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Int'l Association of Genocide Scholars Open Letter to Turkish PM

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  • Int'l Association of Genocide Scholars Open Letter to Turkish PM

    INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS

    President
    Israel Charny (Israel)

    First
    Vice-President

    Gregory H. Stanton (USA)

    Second Vice-President
    Linda Melvern (UK)

    Secretary-Treasurer
    Steven Jacobs (USA)

    June 13, 2005


    Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
    TC Easbakanlik
    Bakanlikir
    Ankara, Turkey

    FAX: 90 312 417 0476

    Dear Prime Minister Erdogan:

    We are writing you this open letter in response to your call for an
    `impartial study by historians' concerning the fate ofthe Armenian
    people in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

    We represent the major body of scholars who study genocide in North
    America and Europe. We are concerned that in calling for an impartial
    study of the Armenian Genocide you may not be fully aware of the
    extent of the scholarly and intellectual record on the Armenian
    Genocide and how this event conforms to the definition of the United
    Nations Genocide Convention. We want to underscore that it is not
    just Armenians who are affirming the Armenian Genocide but it is the
    overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide: hundreds of
    independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and
    whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of
    decades. The scholarly evidence reveals the following:

    On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk
    government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its
    Armenian citizens - an unarmed Christian minority population. Morethan
    a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing,
    starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the
    Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient
    civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years.

    The Armenian Genocide was the most well-known human rights issue of
    its time and was reported regularly in newspapers across the United
    States and Europe. The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented by
    thousands of official records of the United States and nations around
    the world including Turkey's wartime allies Germany, Austria and
    Hungary, by Ottoman court-martial records, by eyewitness accounts of
    missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by
    decades of historical scholarship.

    The Armenian Genocide is corroborated by the international scholarly,
    legal, and human rights community:
    1) Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term
    genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and
    the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he
    meant by genocide.
    2) The killings of the Armenians is genocide as defined by the 1948
    United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
    Crime of Genocide.
    3) In 1997 the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an
    organization of the world's foremost experts on genocide, unanimously
    passed a formal resolution affirming the Armenian Genocide.
    4) 126 leading scholars of the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel and
    Yehuda Bauer placed a statement in the New York Times in June 2000
    declaring the `incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide' and urging
    western democracies to acknowledge it.
    5) The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Jerusalem), and the
    Institute for the Study of Genocide (NYC) have affirmed the historical
    fact of the Armenian Genocide. 6) Leading texts in the international
    law of genocide such as William A. Schabas's Genocide in
    International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2000) cite the Armenian
    Genocide as a precursor to the Holocaust and as a precedent for the
    law on crimes against humanity.

    We note that there may be differing interpretations of genocide-how
    and why the Armenian Genocide happened, but to deny its factual and
    moral reality as genocide is not to engage in scholarship but in
    propaganda and efforts to absolve the perpetrator, blame the victims,
    and erase the ethical meaning of this history.

    We would also note that scholars who advise your government and who
    are affiliated in other ways with your state-controlled institutions
    are not impartial. Such so-called `scholars'work to serve the agenda
    of historical and moral obfuscation when they advise you and the
    Turkish Parliament on how to deny the Armenian Genocide. In preventing
    a conference on the Armenian Genocide from taking place at Bogacizi
    University in Istanbul on May 25, your government revealed its
    aversion to academic and intellectual freedom-a fundamental condition
    of democratic society.

    We believe that it is clearly in the interest of the Turkish people
    and their future as a proud and equal participants in international,
    democratic discourse to acknowledge the responsibility of a previous
    government for the genocide of the Armenian people, just as the German
    government and people have done in the case of the Holocaust.

    Approved Unanimously at the Sixth biennial meeting of
    THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS (IAGS)
    June 7, 2005, Boca Raton, Florida

    Contacts: Israel Charny, IAGS President; Executive Director, Institute
    on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem, Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia
    of Genocide, 972-2-672-0424; [email protected]

    Gregory H. Stanton, IAGS Vice President; President, Genocide Watch,
    James Farmer Visiting Professor of Human Rights, University of Mary
    Washington; 703-448-0222; [email protected]
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