An Armenian village on the Turkish border, writes a Hetq article, is surrounded with a hill on the Turkish territory reading ‘Happy is he who is born a Turk.’ 

A vandalism, perhaps, in the eyes of environmentalists, blasphemy in the eyes of earth worshipers and irony in the eyes of history, the writing in Turkish doesn’t bother the villagers of the remote Armenian village. 

The residents of the Shirak village of Jrapi wake up every morning and look at the hills before them, where there are unintelligible words written in a foreign language.  Jrapi is a border village and the hills are located beyond the border, in Turkey. “What is written on that hill?” I asked deputy village head Pargev Balasanyan.

“It says, ‘Happy is he who is born a Turk,'” he said.

“Isn’t it difficult psychologically to see that writing every day?”

“What’s difficult is living here, what do we care about that writing?”

[…]

Read more at http://hetq.am/eng/society/7249/

Reform History Research Center and Ataturk Principles, based at Turkey’s Gazi University, have awarded several Turkish students for participating in a contest denying the Armenian Genocide, writes the Turkish Daily News.

Armenian issue discussed in students’ research papers

Thursday, November 1, 2007

ANKARA – Turkish Daily News

  The research paper of a university student who rejects the claims that the 1915-1917 killings of Armenians by the Ottomans are ”genocide” won an essay competition titled “Psychology, Sociology and the legal aspects of the Armenian issue: Reflections on societies and the measures to be taken,” organized by Gazi University.

   The award ceremony took place yesterday at Gazi University and the students of the winning essays were presented with their awards. The ceremony was organized by Gazi University’s Atatürk Principles and Reform History Research Center. Present at the ceremony were Meral Akşener, deputy speaker of Parliament, Onur Öymen the Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) deputy, Gazi University rector, Professor Kadri Yamaç and Professor Hale Şıvgın from the center. 

  The jury consisting of eight academics selected Mustafa Arıkan’s paper as the winning one. Arıkan is a history graduate student and in his article is titled “A Small Side Note to the Armenian Issue.” In it he says that the forced resettlement of the Armenians in 1915 was a necessity for the Ottoman Empire, setting his in-depth archival work as basis for his paper.

  “Because, in cooperation with the enemy, Armenians were killing the Muslims behind the scene. Forced resettlement, in this sense, was a kind of ‘self-defense’,” he said. “The amount Armenians who were subject to resettlement or the issue of how many died aren’t a matter of question. Because, the governors of the period were judged in Malta just after the World War I for the issue on forced resettlement of the Armenians but they were acquitted.”

  Arıkan also drew attention to the fact that archives indicated no evidence marking the Armenian genocide. “The mass graves which are expected to be found because of the supposed genocide haven’t been found despite all the intensive work. Hence, there is no ‘real’ evidence which supports the Armenian allegations except for the books published for publicity purposes during the war,” he said in his paper.

  Arıkan added that history exists in order to provide information and offer experience for humanity but it is used as an ideological apparatus today. “The Armenian issue, which came on the agenda for the political weakness of Turks, could solely be solved by being powerful in the political and (of course economical and military) sense,” he concluded.

[…]

An Azerbaijani journalist, who is serving 2 1/2 years of prison for having challenged Azerbaijan’s official line that Armenian forces deliberatly massacred a few hundred Azerbaijanis during the Nagorno-Karabakh war in Khojalu, has been given another 8 1/2 years of prison for speculating that Azerbaijan “could support a U.S. attack on neighboring Iran.”

Fatullayev behind bars

[…]

The Court for Grave Crimes convicted Eynulla Fatullayev, the founder and editor of two independent newspapers that stopped publication this spring amid government pressure, on charges of making a terrorist threat and inciting interethnic conflict.

The article in Real Azerbaijan claimed that President Ilham Aliev could support an American military operation against Iran and listed facilities that might face Iranian bomb attacks if the nation were to back the U.S.

There is concern in mostly Muslim former Soviet republics that support U.S. military operations in Iraq or Afghanistan over the possibility that the United States could use their territory for an attack on Iran – a constant topic of rumors.

Azerbaijan has pledged that it won’t assist the U.S. but people living along the border were nervous, pointing to an American-built radar facility and the upgrading of a nearby airport.

Fatullayev, who already is serving a 2 1/2 year prison sentence on a libel conviction, denounced the verdict as politically motivated.

“That’s evidence of political pressure on me as a journalist,” he said.

Aliev, who took over from his father in a 2003 election denounced by opponents as a sham, has faced persistent criticism over the heavy-handed treatment of independent media and opposition parties.

As much as being an issue of freedom of speech, Azerbaijan’s persecution of Fatullayev is clearly not for his views on a possible attack on Iran but for having challenged Azerbaijan’s anti-Armenian rhetoric of charging Armenian forces with a massacre of Azeri civilians in 1992 in a village in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The anti-Armenianism is Azerbaijan has no boundaries, and people who challenge it in Azerbaijan pay a huge price, let’s say, at least, 10 years for now.