A Turkish Daily News Column by Orhan Kemal Cengiz (“Kunta Kinte, ‘Armenian Seed,’ the Denial of Racism,” June 22, 2007) resonates with the recent revealing of racist denier “Holdwater” (the ghostmaster of TallArmenianTale.com hatesite) as cartoonist Murad Gumen.

Cengiz writes:

I have never come across any Turkish person who considers himself a racist. However, racist remarks are just flying in the air in the daily conversations in this country. Our language is full of racist remarks. For example, Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, is called an “Armenian seed” (Ermeni Dölü). If you consider how much Öcalan is hated in this country then you can imagine how “flattering” being an “Armenian seed” may be. “Jews are cowards!” “Arabs are back stabbing people”! Not to mention very offensive vocabulary about the Roma people!

What Cengiz says is true, but not only for Turks. I don’t think any person in this world would admit they are racist, not even a single member of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet Cengiz is particularly upset with the denial of racism in Turkey for the simple fact that Ottoman Empire’s desendant Turkey sees itself a victim and hence doesn’t see its minorities as vulnerable to hate in Turkey:

I believe this feeling of ‘being a victim’ serves as a kind of block in our collective unconscious. It is a way of turning upside down some historical facts in this country. It is a way of not confronting what had happened to non-Muslim citizens of this country. “I am the victim, not the Armenian, or Greek, or Jew!” Today we still have this feeling and it is getting stronger. We are again the victims of the Western powers’ conspiracies against us! We are the Kunta Kintes of the modern times, surrounded by enemies and about to be victimized again by the white man! Are we really!?

Interestingly, racist Murad Gumen has been doing exactly whatCengiz writes about.  Shamelessly comparing Armenians to rodents (“Armeni-lemmings identify with this [photographed] rodent”) and hatefully denying the Armenian Genocide (“I have 100% hatred of the deception of Armenians’ age-old propaganda”), Murad Gumen is fast to proclaim he is not a racist (“I have zero hatred of Armenians”).  You are what you do, would respond the French philosopher.

British archaeology Sam Hardy, who visited Turkey’s Mardin mass grave last month, has set up a blog about Kuru (Xirabeba) where a possible mass grave from the Armenian Genocide was discovered by local Kurds and later destroyed by the Turkish military.

Hardy posts many photographs from the village – including those of a ruined (Armenian or Assyrian?) church – and reflects on his visit to the possible Armenian mass grave.

Kuru building 2a: this photograph shows the empty rock-cut graves of the original Roman tomb; I’m not displaying its entrance.

This tomb was reused as a mass grave, where Armenians killed in 1915 were dumped: before, I collated the most relevant and informative English and Turkish-language sources on the planned forensic excavation of the mass grave and its destruction by the Turkish military; and after, I visited the site, photographed it and examined the indefensible excuses offered by the Turkish Historical Society in their attempt to cover up the Turkish military’s destruction of the site.

A comment by an ultranationalist Turk (Ferit) on our previous post has this to say about the covered-up mass grave:

This site was just confirmed by European scholars as definitely being Roman. Your site looses credibility when it references PKK/terror funded Ozgur Gundem and makes phobic comments that the “Turkish Military”, “Historical Society” covered up. Why is it that everytime the Armenian Genocide lie hits a wall, Armenians cry Foul?

You freely call all who do not believe your depiction of events as “genocide” as being “denialist”, but you fall into the same category without being objective, fair and balanced. I wonder what the Armenian heart thinks of after they are fed all the hate filled stories, most of which are really fiction stories(40 days at Musa, Morgenthau,etc.) and do not have the courage to come out and say, IF THE TURKS KILLED US, WHY DID THEY KILL US AFTER 1,000 YEARS? Or HOW MANY DID WE KILL? Or how many Ottoman troops were used to kill any Armenians? The question should be, HOW MANY ARMENIANS WERE INVOLVED IN THE BURNING OF ANATOLIAN and CAUCASIAN Villages? What was their courage and objective. If they were seeking land, then perhaps you should watch Braveheart, to understand how the Turks might have reacted.

Now you get to see both sides of the story, just like in Shrek III.  I can understand people who avoid using the word “genocide,” but I can’t understand absolute idiots like Ferit who don’t even want to admit that there could be an Armenian mass grave in Turkey.  Swiss courts have the answer – Ferit and deniers like him are racists.

Turkish Historian Brings Struggle Against Turkey’s Article 301 to European Court

Press Release, Taner Akcam, Payam Akhavan

Montreal, QC, June 20, 2007 – Professor Taner Akçam, a Turkish
scholar and Visiting Associate Professor of History at the University
of Minnesota, filed an application today before the European Court of
Human Rights against the Republic of Turkey.

The complaint is based on the criminal investigation launched against
him earlier this year under Turkish Penal Code Article 301, for
insulting “Turkishness” by having publicly used the term “genocide”
to describe the mass murder of Armenians in 1915.

Despite its changed wording over time, Article 301 remains prominent
among the many enduring obstacles in Turkey’s path to membership of
the European Union. The same law has in recent years been the basis
for the prosecution of other leading Turkish intellectuals, writers,
journalists and academics on similar grounds. The most notable
victims of Article 301 include Nobel Prize winning novelist Orhan
Pamuk, recently assassinated Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink,
and publisher Fatih Tas.

The Court, based in Strasbourg, France, enforces the Convention for
the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. It rules
over private individuals’ complaints against human rights violations
committed by signatory States. Turkey signed the Convention in 1954.

“Facing history and coming to terms with past human rights abuses is
not a crime but a prerequisite for peace and reconciliation in the
region,” says Professor Akçam. “My goal is to help Turkey realize its
full potential to evolve into a truly free and democratic society.
This cannot happen if Turkey continues to criminalize academic
discussion.” His legal team is headed by Dr. Payam Akhavan, former UN war crimes prosecutor and professor of international law at McGill
University in Montreal. “In a world where Holocaust denial is a
crime, state-sanctioned denial of genocide is all the more
reproachable,” says Dr. Akhavan. “Limitations on freedom of speech
should apply to hate speech, not to speech against hate.”

The Court will examine Professor Akçam’s application and rule on its
admissibility within one year. If the application is declared
admissible, the Court will then encourage the parties to reach a
friendly settlement. Only if no settlement can be reached will the
Court consider whether or not there has been a violation of the
Convention. Should the Court find that there has been such violation,
it will deliver a judgment which will legally bind Turkey to comply.

Hrant Dink finally acquitted  

Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, slain in January, was officially acquitted in two court cases concluded yesterday at an İstanbul court.

Three other defendants who were facing charges of “insulting Turkishness” and “attempting to influence the judiciary” were also acquitted, though a third similar case opened at a later date will continue.

The two court cases were sent back to a criminal court in the Şişli district after the Court of Appeals ordered a retrial. Retrial of the cases was originally scheduled to begin in February but it was postponed to yesterday, June 14, following Dink’s Jan. 19 assassination by a teenage gunman in downtown İstanbul. Dink, who was the editor of the bilingual Agos daily, was facing charges of insulting Turkishness under the infamous Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code and of attempting to influence the judiciary’s functioning under Article 288 in those two cases.

Two of the defendants, Dink’s son Arat Dink, and Agos editor Serkis Seropyan, appeared in the court for a retrial session of the cases. Lawyers for the defendants demanded acquittal, saying elements of the crime were not in place. The court agreed and acquitted all the defendants in the case.

A similar case in which Dink and other defendants face the same charges of insulting Turkishness was postponed to a later date to allow defense lawyers to prepare their plea.

Dink had become a hated figure for ultranationalists for his comments over an alleged Armenian genocide at the hands of the late Ottoman Empire. He called for reconciliation between Turks and Armenians and was a sharp critic of the Armenian diaspora for its uncompromising stance against Turkey.

Before his death, Dink had complained that the charges of “insulting Turkishness” against him made him a target of nationalist anger.

British archaeologist Sam Hardy has updated his recent post on Turkey’s Mardin mass grave with photographs he took in May 2007.  I placed these images next to October 2006 photographs taken by a now banned Kurdish newspaper in Turkey.  They show the “glorious” work of the Turkish Historical Society in covering up a possible mass grave from the Armenian Genocide.

(there are two more photographs in Hardy’s post)

Before accusing an ordinary Turk of Armenian genocide denial, you may want to consider the possibility that the person has never heard a word about the Genocide, says Melis Erdur.

Erdur, a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the New York University, says when she goes back to her native Turkey this summer “it’ll be a whole different place” for her. This is because she has recently discovered the greatest cover-up of her country’s history – the wipe out of Turkey’s indigenous Armenian Christian community during World War I, otherwise known as the Armenian Genocide.

Almost everyone I know (including me) became aware of the very existence of 1915 in the last several years, and started learning and thinking about it (unfortunately) only after [Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant] Dink’s [January 2007] assassination.

It’s unbelievable (and a “success” story for those who made it happen) that we grew up in Turkey without hearing one thing about the genocide (not even as a “deportation” of Armenians), and being completely unaware of such a significant Armenian presence in Anatolia (until recently, I never thought of anything in Turkey as Armenian; not even Armenian people–only now I’m noticing the Armenian last names of some famous people, for instance. Maybe some of my friends in the past were Armenian–I have no idea. I’ll go back to Turkey this summer–for the first time since I started learning about all this–and it’ll be a whole different place for me, believe me.)I’m ashamed of myself for being this ignorant, and really angry with everything and everyone who made such ignorance possible.

But was I a denialist for all these years?

Erdur’s above e-mail was posted in a discussion group and I contacted her for her permission to publish it.

“Do not talk about genocide or you may be the victim of a new one!” – Turkish nationalists are quoted as saying in a Turkish Daily News column by Orhan Kemal Cengiz.

Angered with a recent written threat against Turkey’s tiny Armenian community, Cengiz mourns the homogenization of his country that was largely due to the Armenian Genocide.  “For some,” writes Cengis,  “homogenization of Turkey might be the final goal, but I assure you the side effects of achieving it will make this country unlivable, unlovable and primitive.”

“Once, Armenians lived all over this country,” writes the columnist making reference to what is now eastern Turkey’s indigenous Armenian population wiped out during World War I.

The brave columnist concludes that Turkey must finally face its history: “without having an honest and open discussion about our history, we will never heal and we will never able to put a mirror in front of these racists [that now threaten Armenians], which means that we will be seeing the same nightmares again and again. ”

…In the face of these threats we see no serious preparation to protect our citizens of Armenian origins. There are very urgent steps that the Turkish government should take to protect their lives and well-being. 

I would like to urge the government and state officials that we cannot stand any new attack on these vulnerable groups. Protecting them is the highest moral obligation of the Turkish Republic and no other priority should prevent Turkey from fulfilling this responsibility.

Our minorities are not able to take public positions. We do not see them as police officers, as soldiers, or as judges. What a pity! They are forced to live an isolated life in their ghettos.

Already long ago we lost the richness the minorities contributed to our lives. But losing even the last members of these communities to foreign countries would be unbearable…

British archaeologist Sam Hardy, according to a post at Human Rights Archaeology, has visited the possible Armenian Genocide mass grave in Eastern Turkey that was first covered up by the Turkish military and later manipulated by the Turkish Historical Society and proclaimed a “Roman site.”

Photo: Yusuf Halacoglu, mastermind of Mardin mass grave manipulation

Linking to our April 25, 2007 update, Human Rights Archaeology reminds that the Kurdish newspaper that reported in Fall 2006 the finding of the mass grave was closed down, and Swedish researcher David Gaunt wasted an entire week in Turkey just to find out (and soon refuse further cooperation) that the possible Armenian skeletons had been cleaned up by official Turkish historians. 

Hardy’s post confirms that the mass grave has been destroyed.  Here are some excerpts from the post.

This post followed a visit to the formerly Roman family tomb, latterly Armenian mass grave, recently destroyed and covered up by the Turkish military with the help of the Turkish Historical Society.

At 10.10pm on the 17th of May 2007, I recorded that,

I visited my first mass grave today, my first nationalist-archaeologist-allied-with-the-military-destroyed mass grave, too; now that‘s negative heritage tourism.

It was the allegedly – to me, fairly definitely – Armenian (or other Other) mass grave in Kuru/Xirabebaba, for the reporting of which Ülkede Özgür Gündem was shut down and on the excavation of which David Gaunt refused to work.

[…]

All of the Roman resting places seemed empty and all of the diagnostic bones from the top of the stack in the centre had gone; only a few long bones and one jaw fragment appeared to have remained.

If it were natural factors that had reburied or degraded “all” of the remains after the reopening of the tomb, it [they] would have to have been exceptional conditions, to have covered the material on top without covering the material beneath that, or to have been such caustic rain, etc., to have decomposed the material on top entirely without leaving any identifiable wear or residue on the material beneath.

[…]

After this site visit, I made my way to a long-ruined, possibly earthquake-“broken” ancient site, which villagers called a church…

When I had discussed the burial site with locals, they had been divided on whether they thought it was a mass grave or not. A few of the men who thought it was a mass grave said that it was destroyed to hide the evidence and commented that, ‘that’s what they’re doing to us’.

They agreed that the Turkish military was working on the assumption that, ‘if there isn’t a body, there isn’t a crime’. (There are, however, hopes that the, ‘no body, no crime’ principle could be outmanoeuvred by developments in forensic archaeology, either through DNA testing of remianing bone fragments or even by identifying traces in the soil, although these would still be dependent upon the potential victims’ descendant community being able to be identified and being willing to cooperate in the process.)

The logic of the “impartial joint excavation” of the mass grave falan falan falan is similar to that of the “impartial joint commission” on the history of the Armenian Genocide.

It is different though; beyond the futility of a joint commission with deniers who aren’t scientists anyway, the erasure of the evidence puts scientists in the position of helping their opponents “prove” their case by their inability to prove their own.

An article from the English Economist quotes Hasan Zeynalov as saying he doesn’t believe in dialogue. Zeynalov is the one who is working to keep the Turkish-Armenian border closed, as we mentioned several weeks ago. Our “findings” on Zeynalov are at http://blogian.hayastan.com/2007/04/22/the-godfather-of-hate/.

 

Clash of civilisations

economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9202614

May 17th 2007 | KARS
From The Economist print edition

Beleaguered Armenians in Turkey—and a closed border with Armenia

FOR a seasoned diplomat, Hasan Sultanoglu Zeynalov, Azerbaijan’s consul-general in Kars, eastern Turkey, is unusually indiscreet. He openly complains about Naif Alibeyoglu, the mayor, who is promoting dialogue between Turkey, Azerbaijan and their common enemy, Armenia, just over the border. “I don’t believe in dialogue,” Mr Zeynalov snorts. He recently ordered his compatriots to boycott an arts festival organised by the mayor after finding that “there were Armenians too.” Like his masters in Baku, Mr Zeynalov is unnerved at the thought of his country’s biggest regional ally suddenly making peace with Armenia.

He will have been cheered by the victory of Serzh Sarkisian, Armenia’s nationalist prime minister, in a general election on May 12th. Mr Sarkisian is said to have engineered a last-minute ban on Turkish observers of the election. “I think it would be unnatural to receive observing representatives from a country that does not even wish to have a civilised official dialogue,” he commented… (see the Economist website for the rest of the article)

The Denver Post has posted an Associated Press article informing that “[e]nvironmental activists are building a replica of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat—where the biblical vessel is said to have landed after the great flood—in an appeal for action on global warming, Greenpeace said Wednesday.”

In this picture provided by Greenpeace, wooden planks are carried by horses in the Dogubayazit valley to built a replica of Noah’s Ark near mount Ararat in Agri, eastern Turkey, Sunday, May 13, 2007. Greenpeace activists are building a replica of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat, the mountain where the original Biblical Ark is said to have landed after the great flood, in an appeal to world leaders to take action against global warming. Turkish and German volunteer carpenters were building the wooden ship on the mountain in eastern Turkey, that sits on the border with Iran. (AP Photo/Manuel Citak, Greenpeace, HO )

The joint Turkish-German project is something to welcome especially the universal message that the involved volunteers are trying to spread.Yet in promoting environmentalism, Greenpeace, I believe, is also unintentionally violating Armenian cultural rights while not inviting Armenians to be part of a project that involves their sacredMount Ararat. Ironically enough, the Mount is not even called Ararat Turkey (it is called “Agri”).