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60 Minutes Transcript: Turkey And Armenia's Battle Over History

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  • 60 Minutes Transcript: Turkey And Armenia's Battle Over History

    TURKEY AND ARMENIA'S BATTLE OVER HISTORY

    CBS News
    March 1 2010

    Bob Simon Reports on the Longtime Feud Between Turkey and Armenia
    over Genocide

    (CBS) Wars are fought over oil, land, water, but rarely over history,
    especially about something that happened nearly 100 years ago. But
    that's what Turkey and Armenia are still fighting over: what to label
    the mass deportation and subsequent massacre of more than a million
    Christian Armenians from Ottoman Turkey during World War I.

    Armenians and an overwhelming number of historians say that Turkey's
    rulers committed genocide, that its actions were a model for what
    Hitler did to the Jews. The Turks, meanwhile, say their ancestors never
    carried out such crimes, and that they too were victims in a world war.

    Ever since, this battle over history has not only ensnared the two
    nations but even the White House and Congress, where resolutions
    officially recognizing the genocide are currently moving through the
    House and Senate.

    But our story begins where the lives of so many Armenians ended,
    far from Istanbul, in the desert.

    "60 Minutes" and correspondent Bob Simon took a drive into what is
    now Syria, to the barren wilderness, to what amounts to the largest
    Armenian cemetery in the world.

    "As many as 450,000 Armenians died here," author Peter Balakian
    told Simon.

    Balakian is an Armenian American who has written extensively about
    what happened in this desolate place.

    According to Balakian, 450,000 Armenians died in this spot in the
    desert. "In this region called Deir Zor, it is the greatest graveyard
    of the Armenian Genocide," he explained.

    Deir Zor is to Armenians what Auschwitz is to Jews. The most ghoulish
    thing about the place is that 95 years later the evidence of the
    massacres is everywhere.

    Just a short distance from the banks of Euphrates there's a dump. It's
    also the site of a mass grave. It has never been excavated. All we
    had to do was scratch the surface of the sand to collect evidence of
    what had happened here.

    Under the surface was evidence of bones. "It's the hill full of bones,"
    said Dr. Haroot Kahvejian, an Armenian dentist who showed Simon around.

    "Nobody bothered to dig them up until now?" Simon asked.

    It was extraordinary standing on a mound where perhaps thousands of
    people lie entombed. There is no record of who they were or where
    they could have come from.

    "Look at that. There are kids who know exactly where they are. They
    are finding them by the dozen," Simon observed.

    "Evidence comes in many forms. It comes in photographs, it comes in
    texts and telegrams," Balakian said. "And it also comes in bones."

    So just how did all these bones end up here?

    In 1915, the First World War was raging and the Ottoman Empire was
    crumbling. The Armenians were a Christian minority who were considered
    infidels by the ruling Muslims -- a fifth column who sided with the
    enemy in the war.

    The fact that they were prosperous didn't help, says Balakian, whose
    great uncle survived the genocide and wrote about it in a memoir
    Armenian Golgotha.

    "Like the Jews of Europe the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire had
    a dominant role in commerce and trade, they were highly educated,
    many of them," Balakian.

    And he said they were highly resented.

    Asked what happened next, Balakian said, "What happens from the
    spring of 1915 on through the summer is a well orchestrated project
    of government planned arrests and deportations."

    (CBS) Some were forced to buy round trip tickets for train journeys
    from which they never returned. They ended up in box cars; the rest,
    mostly women and children were forced on death marches for hundreds of
    miles. Many perished from starvation, disease or brutal killings. The
    survivors ended up in concentration camps hundreds of miles from
    Istanbul, out of sight.

    At the time of the deportations, American diplomats in the region sent
    dispatches to Washington detailing what they had seen and heard. Just
    weeks after the arrests had begun, Henry Morgenthau the U.S.

    ambassador, sent off this one: "Deportation of and excesses against
    peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports of
    eyewitnesses it appears that a campaign of race extermination is
    in progress..."

    To this day the Turks vigorously deny there was any such campaign.

    When we spoke to Nabi Sensoy, he was Turkey's ambassador to Washington.

    "We were in Syria, sir, and we scratched the sand and came up with
    bones. How can you argue with that?" Simon asked the ambassador.

    "Well bones you can find anywhere in Turkey, you know. There have
    been a lot of tragedies that have happened in those lands," he replied.

    "Excuse me, sir. We dug up these bones in a place called Deir Zor,
    which Armenians say is their equivalent of Auschwitz," Simon pointed
    out.

    "Well, I don't think that it was anything to comparable to Auschwitz.

    This was only deportation. And things happened on the road," Sensoy
    replied.

    "But the deportations ended in massacres, didn't they?" Simon asked.

    "No, it did not," the ambassador insisted.

    "Weren't there massacres, mass executions and death marches of the
    Armenians?" Simon asked.

    "There was no death marches of Armenians. There was deportation and
    tragic things happened. Many people perished under the deprivations
    of the First World War," Sensoy said.

    But did what happen in 1915 amount to genocide? The UN defines it as
    the intent to destroy a racial, ethnic or religious group.

    "The most important thing is the intent. The killings are something
    else. It happened on both sides. But whether it constitutes genocide
    is another matter. It is a legal word and it should not be lightly
    used," Sensoy explained.

    "But you're saying there was no intention of the Turkish
    government...," Simon said.

    "There was no intention of annihilating in all or in part the Armenian
    population," Sensoy said.

    Bishop Sarkin Sarkissian is convinced that the massacres were intended
    and meticulously executed. He showed us one of the caves into which
    he said untold numbers of Armenians, women and children were thrown.

    It was, the Armenians believe, a primitive gas chamber.

    According to the bishop, they lit fires at the mouth of the cave.

    "And the people inside couldn't breathe anymore?" Simon asked.

    "Exactly. And there is no other way to escape out," Bishop Sarkissian
    replied.

    (CBS) The Ottoman Turks developed a template, which according to
    genocide scholars, was later adopted by the Nazis.

    "Most dramatically we have Adolf Hitler saying eight days before
    invading Poland in 1939, 'Who today, after all, speaks of the
    annihilation of the Armenians?' Hitler was inspired by the Armenian
    extermination. You know, it made him think, 'Well, sure you know, you
    can get rid of a hated minority group and if you're powerful and your
    side wins, that event will never get recorded,'" Balakian explained.

    The Turks dispute the evidence that Hitler ever uttered those words
    or was inspired by the events of 1915. Nonetheless, when the Ottomans
    were swept from power, and the modern Turkish state was founded,
    all memory of what happened to the Armenians was erased. Records were
    destroyed, a new alphabet was adopted and ever since, the massacres
    have not been taught in schools.

    The use of the word genocide is regarded as an insult to Turkish
    nation; it is a jailable offense.

    Hrant Dink, who edited an Armenian newspaper in Turkey, was prosecuted
    three times for insulting the Turkish nation. He also received
    thousands of death threats from extremists, but kept on writing.

    His daughter Delal recalls the Turkish authorities telling her father
    they couldn't protect him.

    "They were kind of warning my father about what might happen. And
    the days following that, nationalists groups came in front of Agos
    [her father's newspaper] ... in front of the newspaper shouting that
    he's their target. And he's their enemy. And one day they will come
    for him," Delal Dink remembered.

    Days later, as he stepped outside that same office, he was shot at
    point blank range.

    Dink is viewed as a martyr now, in Armenia, where he is seen as the
    latest victim of the genocide. His picture emerges from the wall
    of flowers on a hillside outside the capital Yerevan, where every
    April hundreds of thousands attend a memorial to remind the Turks,
    and the world, of what they went through. They pay homage to those
    who died nearly a century ago. It's as if the entire country turns
    out for what is emotionally a funeral, a burial the victims never had.

    And on the same day, in Times Square, thousands of Armenian Armenians
    gather to demand that Congress pass a resolution recognizing the
    genocide.

    (CBS) Two years ago, before a resolution was to be put to a vote in
    the House, Turkey recalled Ambassador Sensoy in protest. Its president
    warned of "serious troubles" and its top general said that military
    ties with the U.S. would never be the same. To limit further damage,
    the Bush administration and eight former secretaries of state then
    weighed in to kill the bill. It worked.

    "Eight former secretaries of state rallied behind Turkey to defeat
    that resolution," Simon told Ambassador Sensoy. "Why do you think
    that was, Sir?"

    "Well, I think it's the importance of Turkey for the United States. We
    have a long list of positive agenda between us," he replied.

    And the items on that list, Sensoy says, are far more important than
    the Armenian issue: Turkey is, after all, a regional superpower and
    an essential broker between the U.S. and the Muslim world. It has
    the second largest army in NATO and the U.S. relies on the country's
    Airbases for its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Seventy percent of
    American supplies to those wars go through Turkey, which is also a
    crucial conduit for oil.

    Which is probably why no U.S. president has uttered the word genocide.

    During his presidential campaign, Candidate Obama promised that, if
    elected, he would use the word. "The Armenian genocide," he said,
    "is a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of
    historical evidence."

    But when President Obama made his first overseas trip to Turkey,
    he never mentioned the word.

    Late last year, the U.S. brokered an agreement between Turkey and
    Armenia to establish diplomatic relations, with one key condition: that
    a historical commission be formed to rule on whether a genocide took
    place. Nearly six months later, the deal appears to be unravelling. The
    battle over the use of the word is far from over.

    http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/26/6 0minutes/main6246574.shtml?tag=currentVideoInfo;se gmentTitle

    Watch the segment at http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6253043n
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