International Association Of Genocide Scholars

[Hovik]

INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS

President
Israel Charny (Israel)

First
Vice-President

Gregory H. Stanton (USA)

Second Vice-President
Linda Melvern (UK)

Secretary-Treasurer
Steven Jacobs (USA)

June 13, 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 ofthe 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 the
overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide: 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. Morethan
a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing,
starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the
Armenian population 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), and 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. In preventing
a conference on the Armenian Genocide from taking place at Bogacizi
University in Istanbul on May 25, your government revealed its
aversion to academic and intellectual freedom-a fundamental condition
of democratic society.

We believe that it is clearly in the interest of the Turkish people
and their future as a proud and equal participants 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.

Approved Unanimously at the Sixth biennial meeting of
THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS (IAGS)
June 7, 2005, Boca Raton, Florida

Contacts: Israel Charny, IAGS President; Executive Director, Institute
on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem, Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia
of Genocide, 972-2-672-0424; [email protected]

Gregory H. Stanton, IAGS Vice President; President, Genocide Watch,
James Farmer Visiting Professor of Human Rights, University of Mary
Washington; 703-448-0222; [email protected]

[Gavur]

Israel Charny Suggests Including Armenian Genocide In An Israeli University Curriculu

AZG Armenian Daily #090, 18/05/2006



The third sitting of the Armenian Genocide experts’ group of the World Armenian Congress with the participation of 21 members from 17 countries was held yesterday. The work of the experts group launched after the meeting with foreign minister Vartan Oskanian in the morning that was assessed very positively by WAC chairman Ara Abrahamian: "This was the first time we had a very serious discussion on the stance of the state and WAC in this issue."

Head of the chair of Armenian Studies at the UCLA, Richard Hovhannisian, said that at all previous meetings they tried to outline the paths that would bring to international acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide as well as the steps that will follow recognition and legal grounds for applying to international structures.

"I am one of those who are concerned over bringing the issue to international courts," Prof. Mihran Dabag of the Center for Armenian Studies at the Bochum University, Germany, says. "The court means a decision based on the materials provided by both sides, and in my view, the historicity of the Genocide is over doubt and it is not up to the courts to decide. For that reason we need to boost our fight against denial standing firm on legal ground. My greatest wish is that our focusing on Genocide’s recognition does not harm our future plans."

Dr. Israel Charny from Israel suggests opening an Armenian chair at one of the biggest Israeli universities and organize lectures on the Genocide alongside with Holocaust classes and thus contribute to Israeli state’s recognition of the Armenian Genocide.

It is planned to hold a large-scale conference on Armenian Genocide in 2007 and invite representatives of the Armenian government. Mr. Abrahamian suggested to hold 2 more sittings of the WAC’s expert’s group to clarify their stances and the work ahead. The range of questions is rather broad: when was the Armenian genocide perpetrated, what was its continuation, what should be the steps following Genocide recognition by foreign states, should we apply to international courts or not, what are our demands from Turkey? Ara Abrahamian said that there are 3-4 different answers to these questions but they do not conflict with each other but rather supplement each other. He said that they have agreed with the Foreign Affairs Ministry to put forward their written proposals and views and begin joint work.

By Tamar Minasian