Turkish Propaganda strategy

[Joseph]

Misinformation regarding ties between Armenia and Kurdistan Workers
Party is possible prelude to aggression: Armen Ayvazyan

Permanent news address: www.regnum.ru/english/929158.html
13:33 12/26/2007

Recently, the Azeri mass media disseminated information claiming that
`Armenia is settling Armenians and Kurds, emigrants from Syria and
Iraq, in Nagorno Karabakh and now it also plans to host terrorists from
the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).' REGNUM asks Armen Ayvazyan,
political scientist and Director of the `Ararat' Center for Strategic
Research, to comment on this.

The new Turkish deliberations regarding ties between the PKK and
Armenia that were voiced in recent weeks and the immediate joining-in
of the official Baku should be considered in several aspects: first, in
the context of Turkey's consistently hostile policy towards independent
Armenia; second, in the light of the acceleration in the pace of
Azerbaijan's preparation for a large-scale war of aggression against
Artsakh and Armenia; and third, in the context of the continued passive
information policy of Armenia.

The Turkish propaganda campaign alleging that Armenia supports and even
provides bases for the PKK was first launched in 1993 and continued at
varying degrees of intensity up to 2000, when the PKK temporarily
extinguished the insurgency. The following headlines from the Turkish
press convey an idea of the scale of the initial campaign: `Syria Flies
PKK Militants to Armenia;' `PKK Will Attack with ASALA in the Spring;'
`Intelligence Report Details Armenia-PKK ties;' `PKK Reportedly Moving
to Iran, Armenia.' (1) Moreover, the Turkish Daily News article
published on April 16, 1998, asserted without any proof that
purportedly the PKK has 7 bases in Armenia, 11 in Iran, 4 in Russia and
1 in Cyprus. At the time Azerbaijan joined in this Turkish propaganda
campaign when its defence minister declared that supposedly "200
Kurdish terrorists are being trained in the Lachin region, occupied by
the Armenian aggressors, and another 457 Kurdish fighters are receiving
full military training in Armenia, to be later deployed in the
territory of Turkey. (2)

A number of high-ranking Turkish officials, including the Chief of
Staff of the Turkish army, have made statements regarding ties between
the PKK and Armenia. On October 11, 1998, Turkey's Secretary of State
Metin Gurderen openly threatened Armenia with war: `If Armenia supports
separatists, then we have made our decision, the button has been
pressed. A war might break out any moment.' (3)

Many suggest that the Turkish allegations regarding Armenia-PKK ties
are intended only for `domestic consumption', that they are put forth
to explain the prolonged nature of the Kurdish armed resistance and to
satisfy the hostile sentiments of the Turkish public towards Armenia.
However, the reality is even more dangerous. The true purpose of this
continuous and well planned false propaganda, coordinated with
Azerbaijan, regarding Armenia-PKK ties is to create new and additional
causes for exerting constant pressure on Armenia, to demonise Armenia
and NKR in the eyes of the international community and to prepare the
information front for the planned military aggression by Azerbaijan,
with a possible direct intervention of Turkey. Let's not forget that
using the pretext of pursuing PKK, Turkey has periodically been
invading Northern Iraq. Within the period of 1991 and the beginning of
1999 Turkey carried out 55 incursions into Northern Iraq, which the
international community although did not authorize, but neither did it
condemn. Four of them were large-scale operations with the
participation of over 20,000 Turkish soldiers. (4)

Recently, new information was published revealing that Turkey planned
an incursion into Armenia in October 1993, using the very same Kurdish
bases as a pretext. (5) Leonidas Khrisantopolos, the Greek Ambassador
to Armenia in 1993-1994, stated that the then Turkish Prime Minister
Tancu Chiller had come to an agreement with the speaker of the Russian
parliament Ruslan Khasbulatov on launching a few `surgical' strikes
against Armenia. This information was indirectly confirmed by RA
Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanyan in his interview to `Azg' daily
(October 4, 2001), as well as by the former head of the National
Security of Armenia Eduard Simonyan. (6)

Before that Western sources had reported that twice in 1993, in April
and September, Turkey deployed its tank, mechanized and other units on
the border with Armenia, the Turkish armed forces were brought to high
state of combat readiness and Prime Minister Tancu Chiller warned she
would ask the parliament for authorization to start military action, if
Armenia touched any part of Nakhijevan. (7) Consequently, it is no
accident that reports about PKK bases allegedly located in Armenia
started to appear in the Turkish press as of Fall 1993. It is even less
of an accident that in the above-mentioned reports the Turks indicated
a number of locations in Armenia for supposed PKK bases (including the
surrounding areas of the Armenian Atomic Power Plant and the Lachin
region). (8)

Well affected by the Turkish propaganda some Western information
agencies and think tanks presented the non-existent ties between
Armenia and the PKK as a widely known fact. (9) Thus, in 1999, after
the declaration of cease-fire by the PKK, one of the most famous
American institutions of geopolitical research, Stratfor, apparently at
the bidding of the Turks, trumpeted twice (on August 23 and November
23, 1999) to the whole world that the PKK squads were supposedly
retreating to Armenia, for rearming and retraining in bases prepared
for them beforehand. (10)

The halting of the Kurdish guerrilla war since 2000 (formalized only in
2002 (11)), to some extent deprived Turkey of the possibility to play
the Kurdish card against Armenia. That is why the Chief of Staff of the
Turkish armed forces Hussein Kivrikoghlu made a new false statement in
the beginning of 2002, which alleged that Armenia possesses weapons of
mass destruction, and, consequently, the same measures of punishment
should be applied against Armenia as those against Iraq. (12)

On June 1, 2004, the PKK, now operating under the name CONGRA-GEL,
terminated its 5-year old unilateral truce, (13) thus confirming that
the Kurdish insurgents in Turkey are a long-term strategic factor in
the region.

The latest insinuations coincided almost to the date with the
intensification of Baku's war rhetoric and particularly with the
statement made by the Azeri Defence Minister Safar Abiyev that `as long
as the Azeri territories remain occupied by Armenia, the probability of
war is almost 100 percent.' Mr Abiyev's statement was made on November
27 at the closing press conference of the Meeting of the CIS Defence
Ministers Council in Astana. On November 30, with a direct reference to
the Turkish intelligence, the Turkish pro-government newspaper `Zaman'
disseminated misinformation about talks between Armenia and the PKK and
alleged about the installation of bases for Kurds in NKR, in the towns
of Shushi, Lachin and Fizuli. (14) This bait was immediately caught and
circulated by the American United Press International. (15) On
December 10, Araz Azimov, the Deputy Foreign Minister of Azerbaijan and
Azerbaijani President's Special Representative on Nagorno-Karabakh
conflict, stated about `readiness of Baku to launch anti-terrorist
operations against the PKK's military detachments stationed in
Nagorno-Karabakh.' (16) It is exactly the coordination of activities
between Baku and Ankara with respect to the timing and target of
information attack that should be cause for concern. All these could be
a prelude to not so virtual attacks.

The corresponding government bodies of Armenia should treat this newly
unleashed campaign of Turkish-Azerbaijani propaganda in all
seriousness. The brief refutations voiced by the Armenian MFA in this
case are not at all effective. A well-supported clarification and
condemnation of all the underpinnings of this old/new anti-Armenian row
is necessary, including an exposition of all the dimensions, of its
true purpose and possible consequences for the peace and stability in
the region. Otherwise, it is impossible to expect the understanding and
support of the international community for Armenia's foreign policy
positions, including for the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh
conflict.

(1) Sezai Sengun, `Syria Flies PKK Militants to Armenia,' Hurriyet, 10
November, 1993, in Foreign Broadcast Information Service Daily Report
(further in FBIS Daily Report): West Europe, 15 Nov. 1993, p. 72;
Gorsel Polat, `PKK Will Attach with ASALA in the Spring,' Cumhuriyet,
27 December 1993, in FBIS Daily Report: West Europe, 5 January 1994, p.
29; Sinan Onus, `Intelligence Report Details Armenia-PKK ties,'
Aydinlik, 29 January 1994, in FBIS Daily Report: West Europe, 3
February 1994, p. 36; `PKK Reportedly Moving to Iran, Armenia,' Turkish
Daily News, 1 February 1994, in FBIS Daily Report: West Europe, 7
February 1994, p. 44.

(2) Elmira Akhundova, "Defense Minister Abiyev: `We are keen on
privileged partnership with NATO,' Azernews/Azerkhabar 2/17/99 '
2/23/99.

(3) RFE/RL Newsline Vol. 2, ?- 197, Part I, 12 Oct. 1998, Transcaucasus
and Central Asia.

(4) Ed Blanche, `Terrorism: Turkey seizes PKK commander,' Jane's
Intelligence Review-Pointer, 1 June, 1998. The same source notes that
since the start of the Kurdish rebellion in 1984 through 1998 Turkey
destroyed or deported 3000 Kurdish villages. According to data of the
Turkish army, 39900 PKK fighters were taken out of action. The losses
of the Turkish army amounted to 4600 deaths.

(5) См. Leonidas T. Chryzantopoulos, Caucasus Chronicles:
Nation-Building and Diplomacy in Armenia, 1993-1994 (Princeton &
London: Gomidas Institute Books, 2002), pp. 76-78, 155. `The
Sensational Announcement of Leonidas Chryzantopoulos', Golos Armenii,
19 September 2002 (in Russian).

(6) `'Turkey Really Was Going To Attack Armenia in Autumn 1993', Former
Head of State Department of National Security, Major General Eduard
Simoniants Says,' Noyan Tapan News Agency, Yerevan, September 23, 2002.

(7) R. Ernest Dupuis and Trevor N. Dupuis, World History of Wars. Book
Four: 1925 ` 1997 Saint Petersburg ' Moscow: Polygon ` Ast., 1998), pg.
754 (in Russian).

(8) Rouben Paul Adalian, `Armenia's Foreign Policy: Defining Priorities
and Coping with Conflict,' in Adeed Dawisha and Karen Dawisha, eds.,
The Making of Foreign Policy in Russia and the New States of Eurasia
(Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1995), p. 318.

(9) For example, see Ed Blanche, `Terrorism: Turkey seizes PKK
commander,' op. cit..

(10) Stratfor.com: `Where, oh where, has the PKK gone?' 1999.08.27;
`PKK Wields Pipeline Leverage,' 1999.11.23.

(11) Officially the temporary halt in the armed resistance was
announced after the regular 5th assembly of the PKK. It became known
on February 6th, 2002, from the announcement of MED TV (see Akop
Chakryan, `PKK decided to halt armed resistance in Turkey', Azg,
February 8th, 2002, #24, in Armenian).

(12) Here is an excerpt from the announcement distributed by
PanARMENIAN.net on that occasion: `Chief of the General Staff of the
Armed Forces of Turkey Hussein Kivrikoghlu stated the other day that
Armenia possessed mass destruction weapons ¦ This statement is included
in the list of the six `apprehensions' of Turkey that Kivrikoghlu had
presented to Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit before the latter's
visit to the U.S.A. Speaking about the negative response of Turkey to
the possible U.S. strikes on Iraq, Kivrikoghlu stated not only Saddam
Huseyn regime, but also Armenia, Syria, Iran and some other countries
possessed weapons of mass extermination. In the words of the chief of
the general staff of Turkey, sanctions like those used against Iraq,
should be applied to Armenia.' See also. `Azeri ex-military men on
threat if Armenia has weapons of mass destruction,' Azerbaijan News
Service TV January 8, 2002; `Does Armenia Possess a Mass Destruction
Weapon?' Azerbaijan News Service, January 9, 2002; `Armenian Defence
Ministry spokesman calls Turkish general's statement 'absurd','
Arminfo, January 7, 2002.

(13) Selcan Hacaoglu, `Turkey's Kurdish Rebels End 5-Year Truce',
Associated Press News, 1 June 2004.

(14) Ercan Yavuz, `PKK looks into relocating to Karabakh,' 30.11.2007
http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/de...ay&link=128340.
It must be noted that even a month before this, on October 29 the same
`Zaman' newspaper published an article titled `Relations between
Armenian and PKK terrorism', full of myths about Armenian-Kurdish
relations during the 1980's and 90's, with an indication of dates and
locations, intended to give the `information' semblance of veracity.
That article seemed to prepare ground for the subsequent direct
accusations.

(15) `PKK reportedly planning move to Azerbaijan,' United Press
International, Published: Dec. 1, 2007 at 1:49 AM.

(16) Araz Azimov: Azerbaijan is ready to launch operations against the
Kurdish guerrillas in Nagorno-Karabakh, REGNUM News Agency, 10:22
11.12.2007 (in Russian).

[Joseph]

http://f28.parsimony.net/forum68141/messages/4795.htm

Geschrieben von BY JULIE KOSTERLITZ (taken from Armenian Horizonweekly) am 26. November 2007 16:51:31:


BY JULIE KOSTERLITZ
From The National Journal


Armenian-Americans and the Turkish government use different strategies in their ongoing battle over a genocide resolution

By the time the Armenian-Americans from Detroit arrived in Washington on October 25 's one of several such contingents from around the country 's to try to rescue their decades-long dream, it was already too late.
Just two weeks earlier, the House Foreign Affairs Committee had approved the Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., vowed to bring it to a floor vote. But since then more than a dozen co-sponsors had withdrawn their support, under intense pressure from the government of Turkey, its high-wattage Washington lobbyists, and a Who's Who of Bush administration officials and military leaders.

By day's end, the measure's lead sponsor, Democrat Adam Schiff 's whose Los Angeles-area district includes a significant Armenian enclave 's would write Pelosi asking her to postpone the vote.
The Motor City delegation, however, was not conceding. "We'll tighten our belts, stand shoulder to shoulder, and continue to struggle until this is passed," said Narses Gedigian, a retired Ford Motor manager and the Detroit director of the Armenian National Committee of America. "It is going to pass," echoed banker Ralph Kourtjian just before the group returned to the airport that day.

The long-running battle in Congress between the Turks and Armenians is instructive, a study in both clashing viewpoints and the two different ways that political power is applied: the Turks' use of the diplomatic leverage of a foreign government versus the Armenians' use of the ballot-box clout of an American ethnic group. At issue is how the U.S. government will refer to the mass slaughter and deadly deportations of more than a million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

Whether it was genocide 's a systematic effort to eradicate a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group 's as Armenian-Americans and most genocide scholars contend, or a tragic but more nuanced event, as the Turkish government and a few scholars argue, may seem like an arcane historical debate. But the outcome bears directly on the core identity of both the sizable Armenian-American disapora and the Republic of Turkey, a vital U.S. ally.

In a technical sense, the Turks' government-to-government realpolitik has triumphed, preventing a full House vote three times since 2000. But even Turkey's allies recognize that the grassroots Armenian lobby has effectively fought them to a draw. The issue keeps coming back, and each skirmish raises its profile.
"One of the major problems has been that it's the Turkish government that has led the charge in presenting the Turkish position, and there's a need to get Turkish-Americans involved and to be more active citizens," says Lincoln McCurdy, the former longtime director of a pro-Turkish business group. It is a problem that McCurdy and some prominent Turkish-Americans are now hoping to remedy.

Part of the Armenian-Americans' power comes from the focus and persistence they bring to the issue. "The Turks thought, 'After the first generation, they [Armenians] will forget.' I'm second generation, and the third are still on it," says Kourtjian, whose fellow lobbyists included college senior Ani Hagopian and Karine Birazian, who put a nursing career on hold to become an Armenian National Committee organizer.

The Armenian diaspora has consciously nurtured this sense of identity through close-knit families; the Armenian Apostolic Church; and, in many communities, separate Armenian schools and newspapers. The passage of time has actually boosted the Armenian community's political strength. Those from second and third generations bring more affluence, education, and sophistication to the cause than do their traumatized, mostly working-class parents and grandparents.

They have had particular success outside Washington: 40 state governments have recognized an Armenian holocaust. And Armenian-Americans successfully lobbied the Massachusetts Legislature in the late 1990s to require that school children be taught about the Armenian genocide.
Now the younger generation is making its case through popular culture. Author and Colgate University professor Peter Balakian's 2004 book about the Armenian genocide and the Americans response, The Burning Tigris, was a best-seller. Prominent Armenian-Americans helped underwrite the 2006 PBS documentary The Armenian Genocide, and the Armenian-American members of the Grammy-winning heavy-metal group System of a Down wrote a song about the genocide and put information booths at their concerts.

The fourth estate has also been lobbied. In 2003, The Boston Globe began allowing unqualified use of the term "genocide" to describe the events of 1915 after meeting with Armenian activists, and in 2004 The New York Times did the same.
Armenian-Americans are also poised to erect a visible symbol of their cause in the nation's capital: an Armenian Genocide Museum, to be housed in a historic former bank building just blocks from the White House. Despite legal wrangling among donors, sponsors vow to complete the project by 2011.
If the diaspora's cause was previously hurt by the perception that it involved an Old World blood feud, it had increasingly been helped by the rise of a separate anti-genocide movement over the past decade.

After Americans' belated recognition of the unchecked ethnic slaughter in Rwanda in 1994, an informal network of academics, human-rights activists, and Jewish Americans has been organizing to stop and prevent similar tragedies. The creation of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, as well as Samantha Power's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2003 book, A Problem From Hell, have both fostered the issue's rising importance. In the past few years, grassroots groups were created to stop the massacre of civilians in Sudan's Darfur region. Armenian-American groups have joined the Save Darfur Coalition, the Genocide Intervention Network, and others.
The anti-genocide movement, in turn, has helped give the Armenians' cause more contemporary relevance. "Turkey's policy of denying the Armenian Genocide gives license to those who perpetrate genocide everywhere," the officers of the International Association of Genocide Scholars wrote in a letter to members of Congress earlier this year in support of the House resolution. "Little by little, we see the growth of an [anti-]genocide political constituency," says Aram Hamparian, a third-generation Armenian-American who heads the Armenian National Committee of America, one of the diaspora's two Washington-based lobby groups.

The anti-genocide movement has also helped Armenians to make inroads with another powerful lobby that has to date sided with Turkey: American Jewish organizations. Because Turkey has been one of Israel's few friends in the region, such Jewish groups as the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, and B'nai B'rith International have opposed the Armenian genocide resolutions. Until recently, the Turkish Embassy also retained PR consultants Jason Epstein, a former lobbyist for B'nai B'rith, and Lenny Ben-David, a former deputy chief of mission at Israel's embassy in Washington, in part as liaisons to Jewish leaders.
In August, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with Jewish leaders in New York and pressed them to help block the resolution.
Increasingly, however, local Jewish groups are siding with Armenian groups. In August, under pressure from chapters in New England, ADL President Abe Foxman finally called the events of 1915 "tantamount to genocide" but still said the House resolution was a "counterproductive diversion" that could put Turkey's Jewish community at risk.

The Armenian-Americans' public lobbying has convinced some that Turkey's reliance on powerful high-level advocates 's paid or otherwise 's is no longer sufficient.
Turkey's latest victory took far more effort than its prior one in a Republican-controlled Congress. At that time, the secretary of State merely sent a letter of opposition, Schiff said, but this time, President Bush, the secretaries of State and Defense, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David Petraeus all lobbied House members in "the most intensified effort I've seen."
Turkey also had to supplement its prominent Republican lobbyist, former House Speaker Bob Livingston, R-La., with a high-priced Democratic one, former Minority Leader xxxx Gephardt, D-Mo., who had supported the resolution as a member of Congress.
Even so, Schiff argued, Turkey won mainly due to a last-minute turn of world events. After Iraqi-based Kurdish rebels attacked Turkish soldiers in mid-October, the Bush administration argued that the measure jeopardized U.S.-Turkish relations just when the United States was urgently seeking to dissuade Turkey from invading northern Iraq. A successful floor vote, Schiff argued, is now just a matter of time 's and timing.
Some Turkish-Americans seem to fear that he is right. A small, affluent group has hired McCurdy to start the Turkish Coalition of America to help create a grassroots lobby. The sponsors, whom McCurdy won't name, have provided a budget of "well under $1 million."
Forging an effective lobby, McCurdy acknowledges, will be tough. The Turkish-American community is about a third the size of the Armenian one, McCurdy says, and is "one of the most fragmented ethnic groups in the United States," in part because Turkey is officially secular and emigrants lack the built-in sense of community that Armenians get from their church.
Up to now, the closest thing to a grassroots lobby has been the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, an umbrella group for 60 local organizations. But for most of the past year, the assembly has been embroiled in an internal power struggle from which it is only now beginning to re-emerge.
Instead, most of Turkey's nongovernmental lobbying support in the United States has come from the American Turkish Council, the business group that McCurdy founded. The council's board is chaired by Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor for President H.W. Bush, and includes executives from Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and other defense firms.
McCurdy is holding seminars to teach Turkish-American groups around the country how to get involved in the political process.
That the Turkish lobby relies so heavily on McCurdy 's a self-described Christian Anglo from Indiana 's is emblematic of how far that effort has yet to go.

[Joseph]

Genocide Deniers

http://hnn.us/articles/43861.html

Genocide Deniers

By Scott Jaschik

Mr. Jaschik is one of the three founders of Inside Higher Ed, where this piece first appeared. With Doug Lederman, he leads the editorial operations of Inside Higher Ed, overseeing news content, opinion pieces, resources, and interactive features. Scott is a leading voice on higher education issues, quoted regularly in publications nationwide, and publishing articles on colleges in publications such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Salon, and elsewhere.

Note: Comments on this article may be posted either here on HNN or at the website of Inside Higher Ed, where this article was first published. -- Editors
In the buildup to the vote by a House of Representatives committee officially calling for U.S. foreign policy to recognize that a genocide of Armenians took place during World War I, at the behest of the “Young Turk” government of the Ottoman Empire, a flurry of advertising in American newspapers appeared from Turkey.

The ads discouraged the vote by House members, and called instead for historians to figure out what happened in 1915. The ads quoted such figures as Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, as saying: “These historical circumstances require a very detailed and sober look from historians.” And State Department officials made similar statements, saying as the vote was about to take place: “We think that the determination of whether the events that happened to ethnic Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire should be a matter for historical inquiry.”

Turkey’s government also has been quick to identify American scholars (there are only a handful, but Turkey knows them all) who back its view that the right approach to 1915 is not to call it genocide, but to figure out what to call it, and what actually took place.

Normally, you might expect historians to welcome the interest of governments in convening scholars to explore questions of scholarship. But in this case, scholars who study the period say that the leaders of Turkey and the United States — along with that handful of scholars — are engaged in a profoundly anti-historical mission: trying to pretend that the Armenian genocide remains a matter of debate instead of being a long settled question. Much of the public discussion of the Congressional resolution has focused on geopolitics: If the full House passes the resolution, will Turkey end its help for U.S. military activities in Iraq?

But there are also some questions about the role of history and historians in the debate. To those scholars of the period who accept the widely held view that a genocide did take place, it’s a matter of some frustration that top government officials suggest that these matters are open for debate and that this effort is wrapped around a value espoused by most historians: free and open debate.

“Ultimately this is politics, not scholarship,” said Simon Payaslian, who holds an endowed chair in Armenian history and literature at Boston University. Turkey’s strategy, which for the first 60-70 years after the mass slaughter was to pretend that it didn’t take place, “has become far more sophisticated than before” and is explicitly appealing to academic values, he said.

“They have focused on the idea of objectivity, the idea of ‘on the one hand and the other hand,’ ” he said. “That’s very attractive on campuses to say that you should hear both sides of the story.” While Payaslian is quick to add that he doesn’t favor censoring anyone or firing anyone for their views, he believes that it is irresponsible to pretend that the history of the period is uncertain. And he thinks it is important to expose “the collaboration between the Turkish Embassy and scholars cooperating to promote this denialist argument.”

To many scholars, an added irony is that all of these calls for debating whether a genocide took place are coming at a time when emerging new scholarship on the period — based on unprecedented access to Ottoman archives — provides even more solid evidence of the intent of the Turkish authorities to slaughter the Armenians. This new scholarship is seen as the ultimate smoking gun as it is based on the records of those who committed the genocide — which counters the arguments of Turkey over the years that the genocide view relies too much on the views of Armenian survivors.

Even further, some of the most significant new scholarship is being done by scholars who are Turkish, not Armenian, directly refuting the claim by some denial scholars that only Armenian professors believe a genocide took place. In some cases, these scholars have faced death threats as well as indictments by prosecutors in Turkey.

Those who question the genocide, however, say that what is taking place in American history departments is a form of political correctness. “There is no debate and that’s the real problem. We’re stuck and the reality is that we need a debate,” said David C. Cuthell, executive director of the Institute for Turkish Studies, a center created by Turkey’s government to award grants and fellowships to scholars in the United States. (The center is housed at Georgetown University, but run independently.)

[Joseph]

cont. 2

The action in Congress is designed “to stifle debate,” Cuthell said, and so is anti-history. “There are reasonable doubts in terms of whether this is a genocide,” he said.

The term “genocide” was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish-Polish lawyer who was seeking to distinguish what Hitler was doing to the Jews from the sadly routine displacement and killing of civilians in wartime. He spoke of “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” Others have defined the term in different ways, but common elements are generally an intentional attack on a specific group.

While the term was created well after 1915 and with the Holocaust in mind, scholars of genocide (many of them focused on the Holocaust) have broadly endorsed applying the term to what happened to Armenians in 1915, and many refer to that tragedy as the first genocide of the 20th century. When in 2005 Turkey started talking about the idea of convening historians to study whether a genocide took place, the International Association of Genocide Scholars issued a letter in which it said that the “overwhelming opinion” of hundreds of experts on genocide from countries around the world was that a genocide had taken place.

Specifically it referred to a consensus around this view: “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. The rest of the Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years.”

Turkey has put forward a number of arguments in recent years, since admitting that something terrible did happen to many Armenians. Among the explanations offered by the government and its supporters are that many people died, but not as many as the scholars say; that Armenians share responsibility for a civil war in which civilians were killed on both sides; and that the chaos of World War I and not any specific action by government authorities led to the mass deaths and exiles.

Beyond those arguments, many raise political arguments that don’t attempt to deny that a genocide took place, but say that given Turkey’s sensitivities it isn’t wise to talk about it as such. This was essentially the argument given by some House members last week who voted against the resolution, saying that they didn’t want to risk anything that could affect U.S. troops. Similarly, while Holocaust experts, many of them Jewish, have overwhelmingly backed the view that Armenians suffered a genocide, some supporters of Israel have not wanted to offend Turkey, a rare Middle Eastern nation to maintain decent relations with the Israel and a country that still has a significant Jewish population.

Dissenters or Deniers?

Probably the most prominent scholar in the United States to question that genocide took place is Bernard Lewis, an emeritus professor at Princeton University, whose work on the Middle East has made him a favorite of the Bush administration and neoconservative thinkers. In one of his early works, Lewis referred to the “terrible holocaust” that the Armenians faced in 1915, but he stopped using that language and was quoted questioning the use of the term “genocide.” Lewis did not respond to messages seeking comment for this article. The Armenian National Committee of America has called him “a known genocide denier” and an “academic mercenary.”

The two scholars who are most active on promoting the view that no genocide took place are Justin McCarthy, distinguished university scholar at the University of Louisville, and Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Both of them are cited favorably by the Turkish embassy and McCarthy serves on the board of the Institute of Turkish Studies.

McCarthy said in an interview that he is a historical demographer and that he came to his views through “the dull study of numbers.” He said that he was studying population trends in the Ottoman Empire during World War I and that while he believes that about 600,000 Armenians lost their lives, far more Muslims died. “There’s simply no question,” he said, that Armenians killed many of them.

The term genocide may mean something when talking about Hitler, McCarthy said, “where you have something unique in human history.” But he said it was “pretty meaningless” to use about the Armenians. He said that he believes that between the Russians, the Turks and the Armenians, everyone was killing everyone, just as is the case in many wars. He said that to call what happened to the Armenians genocide would be the equivalent of calling what happened to the South during the U.S. Civil War genocide.

So why do so many historians see what happened differently? McCarthy said the scholarship that has been produced to show genocide has been biased. “If you look at who these historians are, they are Armenians and they are advancing a national agenda,” he said. Cuthell of the Institute for Turkish Studies said that it goes beyond that: Because the Armenians who were killed or exiled were Christians (as are many of their descendants now in the United States), and those accused of the genocide were Muslims, the United States is more sympathetic to the Armenians.

Lewy said that before he started to study the issue, he too believed that a genocide had taken place. He said that intellectuals and journalist “simply echo the Armenian position,” which he said is wrong. He said that there is the “obvious fact” that large numbers of Armenians were killed and he blamed some of the skepticism of Turkey’s view (and his) on the fact that Turkey for so long denied that anything had taken place, and so lost credibility.

In 2005, the University of Utah Press published a book by Lewy that sums up his position, Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide. Lewy’s argument, he said in an interview, “is that the key issue is intent” and that there is “no evidence” that the Young Turks sought the attacks on the Armenians. “In my view, there were mass killings, but no intent.” Lewy’s argument can also be found in this article in The Middle East Forum, as can letters to the editor taking issue with his scholarship.

The Evidence for Genocide

Many scholars who believe that there was a genocide say that Lewy ignored or dismissed massive amounts of evidence, not only in accounts from Armenians, but from foreign diplomats who observed what was going on — evidence about the marshaling of resources and organizing of groups to attack the Armenians and kick them out of their homes, and the very fact of who was in control of the government at the time.

Rouben Adalian, director of the Armenian National Institute, called the Lewy book part of an “insidious way to influence Western scholarship and to create confusion.” He said it was “pretty outrageous” that the Utah press published the book, which he called “one of the more poisonous products” to come from “those trying to dispute the genocide.”

John Herbert, director of the University of Utah Press, is new in his job there and said he wasn’t familiar with the discussions that took place when Lewy submitted his book. But he said that “we want to encourage the debate and we’ve done that.”

Notably, other presses passed on the book. Lewy said he was turned down 11 times, at least 4 of them from university presses, before he found Utah. While critics say that shows the flaws in the book, Lewy said it was evidence of bias. “The issue was clearly the substance of my position,” he said.

Of course the problem with the “encouraging the debate” argument is that so many experts in the field say that the debate over genocide is settled, and that credible arguments against the idea of a genocide just don’t much exist. The problem, many say, is that the evidence the Turks say doesn’t exist does exist, so people have moved on.

Andras Riedlmayer, a librarian of Ottoman history at Harvard University and co-editor of the H-TURK e-mail list about Turkish history, said that in the ’80s, he could remember scholarly meetings “at which panels on this issue turned into shouting matches. One doesn’t see that any more.” At this point, he said, the Turkish government’s view “is very much the minority view” among scholars worldwide.

[Joseph]

cont. 3

What’s happening now, he said, outside of those trying to deny what took place, “isn’t that the discussion has diminished, but that the discussion is more mature.” He said that there is more research going on about how and why the killings took place, and the historical context of the time. He also said that he thought there would be more research in the works on one of “the great undiscussed issues of why successive Turkish governments over recent decades have found it worthwhile to invest so much political capital and energy into promoting that historical narrative,” in which it had been “fudging” what really happened.

Among the scholars attracting the most attention for work on the genocide is Taner Akçam, a historian from Turkey who has been a professor at the University of Minnesota since 2001, when officials in Turkey stepped up criticism of his work. Akçam has faced death threats and has had legal charges brought against him in Turkey (since dropped) for his work, which directly focuses on the question of the culpability of Young Turk leaders in planning and executing the genocide. (Akçam’s Web site has details about his research and the Turkish campaigns against him.) Opposition to his work from Turkey has been particularly intense since the publication last year of A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility.

In an interview, Akçam said that his next book — planned for 2008 — may be “a turning point” in research on the genocide. He is finishing a book on what took place in 1915 based only on documents he has reviewed in Ottoman archives — no testimony from survivors, no documents from third parties. The documents, only some of which he has written about already, are so conclusive on the questions Turkey pretends are in dispute, he said, that the genocide should be impossible to deny.

To those like Lewy who have written books saying that there is no evidence, “I laugh at them,” Akçam said, because the documents he has already released rebut them, and the new book will do so even more. “There is no scholarly debate on this topic,” he said.

The difficulty, he said, is doing the scholarship. In the archives in Turkey, he said, the staff are extremely professional and helpful, even knowing his views and his work. But he said that he has received numerous death threats and does not feel safe in Turkey for more than a few days, and even then must keep a low profile. As to legal risks, he said that laws on the books that make it illegal to question the Turkish state on certain matters, are inconsistently enforced, so while he has faced legal harassment, he generally felt that everything would work out in the end. But Akçam is well known, has dual German-Turkish citizenship, and a job at an American university, and he said those are advantages others do not have.

He plans to publish his next book first in Turkey, in Turkish, and then to translate it for an American audience.

Another scholar from Turkey working on the Armenian genocide is Fatma Müge Göçek, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. Until she came to Princeton to earn her Ph.D., Göçek said that she didn’t know about the Armenian genocide. For that matter, she said she didn’t know that Armenians lived in Turkey — “and I had the best education Turkey has to offer.”

Learning the full history was painful, she said, and started for her when Armenians she met at Princeton talked to her about it and she was shocked and angry. Upon reading the sorts of materials she never saw in Turkey, the evidence was clear, she said.

Göçek’s books to date have been about the Westernization of the Ottoman Empire, but she said she came to the view that she needed to deal with the genocide in her next book. “I have worked on how the Ottoman Empire negotiated modernity,” she said, and the killings of 1915 are part of “the dark side of modernity.”

So the book she is writing now is a sociological analysis of how Turkish officials at the time justified to themselves what they were doing. She is basing her book on the writings these officials made themselves in which they frame the issue as one of “the survival of the Turks or of the Armenians” to justify their actions. While Göçek will be focusing on the self-justification, she said that the diaries and memoirs she is citing also show that the Turkish leaders knew exactly what they were doing, and that this wasn’t just a case of chaos and civil war getting out of hand.

Göçek said she was aware of the harassment faced by Akçam and others from Turkey who have stated in public that a genocide took place. But she said scholars must go where their research leads them. “That is why one decides to become an academic — you want to search certain questions. If you do not want to, and you are not willing to, you should go do something else.”

Related Links

HNN Hot Topics: Armenian Genocide

[Joseph]

Yeah, good luck with that.

http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=100563

Turks need a calmer approach to counter Armenian claims

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

The crucial point that many Turkish lobbyists miss is that you need to invoke calmer argumentation when your viewpoint is the less accepted one

Justin PAUL
We are a few weeks away from the date the Armenian Diaspora chooses to commemorate their interpretation of the events of 1915 as "genocide." This marks an especially strident peak of tension in a geo-political relationship that is already a poisoned chalice. The Armenian side's commemoration will likely be the same as it always is. But the Turkish camp should take the moral high-ground and begin to change their tactics.It is very understandable that Turks and Turkish-Americans feel cornered by the often aggressive tactics of the Armenian lobby, including recent demonstrations featuring disgusting imagery of a mock lynching of a Turkish imam. However, this is no excuse to respond in a manner that is frequently disingenuous. The use of the Pinocchio imagery at demonstrations in New York last year was beyond reprehensible. Let us keep in mind that the Turkish narrative that those demonstrators were seeking to uphold maintains that a substantial inter-communal conflict did take place with many deaths on both sides. The Pinocchio imagery seems to indicate that those demonstrating felt that 1915 with all its bloodshed was a giant cartoon. Any objective third party to walk by that day would likely see such a tactic as desperate.

Stop the Pinocchio imagery:

Strident and over-the-top reactions to the Armenian narrative are not going to engender support from neutrals. It is true that most Americans are disinterested in this whole affair, we would probably be barely aware of what happened in our own country in 1915 had it not been for World War I. But for those Americans with knowledge of history, and who are interested in exploring both sides of a complex equation, there needs to be an effective and reasonable response to the Armenian lobby's political and historical assertions.The major tactic that seems to be in favor with Ankara and Turkish American groups is the “shotgun” method. This is a term we use on certain types of law school exams that means listing as many arguments as possible without much concern for which are the best arguments. This is generally not the best way to do well in legal education, nor is it a charm offensive that is reaping the Turkish side many supporters. An example of this is the site tallarmeniantale.com, which, while done by a lay person, has been championed by some Turkish lobbyists as a resource. The overall design of the site has become slightly less of an aesthetic blight over the years, but its content is jumbled, disorganized and often intellectually misleading. This site launches ad-hominem attacks on Turkish intellectuals closer to the Armenian side, such as disparaging Fatma Muge Gokcek about her weight. It also portrays Armenians as arch Nazis on the basis of one particular collaborator, conveniently forgetting that many more Armenians died fighting Nazism. The site basically strays far and away from any noble defense of the Ottoman Muslims who lost their lives in World War I and enters a realm of vicious anti-Armenian diatribe. Its intellectual companionship would be such conspiracy oriented rags like the Protocols of Elders of Zion, as you would leave this site thinking the Armenian Lobby pretty much controls the United States and is one hateful cabal.

Stop ad-hominem attacks:

The Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA) has also engaged in some misrepresentations, especially when they listed ASALA terrorism as going on to the present day. Thanks to the efforts of Turkish Special Forces and Israel, ASALA is gone. The ATAA is a very solid and well-organized lobbying group that has done a lot for Turkish Americans and it behooves its otherwise solid reputation not to print such stories. Turkey has every right to mention ASALA and mourn the diplomats killed by those terrorists, but it should not be conflated with 1915. Similarly, intellectual honesty was dealt another blow when Taner Akçam was compared to Osama Bin Laden in some signs at Turkish demonstrations. Invoking Akçam's leftist past is indeed a valid point one can make when assessing potential bias he may have. But to say he is the same as the arch terrorist responsible for killing 3,000 Americans is pretty insulting. Would Turks like it if Abdullah Öcalan's murderous legacy were cheapened to score points by comparing him to some obscure American group, like ecological vandals? Yet another failed attempt to make a noble defense is Sarı Gelin, a popular Turkish documentary on the topic. It makes numerous false claims, including the “facts” that Armenian terrorists are buried under their 1915 memorial in Yerevan and that Armenians have co-opted a major university in California, which has in fact not been co-opted and is actually an insignificant community college. It has good material too, but that gets lost in its jumbled and oftentimes stridently tribal message.There also needs to be complete cessation of the tendency to conflate 1915 with dreadful Khojaly Massacre. The Karabakh question is completely separate from the historical question of 1915, and must be solved in a political manner, one that would ideally recognize Azerbaijan's territorial integrity. But Khojaly doesn't prove or disprove anything related to 1915. Then there have been the outlandish signs at Turkish demonstrations which allege that Armenian killed 3 million Turks and Azeris. Turks have accused Armenians of inflating numbers and there is some history, such as that of Justin McCarthy, which supports that viewpoint. But why is a lobby arguing that the Armenians inflate numbers going to turn around and do the same thing?

The crucial point that many Turkish lobbyists miss here is that you need to invoke calmer argumentation when your viewpoint is the less accepted one. It may not be fair that the Armenian narrative is in the ascendancy, but that matters little. When one viewpoint is entrenched, shrill and defensive argumentation that smacks of desperation and all-out defamation of the original accusing party makes people shut down. The Turkish side has numerous historians of both foreign and Turkish extraction whose viewpoint is valuable in offering a counterpoint to the better-known Armenian narrative. They should be relied on more heavily without the invective nonsense about Armenians being arch Nazis and being hateful to the core, and Pinocchio must go to the scrap heap of shallow argumentation. It is very possible to win American hearts and minds on this issue. When my Turkish friends ask me the question “who remembers the Ottoman Muslims,” I entirely empathize. But those dead Ottoman Muslims' memories are not being enhanced nor elevated in the Western conscious by the intellectually disorganized and shrill lobbying campaign currently being run against the Armenian allegations.

………

Justin Paul is a JD Candidate at the William Mitchell College of Law in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

[phantom]

Who is this Justin Paul retard?

[Joseph]

Who is this Justin Paul retard?

Just another law student...one that is smart enough to bring his horse to the right trough. The Turkish MFA should be paying him handsomely in a few years.

[bell-the-cat]

Who is this Justin Paul retard?

Does retardation account for your inability to see the considerable value in that article?

[bell-the-cat]

Just another law student...one that is smart enough to bring his horse to the right trough. The Turkish MFA should be paying him handsomely in a few years.

Most times I think you are an intelligent sensible guy, sometimes I think otherwise. This is one of those otherwise times.

OK, its author is at the least, a badly informed person. His "aggressive tactics of the Armenian lobby, including recent demonstrations featuring disgusting imagery of a mock lynching of a Turkish imam" comment is obviously some garbled account of that recent "event" at Ashkale - and he is so ill-informed that he thinks it was Armenians who were acting out the scene and not Turks! But his explicit condemnation of hate sites like TAT are extremely useful (I have just added part of his description of it to a Wikipedia entry). His overall attack on the extreme Turkish denialist sources is extremely valuable because such sources are so extreme that nobody can deal with them or neutralise them. His advocacy of a "calmer approach" must be encourged because the inevitable end of that calmer approach will be the acceptance of the historical reality (because there is no sustainable calm and reasonable argument that would support the official Turkish position).
What are you afraid of in this "calmer approach"? Are you perhaps not as sure of your arguments as you think, or is is it just easier for Armenians to confront only extremists?