Robert Fisk has another moving and provoking column on the Armenian Genocide in The Independent:

“”It’s a tiny book, only 116 pages long, but it contains a monumental truth, another sign that one and a half million dead Armenians will not go away. It’s called My Grandmother: a Memoir and it’s written by Fethiye Cetin and it opens up graves. For when she was growing up in the Turkish town of Marden, Fethiye’s grandmother Seher was known as a respected Muslim housewife. It wasn’t true. She was a Christian Armenian and her real name was Heranus. We all know that the modern Turkish state will not acknowledge the 1915 Armenian Holocaust, but this humble book may help to change that. Because an estimated two million Turks – alive in Turkey today – had an Armenian grandparent.

As children they were put on the death marches south to the Syrian desert but – kidnapped by brigands, sheltered by brave Muslim villagers (whose own courage also, of course, cannot be acknowledged by Turkey) or simply torn from their dying mothers – later became citizens of the modern Turkey which Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was to set up. Yet as Maureen Freely states in her excellent preface, four generations of Turkish schoolchildren simply do not know Ottoman Anatolia was between a quarter and a half Christian.

Heranus – whose face stares out at the reader from beneath her Muslim headscarf – was seized by a Turkish gendarme, who sped off on horseback after lashing her mother with a whip. Even when she died of old age, Fethiye tried to record the names of Heranus’s Armenian parents – Isguhi and Hovannes – but was ignored by the mosque authorities. It was Heranus, with her razor-sharp memory, who taught Fethiye of her family’s fate and this book does record in terrible detail the now familiar saga of mass cruelty, of rape and butchery.

In one town, the Turkish police separated husbands, sons and old men from their families and locked the women and children into a courtyard with high walls. From outside came blood-curdling shrieks. As Fethiye records, “Heranus and her brothers clung to their mother’s skirts, but though she was terrified, she was desperate to know what was going on. Seeing that another girl had climbed on to someone’s shoulders to see over the wall, she went to her side. The girl was still looking over the wall; when, after a very long while, she came down again, she said what she had seen. All her life, Heranus would never forget what came from this girl’s lip: ‘They’re cutting the men’s throats, and throwing them into the river.’”

Fethiye says she wrote her grandmother’s story to “reconcile us with our history; but also to reconcile us with ourselves” which, as Freely writes, cuts right through the bitter politics of genocide recognition and denial. Of course, Ataturk’s decision to move from Arabic to Latin script also means that vital Ottoman documents recalling the genocide cannot be consulted by most modern-day Turks. At about the same time, it’s interesting to note, Stalin was performing a similarly cultural murder in Tajikistan where he moved the largely Persian language from Arabic to Cyrillic.

And so history faded away. And I am indebted to Cosette Avakian, who sent me Fethiye’s book and who is herself the granddaughter of Armenian survivors and who brings me news of another memorial of Armenians, this time in Wales. Wales, you may ask? And when I add that this particular memorial – a handsome Armenian cross embedded in stone – was vandalised on Holocaust Memorial Day last January, you may also be amazed. And I’m not surprised because not a single national paper reported this outrage. Had it been a Jewish Holocaust memorial stone that was desecrated, it would – quite rightly – have been recorded in our national newspapers. But Armenians don’t count.

As a Welsh Armenian said on the day, “This is our holiest shrine. Our grandparents who perished in the genocide do not have marked graves. This is where we remember them.” No one knows who destroyed the stone: a request for condemnation by the Turkish embassy in London went, of course, unheeded, while in Liverpool on Holocaust Day, the Armenians were not even mentioned in the service.

Can this never end? Fethiye’s wonderful book may reopen the past, but it is a bleak moment to record that when the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was prosecuted for insulting “Turkishness”, Fethiye defended him in court. Little good it did Dink. He was murdered in January last year, his alleged killer later posing arrogantly for a picture next to the two policemen who were supposed to be holding him prisoner. It was in Dink’s newspaper Agos that Fethiye was to publish her grandmother’s death notice. This was how Heranus’s Armenian sister in America came to read of her death. For Heranus’s mother survived the death marches to remarry and live in New York.

Wales, the United States, even Ethiopia, where Cosette Avakian’s family eventually settled, it seems that every nation in the world is home to the Armenians. But can Turkey ever be reconciled with its own Armenian community, which was Hrant Dink’s aim? When Fethiye found her Aunt Marge in the US – this was Heranus’ sister, of course, by her mother’s second marriage – she tried to remember a song that Heranus sang as a child. It began with the words “A sad shepherd on the mountain/Played a song of love…” and Marge eventually found two Armenian church choir members who could put the words together.

“My mother never missed the village dances,” Marge remembered. “She loved to dance. But after her ordeal, she never danced again.” And now even when the Welsh memorial stone that stands for her pain and sorrow was smashed, the British Government could not bring itself to comment. As a member of the Welsh Armenian community said at the time, “We shall repair the cross again and again, no matter how often it is desecrated.” And who, I wonder, will be wielding the hammer to smash it next time?”"

Bookmark to:

Last month The Southern Poverty Law Center, a few days ago Inside Higher Ed, and now The Washington Post have stories about the ultimate firing of an American scholar by the Turkish government for changing his views from denying to admitting the Armenian Genocide.

What is quite interesting in this growing media coverage is a lesser-known mention of the firing by cartoonist Murad “Holdwater” Gumen at his tallarmeniantale.com hatesite. Back in October 2007, while mocking another piece by Inside Higher Ed on genocide denial, Gumen mentioned the following to demonstrate, according to Gumen, Turkey’s tolerance of academic diversity:

“As another example to demonstrate that the ITS [Institute of Turkish Studies] is out of the clutches of the Turkish government, not long ago its chairman was Donald Quataert, one of the 69 scholars who had signed the 1985 advertisement signifying there was no genocide. Quataert has since revised his views; one must suspect the historian has found striking new genocide evidence in order to have performed his 180 degree turnaround. From the bits and pieces I have gathered, an academician, whom I’m sure has no ties to the Turkish government, pointed out this oddity to some higher-ups, wondering why a ‘genocide advocate’ should be in charge of the ITS, and as a result, Donald Quataert was replaced.”

While the Turkish Ambassador, as quoted in the Washington Post, denies any personal or official involvement in the de facto firing, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that Quataert lost his position due to his stance on the Armenian Genocide. But who are the “higher-ups” that Gumen mentions is interesting to find out. If Quataert was the chairman, who was “higher” than him in ITS?

Bookmark to:

Threatening to damage its uniquely objective reputation in the smallest of the former Soviet states, ArmeniaNow.com has published a partisan commentary on a recent Jewish-American visit to Armenia written by a member of a Diaspora organization often criticized as “soft” for its cooperation with some not-so-pro-Armenian groups.  The same Armenian organization, some say, is now criticizing others for the same thing it has been doing for many years.

The commentary, provided by the Armenian Assembly of America (AAA) to its sponsored publication, reads:

A two man delegation representing the American Jewish Committee (AJC), has just finished a visit to Armenia accompanied by two employees of Gerard Cafesjian (founder of the Cafesjian Foundation and long-time philanthropist/investor in Armenia), where they met with the new president, defense minister and others. Their visit to Armenia in itself is not surprising, since the AJC had sought such a trip in conjunction with the Armenian Assembly of America for the past five years, but the Assembly has repeatedly said “no.”

The Assembly told the AJC that its opposition to the passage of the Armenian Genocide resolution made such a visit under Assembly auspices inappropriate. I was involved in the first rejection, as was the former Executive Director of the Assembly, Ross Vartian. Now, however, Vartian, is the Executive Director of Cafesjian’s private Washington, D.C. operation named USAPAC.

He arranged for Peter Rosenblatt, a prominent leader of the AJC and Barry Jacobs, who has the title of Strategic Studies Director, to meet with Armenia’s top leadership.

Jacobs circulates articles from various sources supporting not only Israeli positions but pro Turkish and pro Azerbaijani policies as well. Jacobs’s bias against Armenia is palpable. A New York Times photograph taken at the session of the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee showed Jacobs seated among a group of Turkish protesters wearing badges saying “NO” to the pending Genocide resolution.

[...]

According to David Boyajian, an outspoken Armenian activist who sparked the recent fight against the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for its refusal to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, the controversy at stake is not as much the obvious anti-Armenian Jewish leaders’ visit to Armenia (which needs to be condemned), but that the Armenian Assembly of America - the organization that now criticizes its breakaway wing - has a long history of cooperating with deniers of the Armenian Genocide itself.

In Boyajian’s words:

It takes chutzpah AAA - long-time apologists for the very Jewish denialists that it is now criticizing - to criticize USAPAC, not that USAPAC does not fully deserve it (and I have been emailing many people the past few days and getting them to call/write USAPAC).
 
And where does Armenia stand on this?  It’s president gave an audience to a genocide denier.  Maybe Armenia deserves some criticism too.
 
Fact is, AAA has done next to nothing to help on ADL/NPFH issue, and we all know it.
 
Suddenly, AAA is now some sort of hardliner?
 
The main reason AAA is criticizing USAPAC now is that the latter is run by Cafesjian and Vartian, who quit AAA.  Whom is the AAA kidding? 
 
AAA would be (very) well-advised to look to its own record.
 
This article is also full of outright falsehoods, and I will be proving it.

Jewcy, a website by young Jewish-American bloggers, has condemned Barry Jacobs, the gentleman who was given a free ride to Armenia by USAPAC, for denying the Armenian Genocide. As a supporter of open dialogue, I myself am not outright against USAPAC’s sponsorship of Jacobs’ trip to Armenia pending on the results. If Jacobs gives up his anti-Armenian campaign, which is highly unlikely to happen, then USAPAC will be proven right in its judgment. 

Bookmark to:

While Turkey says it wants to discuss “the events of 1915″ with Armenia, its Ambassador to the United States has fired one of its own payroll scholars for doing the unimaginable - referring to the Armenian genocide as such.

Recounting the fiasco, The Armenian Reporter writes in its May 31, 2008 issue that a in a letter to Turkey’s government “the Middle East Studies Association [MESA] on May 27 condemned the forced resignation of Donald Quataert from the chair of the Institute of Turkish Studies after Prof. Quataert affirmed in a book review that ‘what happened to the Armenians readily satisfies the U.N. definition of genocide.’”

Expecting retaliation  from at least other scholars on Turkish payroll (but apparently not from the Ambassador himself), Prof. Quataert urged pro-Turkish historians “to take their rightful responsibility to perform the proper research” on the Armenian annihilation of 1915.

The above words, mentioned in a scholarly book review by Dr. Quataert, angered Turkish Ambassador Nebi Şensoy - honorary chairman of the Institute of Turkish Studies - who requested the scholar to retract them.

“We are enormously concerned that unnamed high officials in Ankara felt it was inappropriate for Professor Quataert to continue as chairman of the board of governors and threatened to revoke the funding for the ITS if he did not publicly retract statements made in his review or separate himself from the Chairmanship of the ITS,” wrote MESA president Mervat Hatem in the letter of protest to Turkey’s Prime Minister.

The Armenian Reporter states that:

[...]

A professor of history at the State University of New York at Binghamton, Mr. Quataert chaired the ITS board of governors from 2001 until December 13, 2006. In 1985, as an associate professor at the University of Houston, he was among the 69 Ottoman, Turkish, and Middle Eastern area scholars who petitioned against a House Joint Resolution that memorialized “the one and one half million people of Armenian ancestry who were victims of genocide perpetrated in Turkey between 1915 and 1923.”

As he recalled the emerging Ottoman and Turkish area scholarship of the 1980s from a vantage point twenty years later, Prof. Quataert wrote in his book review, “the authors were not writing critical history but polemics” and “many of their works were directly sponsored and published by the Turkish government.” To date, said MESA, most of the scholarship in this area still fails to adhere to the highest professional standards “and as such serves neither the field of Ottoman-Turkish studies nor the interests of the Republic of Turkey and its citizens.”

Nevertheless, both Prof. Quataert in his review and MESA with its 2005 Academic Freedom Award lauded the new wave of critical thinking in this field - specifically mentioning a conference held at Istanbul’s Bilgi University “despite official intimidation and public harassment,” as Prof. Quataert recalled.

[...]

While it is sadenning to see an academic being de facto fired by a politician, it is encouraging that a scholar on Turkish payroll has finally realized and admitted the truth of the Armenian Genocide.  

In his weekly column, California Courier publisher Harout Sassounian writes that “Prof. Quataert’s transformation from a denialist to a believer in the Armenian Genocide is based on the growing body of scholarship in recent years both within and outside Turkey. A comparison of the 2000 and 2005 editions of his book, ‘The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922,’ illustrates the gradual evolution of his position on the Armenian Genocide. In a sharp departure from the cautious language used in his first  edition, Dr. Quataert… comes to the conclusion in his 2006 book review that what had happened to the Armenians in 1915 was indeed a Genocide.”

Reminding that this is not the first controversy including the Turkish-sponsored organization, College of William and Mary professor emeritus Roger Smith wrote in a discussion forum on Armenian-Turkish relations that as a de facto lobbying organization ITS shouldn’t be tax-free.

[...]

Bookmark to:

Globe and Mail from Canada reports that a nationalist Turkish group has succeeded in banning a recommended High School book on Genocide. The banned book, which included a chapter on the WWI extermination of Ottoman Armenians, has been replaced by works of two genocide deniers.

A book about genocide has been pulled from the recommended reading list of a new Toronto public school course because of objections from the Turkish-Canadian community, the author says.

Barbara Coloroso’s Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide was originally part of a resource list for the Grade 11 history course, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, set to launch across the Toronto District School Board this fall.

The book examines the Holocaust, which exterminated six million Jews in the Second World War; the Rwandan slaughter of nearly one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994, and the massacres of more than a million Armenians in 1895, 1909 and 1915.

[...]

Ms. Coloroso, a best-selling author of parenting books, said she wasn’t surprised her work was removed, given that “ever since the book came out, the Turks have mounted a worldwide campaign objecting to it, which is not surprising because of the denial of the genocide.”

She said what upset her was not so much that her book had been pulled, but that it was replaced by works by Bernard Lewis and Guenter Lewy, whom she refers to as deniers of the Armenian genocide.

“I knew when I wrote Extraordinary Evil that I would anger some genocide deniers,” she wrote to Ms. Connelly. “I am disappointed that a small group of people can bully an entire committee. …”

[...]

Bookmark to:

Who would think that another genocide would be denied in the Republic of Turkey? But here you go - it is time for Darfur.

The head of Sudan’s genocidal regime Omar al-Bashir “the Sudanese Talaat” is in Ankara, reports The New York Times, where the African dictator has not only denied the genocide in Sudan’s region of Darfur but has also justified the government promotion of Musa Hilal - one of the commanders of the Darfuri massacres.

On an official visit to Turkey, Mr. Bashir described the sheik, Musa Hilal, as a Sudanese citizen who is influential in Darfur and has “contributed greatly to stability and security in the region,” Reuters reported from Ankara, Turkey’s capital.

“We in Sudan believe that those accusations against Mr. Hilal are untrue,” Turkey’s state-run Anatolian News Agency quoted Mr. Bashir as saying. “Right now in Darfur, the real murderers are those who are aided by Europe and others.”

Mr. Musa is believed to be a leader of the janjaweed, Arab militia forces that have committed mass killings of civilians in Darfur. The conflict has also displaced 2.5 million people in less than five years.

Bashir seems to have learned a lot from the Republic of Turkey - a country that itself denies the Armenian Genocide. Bashir’s statement that “the real murderers are those who are aided by Europe and others” is an implication that the indigenous people of Darfur - who are still being massacred - are “traitors” and they are “criminals.” Just like Talaat, the architect of the Armenian Genocide, had said that Armenians only had themselves to blame.

Bookmark to: