GENOCIDE OR NOT: TURKISH, FOREIGN ACADEMICS DEBATE WWI ARMENIAN MASSACRES

Agence France Presse — English
March 15, 2006 Wednesday 12:01 PM GMT

Some 70 Turkish and foreign academics gathered here on Wednesday for
a three-day conference to discuss whether the controversial massacres
of Armenians during World War I amounted to genocide or not.

In a rare move, the gathering, organised by the Istanbul state
university, offered the floor to academics of all convictions even
though it was largely dominated by historians and officials who defend
Turkey’s official position on the 1915-1917 killings.

Turkey categorically denies that Armenian subjects under its
predecessor, the Ottoman Empire, were victims of a genocide, but
acknowledges that at least 300,000 Armenians and as many Turks died
in civil strife during the last years of the empire.

Armenians claim up to 1.5 million of their kin were slaughtered in
orchestrated killings.

In the first session of the conference, Yair Auron, an Israeli
researcher of Jewish archives from Ottoman times, openly used the term
“genocide” and appealed on Turks to question their past.

“Every civil society has to deal with its past, including the black
pages of this past,” Auron said.

Books detailing the Armenian claims were also available at the entrance
to the conference hall in a rare move.

Turkey has only recently begun to openly discuss the taboo subject
of the Armenian massacres, which many countries have recognized
as genocide.

In September last year, a private Istanbul university hosted a
landmark conference organised by intellectuals disputing Ankara’s
official line on the mass killings, despite a court order to block it.