Saturday, September 6 2014

The article of Foreign Minister Edward
Nalbandian with slight reductions published in French "Le Figaro"
newspaper. Here is  the full version of
the article. 

 

"In international relations there are,
unfortunately, cases of missed opportunities. The statement of Recep Tayyip
Erdogan followed by the comments of other Turkish senior officials on the eve
and after the commemoration of the 99th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide
are such cases. The fabricated notions of "common pain", "just
memory" and the appeal to the Turks and Armenians to "follow
Erdogan's lead" are misleading. Ahmet Davutoglu declares "that the
main goal of Erdogan's statement is prevention of worldwide efforts of the
Genocide recognition". Instead of concrete steps towards reconciliation
one can find calls to complicity. I mean complicity against the international
recognition of the Armenian Genocide.  It
is hard to find a nation nostalgic towards its centuries-old suppression in its
ancestral homeland. Any oppressed nation cannot share the nostalgia towards the
Ottoman Empire. Like other empires, the Ottoman Empire was built upon and
forcefully sustained through suppression of the basic rights and freedoms of
many of its citizens.  Mr. Davutoglu's
differentiation of the Western and Turkish perception of sufferings by
Christians and Muslims is astonishing. The Armenian Genocide is not only part
of Armenian or western memory and history, but also of the memory of the Muslim
world. One of the earliest references to the Armenian Genocide belongs to
Muslim witness Fayez El Ghossein, who in 1916 published his work entitled
"The Massacres in Armenia." Sharif and Emir of Mecca Husayn ibn Ali
was one of the prominent Islamic leaders, who acted against the program of
physical annihilation of the Armenians and called on his subjects to defend
Armenians as they would defend themselves and their children. In 1919-1921 the
large-scale extermination of Armenians were referred such Turkish public
figures as Refi Cevat, Ahmet Refik Altinay. Many Muslim historians refer to the
massacres of Armenians as genocide, while Arab historian Moussa Prince used the
term

 

"Armenocide", considering it as "the
most genocidal genocide." For the sake of "just memory"
artificial political actions and calls are not needed, while those, who dare
express their opinion freely are killed like Hrant Dink, or exiled like Orhan
Pamuk, or taken to custody, like Ragip Zarakolu.  Davutoglu is playing the same old tune of founding a commission
of historians "in order to find the truth". One of the most competent
international institutions on genocide studies, the International Association
of Genocide Scholars, in answer to the same proposal, made an appeal to the
Turkish government to accept what had been proven long ago. Instead of
repeating decade-old re-worded or rephrased appeals we need genuine and
concrete steps. Ratification of the Zurich Protocols, normalization of
Armenian-Turkish relations, opening of the borders could pave the way to the
difficult path of reconciliation between our peoples. The sub-commission on
historical dimension, as envisaged by those Protocols, could implement a
dialogue with the aim to restore mutual confidence between the two nations. It
would be impossible to do by putting under question the reality of the Armenian
Genocide.

 

Led by an apparent desire to deny the fact of the
genocide, as defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide, Erdogan's message yet again underlined that what
happened in 1915 "was regardless of religion or ethnic origin." It
seems that the 1919 Turkish Military Tribunal's Indictment, which proved by
undeniable facts that the deportations and large-scale massacres of the
Armenians were a state policy, and sentenced its main masterminds to death, has
been forgotten in Ankara. It seems that Rafael Lemkin's development of the
concept of "genocide" has gone unnoticed in Ankara. I have to remind
that 99 years ago on May 24, 1915 Russia, France and the Great Britain issued a
special declaration by which they warned the perpetrators of the atrocities
against the Armenian people of their personal responsibility for "these
new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization." It is beyond any
doubt that the Armenian Genocide was organized with genocidal intent. Meanwhile
an attempt is made by the Turkish officials to equate the losses of the war and
the systematic annihilation of Armenians, as a result of which millions of my
predecessors lost their lives, homes, lands, properties. There was an attempt
to strip millions of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire of their right to life, as
well as their past - more than 2000 cultural and religious monuments were
destroyed and the survivors were driven off the lands they had inhabited for
many centuries, before Turks came to this region. In 1915 one of the chief
masterminds of the Armenian Genocide, then Interior Minister Mehmed Talaat
Pasha confessed to Germany's Consul General that "there is no Armenian
question, because there are no more Armenians." He was wrong, but the
nature, magnitude and the consequences of that horrible crime are far beyond
the definition of "suffering."

 

In one of the interviews Erdogan rhetorically asked
"if such a Genocide occurred would there have been any Armenians living in
this country?" Today a large number of Jews live in Germany, but no one
would dare put under question the reality of the Holocaust. Or, how can one
speak of "relocation", when 1.5 million of people died or were
killed? Planned marching people to the dessert, starving them to death, killing
most of them en route is not a relocation, it is a "death march," it
is a genocide.  The denial of the genocide,
the atmosphere of impunity paved the way for the repetition of new crimes
against humanity. Genocide denial is considered by scholars as the last phase
of the crime of genocide. Even though there are still few who continue to deny,
but this does not mean that there is a "dispute" about it. On the one
hand, there is the fact of genocide that nobody doubts in the world, the pain
of which every single Armenian family anywhere in the world bears until now,
and on the other hand, there is an official and imposed denial of the genocide
by the Turkish government. Turkey is in dispute with itself.  Is it possible to make the descendents of
genocide survivors, spread all over the world, a part of the complicity of
genocide denial? Is it possible to equate perpetrators and victims of genocide
by such cliches as "common pain"? It is appalling to imagine that the
perpetrators of Holocaust, of genocides in Cambodia, in Rwanda, and other
crimes against humanity, can be equated with the victims. Is it even possible
to consider genocide survivors' descendants as "Turkish diaspora",
which some Turkish politicians are trying to do today?  As Rwanda Genocide survivor Esther Mujawayo
recently mentioned at the UN Human Rights Council High Level Panel Discussion
in Geneva dedicated to the Genocide Prevention Convention, "Today is the
fourth generation of Armenians who are still waiting". Not only Armenians,
the whole international community for almost 100 years has

been waiting for Turkey to
recognize the Armenian Genocide. The genuineness of the desire for
reconciliation must be proven through recognition and condemnation of the
Armenian Genocide. The Turkish government must not refrain from genuine
reconciliation. Thousands of Turkish citizens have opted for that path already.  Davutoglu mentions Armenian composer Komitas
as an example of Armenians' creative activities in the Ottoman Empire. ''Just
memory'' should have shed some light on the life of Komitas, who was a witness
of the Genocide. He had seen all the sufferings, the horror that befell the
Armenians and said that "nobody knows all the wounds of our tragedy...
this distress will drive us mad!" And from 1916 onwards, for 20 years he
spent his life in a psychiatric hospital. 
On April 24, 2003 when we were unveiling the Komitas statue in Paris, I
expressed hope that this memorial to the Armenian Genocide victims could
symbolize the sufferings and memory of the victims of all genocides perpetrated
in the 20th century, that it would become a mourning site for all those who
consider tolerance and respect to human life and dignity as a continuous
process, that there would bow not only the descendents of those who suffered
physically and spiritually, but also the descendents of those who caused those
sufferings. I believe that the route to reconciliation is not a path of denial,
but that of conscious memory, because true reconciliation does not mean
forgetting the past or feeding younger generations with the tales of denial. Turkey
should reconcile with its own past to be able to build its future.  The President of Armenia has invited the
Turkish President to visit Armenia on April 24, 2015, on the occasion of the
commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. We hope it
will not be a missed opportunity and Turkey's President will be in Yerevan on
that day", -  Edward Nalbandian The
Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia.