Sweden, and Azerbaijan,” The Guardian concludes.

The Guardian: Eurovision 2015: the Guardian’s data-driven prediction

Turkey should pay $196 billion for Armenian goods looted

May 22, 2015 By administrator

On the table in his kitchen, in Yerevan, Armenia, Vartan Gazinian spread a map of the region of Van (eastern Turkey) and family photo while allowing room for a bottle of house wine, some zakutski to wedge the appetite and an ashtray that fills up as Vartan tells the story of his family. “We come from Van. My grandfather fought in the war with the Turks in 1915 while my grandmother and my father fled to Echmiadzin [seat of the Armenian Apostolic Church in Armenia today]. “

Vartan was born in 1932 in Soviet Armenia, but for generations, his family lived in one of the six vilayets (regions) predominantly populated by Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. His grandmother raised him in the hope of one day returning home, “she told me every evening of life in the arid mountains around Van as one would tell a story to a child, remembers-t he moved.

Vartan is a veritable encyclopedia of his home region. He knows the rhythm of the seasons, wildlife, flora, customs, monuments, “I know every corner but never went there.” Because his family is never returned, like most of the survivors of the Armenian genocide. Her grandmother also told him this: the exodus, hunger and fear “when the Turks invaded Armenia in 1918,” he said.

Read more, see link below

Friday, May 22, 2015,
Jean Eckian © armenews.com

Other information available: on ijsbergmagazine.com

Armenian President Sargsyan, Merkel talk German stance on Genocide, Armenia-EU prospects

May 22, 2015 By administrator

President Serzh Sargsyan met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the sidelines of the European Union’s Eastern Partnership summit in Riga, Latvia, presidential press service reports.

At the May 21 meeting, the parties focused on Armenian-German relations, expressing satisfaction over enriched cooperation agenda of the two countries through around six dozen cooperation agreements.

President Sargsyan further expressed his gratitude to the German government for its continued support of Armenia.

The Armenian president and the German chancellor touched upon Armenia-EU relations and their development prospects. The President stressed Germany’s role in deepening those relations as a key player in the EU.

The parties also reflected upon the Armenian Genocide centennial and the respective commemorative events which took place in Armenia and numerous countries around the world, including Germany. President Sargsyan thanked German authorities for their position on the condemnation of the Genocide.

At the meeting, the parties exchanged views on issues and challenges present in the South Caucasus region, including the Nagorno Karabakh peace process within the frame of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairmanship.

The Guardian: Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad review – Armenia’s tragedy becomes meaty drama

May 22, 2015 By administrator

Love on the run … Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad. Photograph: PR

Cannes 2015

French-Armenian director Robert Guédiguian takes on the Armenian genocide and the campaign of vengeance against Turkey in a film that goes in unexpected directions

The indefatigable Robert Guédiguian returns to the highminded thriller style that proved successful with his 2009 picture The Army of Crime, which unveiled local complicity in the betrayal of a wartime resistance cell in German occupied Marseilles. This new film, for which the original French title is a slightly more snappy Une Histoire de Fou (A Story of Madness), jumps forwards three decades, to Marseilles in the 1970s, and takes as its subject the wave of bombings and assassinations perpetrated by Armenian radicals against Turkish interests, in response to the genocidal killings of Armenians during and after the first world war.

With his Armenian heritage, this counts as deeply personal territory for Guédiguian; though you sense that the director’s uncompromising political sternness makes it difficult for him to fully plant a flag. Nevertheless, he has produced a film that both acts as a useful primer for understanding the decades-long grievance that the Armenian genocide produced, and discusses the peculiar politics of direct action terror in the 1970s.

Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad begins with a black-and-white preface, describing the assassination of Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman minister generally considered to have initiated the 1915 massacres, by Soghomon Tehlirian in Berlin in 1921; he was acquitted by a German court who, somewhat ironically, were outraged by Tehlirian’s accounts of Turkish-organised death marches and concentration camps. The film then abruptly cuts to the 1970s and the Armenian diaspora in Marseilles where we home in on a storekeeper called Hovannes (Simon Abkarian, from Army of Crime), his wife Anouch (Ariane Ascaride, Guédiguian’s wife and regular collaborator), and hotheaded son Aram (Syrus Shahidi). Fed with tales of Turkish brutality by Anouch’s aged mother, Aram joins a local group of like-minded agitators, which becomes the gateway drug of the very 70s form of urban terrorism. Soon Aram finds himself clutching a detonator, waiting to blow up the Turkish ambassador to France.

t’s here that Guédiguian’s takes a significant detour into more complex moral discussion. As Aram is about to push the button, a random cyclist pulls up behind the ambassador’s car; Aram makes the choice to set off the bomb anyway. The cyclist, called Gilles, is not killed, but severely enough injured to require months of operations and be largely confined to a wheelchair. Aram disappears to Beirut, there to join up with like-minded urban guerrillas and continue the campaign of terror; but racked with guilt, Anouch tracks Gilles down and offers him the family’s help, as a kind of penance. Gilles, angry and bitter, takes up the offer; after practically moving into Aram’s old bedroom, he starts to take on and identify with the Armenian cause. Meanwhile, over in Beirut, Aram swiftly becomes disillusioned with his commander’s callousness towards innocent bystanders – as Gilles once was – but can’t quite bring himself to quit for a more principled splinter group to stay with his lover, Anahit.

All this makes for a meaty two-hour-plus drama, with Guédiguian sketching in the moral dilemmas with clarity and firmness. The central debate is rehearsed again and again: can innocents ever be sacrificed for a cause, however urgent? Some of the dialogue is a little decks-clearing – Ascaride at one point quickly explains that “most Armenians abhor violence” – while the largely studio-bound sets make the film feel a little airless. It’s only when we get to Armenia in the final frames that the horizons open up. Guédiguian, none the less, has something interesting to say; his film is always good, if it’s not quite brilliant.

Source: The Guardian

Armenian Genocide film by Robert Guediguian screened at 2015 Cannes Film Festival

May 21, 2015 By administrator

The ripple effects of the Armenian Genocide on subsequent generations are felt in the 2015 drama Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad by Robert Guediguian. The drama Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad by Guediguian was screened in the Special Screenings section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

Cannes regular Guediguian, the social-realist chronicler of working-class Marseille, reconnects with his paternal roots in Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad, an impassioned consideration of the Armenian genocide’s lasting impact on the displaced generations that followed, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The English-language title comes from the lyrics of a 1980 hit by French pop songstress France Gall. But the source material is an autobiographical novel by Spanish journalist Jose Antonio Gurriaran, who was semi-paralyzed in a bomb blast planned by militants from the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) in Madrid in 1981. During his recovery, he researched the Ottoman Empire’s extermination and removal of Armenians from their homeland during World War I, a crime against humanity still officially denied by Turkey. As a result, Gurriaran became an activist for international recognition of the Armenian Genocide.

Australia: Armenian genocide panel cancelled as minister withdraws amid ‘denial’ claims

May 21, 2015 By administrator

By Philippa Hawker,

NSW Treasurer Gladys Berejiklian has withdrawn from a panel to discuss the film The Cut,

A post-screening discussion of the Armenian genocide has been cancelled after NSW Treasurer Gladys Berejiklian, a senior figure in the Armenian-Australian community, withdrew, allegedly in response to the presence of Turkish “genocide deniers” on the panel.

The panel discussions had been planned to accompany screenings at the German Film Festival in Sydney and Melbourne of the film The Cut, from acclaimed German-Turkish director Fatih Akin.

The Cut opens in 1915, just before the events that led to the death of more than a million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. The film focuses on the story of an Armenian blacksmith searching for his two daughters, years after he was separated from them.

The atrocities depicted have come to be known as the Armenian genocide, but that is a term rejected by many Turks.

According to Dr Arpad Solter, director of both the film festival and the Goethe-Institut, “the minister was concerned about appearing on a platform with genocide deniers”.

A spokesman for the Treasurer refused to confirm that was the case. “It’s fine for the organisers to say that, but we’re not actually commenting on it at all,” the spokesman said.

Dr Solter said that once the minister pulled out, other Armenian representatives did too. “If there’s no dialogue possible, and that’s what we were aiming for, then the decision had to be made to cancel.”

A scene from Fatih Akin’s The Cut, starring Tahar Rahim (centre).

He said the panel was “meant to offer Armenians and Turks in Australia a forum to share and discuss their most painful history and to open new, fresh avenues for exchange, open debate and mutual understanding”.

The need to cancel, Dr Solter said, indicated that the subject is, after 100 years, “still a minefield”.

“It’s too sensitive, and too painful, most of all. I believe at the end of the day, reason and research and enlightenment will prevail, but it will take time.”

The CEO of the Australian Turkish Advocacy Alliance, Ertunc Ozen, who was to be one of the Sydney panellists, said he was disappointed at the cancellation, and the missed opportunity for “open and respectful dialogue with people of a different point of view”.

He said no one was disputing the fact that “hundreds of thousands of civilians lost their lives and were uprooted and moved throughout this period. There’s never been any denial of that.” However, he added that he “absolutely” disputed the term “genocide”.

Author and historian Robert Manne, one of the Melbourne panellists, said he regretted the cancellation.

“Given that the Armenians have been trying for 100 years to have the astonishing crimes committed against them acknowledged, the fact that a panel discussion about a straightforward film on the genocide is cancelled, that’s a matter of great dismay.”