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I want to make a statement
Speak about the result of the intention to destroy, in whole or in part, people grouped by ethnic, racial, religious, or national identity.
Armenian genocide is held on the territory of the Ottoman empire and nowadays Turkey during and after the First World War 1915- 1923 years, by deportation of nearly 2,000,000 Armenian, of whom 1,500,000 men, women, and children were killed, 500,000 survivors were expelled from their homes, which crime succeeded in the elimination of the over 2,500-year presence of the Armenians in our historic homeland.
This deliberate and systematic destruction (genocide) of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was characterised by the use of massacres, and the use of deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of Armenian deaths generally held to have been between one and one-and-a-half million. Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked by the Empire during this period, including Assyrians and Greeks, and some scholars consider the events to be part of the same policy of extermination.
The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case of genocide.
The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, does not accept the word genocide as an accurate description of the events. In recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as genocide. To date, twenty-one countries have officially recognized the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars and historians accept this view. The majority of Armenian diaspora communities were founded as a result of the Armenian genocide.
Hrant Dink is a victim of the denial and silence on the Armenian genocide. This issue is 90 years old and its ignorance has recently taken a human life.
Reconciliation. Long time peace is on the ground of truth (telling truth when asked and even when not with the aim to save shared ideas) and awareness.
People have a deep relation with their homeland and the homeland of their forefathers. The homeland takes a serious part of the definition of the nation and left a mark in the culture of these people. Both extermination and deportation are crimes against humanity to whom statutory limitation is not applicable (Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity). On May 24, 1915, the Allied Powers, Britain, France, and Russia, jointly issued a statement explicitly charging for the first time ever another government of committing "a crime against humanity". An excerpt from this joint statement reads: In view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres. Basically, crimes against humanity, beyond the sphere of traditional war crimes, represented offense committed against civilians, and not so much against individuals as against civilian population. Obviously such a development meant an expansion in the scope of international law [See Gould, pp.656-657; and note the war crimes trial decision cited there]. The interesting and certainly debated aspect centered on the fact that acts of Germans against their fellow citizens were deemed to fall within the purview of he Allies authority, even though German law would have sanctioned a number of the acts in question. [Gerhard von Glahn, Law Among Nations, An Introduction to Public International Law, New York, 1981]
The pattern of an International crime and the concrete historical act of such crime are not prevented, nor repaired with silence. Acknowledgement of a crime prevents future ones. In my opinion UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide while confirming the International statue of the crime of genocide contains retroactive moral punishment by formal acknowledgement of genocides that took place. "Punish" of its own separately contains prevention. (The value of the punishment and the public application of the penalty are dedicated to prevent future similar acts) "[T]he Turkish massacres of Armenians ... are outstanding examples of the crime of genocide" [ INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSITCE; May 28, 1951 ].
Formal acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide means:
1. Validation - events from 1915 fulfil the legal definition of genocide, other similar events are genocides, too.
2. Justice- there is no rational explanation of the deaths of these people. It was a result of intention of genocide, a crime prohibited by the civilized; ethnical, religious and national tolerant and rational world.
In 2002, the International Center for Transitional Justice was asked by the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission to provide a report on the applicability of the Genocide Convention to the controversy. The ICTJ report ruled that it was a genocide, and further that the Republic of Turkey was not liable for the event.
In 2005, the International Association of Genocide Scholars affirmed that scholarly evidence revealed 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" and condemned Turkish attempts to deny its factual and moral reality.
Genocide denial is at least some of these: form of hate speech (the victim group is not human because of his identity, therefore intent of extermination addressing the victim group is no genocide); politically-minded historical revisionism or question on the legal definition of the genocide and/ or even its International statutory ("You can not do nothing with this").
In March 2007 A Swiss district court in Lausanne convicts Turkish politician Doğu Perinçek for denying the Armenian Genocide; public genocide denial is illegal in Switzerland. Swiss law bans denying, belittling or justifying any genocide. Perinçek, who was fined CHF 10.000 (Euro 6.230, USD 8.180), appealed the verdict. Perincek told the Lausanne criminal court that there had been no genocide against Armenians, but there had been "reciprocal massacres", according to Swiss Radio. The conviction was upheld by the Swiss Federal Supreme Court on December 12, 2007.
In April, 14 2003 (after ICTJ presents his opinion to Turkish- Armenian Reconciliation Commission) According to the League for Human Rights, the Turkish Ministry of Education issued a document instructing heads of schools to organize conferences stating that Turkey never exterminated its minorities. It also recommended that the students should write dissertations on "fighting allegations of genocide", in which phrases such as "Turks may have killed Armenians" are banned in favour of presenting these events as a necessity in the face of the "massacres perpetrated by Armenians". A first report detailing the application of these recommendations was to be sent by each school to the local Ministry directorates on May 13, 2003.
British scholar Bernard Lewis. While he had once written of "the terrible holocaust of 1915, when a million and a half Armenians perished", he later came to believe that the term "genocide" was distinctly inaccurate, because the "tremendous massacres" were not "a deliberate preconceived decision of the Turkish government." This opinion has been joined by Guenter Lewy.
In November 1993 American historian Bernard Lewis said in an interview that calling the massacres committed by the Turks in 1915 a genocide was just "the Armenian version of this history". In a 1995 civil proceeding a French court censured his remarks as a denial of the Armenian Genocide and fined him one franc, as well as ordering the publication of the judgment at Lewis' cost in Le Monde. The court ruled that while Lewis has the right to his views, they did damage to a third party and that "it is only by hiding elements which go against his thesis that the defendant was able to state that there was no 'serious proof' of the Armenian Genocide; consequently, he failed in his duties of objectivity and prudence by expressing himself without qualification on such a sensitive subject".
Gregory Stanton (presentation Eight Stages of Genocide and Preventing Genocide, Genocide Watch May 2008):
Prosecute hate crimes and incitements to commit genocide. Provide programs for tolerance to radio, TV, and newspapers. Enlist religious and political leaders to speak out and educate for tolerance. Organize inter- ethnic, interfaith, and inter- racial groups to work against hate and genocide.
Denial is always found in genocide, both during it and after it. Continuing denial is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. Denial extends the crime of genocide to future generations of the victims. It is a continuation of the intent to destroy the group.
The tactics of denial are predictable.
Deny the evidence. Deny that there was any mass killing at all. Question and minimize the statistics. Block access to archives and witnesses. Intimidate or kill eye- witnesses. Destroy the evidence (Burn the bodies and the archives, dig up and burn the mass graves, throw bodies in rivers and seas). Attack truth- tellers. Attack the motives of the truth- tellers. Say they are opposed to the religion, ethnicity, or nationality of the deniers. Point out atrocities committed by people from the truth- tellers' group. Imply they are morally disqualified to accuse the perpetrators. Deny genocidal intent. Claim that the deaths were inadvertent (due to famine, migration, or diseases). Blame "out of control" forces for the killings. Blame the deaths on ancient ethnic conflicts. Blame the victims. Emphasize the strangeness of the victims. They are not like us (savages, infidels). Claim they were disloyal insurgents in a war. Call it a "civil war", not genocide. Claim that the deniers' group also suffered huge losses in the "war". The killings were in self- defence. Deny current interests. Avoid upsetting "the peace process". "Look to the future, not to the past". Deny to assure benefits of relations with the perpetrators or their descendants (oil, arms, sales, alliances, military bases). Don't threaten humanitarian assistance to the victims, who are receiving good treatment. Deny facts fit legal definition of genocide. They're crime against humanity, not genocide. They're "ethnical cleansing", not genocide. There's not enough proof of specific intent to destroy a group, "as such" ("Many survived"- UN Commission of Inquiry on Darfur). Claim the only "real" genocides are like the Holocaust: "in whole" (Ignore the "in part" in the Genocide Convention). Claim declaring genocide would legally obligate us to intervene. (We don't want to intervene).
Genocide succeeds when state sovereignty blocks international responsibility to protect.
Since founding of UN over 70 million dead of 45 genocide and politicides. Genocide prevention is not equal to conflict resolution.
Prevention requires Courts of accountability. Prevention: Political Will. End genocide in this century.
In the late 1980s access was granted to some archives by the Turkish government, but it appears that the material was limited and the government took a very selective approach to who was allowed to study the material. Heather Rae marks that "scholars have long been denied access to Ottoman archives". Historian Taner Akcam also writes about the "carefully selection" of Ottoman archive materials. "While we are missing a significant portion of these papers, what remains in the Ottoman archives and in court records is sufficiant to show that the CUP Central Committee, and the Special Organization is set up to carry out its plan, did deliberately attempt to destroy the Armenian population".
The following gives in addition Why Armenian genocide recognition is important.
United Nations Human Rights Commission
SubCommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities
Excerpts from
The UN Report on Genocide 1985
Downloaded from http://www.teachgenocide.org/files/D...(excerpts).pdf aware to me in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Ar...ocide_timeline ; this context is not found in the armenian-genocide.org document's archive ( http://www.armenian-genocide.org/key...on_detail.html ).
Paragraph 24 and the Armenian Genocide1
THIRTY-EIGHTH SESSION
August 5-30 1985 Geneva, Switzerland
Statement by Mr. Laurin of the International
Federation of Human Rights
Genocide is the worst crime under international law, and any attempt to hide it or deny its existence must be looked upon as a serious infringement of human rights, derogating from the rights of peoples to their history, their memory, their dignity and their right to moral restitution.
My organization, which has protested in both the Commission on Human Rights and the Sub- Commission at the deletion from the previous report of a paragraph3 concerning the Genocide of which Armenians have been victims in the Ottoman Empire, welcomes the fact that Mr. Whitaker
has covered the topic in his latest report.
Evidence of that massacre has been provided in numerous diplomatic documents of the various countries, including Germany, which had been Turkey's ally during the First World War.
The premeditated nature of the acts aimed at the systematic and organized extermination of all Armenians living in their own historical territory and in the rest of the Ottoman Empire has been amply documented.
In 1923 and 1926, my organization urged the League of Nations to ensure that Armenians who had survived the massacre were given sufficient territory to guarantee their national life.
The acts committed against the Armenians meet the definition of genocide given in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The Armenians are still suffering from the tragedy that befell them at the beginning of the century, since they are still deprived the right to their history. The silence of the international community adds to their sufferings.
To recognize the right of a people to its history is also to recognize its right to existence, and that concept should form part of the overall concept of human rights and the rights of peoples.
The Genocide of the Armenians forms part of the universal conscience and the collective memory. Recognition of the existence of genocide is an essential prerequisite for its prevention.
The United Nations came into being largely as a result of the genocide committed during the Second World War against the Jewish and gypsy populations in Europe.
One of the foremost tasks of the United Nations is to prevent the crime of genocide, with particular reference to the crimes committed prior to its establishment. Prevention is difficult unless past crimes of genocide are acknowledged by the international community.
The international community has a duty to oppose all efforts to manipulate history. Knowledge of the historical facts constituting the crime of genocide, which have dishonored and are still dishonoring the societies of the world, should be passed on to future generations so that the case of those who denied the existence of that crime will not be strengthened by forgetfulness.
I recognize the Armenian genocide as it was described here and my conscience does not accept the injustice since 1915.
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