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Sydney: European Armenian Fed. Prez Delivers 2005 Genocide Lecture

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  • Sydney: European Armenian Fed. Prez Delivers 2005 Genocide Lecture

    ARMENIAN GENOCIDE COMMEMORATIVE COMMITTEE
    259 Penshurst Street
    Willoughby NSW 2068
    Email: [email protected]
    Contact: Dr Tro Kortian 0412197364


    AUSTRALIA, President of European Armenian Federation, Mrs Hilda
    Tchoboian, Delivers 2005 Armenian Genocide Commemorative Lecture in
    NSW Parliament



    Sydney, AUSTRALIA: [28 April 2005] Accepting the invitation of the
    Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Mrs Hilda
    Tchoboian, President of the Armenian European Federation for Justice
    and Democracy, delivered the 2005 Armenian Genocide Commemorative
    Lecture in the Parliament of New South Wales Theatrette.

    The annual Armenian Genocide Commemorative Lecture series seeks to
    honour the memory of the victims of the Armenian Genocide by
    addressing human rights issues of contemporary importance and by
    providing a constructive role in the understanding and prevention of
    genocide and other crimes against humanity. Accordingly, each year a
    distinguished speaker is invited to deliver the Commemorative Lecture
    on a topic of contemporary national or international relevance with
    respect to issues of tolerance, human rights, international law,
    genocide, and other crimes against humanity. Previous speakers have
    been Prof. Richard G. Hovannisian (1996), Prof. Vahakn N. Dadrian
    (1997), NSW Supreme Court Judge Justice John Dowd (1998), Baroness
    Caroline Cox, Deputy Speaker of the British House of Lords (2000) and
    Israeli scholar Dr Yair Auron (2001): Mr Raffi Hovaannisian, former
    Foreign Minister of the Republic of Armenia (2002); and Dr Sev
    Ozdowski, OAM, Human Rights Commissioner and Disability Discrimination
    Commissioner (2004)



    Below is the text of Mrs Hilda Tchoboian's 2005 Armenian Genocide
    Commemorative lecture:



    Ladies and Gentlemen,

    I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to share with
    you these words on the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of the
    genocide of the Armenian people.

    It is undeniable that although ninety years have passed since the
    first genocide of the twentieth century, it is only for the past
    quarter century, that its internationalization has been mounting.

    At the end of the First World War, the extermination of the Armenians
    made an important mark on international doctrines, in particular on
    the Treaty of Sevres of August 10, 1920, in which article 230
    stipulated that the Turkish leaders responsible for the massacres of
    the Armenian populations would be brought to justice before an
    international penal court:

    `The Turkish Government undertakes to hand over to the Allied Powers
    the persons whose surrender may be required by the latter as being
    responsible for the massacres committed during the continuance of the
    state of war on territory which formed part of the Turkish Empire on
    the 1st August 1914. The Allied Powers reserve to themselves the
    right to designate the Tribunal which shall try the persons so accused
    and the Turkish Government undertakes to recognise such Tribunal.



    Article 144 called for reparations, due to the survivors of the
    genocide, and the return of goods confiscated from their Armenian
    owners.

    `The Turkish Government recognises the injustice of the law of 1915
    relating to Abandoned Properties (Emval-I-Metroukeh), and of the
    supplementary provisions thereof, and declares them to be null and
    void, in the past as in the future.

    `The Turkish Government solemnly undertakes to facilitate to the
    greatest possible extent the return to their homes and
    re-establishment in their businesses of the Turkish subjects of
    non-Turkish race who have been forcibly driven from their homes by
    fear of massacre or any other form of pressure since January 1, 1914.
    It recognises that any immovable or movable property of the said
    Turkish subjects or of the communities to which they belong, which can
    be recovered, must be restored to them as soon as possible, in
    whatever hands it may be found¦. The Turkish Government agrees that
    arbitral commissions shall be appointed by the Council of the League
    of Nations wherever found necessary. .. These arbitral commissions
    shall hear all claims covered by this Article and decide them by
    summary procedure.

    Turkey refused to ratify this text; the Treaty of Lausanne of July 23,
    1923, which replaced that of Sevres, remained silent on this
    subject. It is here that the first attempt at establishing an
    international penal tribunal failed, because of the indifference of
    the Allies, who favored Real politik with regard to their trade
    relations with Turkey.

    It all started in the years following the Genocide, with the
    Diaspora's first commemorations of the Great Catastrophe, "medz
    Yeghern" in Armenian. These gatherings were of a private, disorganized
    and tragic nature; it was an opportunity for the survivors to remember
    their exterminated families or those they lost to deportation; these
    gatherings always ended in tears, as people were overcome by the
    enormous suffering and the feeling of powerlessness before such an
    overwhelming tragedy.

    The trials of the Ittihadist perpetrators indeed condemned in
    abstencia the organizers of the Genocide; however, in the absence of
    international justice, it was the Armenians themselves who had to
    bring to justice some of the guilty, in particular the perpetrating
    triumvirate Talaat, Enver and Jemal.

    The trial of the young Soghomon Tehlirian, in Berlin, for the
    execution of Talaat, the Turkish Minister of Interior, raised public
    awareness of the extermination of the Armenians, but remained a
    judicial act Though it certainly had great impact on public opinion,
    it did not reach Germany's post-war political scene.

    At the end of the Second World War, there was hope that the Soviet
    Union would address the issue of the genocide and territorial claims
    at the UN; but that too, for various reasons, resulted in
    disappointment, when Molotov, who represented the USSR at the UN,
    ended up asking for the Armenian territories in the eastern part of
    Turkey in order to annex them...... to Soviet Georgia.

    During the Cold War, the USSR policy froze the genocide issue, and all
    of the Armenian Diaspora's efforts to internationalize the issue
    resulted in failure during this time due to unfavorable conditions on
    the international political scene. The memorandum that the independent
    Delegation of Armenia regularly presented at the UN received no
    traction. The UN remained silent in response to repeated demands by
    Armenian organizations to consider the issue of plundering following
    the Genocide. Similarly, requests made to various world governments
    remained unanswered.

    Ironically, it is on this foundation that the effort to
    internationalize the Genocide issue began. It is through
    acknowledgement by a few countries--still rare in the Sixties and
    Seventies--that it developed. The recognition of the Armenian Genocide
    was at no time a high-stakes issue in international relations; it is
    thanks to the diligent work of dedicated activitists in Armenian
    organizations, reinforced in their fight by democratic supporters,
    often by local elected officials, that the recognition of the Genocide
    gradually became a question of Humans Rights and the right to
    historical memory, recognized by a growing number of national
    parliaments and local and regional political bodies.

    >From 1975 to 1985, there was a ten-year battle to retain mention of
    the Armenian Genocide in article 30 of the report of the UN Human
    Rights Commission's Subcommission on the Fight Against Discrimination
    and Racism. Sixty years after the tragedy, the Armenian Genocide
    forced its way onto into the international arena; the mention of the
    Armenian question would have almost passed unnoticed if Turkey had not
    engaged all its political and diplomatic might to remove it from the
    report. Several years of pressure and blackmail by Turkey caused quite
    some turmoil in the drafting and adoption of the report.

    However, in August 1985, the final report by Benjamin Whittaker
    maintained the Armenian Genocide among the Genocides of modern
    times. It was a considerable victory, which mobilized the energy of
    Armenian activists and independent experts; the Genocide issue left
    the private sphere of the Armenian Diaspora, and made its entry into
    an international text, and moreover at the level of a UN
    Subcommission, which consisted of independent experts and where
    Turkish diplomacy had less influence than it would have with a body of
    government representatives.

    In 1984, one year before the successful conclusion of the UN efforts,
    the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal, heir to the famous Russel Tribunal,
    brought together in Paris a few dozen experts, including several Nobel
    Prize recipients and Genocide experts, to in turn affirm that the
    Armenian killings indeed constituted a genocide according to the
    definition of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention of Genocide.

    Finally, it is on June 18 1987 that the rapporteur Jaak
    Vandemeulebroucke, a Flemish deputy of the European Parliament,
    proposed his final report titled "for a political solution to the
    Armenian Question". The text adopted by the European Parliament stated
    that denial of the genocide by Turkey constitutes, along with the
    occupation of Cyprus and repression of the Kurds, unnegotiable
    barriers to Turkey's entry into Europe. The same year, the European
    Council rejected Turkey's application to join the European Community.

    Since then, the worldwide movement to achieve Genocide recognition has
    taken on new momentum; great Western Democracies, like France, Italy,
    and Belgium have resisted economic and political blackmail, and in
    spite of unprecedented Turkish pressures have officially recognized
    the Armenian Genocide.



    Of course all of these official recognitions had an important impact
    on public opinion, but of a moral nature more than having an impact on
    Turkey's relations with the recognizing countries. Turkey continued to
    develop its campaign of denial, enveloping into its fold academics and
    others who might lend credibility to its policy of denial.

    And so, it was the acceleration of Turkey's EU accession process that
    pushed the Genocide question to the forefront of the world political
    scene.

    In 1999, the European Summit of Helsinki included in its conclusions
    that Turkey had a role associated with Europe;

    In 2000, the European Commission published its report on Turkey's
    progress, which was followed by the European Parliament, whose
    rapporteur, General Morillon refused to include Genocide recognition
    as a pre-condition to Turkey's accession. Our actions were
    instrumental in influencing the Parliament's final decision; indeed,
    the Parliament adopted amendments demanding that Turkey recognize the
    Genocide and lift the blockade of Arménia. For the first time,
    the recognition of the Genocide entered legislation governing the
    relations between Turkey and the European Union.

    In the following years, and in spite of the reticence of the major
    political parties within the European Parliament, we succeeded in
    inserting this requirement in all the legislation and resolutions of
    this European democratic assembly. We in essence created a cumulative
    effect between the European Parliament legislation and the growing
    Genocide recognitions by the national Parliaments, in order to create
    a situation where the public opinion would consider it totally
    anti-democratic not to take into account all these recognitions and
    resolutions.

    Of course, during the early years, the European Commission turned a
    deaf ear; however faced with mounting evidence of Turkey's obstinate
    denial (from the Education Minister's directives to deny the Genocide
    in the schools to the Turkish penal code's article 305 which calls for
    prison sentences for anyone authoring a publication on the Armenian
    Genocide or calling for the withdrawal of Turkish troops from Cyprus),
    the European executive body finally invoked in 2004 the Genocide,
    asking Turkey to reconcile its historical disputes with
    Arménia.

    And so today, Turkey faces the demand for recognition from its
    relationships with third-party countries and international entities,
    in particular from the European Union and the United States of
    America. In this phase of the internationalization of the recognition
    issue, Turkey continues to seek a way out through denial and attempts
    at diversion.

    In the summer of 2001, with the help and financing from the U.S. State
    Department and Turkey, a group of Turks and Armenians formed a
    so-called "Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission" supposedly to
    start a discussion to reconcile the Armenian and Turkish people,
    without broaching the genocide issue, since the Turkish members of the
    group, all of whom were seasoned former diplomats in the denial
    campaign, refused to discuss it.

    The true nature of the so-called `Turkish Armenian Reconciliation
    Commission' (TARC) was exposed, a long time ago, by the Armenian
    National Committee of America (ANCA) in Washington and the European
    Armenian Federation for Justice and Democracy (EAFJD) in
    Brussels. Those who `masterminded' the operation have publicly
    admitted recently that it was a failure for which the `Armenian
    nationalists' are to be blamed. Armenians everywhere rejected this
    suspect operation no sooner than it was launched. European Armenian
    organizations, in large numbers, went on record signing the
    Declaration initiated by EAFJD.

    Since then, other more subtle forms of this Turkish-inspired strategy
    are being initiated. Artificial forms of `cooperation' are being
    devised bringing together elements of civil society in Turkey and
    Armenia into a propaganda show. Large sums are being committed to
    such operations targeting needy intellectuals and institutions in
    Armenia who could be tempted. The organizers of TARC know that this
    operation, in all of its forms, is doomed to eventual failure. Their
    true purpose, however, is to create a false aura of `dialogue' at the
    grass-roots level in order to confuse the political scene in the US
    and in Europe. Their purpose is to divert the attention of the world
    community away from Turkey's responsibility for the crime.

    During this time of pre-accession negotiations, Europe is sending an
    increasingly clear message to Turkey requiring its recognition of the
    Genocide. For other reasons related to its economic and strategic
    interests, the United States is also searching for a solution to lead
    Turkey out of the grave that it continues to dig with its policy of
    denial.

    With this in mind, TARC commissioned a study on the applicability of
    the 1948 Genocide Convention to the Armenian case; the answer was
    foreseeable: with great media reinforcement, the "International Center
    for Transitional Justice" hired for this study concluded that the
    Convention could not apply because of the non-retroactive nature of
    the Convention, even if the massacres of the Armenians constitute a
    Genocide according to Convention criteria.

    However, where crimes against humanity are involved, there can be no
    statute of limitation. This is a fundamental principle of
    international law. Responsibility for the crime of genocide cannot
    lapse with time and it weighs heavily on the shoulders of the nation
    whose government has perpetrated the mass annihilation. And ever since
    the adoption of the United Nations Genocide Convention, the world
    community also has the ancillary moral responsibility to make sure
    that the perpetrator nation is brought to justice.

    As reflected in the relevant provisions of the Treaty of Sevres, the
    doctrine of State Responsibility for genocide Crimes against Humanity
    already existed at the time of the genocide of teh Armenians. Such
    State Responsibility entailed both an obligation to provide
    restitution or compensation and the personal criminal liability of the
    perpetrators.

    At the end of the second world war, the Allies adopted he Cherter of
    the International Military Tribunal, following the London Agreement of
    8 August 1945, which provided for the prosecution of the Crime of
    genocide ( « murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation,
    and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population
    ») as international crimes within the « Crimes against
    Humanity ».

    Obviously the drafters of the London Agreement had clearly in mind the
    genocide against the Armenian people. Thus we read the following in
    the History of the United Nations` War Crimes Commission : «
    The provisions of Article 230 of the Peace Treaty of Sevres were
    obviously intended to cover, in conformity with the Allied note of
    1915, ¦ offences which had been committed on Turkish territory
    against persons of Turkish citizenship, though of At menian ¦
    race. This article constitutes, therefore, a precedent for Articles
    6c) and 5c) of the Nuremberg and Tokyo charters, and offers an exa
    ;ple of the one of the categories of « Crimes against Humanity
    » as understood by these enactments ».

    On 9 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the
    Convention on the Prevention and the Punishment of the Crime of
    Genocide. The Convention does not purport to create a new crime, but
    recognizes in the preamble « thet at all periods of History
    genocide has inflicted great losses on Humanity » ; and in
    article 1, stipulates ˜ The Contracting Parties confirm that
    genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a
    crime under international law .. ».

    So we see that the Convention merely codified the prohibition of
    genocide, because it was not constitutive of a new offence in
    internaitonal Law termed « genocide », but was
    declaratory of the pre-existing crime.

    Today the majority of the 191 member States of the United Nations have
    ratified the Convention. But the Genocide Convention underlies
    « principles which are recogniwed by civilized nations as
    binding on all States, even without any Conventional obligation
    » as stated by the International Court of Justice in 1951.

    Later the Court stated that the rights involved in the outlawing of
    genocide are obligations « erga omnes » which means
    obligations « towards the International Community as a whole
    ».

    And because of its « erga omnes » quality, the ceime of
    genocide cannot be subject to prescription, and the obligation of the
    genocidal State to make reparation and State Responsibility for the
    crime does not lapse with time.

    In 1968 the United Nations adopted the Convention of the Non
    Applicability of Statutory Limitations to war Crimes and Crimes
    against Humanity. Although Turkey is not a State-party ot this
    Comvention, internatuional Law clearly stipulates that there is no
    prescription on the prosecution of the crime of the genocide,
    regardless of when the genocide occurredm and the obligation of the
    responsible State to make restitution or pay compensation for
    confiscated properties does not lapse with time.

    Finally a general principle of international Law stipulates that a
    State is responsible for injuries causes by its wronglul acts and
    bound to provide reparation for it. In the case of the genocidem it is
    not a mere violation of International Law, engaging inter-state
    responsibity , but an obligation of thd crimimal State toward the
    International Community as a whole.

    The legal impact of the « erga omnes » nature of the
    crime of genocide involves an obligationn to make reparation, which
    lays over the responsible State and the International Community.

    Responsibility, in this case, involves a formal and genuine
    recognition of the crime committed and an official apology by the
    perpetrator nation. It involves prosecution and punishment of the
    individuals responsible under the accepted norms of international law;
    reparations to the survivor population; compensation, for the damages
    and pain incurred, to the individual victims (or their rightful
    heirs), as well as to the collective interest of the victimized
    community or the nation; restoration to the rightful inheritors (and
    restitution) of the territories and all other cultural treasures
    (mobile and immobile); finally, institution by the successor
    government of the perpetrator nation of a massive educational program
    about the genocide committed thus restoring the true collective memory
    of the society involved for the benefit of the present and future
    generations.

    We take note of a new attempt by Turkey to escape from the increasing
    European pressure.

    Prime Minister Erdogan stated recently that he would like to see an
    impartial study performed by a group of historians to determine
    whether a Turkish genocide against the Armenians did, in fact, take
    place. The Prime Minister's statement confused many in the world
    community and for good reason. For a head of government, he was a
    little late in trying to learn about his country's recent past. His
    statement was, indeed, the vivid evidence of how systematically the
    present Turkish Republic, since its inception, has wiped out Turkey's
    historical memory depriving many generations of Turks of the truth
    about themselves.

    Knowing Turkey's policy of denial, however, the world community cannot
    be naïve and not see the diversionary tactics behind the
    Turkish government's recent campaign of deception. The facts about the
    Armenian Genocide have long been established and recognized by the
    world community. An impressive number of nations are on record on this
    subject and many more will follow suit. Turkey is too late in meeting
    its obligations and it knows it. Relegating this matter to
    `historians' is a discredited tactic. Its aim is to drive this issue
    out of the political arena.

    Only a few days ago, the International Association of Genocide
    Scholars wrote to the Turkish Prime Minister reminding him that he
    cannot with any credibility use Turkish claims against Armenian
    claims, quite simply because in fact it is not only the Armenians that
    affirm that there was genocide, but hundreds of independent academics
    whose works make them authorities in many countries.

    The International Association of Genocide Scholars clearly demanded
    that Turkey own up to its responsibility by recognizing and paying
    reparations for the crime of genocide made by Turkey. Because Turkey
    is responsible.

    90 years later, the Armenian Genocide remains a contemporary
    issue. The contemporary nature of the Armenian Genocide comes to
    restate fact that there can be no statute of limitations on this
    issue. And the children and grand-children of the victims will stand
    up to demand justice of Turkey, which is responsible before
    International law, whose entire State apparatus including its army,
    police and judicial and legislative authorities, conceived, planned,
    organized the most horrible Crime against Humanity: the Genocide of
    the Armenians.
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