Epitome of Denial

[Gavur]

Denial Without Boundaries

I-Newswire.com (press release)
Jan 6 2006



(I-Newswire) - The Azerbaijani propagandists are in the hunt for new
methods of denying the recent destruction of the ancient Armenian
cemetery of Old Julfa. The latest shameless denial states, `Claims on
existence of Armenian graveyard in Julfa are historically and
ethnically baseless.'

Azer-Press Informsiya Agentliyi ( http://en.apa.az ), an Azerbaijani
source, quotes Dr. Vali Bakhshaliyev, a member of Azerbaijan's
National Academy of Sciences, as saying, `The claims of Armenian[s]
are historically and ethnically groundless. There was not any
Armenian graveyard in Julfa.' Dr. Bakhshaliyev referred to the
publication of photographs and videos from mid-December ( 2005 ),
which showed about 100 Azerbaijani soldiers destroying the last
historic headstones ( khachkars ) of the Armenian cemetery of Old
Julfa ( Hin Jugha ).

The historic cemetery of Old Julfa is so famous that to deny it ever
existed - means to deny that the planet Earth exists. Even
Azerbaijani websites enclose information about the cemetery (
www.Azerb.com, for instance, writes, `Today you can still imagine
Julfa's former grandeur, visiting what's left of... the vast cemetery
with thousands of artistically sculpted tomb stones known as
`Khachkars.'' ). The ridiculous lies about Julfa's nonexistence are
hopeless tactics of denial. Before Dr. Bakhshaliyev's announcements,
the Azerbaijani media had fabricated information about `destruction
of Azerbaijani holy place in Armenia' with the denialist ideology of
`we did - but you did it too.' Apparently, the propaganda of the
`destruction of Azerbaijani holy place in Armenia' had not been
successful.

The Christian cemetery of Julfa, as stated in a letter of the
American congressmen Joe Knollenberg and Frank Pallone to the
Azerbaijani Ambassador, Jr., `is known to specialists to have housed
as many as 10,000 of these intricately carved khachkar headstones, up
to 2,000 of which were still intact after an earlier outbreak of
vandalism on the same site in 2002.' Back in 1648, according to
Alexander Rodes' data, there were 10,000 well-preserved headstones in
Julfa, many as old as the 8th century. After Soviet dictator Joseph
Stalin annexed Nakhichevan from Armenia and signed it off to
Azerbaijan in the 1920s, the Armenian population of Nakhichevan (
where Julfa is situated ) was wiped out. Since then, many Armenian
monuments ( ancient cathedrals and thousands of beautifully-carved
headstones ) have been raised to the ground. Steven Sim from
Scotland, who visited the ruins of the Armenian holy places in
Nakichevan, affirmed in 2005: `a special state policy of destruction
is being implemented in Azerbaijan.'

Photographs from the mid-December ( 2005 ) destruction of Old Julfa
are available at
http://www.armenica.org/history/old-jougha/index.html and
http://www.cathcil.org/v04/doc/Photos/Pictures109.htm. The video,
taped by the Armenian Prelacy of Iran at the Iranian-Azerbaijani
border and made available by www.Blogian.cjb.net, can be downloaded
from www.azerivandalism.cjb.net; the same video ( clearer view, but
larger file ) is also available at www.julfa.cjb.net.

The administration of www.Genocide.com is shocked with the sinister
denial of the Azerbaijani party, and is adding its voice to the
international community in protesting the destruction of Old Julfa's
ancient cemetery.

It is certainly hoped that UNESCO will find courage to address the
destruction of the Armenian heritage in Azerbaijan.

http://i-newswire.com/pr53462.html

[Gavur]

Prof. Gocek Threatens to Sue Turks Who Sent Her Hate Mail

California Courier Online, January 12, 2006


By Harut Sassounian
Publisher, The California Courier

Turkish American Prof. Fatma Muge Gocek received abusive and possibly
libelous e-mails from Turks last week after criticizing the denialist
policies of the Turkish government on the Armenian Genocide in an interview
conducted by Aris Babikian which was published in Horizon Weekly, a
Canadian-Armenian newspaper, and posted on several internet sites.
A Turk, calling himself "Ilyas Botas" (who also uses various aliases on
different occasions) sent an e-mail full of insults to Dr. Gocek with
copies to scores of others, including the Turkish Embassy. Referring to
Prof. Gocek as "a useful idiot," the so-called "Botas" wrote: "This bimbo
not only has an immense ego problem, but she is odiously (sic) arrogant....
The chutzpah of this airhead of a woman is as big as her considerable
heft."
In a blatant attempt to libel Dr. Gocek, "Botas" wrote: "How obviously and
how crudely her words are geared to please her Dashnak benefactors. If this
woman is not a pathetic, sycophantic, toady of the Dashnak hate lobby, then
my name is not Keenan Pars," thus shamelessly disclosing another one of his
aliases.
"Botas" then went on to attack Elif Shafak, a prominent Turkish scholar who
had no role in the interview, but who had previously made sympathetic
comments about Armenians. "Botas" described Shafak as "the other bimbo."
Another Turk by the name of Ferruh Demirmen, who supposedly is a petroleum
consultant in Houston, Texas, also sent a libelous hate e-mail to these two
Turkish scholars, stating that "they are self delusional, they thrive in
vanity, surpass in inanity, and their mark is stupidity. Arrogance is in
their blood, deceit is their trade, and the Pavlovian instinct is in their
psyche. As long as there are those like Gocek and her ilk, that are ready
to serve their Dashnak masters, Turks don't need enemies."
In a separate e-mail posted on the Turkish Forum, "Botas" referred to Gocek
and Shafak as "opportunistic parasites...who sell their souls for personal
gain." "Botas" is listed as a Board Member of the Turkish Forum.
Prof. Gocek sent an e-mail to both Demirmen and "Botas," advising them
that attorneys for the University of Michigan, where she is a tenured
professor, are "looking into the legal implications of internet hate mail
on the senders, their e-mail service providers, as well as the websites and
the service providers of the websites at which these hate mails then get
posted."
In an e-mail Dr. Gocek posted on the Armenian Workshop site, she said: "I
am not the only one to receive such hate mail. I know Taner Akcam, Halil
Berktay and Elif Shafak had received such mail in large volumes and it
became clear at the Istanbul Conference in September 2005 that many of the
participants there and specially the journalists who happened to write on
the Armenian issue have received it in droves as well."
Dr. Gocek described her predicament as follows: "You have scholars on the
one side and some vicious individuals - who of course are not scholars -
backed by certain institutions sent out to attack them with all their
might, on the other. That is not fair. For the peaceful resolution of the
Armenian issue, such tacit institutional/organizational support behind such
maliciously behaving individuals needs to stop. And even though such tacit
support may work in Turkey, where the legal system, unfortunately, does not
work as well as it ought to, it should not work in the United States."
In response to Dr. Gocek's e-mail to the senders of the these hate mails,
"Ilyas Botas" responded with even more insulting and obnoxious words, by
writing: "The fat lady threatens legal action. And I am shaking in my
boots, or more correctly, in my wing-tip shoes. Are the chickens coming
home to roost, Ms. Gocek? How do you like them apples? Weren't you and a
bunch of other Dashnak lackeys the ones who were decrying the lack of
freedom of expression in Turkey before you held your 'Armenian Conference'
in Istanbul? How now, Gocek Efendi? The moccasin is on the other foot and
you don't seem to like it. That's too bad. ...How am I doing so far, fat
lady? Am I providing you with even more grounds for 'legal action'? Good.
Send in your lawyers. Take your best shot. ...I'll provide you with even more
grounds. Or by 'legal action' do you mean to send the hoodlum punks from
the Armenian Youth Federation or some such thing? ...Fat lady Gocek, I am
ready for all eventualities, including having the perimeter of my house
decorated with surveillance cameras. You say you are a professor 'with
tenure.' Where did you get your degree? Like Dennis Papazian, at the Guguk
Gagikyan Lahmajun Bakery? ...I will distribute the same piece to every
institution, public or non (sic), as well as to individuals, that I can. I
think every Tom, xxxx and Harry in the world should know what you're up to.
Hey, what the hell more can you ask for? I'm making you famous. I expect
you will send me my 10 percent commission via Fedex. Oh, if you want a good
attorney, I recommend the Armenian lawyer, Mark Geragos the Gorgeous. Oh, I
know he lost his last two big cases for the shoplifter actress Winona Rider
[he means Ryder] and for the murderer Scott Peterson, but I think he still
has the knack. I bet he'll even do pro bono work for people who are
inclined to be toadies for the slick Dashnak lobby. Wishing for your
eventual cessation of prostituting for the Dashnak hate peddlers, Ilyas."
These vicious words remind one of the Armenian saying: "hayhoyanke pasdi
sove e." Cusswords or name-calling indicates an absence of proof.
If Dr. Gocek does carry out her intent to sue these unsavory characters,
she would not only safeguard her own reputation, but she would blow the
cover of such impostors who carry out a vicious campaign of insults and
threats, hiding behind fake names and phony e-mail addresses!

[Gavur]

Azeri ambassador to US "shares" congressmen concern over preserving historical herita

Azeri ambassador to US "shares" congressmen concern over preserving historical heritage
Azeri Ambassador to US Hafiz Pashayev gave a written response to a letter of Co-Chairs of the US Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues Joe Knollenberg (R-MI) and Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) on destruction of Armenian khachkars (headstones) in Nakhichevan. H. Pashayev “expresses regret” over “unreliable” information sources, to which Congressmen referred. The Ambassador reminded that the Azeri Defense Ministry has rejected such accusations. The diplomat reminded that Azerbaijan is a society based on “rich historical legacy.” “Some 30 thousand Armenians live in Azerbaijan today. Our country highlights preservation of thousands of historical, cultural and architectural monuments,” he said. Addressing Congressmen the Azeri diplomat remarked he “shares their concern over preservation of historical and cultural heritage,” reported Trend agency. It should be reminded that Co-Chairs of the US Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues Joe Knollenberg (R-MI) and Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) have sent a joint letter to Ambassador Pashayev of Azerbaijan expressing their concern over the reported destruction of Armenian khachkars (headstones), monuments and headstones in the medieval cemetery of Julfa, Nakhichevan of the Azerbaijan Republic on December 15, 2005, reported the Armenian Assembly of America. Knollenberg and Pallone stated their opposition to the vandalism of Armenian khachkars that have for centuries existed in the Julfa Cemetery, pointing out that the same site was vandalized in 2002, leaving up to 2,000 of the 10,000 khachkars intact. The organized nature of the ongoing demolition accounted by eyewitnesses has been qualified as cleansing. The letter also calls attention to Azerbaijan's national responsibilities within the United Nations, the OSCE, the Council of Europe and other international frameworks. “As a member of the international community, Azerbaijan has a duty to preserve the cultural and historical heritage in its custody. By ignoring this obligation, the government of Azerbaijan undermines U.S. and international efforts to achieve greater stability in the South Caucasus region,” says the letter of Knollenberg and Pallone. The Co-Chairs concluded their missive by urging Azerbaijan to cease the vandalism in Julfa's Old Cemetery and to prepare a report documenting the damage leading to measures in remedy of the situation. The government of Azerbaijan is also urged to cooperate with international and expert community in developing a program of action to prevent and preserve treasures of cultural heritage and halt future occurrences of violence.


© PanArmenian

[Gavur]

`Protestcide' - The Killing of Protest of a Denial of Genocide

March 27, 2006

by Israel W. Charny


To what extent does a publication have the right to alter a Letter to
the Editor that criticizes the publication, and then to publish their
altered version of the letter without the full permission of the
letter writer, especially in light of his explicit refusal to approve
their revision?

In December 2005, Commentary published a lengthy article denying the
Armenian Genocide by one, Guenter Lewy, a retired professor who has
previously published denials of other genocides as well, including a
denial that the Gypsies were victims of genocide in WW II (Simon
Wiesenthal defended the role of the Gypsies as fellow victims of the
Holocaust, and on several occasions wrote and told passionately of
seeing the Gypsies in Auschwitz in the barracks right next to his);
and including a denial that the Native Americans (Indians) were
victims of genocide in America. It is clear that Lewy has established
himself as an arch specialist in denial who has now relegated no less
than three victim peoples to some kind of status of sufferers other
than victims of genocidal mass murder. I think that readers of this
current Commentary piece denying there was a genocide of the Armenians
had a right to know of the author's previous publications of denials
(one of which was also in Commentary), but not a word was mentioned.

Lewy's article in Commentary is entitled, `The first genocide of the
20th century?' Lewy himself mentions in his article that the
International Association of Genocide Scholars, of which I am the
current president, had passed a unanimous resolution some years ago
confirming the validity of the Armenian Genocide. When Commentary was
approached by a colleague as to whether they would publish a rejoinder
to Lewy's article by me, the editor agreed immediately to receive a
600-word statement from me. So far to their credit. But then in the
grotesque sequence of censorship and revisions of my rejoinder that
follows, Commentary at first refused to identify my connection to the
same Association that passed the resolution, and finally did in fact
identify me as somehow affiliated with the Association but eliminated
identifying my leadership role. A personal slight? Then it's
irrelevant. Or is it a diminution of the significance of my protest?
In the meantime, Commentary published a lengthy rejoinder by Lewy in
the same issue with the following statement that, by a wave of the
Lewy-Commentary wand removes any significance to our association's
informed judgment: `I am less than impressed by the unanimous vote of
the International Association of Genocide Scholars that the Armenian
case `was one of the major genocides of the modern era' writes Denier
Lewy conclusively and then presumptuously slams the members of the
association that virtually no one (but him) has done real research.

No matter. Commentary commits more serious infringements to the point
of not allowing me to voice my definite judgment about their question,
`The first genocide of the 20th century?'

In my letter I write about how the Turks also killed other Christian
(therefore non-Turkish) groups such as the Assyrians and Greeks as
well as the Armenians (the first Christian people of Europe) and that
this was `outright genocidal murder.' Commentary removed this vital
statement from my letter. Remember, the article by Lewy they have
published is asking explicitly if this was genocide, and the section
of Letters to the Editor in February is re-entitled, `Genocide?' but
my clear-cut rejoinder that it was `outright genocidal murder' was not
permitted.

Moreover, what does Lewy do? I say in my letter that I wonder if
readers of the Jewish-sponsored Commentary (this remark by me is also
censored out) know that the Turks were also responsible for two forced
expulsions of Jews from Jaffa-Tel Aviv in 1914 and 1917, both of which
resulted in losses of life of the elderly, infirm and ill. As if
referring to this information, Lewy says to me in his rejoinder,
`Mr. Charny stops short of calling these occurrences `genocide,'' but
he and the hard-working editor who we have seen manages to censor my
writing so fastidiously, thus manage to get across a message that
seems to refer to the whole bigger original issue of the Armenian
Genocide. Now, not only have I not been allowed to say what I did say
that there was clear-cut genocide, but it is as if claimed explicitly
that I too don't call the Ottoman murders genocide.

Higher-class deniers, like Lewy and Commentary, are a fascinating
study in the propagandistic logic-defying language mechanisms they
employ -- Commentary also removed from my letter a reference to an
article that Daphna Fromer and myself published in the British
journal, Patterns of Prejudice in which we analyzed the language-logic
of earlier deniers of the Armenian Genocide.

Ultimately, my most serious criticism is that Commentary is fully
responsible alongside of its author for publishing a bald exposition
of denial of an established major genocide. Thus, I conclude my
letter, `Regrettably, Mr. Lewy and Commentary too have now earned
places in the pantheon of genocide Deniers,' but -- by now you guessed
it -- you will never see that sentence, or an earlier statement
similarly critical of Commentary in the letter they published.

I ask, do responsible publications in a free world have the right to
censor and arbitrarily revise Letters to the Editor beyond
considerations of space, bad language such as epithets, and ad hominem
attacks (but not legitimate major criticisms of an author or the
publication!)? Obviously a publication holds the ultimate power and
can simply decline to publish a letter (who will ever know?). But to
cut and revise and remove and distort the thrust of the original
message, and fail to advise and fail to get approval of changes? I
don't know if there are legal controls against such tampering with the
lowly institution of a Letter to an Editor and/or op-ed writing, but I
do know such tampering violates the `natural law' of journalistic
integrity, and I think Commentary should be told so by an informed
public.



--
Prof. Israel W. Charny, Ph.D. is President of the International
Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia
of Genocide [www.abc-clio.com/product/109124] Executive Director,
Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem Prof. of Psychology
& Family Therapy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Tel & Fax:
972-2-672-0424 e-mail: [email protected] Author of forthcoming book,
Fascism and Democracy in the Human Mind, by the University of Nebraska
Press, May 2006

[Gavur]

France Is Solving The Armenian Question

Cengiz Aktar

TDN
Friday, May 5, 2006

France, which is going through a period of "end of rule," seems like
a floundering ship. No one knows who is at the helm, and it is very
hard to predict where it will bump next.

The Socialist Party, which may take the reins next year in France,
suddenly decided to reopen the Armenian case file. On May 18, it
will submit to Parliament a bill that criminalizes negation of the
"Armenian genocide." If the bill becomes law with the approval of
Parliament, the Senate and the president, negation of genocide will
carry substantial fines and prison terms.

(Gav.Well socialists in the world seem to be the only ones that are sane at this point of history!)



The French socialists have always had an "Armenian genocide"
policy. One of the former defense ministers, Charles Hernu, was a
fervent supporter of the matter. The Socialist Party, still considering
the Armenian Dashnak Party as a fellow socialist movement, always
entertained good relations with it. Today this relationship together
with the naive approach of Francois Hollande, first secretary of the
Socialist Party, kept the matter on the agenda of the socialists.

If the bill becomes law, France will have solved its Armenian
issue. But this move may even be beneficial to the overall debate.



(Gav.I agree.)



The self-confident Armenian diaspora exploited and is exploiting
pretty successfully the humanitarian compassion of the Western
countries they reside in, the feeling of guilt that resulted from
the Holocaust and the anti-Turkish sentiments. Their distance from
the time and place where this tragedy happened has become a part
of their identity and is directly affecting their attitudes. It is
indeed difficult to expect a constructive approach from them or to
discuss the current state of the issue in connection with the real
protagonists living in this region. If this matter is solved one day,
it will be solved between Turkish Armenians, Armenia and Turkey. Not
in France, Switzerland or the United States.



(Gav.And the Diaspora who are direct descendants of the Genocide!)



Thus, with France now banning any further discussion on the Armenian
issue, we will be forever freed from this never-ending and unproductive
debate that is taking place in France.

But France cannot solve the Algerian question:


(Gav.If this matter is solved one day,it will be solved between Algeria and France not Turkey)

For some time, France has been trying to mend its relations with
oil-rich Algiers. It is trying to balance its present policy of
supporting Morocco against Algeria. It wants to base its relations
on a solid foundation, namely a "Friendship Treaty." Their foreign
minister even approached Algiers with a sort of special relation, this
time an "exceptional partnership," but as empty as the "privileged
relationship" which we were presented with.

However, a new era is only possible with the questioning of the
old one. France's social memory carries a lot of mixed feelings and
memories about Algeria: The very harsh colonial period that started
with the occupation in 1830; French Minister Adolphe Crémieux's
decision to grant Algerian Jews French citizenship, which ruined
the social cohesion of the land once and for all; the civil war that
started in 1954 which was full of pain and bloodshed and only ended in
1961 with independence, with around a million people mainly composed
of "pieds-noir" colonials but also "harki" Arabs who had fought for
France, departing for France.

France, just like Turkey, is refusing to question this hurtful era.

Whenever an Algerian official or a French intellectual utters a word
contrary to the official position, condemnation follows. Algerian
President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, only recently, said: "You carried out
an identity genocide on us between 1830 and 1962. We can't tell whether
we are Arabs, Berbers, Europeans or French," creating uproar in France.

Let's ignore the sound comparison of social memory. France, on Feb.

23, 2005, passed a bill that noted the positive aspects of
colonialism. Even though there was considerable criticism, Parliament
refused to amend the controversial article.

French philosopher Voltaire, who said, "I don't agree with you,
but I will defend to the death your right to express it," must be
turning in his grave.

(Gav.I don't think Mr.Voltaire had to or felt the need to ever deal with disgusting phenomenon called Genocide denial!)-----------
Copyright 2006, Turkish Daily News. This article is redistributed with
permission for personal use of Groong readers. No part of this article
may be reproduced, further distributed or archived without the prior
permission of the publisher. Contact Turkish Daily News Online at
http://www.TurkishDailyNews.com for details.

[Joseph]

BBC Article

I don't agree 100% with the author but it is an interesting article nevertheless


Turkey's Armenian dilemma

Turkey did not always deny the mass killing of Armenians. As the US House of Representatives prepares to vote on recognising the 1915 massacres as genocide, journalist and historian Bruce Clark looks at how and why Turkish attitudes have changed over the past 90 years.

"The more foreign parliaments insist that our forebears committed crimes against humanity, the less likely anybody in Turkey is to face up to the hardest moments in history."

That, roughly speaking, is the message being delivered by Turkey's hard-pressed intelligentsia as the legislators in one country after another vote for resolutions which insist that the killing of hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenians in 1915 amounted to genocide.

"Will the adoption [of a resolution] help to inform the Turkish public... on the great tragedy which befell the Ottoman Armenians?

"No, it can hardly be expected to... broaden the debate on the history of the Ottoman Empire's final period."

So writes Sahin Alpay, a liberal-minded Turkish academic, in a recent column in Zaman newspaper.

What such appeals reflect, of course, is an elementary fact of human psychology: the phenomenon of individual and collective defensiveness.

When people feel completely secure, and among friends, they can be very frank about misdeeds which they, or people close to them, have committed.

But hackles will go up again as soon as they become insecure, because they feel their accusers are acting in bad faith, or that accepting their accusations will have bad consequences.

On the defensive

In recent years, liberal Turkish scholars have expressed the hope that membership, or even prospective membership of the European Union, will give the country enough confidence to discuss the Armenian tragedy without threatening those who use the "g-word" with prosecution.


Sceptics may retort that in recent years, things have been moving in the opposite direction: the revised Turkish penal code and its preamble, adopted in 2005, make even more explicit the principle that people may be prosecuted if they "insult Turkishness" - a crime which, as the preamble makes clear, includes the assertion that the Ottoman Armenians suffered genocide.

It is certainly true that Turkish defensiveness - the sort of defensiveness which can treat open discussion as verging on treachery - has been running high since the 1960s when the Armenians round the world began lobbying for an explicit acceptance, by governments and parliaments, that their people suffered genocide in 1915.

A campaign of violence launched by Armenian militants in the 1970s, who mainly attacked Turkish diplomatic targets and claimed over 50 lives, raised hackles even higher.

All that raises a question: has there ever been a moment, since the events of 1915, when the Turkish authorities might, conceivably, have acknowledged or even freely discussed the view that almost every Armenians regards as self-evident: the view that in addition to relocating the entire ethnic Armenian population of eastern Anatolia, the "Committee of Union and Progress" (CUP) which wielded effective power in the Ottoman empire also gave secret orders to make sure that as few as possible of the deportees survived the experience?

In fact, there was such a moment: the immediate aftermath of World War I.

Tried and executed

At that time the Ottoman government was intact but dependent for its survival on the good graces of the victorious British Empire.

The sultan's regime was desperately trying to distance itself from the actions of the CUP, the "state within a state" which in 1915 had masterminded the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Armenians - and is alleged to have given secret "extermination" orders at the same time.

During the early months of 1919, few people in Anatolia publicly doubted that Armenians had suffered atrocities that were egregious even by the standards of a terrible war.

The sultan and his foreign minister were at pains to reassure the British of their determination to punish the perpetrators of these atrocities, and they held four big and revealing trials whose proceedings were published in the government gazette.

In April 1919 a local governor, Mehmed Kemal, was found guilty and hanged for the mass killing of Armenians in the Ankara district.

But the climate shifted rapidly after May 1919, when Greek troops were authorised by the victorious Entente powers to occupy the Aegean port of Izmir and, in another part of Anatolia, Mustafa Kemal - later known as Ataturk - began his campaign to make the Turks masters in their own land.

Nationalist feeling

Turkish rage over the Greek landing lent fuel to the Kemalist cause, and discredited the Ottoman government.

With every passing month, the British government's leverage over the Ottoman authorities waned, and so did British enthusiasm for the conduct of war crimes trials.

In 1921, the British government made a pragmatic deal to release a group of Turkish prisoners it had been holding in Malta on suspicion (among other things) of crimes against the Armenians.

They were freed in exchange for Britons being held by the Turks.

In Turkish lore, this release is held up as proof that no serious evidence against the captives existed.

What it certainly proves is that British zeal for investigating the past was waning, even as the Kemalist cause gained strength and the British-influenced Ottoman regime faded into oblivion.

In any case, the officially cherished version of the Turkish state's beginnings now insists since the empire's British adversaries and occupiers were the main promoters of war crimes trials, those trials themselves must have been worthless or malicious.

A new state

But in the midst of all this nationalist discourse, something rather important is often obscured, and there are just a few Turkish historians who dare to point this out.

The atrocities against the Armenians were committed by an Ottoman government, albeit a shadowy sub-section of that government.

There is no logical reason why a new republican administration, established in October 1923 in an act of revolutionary defiance of Ottoman power, should consider itself responsible for things done under the previous regime.

In fact, when the nationalist movement was founded in 1919, the climate of revulsion over the sufferings of the Armenians was so general that even the neo-nationalists were keen to distinguish themselves from the CUP.

Some see significance in the fact that the nationalist movement chose to rally round an army officer, Mustafa Kemal, who had never been anywhere near the places where the Armenians met their fate.

The very fact that the Turkish republic bears no formal responsibility for eliminating the Armenian presence in eastern Anatolia (for the simple reason that the republic did not exist when the atrocities occurred) has given some Turkish historians a flicker of hope: one day, the leaders of the republic will be able to face up to history's toughest questions about the Armenians, without feeling that to do so would undermine the very existence of their state.

Fatma Muge Gocek, a Turkish-born sociologist who now works as professor in America, has said there are - or will be - three phases in her country's attitude to the fate of the Armenians: a spirit of "investigation" in the final Ottoman years, a spirit of defensiveness under the Turkish republic, and a new, post-nationalist attitude to history that will prevail if and when Turkey secures a places in Europe.

That makes perfect psychological sense, even if the immediate prospects for a move from phase two to phase three do not look very bright.

Bruce Clark is international news editor of the Economist newspaper.

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/6386625.stm

Published: 2007/02/27 07:24:25 GMT

© BBC MMVII

[1.5 million]

Next time I murder someone make sure to remind me to change my name so I no longer will be the person who commited the crime.

[Joseph]

Next time I murder someone make sure to remind me to change my name so I no longer will be the person who commited the crime.

Exactly.

If I ever murder anyone, I'll change my name from Joseph to Steve.
Steve never murdered anyone because there was no Steve when the "so-called" murder supposedly happened.
If Steve killed anyone, they had it coming because no one should ever provoke Joseph...I mean Steve.

[Joseph]

Next time I murder someone make sure to remind me to change my name so I no longer will be the person who commited the crime.

Check this post out:

http://www.armeniangenocide.com/forum/showthread.php?p=22236#post22236

The Turkish defense always seems to essentially be derived from this arguement:
1. It was the Ottoman Empire that did those things.
2. The Ottoman Empire ceased to exist in 1923
3. The Ottomans then called themselves Turks and history just evaporated and they can no longer be blamed for the what happened.

Like magic.

I'll give you a hypothetical situation. Suppose I murder someone but then I change my name from Joseph to Mehmet. I can now use the Turkish defense and say that it was Joseph who committed the murder and since I'm now Mehmet, I cannot be held responsible for what Joseph has done.

Furthermore, I can supplement my arguement by saying: Joseph no longer exists so perhaps the murder never happened or what happened is in the past, people should not anger Mehmet with such triviality because he may revert to his Joseph-like ways and murder again.