Turkey event on Armenians blocked

Aljazeera.Net

Thursday 22 September 2005, 21:11 Makka Time, 18:11 GMT

AFP

A Turkish court has blocked an unprecedented conference that was to have
questioned the country’s official line on the massacres of Armenians under
the Ottoman Empire.

The planned university conference, entitled Ottoman Armenians of an Empire
in Decline, was to have opened on Friday. It already had been aborted once
after Justice Minister Cemil Cicek in May branded such discussion as
“treason” and a “stab in the back of the Turkish nation”.

Thursday’s court order followed a complaint by a non-governmental
organisation of lawyers opposing the three-day event.

“We received an order from the court, asking us to supply the court with
information on the case within 30 days and ordering us to suspend our
activities during this period,” Nukhet Sirman, an academic on the organising
committee, told AFP.

EU concerned?

Sirman said the organisers had received a telephone call from the governor
of Istanbul, Muammer Guler, “who apologised but said he had to implement the
law”.

The nature of the complaint against the conference was not immediately
clear.

Cicek’s outburst raised eyebrows in European diplomatic circles about
Ankara’s commitment to democratic reforms, a requirement for the 3 October
negotiations over its adhesion to the European Union.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan then distanced himself from the
minister’s remark, calling it “a personal statement” and said he encouraged
researchers to carry out their work.

The Armenian massacres constitute one of the most controversial periods of
Turkish history.
Armenians claim up to 1.5 million of their people were slaughtered in mass
killings under the Ottoman Empire, forerunner to the present-day Turkish
republic.

Increased importance

Ankara categorically rejects claims of genocide and argues that 300,000
Armenians and at least as many Turks died in civil strife during World War
I, when the Armenians took up arms for independence in eastern Anatolia and
sided with Russian troops invading the crumbling Ottoman Empire.

The issue has taken on increased importance as some European politicans have
pressed Turkey to address the genocide claims in what Ankara sees a
politically motivated campaign to impede its bid to become a member of the
European Union.

Much to Ankara’s anger, the killings have already been acknowledged as
genocide by a number of countries, including France, Canada and Switzerland.

“Our aim is simply to bring together Turkish intellectuals in an appropriate
setting for the discussion of a subject that until now has been carefully
avoided,” said historian Edhem Eldem, who was to have participated in the
conference.

“It is not a question of setting up a tribunal or reaching definitive
conclusions,” he told AFP.
Several nationalist groups expressed outrage over the planned conference.
The Hur party called it a “perfidy” and the small left-wing Workers’ Party
called for demonstrations outside the Bogazici University, where the
conference was to have been held.

The meeting had been expected to bring together about 60 researchers,
including critical intellectuals, to examine events in eastern Anatolia
between 1915 and 1917, as well as genocide denials made by the Turkish state
since that time.

Threats

Any questioning of the official line that a genocide did not occur has
proved dangerous to writers and intellectuals.

Orhan Pamuk, the widely translated author of such internationally renowned
works as The White Castle and Snow, is set to go on trial in December for
telling a Swiss newspaper in February that “one million Armenians were
killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it”.
Pamuk said he subsequently received several death threats and a local
official ordered the seizure and destruction of his works.

In Switzerland, where holocaust denial is a crime, the leader of the
Workers’ Party, Dogu Perincek, is under investigation for calling the
genocide claim “a historical lie”.