TURKISH-DUTCH LOBBYISTS TRY TO PUNISH POLITICAL PARTIES OVER ARMENIAN QUESTION
By Toby Sterling, Associated Press Writer
Associated Press Worldstream
October 31, 2006 Tuesday 3:22 PM GMT
Amsterdam Netherlands
A lobby group began a campaign Tuesday to urge Dutch voters of Turkish
ancestry to boycott any party that labels the 1915 mass killing of
Armenians in Turkey genocide.
The campaign three weeks before Nov. 22 national elections is a
setback for both major parties, the governing Christian Democrats
and the Labor Party, which have struck ethnic Turk candidates off
their rolls for refusing to use the term "genocide" to describe the
killing of Armenians during World War I.
Events that took place far beyond Dutch borders nearly a century ago
have became a surprise campaign issue in elections otherwise focused
on bread-and-butter economics.
The lobby group, which calls itself Turks Forum, distributed posters
urging voters to write in a candidate of the small centrist D-66
Party in the elections. D-66 is the only mainstream party that doesn’t
refer to the slaughter as genocide in its stated positions.
The European Parliament has said Turkey should be required to
recognize the killings as genocide before it is considered for EU
membership. The French parliament voted for a bill that, if enacted,
would make denying the genocide a crime.
"Who should the Turkish community’s votes go to? Let’s use the voting
ballot to teach a lesson to those who want to limit our democratic
rights!" said the Turks Forum poster. It is being distributed in
the country’s largest cities, where ethnic Turkish populations are
concentrated.
The poster carries pictures of ethnic Turk candidates with a red
cross and the words "definitely not" in Turkish next to the names of
parties that say the killings constituted genocide. At the top of the
list is a photo of a candidate for the D-66 party, Fatma Koser Kaya,
with the word "evet," Turkish for yes.
Koser Kaya wrote on her Web site that allowing open debate on the
matter was a matter of free speech. "Many hundreds of thousands of
Armenians were slaughtered" in 1915, she wrote.
"Definitely, there can be no doubt about it. There needs to be,
in Turkey, too, an adult and scientific debate over what exactly
happened during the fall of the Ottoman Empire, who is responsible,
and how those events should be described."
"But the point is … why are Dutch candidates of Turkish descent
being pilloried and forced to confess a ‘genocide’ standpoint?"
D-66, which has been in a decade-long decline, was forecast to
disappear entirely during this election. But the Turkish issue has
helped it recover slightly, and recent polls show it holding two
seats in the 150-seat Dutch parliament.
Meanwhile, Labor, which led in most polls a month ago, has now fallen
slightly behind the incumbent Christian Democrats. Immigrant voters
traditionally have supported Labor or other left-leaning parties.
In an apparent attempt to limit political fallout, Labor’s National
Party Chairman Michiel van Hulten wrote to local party offices in
The Hague and Rotterdam instructing them not to use the issue as a
litmus test for Turkish-Dutch candidates, newspaper Trouw reported.
The killings of 1 million or more Armenians starting in 1915 has
been the subject of academic and political debate across Europe,
especially in view of Turkey’s application for EU membership.
Most European governments consider it a genocide. Turkey denies the
deaths resulted from systematic slaughter, saying estimates of 1.5
million dead are wildly inflated and that both Armenians and Turks
were killed in fighting during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
The U.S. government does not use "genocide" to define the killings.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
