Armenian Genocide in the news. Recent and noteworthy articles and news.

[Alexandros]

Re: Armenian Genocide in the news. Recent and noteworthy articles and news.

Alexandros, I had no intention to attack personally you. It was my first post under this tread. Such propaganda articles always annoy me, from whichever side it comes. And if something is anti-Turkish, it is looooved in this forum without any questioning. People at least should be able to distinguish a bad article from a good one regardless of what it says. Sassounian's article is fail-safe, no matter how bad he writes, he is still be applauded and this annoys me. A lot of people gain so much power/political benefit from AG issue, which I feel showing disrespect for the dead as much as the ones in Turkish side. Sassounian could be that kind or not, but this article is a really bad one, just fills a gap in his column, that's all. People should demand better work. Some good work examples can be Gunaysu's articles that you post under another tread and the one ninetoyadome's post above - agree or not it is well written (sad that s/he also post the other one as well)

I said it was an interesting article.I was the only one who said that.It was not like it was 10 people that applauded this article.And quite frankly, I didn`t do that either.Try to relax a little.Geeez.

Regarding the article you sent: The issues raised in the article are so cliche that even high school teachers in national education system can raise. I am not saying they are not true or meaningless, but the fact is that they have nothing to do with scholar attitude of learning Ottoman Turkish and script for achieve studies. The fact is that after language revolution during Republic, the ties of Turkish language with long standing influences with Arabic and Persian were cut. This caused a communication breakdown between two generations; grandchildren had to ask what exactly her/his grandparent said. The language stayed more intact for law and similar issues due to its historical and institutional basis, however in daily life the language was crippled for the sake of purifying it to be more Turkish. Briefly, the points are well-taken, but nothing new, actually so much cliche involved.

Is Ottoman Turkish being taught in primary and secondary in Turkey?Yes or no?

And a side note: Turk Dil Kurumu - TDK (which could roughly be translated as Turkish Language Institution) used to be the main actor of purifying Turkish by kicking out non-Turkish origined words from the language and replace them with new Turkish words. Actually, they have found pretty good counterparts for some words that are still used, but still the points raised by Cengiz are still valid. On the other hand, hard-core conservatists blaim Ataturk to appoint Armenian people in this institution who "ruined" the language. Agop Martayan was appointed to TDK as the general secretary by Ataturk's invitation and given the surname Dilacar (again a rough translation: language-developer). Sounds odd right?

Speaking of Ataturk.I read an article written by a Turkish journalist published in Hurriyet.Don`t know if this is true but according to this journalist it was an Armenian who saved Ataturk`s life.Sounds pretty odd too, right?

The Armenian Who Saved Ataturk's Life

Tufan Turenc, Hurriyet

August 2005

[may]

Re: Armenian Genocide in the news. Recent and noteworthy articles and news.

I said it was an interesting article.I was the only one who said that.It was not like it was 10 people that applauded this article.And quite frankly, I didn`t do that either.Try to relax a little.Geeez.

Alexandros, I'm relaxed, sorry if understood otherwise. I have seen praising of so many cheap articles/comments in this forum, my concern was the general attitude, not personally you.

Is Ottoman Turkish being taught in primary and secondary in Turkey?Yes or no?

No. Will the discussion evolve somewhere with this info, or you asked this for curiosity only?

Speaking of Ataturk.I read an article written by a Turkish journalist published in Hurriyet.Don`t know if this is true but according to this journalist it was an Armenian who saved Ataturk`s life.Sounds pretty odd too, right?

The Armenian Who Saved Ataturk's Life

Tufan Turenc, Hurriyet

August 2005

I have heard about this as well. If you assume each Armenian and Turkish as brutal enemies by blood, both stories are pretty odd. However the oddness I referred to was not related with Ataturk, but how the nationalization process mentioned in the article involved such aspects as having an Armenian at an administrative position.

[Alexandros]

Re: Armenian Genocide in the news. Recent and noteworthy articles and news.

No. Will the discussion evolve somewhere with this info, or you asked this for curiosity only?

Try to have patience my friend.

So those who study history at unis or colleges in Turkey, is Ottoman Turkish only optional or is it included in the history courses?

[may]

Re: Armenian Genocide in the news. Recent and noteworthy articles and news.

Try to have patience my friend.

So those who study history at unis or colleges in Turkey, is Ottoman Turkish only optional or is it included in the history courses?

Ok, patience...

I did not study history, so I do not know curriculum requirements whether Ottoman Turkish courses are mandatory or optional. I had friends from history department during university and what I know is courses are offered for people who want to learn/use in their research (for instance, one of my friends specifically learned for his research). Same situation is valid for foreign universities as well.

Edit: I just checked few university websites for the history department required courses and it looks like at least 2 Ottoman Turkish courses are mandatory, which I assume provides at least a basic knowledge. The rest is optional.

[hipeter924]

Re: Armenian Genocide in the news. Recent and noteworthy articles and news.

Alexandros, I'm relaxed, sorry if understood otherwise. I have seen praising of so many cheap articles/comments in this forum, my concern was the general attitude, not personally you.



No. Will the discussion evolve somewhere with this info, or you asked this for curiosity only?



I have heard about this as well. If you assume each Armenian and Turkish as brutal enemies by blood, both stories are pretty odd. However the oddness I referred to was not related with Ataturk, but how the nationalization process mentioned in the article involved such aspects as having an Armenian at an administrative position.

There are traitor Armenian's today that deny the Armenian Genocide, so its not odd to have Armenian's in administrative positions....if the Armenian is not a traitor though it would be pretty odd though I agree.

[Army]

Re: Armenian Genocide in the news. Recent and noteworthy articles and news.

Ok, patience...

I did not study history, so I do not know curriculum requirements whether Ottoman Turkish courses are mandatory or optional. I had friends from history department during university and what I know is courses are offered for people who want to learn/use in their research (for instance, one of my friends specifically learned for his research). Same situation is valid for foreign universities as well.

Edit: I just checked few university websites for the history department required courses and it looks like at least 2 Ottoman Turkish courses are mandatory, which I assume provides at least a basic knowledge. The rest is optional.

If one is an Ottoman history expert (I mean PhD and above); Ottoman Turkish is a must. Dont know about the master-degree.

[may]

Re: Armenian Genocide in the news. Recent and noteworthy articles and news.

If one is an Ottoman history expert (I mean PhD and above); Ottoman Turkish is a must. Dont know about the master-degree.

That goes without saying: If you are studying Ottoman history, then you must know Ottoman Turkish. But even you are studying other sub-fields, still you have to take Ottoman Turkish.

Anyway, the issue was not the Ottoman Turkish education in universities. Putting this discussion back into frame:

Archive legend: "Even if the documents are obtained, few people within and outside Turkey can read and comprehend them, as they are written in Ottoman Turkish and difficult to decipher Arabic script."

Ottoman Turkish and Arabic scripts are not ancient cave inscriptions. All history students in Turkey learn it at undergrad, there are courses offered even in US for the interested, if not learned from numerous books for people who really want to learn it. And come on, all this effort to obtain these impossible-to-reach-if-not-destroyed-yet archives but cannot do anything because few people(!!!) can read it?

[ninetoyadome]

Re: Armenian Genocide in the news. Recent and noteworthy articles and news.

New Book: Danish Witness to the Genocide
By Admin • on December 2, 2009 • Email This Post
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‘Danish Witnesses to the Armenian Genocide 1915’
By Helle Schøler Kjær
ISBN 978-87-7695-140-5
The book 1915: Danske vidner til det armenske folkemord (1915: Danish Witnesses to the Armenian Genocide) by author and journalist Helle Schøler Kjær was released in November 2009 by publishing house Vandkunsten.
Danish Witnesses, a creditable and easily readable book aimed at educating the Danish public and government about the Armenian Genocide, tells about the testimonies of three Danish witnesses to the massacres.
The book includes the accounts and diaries of the Danish missionary Maria Jacobsen, who was stationed at Harpoot/Mezreh from 1907-19. Jacobsen watched the persecution of Armenians and provided clandestine relief up to 5,000 widows and orphans. The second Danish witness is Karen Jeppe, who was stationed at Ourfa and later in Aleppo by the German Orient mission. An entire chapter is devoted to her rescue and resistance efforts. Another chapter is dedicated to the writings of Danish envoy Carl Ellis Wandell, who wrote that the sole intention of the deportations was to wipe out the Armenian nation from their historic homeland.
There are a range of passages from Jacobsen´s diaries and Wandel´s reports that describe the mass executions during the deportations—all well organized and part of official state-sanctioned policy.
The majority of the source material for the book —valuable eye-witness accounts and first-hand information—came from the Danish State Archives, dutifully researched by the historian Matthias Bjørnlund.
U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau’s reports to the American government are included, and correspond to the accounts of the three Danish witnesses. Pages are displayed with photo materials and about the background of World War I, the history of Armenia, and the trials and few punishment of the perpetrators of this crime against humanity. The main sources are Vahakn N. Dadrian, Taner Akcam, and Eric Zürcher, as well as “The Turkish Military Tribunal’s Prosecution of the Authors of the Armenian Genocide: Four Major Court-Martial Series.” The last chapter is about the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and his acknowledgment about the crimes of the Young Turk Party, the Committee of Union and Progress.
For more information on Danish Witnesses and Vandkunsten, email [email protected] or visit www.forlagetvandkunsten.dk/108748/.

[Siggie]

Re: Armenian Genocide in the news. Recent and noteworthy articles and news.

Prominent author, journalist, essayist, political activist, and outspoken atheist, Christopher Hitchens has written an excellent article about the importance of genocide recognition to Armenians and the continued reluctance of Turkey to acknowledge history. This is not the first time Hitchens has spoken out about the AG ( Click for an article from April 2009).


----------------

Shut Up About Armenians or We'll Hurt Them Again
Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan's latest sinister threat.
By Christopher Hitchens



Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan April is the cruelest month for the people of Armenia, who every year at this season have to suffer a continuing tragedy and a humiliation. The tragedy is that of commemorating the huge number of their ancestors who were exterminated by the Ottoman Muslim caliphate in a campaign of state-planned mass murder that began in April 1915. The humiliation is of hearing, year after year, that the Turkish authorities simply deny that these appalling events ever occurred or that the killings constituted "genocide."

In a technical and pedantic sense, the word genocide does not, in fact, apply, since it only entered our vocabulary in 1943. (It was coined by a scholar named Raphael Lemkin, who for rather self-evident reasons in that even more awful year wanted a legal term for the intersection between racism and bloodlust and saw Armenia as the precedent for what was then happening in Poland.) I still rather prefer the phrase used by America's then-ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau. Reporting to Washington about what his consular agents were telling him of the foul doings in the Ottoman provinces of Harput and Van in particular, he employed the striking words "race extermination." (See the imperishable book The Slaughterhouse Province for some of the cold diplomatic dispatches of that period.) Terrible enough in itself, Morgenthau's expression did not quite comprehend the later erasure of all traces of Armenian life, from the destruction of their churches and libraries and institutes to the crude altering of official Turkish maps and schoolbooks to deny that there had ever been an Armenia in the first place.

This year, the House foreign affairs committee in Washington and the parliament of Sweden joined the growing number of political bodies that have decided to call the slaughter by its right name. I quote now from a statement in response by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the current prime minister of Turkey and the leader of its Islamist party:

In my country there are 170,000 Armenians. Seventy thousand of them are citizens. We tolerate 100,000 more. So, what am I going to do tomorrow? If necessary I will tell the 100,000: OK, time to go back to your country. Why? They are not my citizens. I am not obliged to keep them in my country.

This extraordinary threat was not made at some stupid rally in a fly-blown town. It was uttered in England, on March 17, on the Turkish-language service of the BBC. Just to be clear, then, about the view of Turkey's chief statesman: If democratic assemblies dare to mention the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in the 20th century, I will personally complete that cleansing in the 21st!

Where to begin? Turkish "guest workers" are to be found in great numbers all through the European Union, membership of which is a declared Turkish objective. How would the world respond if a European prime minister called for the mass deportation of all Turks? Yet Erdogan's xenophobic demagoguery attracted precisely no condemnation from Washington or Brussels. He probably overestimated the number of "tolerated" economic refugees from neighboring and former Soviet Armenia, but is it not interesting that he keeps a count in his head? And a count of the tiny number of surviving Turkish Armenians as well?

The outburst strengthens the already strong case for considering Erdogan to be somewhat personally unhinged. In Davos in January 2009, he stormed out of a panel discussion with the head of the Arab League and with Israeli President Shimon Peres, having gone purple and grabbed the arm of the moderator who tried to calm him. On that occasion, he yelled that Israelis in Gaza knew too well "how to kill"—which might be true but which seems to betray at best an envy on his part. Turkish nationalists have also told me that he was out of control because he disliked the fact that the moderator—David Ignatius of the Washington Post—is himself of Armenian descent. A short while later, at a NATO summit in Turkey, Erdogan went into another tantrum at the idea that former Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark would be chosen as the next head of the alliance. In this case, it was cartoons published on Danish soil that frayed Erdogan's evidently fragile composure.

In Turkey itself, the continuing denial has abysmal cultural and political consequences. The country's best-known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, was dragged before a court in 2005 for acknowledging Turkey's role in the destruction of Armenia. Had he not been the winner of a Nobel Prize, it might have gone very hard for him, as it has for prominent and brave intellectuals like Murat Belge. Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink, also prosecuted under a state law forbidding discussion of the past, was shot down in the street by an assassin who was later photographed in the company of beaming, compliant policemen.

The original crime, in other words, defeats all efforts to cover it up. And the denial necessitates continuing secondary crimes. In 1955, a government-sponsored pogrom in Istanbul burned out most of the city's remaining Armenians, along with thousands of Jews and Greeks and other infidels. The state-codified concept of mandatory Turkishness has been used to negate the rights and obliterate the language of the country's enormous Kurdish population and to create an armed colony of settlers and occupiers on the soil of Cyprus, a democratic member of the European Union.

So it is not just a disaster for Turkey that it has a prime minister who suffers from morbid disorders of the personality. Under these conditions, his great country can never hope to be an acceptable member of Europe or a reliable member of NATO. And history is cunning: The dead of Armenia will never cease to cry out. Nor, on their behalf., should we cease to do so. Let Turkey's unstable leader foam all he wants when other parliaments and congresses discuss Armenia and seek the truth about it. The grotesque fact remains that the one parliament that should be debating the question—the Turkish parliament—is forbidden by its own law to do so. While this remains the case, we shall do it for them, and without any apology, until they produce the one that is forthcoming from them.

[url=http://www.slate.com/id/2249825/] Source [/source]

[Haykakan]

Re: Armenian Genocide in the news. Recent and noteworthy articles and news.

PEACE THROUGH PENANCE

Indiana Daily Student

http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=74997

April 7 2010

Ari Terjanian is a sophomore majoring in business and a member of
the Armenian Diaspora.

Countless times through our adolescence, as we sat through another
boring world civilizations lecture, we questioned the purpose of
learning about history at all.

What's the point of learning about the past when it is only the future
that matters?

Adolf Hitler knew his history. In a speech he gave to his commanders,
a week before the German invasion of Poland, to convince them of his
purpose, he said "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation
of the Armenians?"

Already, by 1939, the genocide of the Armenians, swept under the rug
by the Turks under the guise of military conflict, had been forgotten,
and Hitler saw no reason why the genocide he intended to commit would
not be forgotten as well.

Turkish recognition of the Armenian Genocide will dissuade future
attempts at genocide, as well as cleanse a nation of its guilt,
which will ultimately benefit it.

At first glance, Turkey stands to lose a lot by recognizing the
genocide -- they'd be put on the same level historically as Germany
and would face giving up territory to Armenia, as well as paying
compensation to families that were affected.

For this reason, they deny all accusations and try to muddy the
history. In addition, they do not want the United States to recognize
it, given that it is the most influential nation in the world.

For this reason, they leverage their strategic position in the Middle
East to prevent American recognition.

Letting this go unchallenged shows great cowardice on America's
part, and in my opinion, is comparable to Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad's claims that the Holocaust never happened.

Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Greece, Lithuania,
Lebanon, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland,
Uruguay, Vatican City and Venezuela.

What do these countries have in common?

They all recognize that from 1915-1923, the Ottoman Empire, which
encompassed present-day Turkey, murdered 1.5 million Armenians.

These countries' recognitions, as well as an overwhelming consensus
by today's historians, including some Turkish historians, such as
Taner Akcam, should put to rest any questions of the validity of the
occurrence of the massacres.

It is insulting to even debate whether it happened or not. At this
point, it's not a question of determining history; instead, it's just
pure politics.

Turkey is a country which is seen as a model Muslim country.

However, its modern day practices of ultra-conservatism, as well as
the lack of safety for Armenians in Turkey, prevent it from reaching
its ideal status on a global scale.

When Turkey tried to join the European Union, one of the reasons it
was not admitted was because of its policy of denial.

It has been said that the last chapter of genocide is its denial.

In other words, by denying it happened, Turkey is carrying out the
genocide to this day.

If there is to be peace between Armenia and Turkey, Turkey must admit
its wrongdoings.

Admission of genocide may cause bad short-term ramifications, but in
the long run, Turkey will emerge with a clear conscience and much more
respect in the world, and millions of innocent souls will finally be
able to rest in peace.