TURKISH COURT BLOCKS DISCUSSION OF ARMENIAN MASSACRES

Agence France Presse — English
September 22, 2005 Thursday 4:28 PM GMT

ISTANBUL Sept 22

A Turkish court on Thursday 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 on “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.”

The 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 organizing committee, told AFP.

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 October
3 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 painful 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.

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 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.

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

Orhan Pamuk, he 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.”