IAGS Official Recognition

[Joseph]

IAGS OFFICIALLY RECOGNIZES ASSYRIAN, GREEK GENOCIDES

armradio.am
18.12.2007 12:27

In a groundbreaking move, the International Association of Genocide
Scholars (IAGS) has voted overwhelmingly to recognize the genocides
inflicted on Assyrian and Greek populations of the Ottoman Empire
between 1914 and 1923, independent French journalist Jean Eckian
informed.

The resolution passed with the support of fully 83 percent of IAGS
members who voted. The resolution declares that "it is the conviction
of the International Association of Genocide Scholars that the Ottoman
campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire between 1914 and
1923 constituted a genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian
and Anatolian Greeks."

It "calls upon the government of Turkey to acknowledge the genocides
against these populations, to issue a formal apology, and to take
prompt and meaningful steps toward restitution."

In 1997, the IAGS officially recognized the Armenian genocide. The
current resolution notes that while activist and scholarly efforts
have resulted in widespread acceptance of the Armenian genocide, there
has been "little recognition of the qualitatively similar genocides
against other Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire." Assyrians,
along with Pontian and Anatolian Greeks, were killed on a scale
equivalent in per capita terms to the catastrophe inflicted on the
Armenian population of the empire - and by much the same methods,
including mass executions, death marches, and starvation.

IAGS member Adam Jones drafted the resolution, and lobbied for it along
with fellow member Thea Halo, whose mother Sano survived the Pontian
Greek genocide. In an address to the membership at the IAGS conference
in Sarajevo, Bosnia, in July 2007, Jones paid tribute to the efforts of
"representatives of the Greek and Assyrian communities ... to publicize
and call on the present Turkish government to acknowledge the genocides
inflicted on their populations," which had made Asia Minor their
home for millennia. The umbrella term "Assyrians" includes Chaldeans,
Nestorians, Syriacs, Aramaens, Eastern Orthodox Syrians, and Jacobites.

"The overwhelming backing given to this resolution by the world's
leading genocide scholars organization will help to raise consciousness
about the Assyrian and Greek genocides," Jones said on December
15. "It will also act as a powerful counter to those, especially in
present-day Turkey, who still ignore or deny outright the genocides
of the Ottoman Christian minorities."

The resolution stated that "the denial of genocide is widely
recognized as the final stage of genocide, enshrining impunity for the
perpetrators of genocide, and demonstrably paving the way for future
genocides." The Assyrian population of Iraq, for example, remains
highly vulnerable to genocidal attack. Since 2003, Iraqi Assyrians
have been exposed to severe persecution and "ethnic cleansing"; it is
believed that up to half the Assyrian population has fled the country.

[Alexandros]

Thanks Joseph for posting this article.This is great news!

[Joseph]

Thanks Joseph for posting this article.This is great news!

You're welcome. Armenians lose sight or are often ignorant of what befell their coreligionists in Asia Minor. Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks all lived amongst each other and all suffered genocide at the hands of the Turks and Kurds.

[Joseph]

Letter to Erdogan from IAGS

http://www.genocidewatch.org/TurkishPMIAGSOpenLetterreArmenia6-13-05.htm

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 of the 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. 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.

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]