In a rare detailed interview to an American publication Turkish historian Taner Akcam has revealed information about his upcoming book on the Armenian Genocide saying it will show “[t]he genocidal intent… based only on Ottoman documents.”  

Speaking to Minnesota Law & Politics, Akcam – one of handful Turkish historians to publicly acknowledge the Armenian Genocide by Ottoman Turkey – has said:

I’m working on some research projects. I just finished work with another leading scholar of the Armenian Genocide, Vahakn Dadrian. We are writing a two-volume book on the indictments and verdicts and minutes of the Istanbul trials. This is a very important first-hand account of the Genocide.

I’m also working on a book I call the Demographic Policy. My central argument in A Shameful Act was that the Armenian Genocide was not an isolated act against Armenians but a part of a demographic policy enacted during World War I. It had two main components. One was against the Muslim non-Turkish population, who were redistributed, relocated and resettled among the Turkish population with the aim of assimilation. The second was against the Christian population, the Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians. The goal was to get the Christians out of Anatolia, what we now know as Turkey-to forcibly move them to Greece or Iran. Or, in the case of the Armenians, to eliminate them altogether.

In 1914, Anatolia was about 25 to 30 percent Christian. After the war it was 3 to 4 percent. The aim was to reduce the Christian population to no more than 5 or 10 percent so that they would have little sway in Turkey.

Akcam has also given interesting details about his life including hesitations to talk on the Genocide:

I grew up in a very secular family. My father was an atheist, but I grew up, of course, within Islamic culture. I am sure I carry on much of this Islamic culture in the way I live, but in terms of my personal convictions, I am very secular.

Please understand that I am a very ordinary Turkish intellectual. I come from the ’68 Generation — here it was the Hippie Generation, but we too were against the Vietnam War, American foreign policy, and so on. As progressive people of that time in Turkey, we believed that we, Turks created our nation-state in a fight against the great imperialist powers. We assigned a very negative role to the Christian minorities in Turkey, to the Armenians. To us, they were collaborators. This is how we perceived ourselves and the world, and how we saw Turkey’s past. Since we saw all Christians in Turkey as allied with the imperialist state, we had a very negative image of them. As progressives, we always thought it was better not to touch on the topic of the Armenian Genocide, because to do so would be to enter a very dark, suspicious terrain, which could not be understood easily. It was not easy for me to decide to work on the Genocide. At first I thought: I’m working on a very suspicious terrain, better not to go in, actually.

After giving fascinating details about Turkey’s current Islamic leadership’s somewhat “silent” acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide and their pressure from nationalist groups, Akcam provides us with some insights to the structure of nationalist Turkish groups in and outside Turkey:

The group who organizes the campaign against me in Turkey and here in the U.S. is a part of what we call the “Deep State,” the military-bureaucratic complex. This non-elected government body is behind the campaign to discredit Genocide scholars. The nationalists and the Social Democrat Party are behind this effort. Here in the U.S. there are some groups organized and controlled mostly by Turkish diplomats. I can give three names: ATAA (Assembly of Turkish American Associations); Turkish Forum (an e-mail group, coordinated between different initiatives in different states in the U.S.) and a Web site, TallArmenianTale.com (one of the most popular Armenian Genocide denial sites).

Definitely there are Turkish diplomats who nourish these sites with information. I mean, who could have given TallArmenianTale.com the exact date of my arrest in 1974? Even I had forgotten that! It was for leafleting! And there is no record of this in any journal or newspaper. This is what that Web site claims is a terrorist act. There must be some police officer in Ankara from whom they got the information. All these groups that I mentioned (ATAA, Turkish Forum, TallArmenianTale.com, some diplomats and police officers from Turkey) are very well connected.

Akcam has taken interest in the above Turkish websites especially after one of them – TallArmenianTale.com – organized hate campaigns against Akcam.  Operated by mysterious “Holdwater,” TallArmenianTale.com is one of the worst anti-Armenian websites and was most secretive until Akcam discovered that “Holdwater” is none other than Turkish-American cartoonist Murad Gumen. 

It turns out that it wasn’t as much the concern for “the safety of American soldiers in Iraq” but  for losing free airfares to Turkey that made some United States lawmakers drop support for commemorating the Armenian Genocide.

New investigation by Politico states that “[o]rganizations promoting Israel, China and Turkey were among the biggest trip sponsors this year” for Congress members.”

According to the report, the trips to Turkey might have paid off.

[…]

Sixteen lawmakers and congressional staffers flew to Istanbul and Ankara on two different trips this year, courtesy of the USAFMC’s “Congressional Study Group on Turkey,” a 2005 creation whose funding includes pro-Turkey interest groups and companies that do business with the country.

Turkey has been in the spotlight this year as it fought a possible congressional recognition of the genocide in Armenia.

The Turkish government mounted a full-court lobbying press against the resolution, which ultimately was defeated.

The nation is also involved in sensitive negotiations over whether it can wage its military battle against the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) over the border in Iraq.

“There was not a meeting we had where those two things did not come up,” said Marilyn J. Dillihay, the legislative director for Rep. Stephen I. Cohen (D-Tenn.). 

“For somebody who is a new staffer like me, it was a fabulous immersion in those kinds of issues,” she said, especially because the issues “were at the forefront this year.”

The week-long trips occurred in May and August, just when Congress was debating the Armenian resolution.

The new ethics rules say that such trips cannot be planned or arranged by a lobbyist.

That doesn’t mean that lobbyists cannot meet the delegations when they arrive.

While the sponsors are not allowed to explicitly tell lawmakers how to vote on a piece of legislation, there is nothing to prohibit them from making the case for their position.

The talk about the Armenian genocide resolution made a big impact on her, Dillihay said.

What she learned, she said, was that “what seemed like a nonbinding, whoop-de-do resolution, had huge resonance somewhere else.”

“The more I have learned about it, the less I thought it was the proper thing to do,” she said.

The Capitol Hill delegation’s agenda included meetings with Turkey’s prime minister and the ministers of foreign affairs and economic affairs.

The trips were entirely planned by the USAFMC, according to the group’s executive director, Peter Weichlein, who responded to written questions.

“No representatives of the Turkish government have any influence over any aspect of our trips, programming and funding,” he wrote.

During the August trip, the travelers stopped at the home of former U.S. Rep. Stephen Solarz, a longtime lobbyist for Turkey.

Solarz spoke to the group about the Armenian resolution and the PKK issue, Dillihay said.

“He expressed a sense of what kind of effect it could have on Turkey and U.S.-Turkish relationships,” Dillihay said.

“If it was lobbying, it was soft as it could be. It was just like somebody hosting you in their house for lunch,” she said.

The purpose of the meeting with Solarz was refreshments and a discussion of history, Weichlein wrote.

Cohen, who also went on a trip to Turkey, opposes the Armenian resolution, citing Turkey’s strategic importance in the Middle East region and support for the U.S. in the Iraq war.

Bob Livingston, the former congressman whose firm took the lead in lobbying for Turkey on the Armenia issue, told Politico he was not involved in planning the congressional delegation’s visit.

“I had absolutely nothing to do with this trip,” he said.

Livingston said Solarz was working with his firm to lobby for Turkey at the time he met with the congressional delegation, and that he himself is on the USAFMC board.

In fact, even if Solarz did lobby the group, he would have been in compliance, said Jan Baran, an ethics expert at Wiley Rein.

Baran, who has done work for USAFMC on other matters, said the rules prohibit a lobbyist from traveling with a congressional delegation, not from meeting with one once it has arrived.

The ethics rules definition of “a trip” as only applying to the physical movement between locations “is fundamentally absurd,” Baran said.

[…]

Istanbul-based young American photographer Kathryn Cook’s “Memory Denied: Turkey and the Armenian Genocide” project has been granted $25,000 as the winner of the 2008 Aftermath Project, reports PDNonline:

The Aftermath Project has announced a $25,000 grant for photographer Kathryn Cook to support her project “Memory Denied: Turkey and the Armenian Genocide.”

A one-time special award of $2,500 will go to Natela Grigalashvili of Tbilisi, Georgia, for her project “Refugees of Georgian Villages.”

Finalists for the 2008 Aftermath grants were Pep Bonet of Mallorca, Spain; Tinka Dietz of Hamburg, Germany; and Christine Fenzl of Berlin, Germany.

The Aftermath Project, which is supported largely by the Open Society Institute, sponsors projects that show the effects of war and conflict.

Judges for this year’s grants were photographer Jeff Jacobson, Fortune deputy picture editor Scott Thode and photographer and Aftermath Project founder Sara Terry.

Cook is an American photographer based in Istanbul who is represented by Agence Vu and Prospekt. Her project on Turkey examines the impact of the Armenian massacres of the early 20th century and the scars it left on the country’s national identity. Turkey still refuses to officially label it “genocide,” a word Cook uses in the title of the project. The Aftermath Project says her work “explores the many ways that the greater implications of memory and history continue to resonate at home and abroad.”

Cook has worked as an Associated Press photographer in Panama, freelanced for a variety of publications including Time and The New York Times, and was featured in PDN’s 30 this year.

Georgian photographer Grigalashvili was awarded a grant for a project on refugees who have fled conflicts in the Caucasus region and have settled in villages in the mountains of Georgia.

All five photographers recognized this year will have their work included in “War Is Only Half the Story, Volume 2,” to be published in Spring 2009 by Aperture, Mets and Schilt, and The Aftermath Project.

America’s public television, PBS, has posted essays written by U.S. High School students dealing with the Armenian Genocide resolution in the Congress.

Erika Martin, for instance, has written in her essay:

The House of Representatives should not pass the resolution acknowledging the Armenian genocide at this point in time.

The genocide occurred form 1915-1917 where approximately 1.5 million Armenians were massacred by the Ottoman Empire. The Armenian Genocide should be recognized, but at the proper time when innocent lives are not in danger by the potential consequences that could occur from passing the resolution.

[…]

Kim Kinden, on the other hand, has argued that moralpolitik is realpolitik:

On October 10, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the resolution and around mid-November the House of Representatives will cast their votes and come up with the final verdict. They should pass the resolution because the Turkish government needs to recognize this tragic event as a genocide.

The Armenian Genocide began in 1915, during the Ottoman Empire, and ended in 1917. During that time there was at least 1.5 million Armenians murdered out of 2.5 million.

The House of Representatives should pass this resolution because the Armenian Genocide is not that different from the Holocaust.

The Holocaust had way over 1.5 million victims, but they still died for no real reason, just like the Armenians who were murdered. Also, they were starved and tortured just like the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

[…]

The story of Turkey’s hidden Armenians is not so hidden any longer as a groundbreaking book by a famed Turkish human-rights lawyer breaks the silence of her suppressed Armenian roots that she learned about at an adult age.

Amazon announces the date of the release of the English translation of “My Grandmother: A Memoir” – March 1, 2008:

When Fethiye Çetin was growing up in the small Turkish town of Maden, she knew her grandmother as a happy and universally respected Muslim housewife.

It would be decades before her grandmother told her the truth: that she was by birth a Christian and an Armenian, that her name was not Seher but Heranush, that most of the men in her village had been slaughtered in 1915, that she, along with most of the women and children, had been sent on a death march.

She had been saved (and torn from her mother’s arms) by the Turkish gendarme captain who went on to adopt her. But she knew she still had family in America. Could Fethiye help her find her lost relations before she died?

There are an estimated two million Turks whose grandparents could tell them similar stories. But in a country that maintains the Armenian genocide never happened, such talk can be dangerous. In her heartwrenching memoir, Fethiye Çetin breaks the silence.

Via Groong, The Noyan Tapan News Agency informs that a theatre play denying the Armenian Genocide has been organized for Turkish prisoners.

ADANA, NOVEMBER 16, NOYAN TAPAN. In one of the prisons of Adana the
actors of the Chukurova’s Center of Culture and Art have staged the
“Yell: the tale of the so-called Armenian Genocide” performance.

As the Turkish press reports, the performance has been staged within
the frameworks of the cultural events organized by the management of
the prison for the prisoners.

Idris Shahin, the Head of the Chukurova’s Center of Culture and Art,
declared that the above-mentioned performance “telling about the
tale of the Armenian Genocide” will also be performed in a number of
villages of Turkey.

Are the Turkish officials going to release again their prisoners to “relocate” Armenians to Moon as was done in 1915? What’s the point in making prisoners to hate Armenians even more?

Founders of a new, semi-official United States Task Force on Genocide were grilled on official attitude toward the Armenian Genocide during their very first press conference, according to Corporate Crime Reporter and CNN.

An official press release was also issued on the task force on November 13, 2007, making no reference to the Armenian Genocide:

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen today announced that they will co-chair a Genocide Prevention Task Force jointly convened by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the United States Institute of Peace. The Task Force will generate practical recommendations to enhance the U.S. government’s capacity to respond to emerging threats of genocide and mass atrocities.“The world agrees that genocide is unacceptable and yet genocide and mass killings continue. Our challenge is to match words to deeds and stop allowing the unacceptable. That task, simple on the surface, is in fact one of the most persistent puzzles of our times. We have a duty to find the answer before the vow of ‘never again’ is once again betrayed,” said Secretary Albright.“We are convinced that the U.S. government can and must do better in preventing genocide—a crime that threatens not only our values but our national interests,” said Secretary Cohen.[…]“The Task Force will harness tremendous expertise from across the spectrum and include distinguished Americans with experience in politics, diplomacy, economics, humanitarian and military affairs,” said Ambassador Brandon Grove, Executive Director of the Genocide Prevention Task Force. “It is a unique partnership of organizations and individuals that care deeply about preventing genocide.”The Task Force will issue a report in December 2008. Continue Reading »

Turkish researcher Ziya Meral has an interesting article in the Turkish Daily News(Nov 12, 2007) calling for “rehumanization” of Armenians by Turks and vice verse.

You are not alone if you have not heard the word ”rehumanization” before. Unlike its twin sister ”dehumanization,” rehumanization is not a popular tool in politics and identity construction.

[…] 

Rehumanization is restoring the other’s dignity and humanity and attributing the other the same rights ”we” have or demand. Without rehumanization, there can never be reconciliation simply because without accepting each other as human beings and acknowledging the other’s voice, we can never expect that the other will hear our pain and concerns and be moved by it to act unselfishly.

With stereotypes of Armenians and official historical propaganda in Turkey, Ziya says there was “no room left to hear what Armenians were trying to communicate.” 

Then one day, I found myself on a trip to Armenia and Karabakh. Thousands of scenarios went through my mind and none of them was about receiving hospitality. After two weeks, I found myself crying in a church in Karabakh and embracing a new Armenian friend. The same night, I remember crying more around a dinner table dominated by vodka shots and toasts for a better future. I was finally able to see who lives on the other side of Mount Ararat; not a group of conspirators with a mischievous plan, but a group of broken and hopeful people. Since then, ”Armenians” isn’t an abstract category for me. The tension between us have been rehumanized and made flesh and blood.

The author, then, discusses Armenian attitudes that the the Armenian Genocide was committed because Turks are a genocidal race.  But we all know that many Turks saved Armenians during the Genocide.  Yet…

If my memory does not fail me, I do not remember seeing a section in the memorial in Yerevan like the one in Yad Vashem– the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, dedicated to ”righteous among the nations.” The phrase refers to non-Jews who risked their lives for protecting Jews. It is a simple yet profound way of rehumanizing a past conflict by showing the humanity found in both ends of the story. Aren’t there Turks who have risked their lives protecting their neighbours and friends? An Armenian friend once replied to me by saying “only a handful, most of them did so for their own benefits.” In a single stroke, whatever they have done was relativized and stripped off its humanity. Thus, we are back to the black and white narrative of  ”Evil Turks.”

[…]

Although I have visited the Genocide memorial many times, I have not been to the actual museum.  I don’t know if there is a section for Turks who saved Armenians, but I highly doubt that there is.

My own great-grandmother was saved and raised for over five years by a Turkish woman in Urfa.  The Turkish woman didn’t do it for her benefit, at least not for benefiting the “Turks,” but benefiting humanity.  I agree with the author that there should be a section in the Genocide museum for those Turks who saved many Armenians.  We shall never forget these brave souls.

Here is Robert Fisk’s November 10, 2007 column in the Independent that I am posting in full.

Robert Fisk: Holocaust denial in the White House

The Turks say the Armenians died in a ‘civil war’, and Bush goes along with their lies

Published: 10 November 2007

How are the mighty fallen! President George Bush, the crusader king who would draw the sword against the forces of Darkness and Evil, he who said there was only “them or us”, who would carry on, he claimed, an eternal conflict against “world terror” on our behalf; he turns out, well, to be a wimp. A clutch of Turkish generals and a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign on behalf of Turkish Holocaust deniers have transformed the lion into a lamb. No, not even a lamb – for this animal is, by its nature, a symbol of innocence – but into a household mouse, a little diminutive creature which, seen from afar, can even be confused with a rat. Am I going too far? I think not.

Had the genocide that Bush refuses to acknowledge not taken place – as the Turks claim – the Americans would be asking the Armenians for permission to use Incirlik.

The “story so far” is familiar enough. In 1915, the Ottoman Turkish authorities carried out the systematic genocide of one and a half million Christian Armenians. There are photographs, diplomatic reports, original Ottoman documentation, the process of an entire post-First World War Ottoman trial, Winston Churchill and Lloyd George and a massive report by the British Foreign Office in 1915 and 1916 to prove that it is all true. Even movie film is now emerging – real archive footage taken by Western military cameramen in the First World War – to show that the first Holocaust of the 20th century, perpetrated in front of German officers who would later perfect its methods in their extermination of six million Jews, was as real as its pitifully few Armenian survivors still claim.

But the Turks won’t let us say this. They have blackmailed the Western powers – including our own British Government, and now even the US – to kowtow to their shameless denials. These (and I weary that we must repeat them, because every news agency and government does just that through fear of Ankara’s fury) include the canard that the Armenians died in a “civil war”, that they were anyway collaborating with Turkey’s Russian enemies, that fewer Armenians were killed than have been claimed, that as many Turkish Muslims were murdered as Armenians.

And now President Bush and the United States Congress have gone along with these lies. There was, briefly, a historic moment for Bush to walk tall after the US House Foreign Relations Committee voted last month to condemn the mass slaughter of Armenians as an act of genocide. Ancient Armenian-American survivors gathered at a House panel to listen to the debate. But as soon as Turkey’s fossilised generals started to threaten Bush, I knew he would give in.

Listen, first, to General Yasar Buyukanit, chief of the Turkish armed forces, in an interview with the newspaper Milliyet. The passage of the House resolution, he whinged, was “sad and sorrowful” in view of the “strong links” Turkey maintained with its Nato partners. And if this resolution was passed by the full House of Representatives, then “our military relations with the US would never be as they were in the past… The US, in that respect, has shot itself in the foot”.

Now listen to Mr Bush as he snaps to attention before the Turkish general staff. “We all deeply regret the tragic suffering (sic) of the Armenian people… But this resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings. Its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in Nato and in the global war on terror.” I loved the last bit about the “global war on terror”. Nobody – save for the Jews of Europe – has suffered “terror” more than the benighted Armenians of Turkey in 1915. But that Nato should matter more than the integrity of history – that Nato might one day prove to be so important that the Bushes of this world may have to equivocate over the Jewish Holocaust to placate a militarily resurgent Germany – beggars belief.

Among those men who should hold their heads in shame are those who claim they are winning the war in Iraq. They include the increasingly disoriented General David Petraeus, US commander in Iraq, and the increasingly delusional US ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, both of whom warned that full passage of the Armenian genocide bill would “harm the war effort in Iraq”. And make no mistake, there are big bucks behind this disgusting piece of Holocaust denial.

Former Representative Robert L Livingston, a Louisiana Republican, has already picked up $12m from the Turks for his company, the Livingston Group, for two previously successful attempts to pervert the cause of moral justice and smother genocide congressional resolutions. He personally escorted Turkish officials to Capitol Hill to threaten US congressmen. They got the point. If the resolution went ahead, Turkey would bar US access to the Incirlik airbase through which passed much of the 70 per cent of American air supplies to Iraq which transit Turkey.

In the real world, this is called blackmail – which was why Bush was bound to cave in. Defence Secretary Robert Gates was even more pusillanimous – although he obviously cared nothing for the details of history. Petraeus and Crocker, he said, “believe clearly that access to the airfields and to the roads and so on in Turkey would be very much put at risk if this resolution passes…”.

How terrible an irony did Gates utter. For it is these very “roads and so on” down which walked the hundreds of thousands of Armenians on their 1915 death marches. Many were forced aboard cattle trains which took them to their deaths. One of the railway lines on which they travelled ran due east of Adana – a great collection point for the doomed Christians of western Armenia – and the first station on the line was called Incirlik, the very same Incirlik which now houses the huge airbase that Mr Bush is so frightened of losing.

Had the genocide that Bush refuses to acknowledge not taken place – as the Turks claim – the Americans would be asking the Armenians for permission to use Incirlik. There is still alive – in Sussex if anyone cares to see her – an ageing Armenian survivor from that region who recalls the Ottoman Turkish gendarmes setting fire to a pile of living Armenian babies on the road close to Adana. These are the same “roads and so on” that so concern the gutless Mr Gates.

But fear not. If Turkey has frightened the boots off Bush, he’s still ready to rattle the cage of the all-powerful Persians. People should be interested in preventing Iran from acquiring the knowledge to make nuclear weapons if they’re “interested in preventing World War Three”, Bush has warned us. What piffle. Bush can’t even summon up the courage to tell the truth about World War One.

Who would have thought that the leader of the Western world – he who would protect us against “world terror” – would turn out to be the David Irving of the White House?

Sibel Edmonds, the Turkish-American lady who has worked for the F.B.I. and alleges that the Armenian Genocide resolution was pulled off the House Floor in 2000 due to bribery by the Speaker at the time, is now saying she is ready to tell the entire story – that includes names of prominent Congress members – about government corruption that she wasn’t allowed to talk about for several years due to “national security.” She said to BradBlog.com that if any of the mainstream TVs aired her entire talk without any editing she’d be willing to tell it all.

Read BradBlog.com for further info.

But will any of the corporate mainstream networks take her up on the offer? It’d certainly be an explosive exclusive.

“I don’t think any of the mainstream media are going to have the guts to do it,” she dared them.

So whaddaya say 60 Minutes? We’ve given you scoops before that you ended up turning down — and likely later regretted. Will you be smart enough to take this one?

“You put me on air live, or unedited. If I’m given the time, I will give the American people the exact reason of what I’ve been gagged from saying because of the States Secrets Privilege, and why it is that I’m the most gagged person in the history of the United States.”

“My feeling is that none of them have the guts to do that,” she dared them, before charging, “they are all manipulated.”

Any Armenians in the mainstream media who would dare to interview Sibel Edmunds?