Armenian Assembly of America
1140 19th Street, NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202-393-3434
Fax: 202-638-4904
Email: [email protected]
Web:
MEDIA ALERT
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 20, 2006
CONTACT: Karoon Panosyan
Email: [email protected]
RE: Boston Globe: “Armenians get allies in genocide teachings,” Boston
Herald: “Expert says slaughter fits bill, despite Turks’ denial”
The Armenian Assembly would like to call your attention to two articles
below: the first published by the Boston Globe entitled, “Armenians get
allies in genocide teachings, Group stands up against denial” and the
second published in the Boston Herald entitled, “Expert says slaughter
fits bill, despite Turks’ denial.” The articles include comments by
Armenian Assembly Board of Trustees Member Anthony Barsamian and
Armenian Assembly Executive Director Bryan Ardouny.
The articles can also be accessed at the following links:
Boston Globe:
tion=doc&p_docid=1111E3
678F8D3F38&p_docnu m=1
Boston Herald:
/view.bg?articleid=135744
Boston Globe
Armenians get allies in genocide teachings
Group stands up ‘against denial’
By Yvonne Abraham, Globe Staff
April 20, 2006
Leading politicians and groups from a range of communities are joining
with Armenians in their battle to ensure that the Armenians’
early-20th-century history be taught as genocide.
The Armenians are fighting a federal lawsuit that seeks to include
opposing views of the genocide in teaching materials for Massachusetts
high schools.
A new group, called kNOw Genocide, includes the Jewish Community
Relations Council, the Irish Immigration Center, the Massachusetts
Council of Churches, Rwanda Outlook, and the Cambodian Mutual Assistance
Association, among others. Standing with them will be Attorney General
Thomas F. Reilly, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey — both gubernatorial
candidates — and several state legislators.
A rally tomorrow at the State House is expected to draw representatives
from the diverse coalition, in a testament to the political clout that
the Armenian community has in Massachusetts.
“This allows our community, together with other communities, to stand
together against denial,” said Anthony Barsamian, a member of the
Armenian Assembly of America board, based in Washington. “And those who
try to deny genocide will be beaten back.”
The coalition is being launched at a time of considerable debate over
events in Ottoman Turkey early last century. Several PBS stations were
criticized this week for airing a documentary called “The Armenian
Genocide” and declining to air an accompanying panel discussion that
included scholars who have denied that a genocide took place.
Those who believe that both views should be heard accused PBS stations,
including Boston’s WGBH, of bowing to pressure from Armenians and their
supporters.
Armenians and many historians have long maintained that the events of
1915 in Ottoman Turkey — in which more than 1 million Armenians were
killed and many more were driven from their homes — constituted
genocide.
In Massachusetts, home to about 30,000 Armenians, legislators
established a day of remembrance for victims.
But the Turkish government, and some historians, say what happened
should not be described as genocide because the deaths were part of a
civil war that resulted in the murder of innocent people on both sides.
In the lawsuit, now pending at US District Court in Boston, a teacher
and a student from Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, and the
Assembly of Turkish American Associations, have demanded that the state
Department of Education include dissenting views on the Armenian
genocide in a curriculum guide on the topic.
A draft of that guide originally included the dissenting views, but did
not mandate that they be taught in Massachusetts schools. The plaintiffs
say the removal violates freedom of speech.
The attorney general, who is defending the state, argues that because
the curriculum guide is a government document, it is not bound by free
speech. Armenians and supporters say presenting opposing views of the
1915 events is like denying the Holocaust.
The struggle has drawn support from other groups who say they speak from
their own painful histories of oppression.
“As members of the Jewish community, we identify with the Armenian
community in terms of the Armenian genocide, and it’s important to fight
denial,” said Nancy Kaufman, executive director of the Jewish Community
Relations Council of Greater Boston. “We thought this was a battle that
had been won long ago.”
Harvey Silverglate, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the
Department of Education suit, said his clients are not denying that a
genocide took place. “We are not admitting it, we’re not denying it,
we’re taking no position,” he said. “We simply want to open up the
avenues for honest debate and restore the censored articles to the
Massachusetts curriculum.”
Boston Herald
Expert says slaughter fits bill, despite Turks’ denial
By Kevin Rothstein
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
The Turkish government’s fierce PR campaign to cast doubt on the
Armenian genocide has spilled into the courts, Congress and even public
television – but not into Harvard genocide expert Helen Fein’s mind.
“It is a genocide by all criteria of genocide,” said Fein, director of
the Institute for the Study of Genocide. “It’s insulting and ridiculous
to argue with these deniers.”
The Republic of Turkey has paid millions of dollars to Washington-based
lobbying firm the Livingston Group, trying to battle a congressional
human rights bill that would recognize the deaths of 1.5 million
Armenians, at the hands of Turks, was genocide.
“Given the fact that Turkey continues its denial campaign, it becomes
that much more important for the U.S. and other countries to remember
and reaffirm what happened so we cannot repeat the mistakes of the
past,” said Bryan Ardouny, head of the Armenian Assembly of America.
The Turkish ambassador to the United States, Nabi Sensoy, yesterday
blasted a PBS documentary, “The Armenian Genocide,” that aired last
night on WGBH-Boston as a “blatantly one-sided perspective of a tragic
and unresolved period of world history.” Many Turkish authorities argue
that civil war, disease and famine, not genocide, contributed to the
deaths of Armenians as well as Turks between 1915 and 1918.
As the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the early 1900s, Turks embarked on a
campaign of death and destruction against Armenians. The campaigns are
substantiated, Fein said, by eyewitness accounts from Armenians,
European missionaries and desperate missives from the U.S. ambassador,
Henry Morgenthau. He cabled Washington on July 16, 1916, that only force
would dissuade the Turks.
Armenians observe the genocide each year on April 24.
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