Genocide Scholars Call on Turkey to End Denial of the Armenian Genocide

[Tongue]

GENOCIDE SCHOLARS CALL ON TURKEY TO END DENIAL OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS

President: Robert Melson (USA)
Vice-President: Israel Charny (Israel)
Secretary-Treasurer: Steven Jacobs (USA)

Respond to: Robert Melson, Professor of Political Science Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907 USA


April 6, 2005


Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
TC Easbakanlik
Bakanlikir
Ankara, Turkey
FAX: 90 312 417 0476

Dear Prime Minister Erdogan:

We are writing you this open letter in response to your call for an “impartial study by historians” concerning the fate of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

We represent the major body of scholars who study genocide in North America and Europe. We are concerned that in calling for an impartial study of the Armenian Genocide you may not be fully aware of the extent of the scholarly and intellectual record on the Armenian Genocide and how this event conforms to the definition of the United Nations Genocide Convention. We want to underscore that it is not just Armenians who are affirming the Armenian Genocide but it is hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades. The scholarly evidence reveals the following:

On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens – an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. Another million fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years.

The Armenian Genocide was the most well-known human rights issue of its time and was reported regularly in newspapers across the United States and Europe. The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented by thousands of official records of the United States and nations around the world including Turkey’s wartime allies Germany, Austria and Hungary, by Ottoman court-martial records, by eyewitness accounts of missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by decades of historical scholarship.

The Armenian Genocide is corroborated by the international scholarly, legal, and human rights community:

1) Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he meant by genocide.

2) The killings of the Armenians is genocide as defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

3) In 1997 the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an organization of the world’s foremost experts on genocide, unanimously passed a formal resolution affirming the Armenian Genocide.

4) 126 leading scholars of the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer placed a statement in the New York Times in June 2000 declaring the “incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide” and urging western democracies to acknowledge it.

5) The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Jerusalem), the Institute for the Study of Genocide (NYC) have affirmed the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide.

6) Leading texts in the international law of genocide such as William A. Schabas’s Genocide in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2000) cite the Armenian Genocide as a precursor to the Holocaust and as a precedent for the law on crimes against humanity.

We note that there may be differing interpretations of genocide - how and why the Armenian Genocide happened, but to deny its factual and moral reality as genocide is not to engage in scholarship but in propaganda and efforts to absolve the perpetrator, blame the victims, and erase the ethical meaning of this history.

We would also note that scholars who advise your government and who are affiliated in other ways with your state-controlled institutions are not impartial. Such so-called “scholars” work to serve the agenda of historical and moral obfuscation when they advise you and the Turkish Parliament on how to deny the Armenian Genocide.

We believe that it is clearly in the interest of the Turkish people and their future as a proud and equal participant in international, democratic discourse to acknowledge the responsibility of a previous government for the genocide of the Armenian people, just as the German government and people have done in the case of the Holocaust.

Sincerely,

[signed]
Robert Melson
Professor of Political Science
President, International Association of Genocide Scholars

[signed]
Israel Charny
Vice President, International Association of Genocide Scholars
Editor in Chief, Encyclopedia of Genocide

[signed]
Peter Balakian
Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities
Colgate University

[TALAT]

How authoritative is that "The Institute for the Study of Genocide (ISG) and the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS)"?

For example, whatever happened to North American Indians in the 19th century? Was that a genocide? No? Yes? Why?

I could set up a more professional web site in a week, and name it, say "The Universal Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS)" and name myself its director.

[pathfinder]

How authoritative is that "The Institute for the Study of Genocide (ISG) and the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS)"?

For example, whatever happened to North American Indians in the 19th century? Was that a genocide? No? Yes? Why?

I could set up a more professional web site in a week, and name it, say "The Universal Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS)" and name myself its director.

No, YOU are the genocide acholar... those people, well they're all a bunch of uneducated ones pretending to know stuff and work towards preventing future genocides from happening. Why in the world would they want to do that? There must be a "political" reason for it. They can't possibly care about other people. A pure mentality of a Turk!

[pathfinder]

And a popular tactic these deniers always use... bringing up Native Americans. How is that connected to the Armenian genocide, can I ask?

[TALAT]

Armenia, Darfur, Rwanda? That's all? In history of humankind?

The connection is, if some people claim to be internation scholars on genocide, I would like to see more detailed, objective information.

[Gavur]

Ok, Ok If you mean what about the Turks that got genozized .I'm sorry my dear Salat you have to wait your turn ,xxxx we waited 90 years i know you are civilized enough not to cut in front ,in case you do?mind you have millions of angry Armenians behind you so i suggest instead of cut in front JUST CUT THE xxxx!!!

[pathfinder]

International Association of Genocide Scholars

[Tongue]

How authoritative is that "The Institute for the Study of Genocide (ISG) and the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS)"?

For example, whatever happened to North American Indians in the 19th century? Was that a genocide? No? Yes? Why?

I could set up a more professional web site in a week, and name it, say "The Universal Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS)" and name myself its director.

You CHOSE your user name after Talat Pasha, the person responsible for the massacres of 1.5 million innocent men, women, and children... and you are questioning the credibility of genocide scholars' institute????

Oh wow!

[Reincarnated Am]

Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Mr. Einstein) you got caught with your pants down this time

[JannissaryofByz]

Pathfinder asks:

And a popular tactic these deniers always use... bringing up Native Americans. How is that connected to the Armenian genocide, can I ask?
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Janissary of Byzantium says:

Hello everyone here.

I am a Circassian whose family emigrated to the Ottoman Empire as a consequence of the harsh policies (forced deportation, plunder and mass slaughter) implemented by the Czarist Russia during 1860s in Caucasus. As a consequence, some 1.500.000 Circassians were perished whilst another 1.500.000 succeeded to reach the safe Ottoman lines (It should be stressed here that the only country which accepted those Circassians at that point in time was not the Great Britain, France, Austria, Germany, Spain, Italy, USA, and Portugal, but the Ottoman Empire).

Furthermore, it is evident that this policy was not the first of its kind since the Czarist Russia previously executed similar policies against Tatars and the Turks through out the 18th and the 19th Century. Thus, similar trends also existed in the Balkans when the Ottomans were in retreat. That is why, some millions of Albanians, Bosniaks, Pomaks, Turks, and the Roma people emigrated to Anatolia whilst some other millions of them were perished as a result of "ethnic cleansing policies" implemented (in the 19th and the 20th Centuries) by Balkan States and their western supporters (it must be also stated here that some other identical Western schemes were also being hatched in Africa, America, Australia and Asia continents at certain points back in time).

So, may I ask as whether you really see no connection with these events and the Ottoman policy applied against the Armenians or not? Are you as much blinded as your statement suggest?

Thank you for your answer in advance.