The hornet’s nest Stallone is planning to put his foot to

Saturday, 20 January 2007 Written by Alexander G. Rubio

er_stallone1_large.jpg

I think it’s safe to say a man of Sylvester Stallone’s means can
afford to globetrot with the best of them. But prudence should perhaps
dictate that he scratch Turkey off his shortlist of potential vacation
spots. As the whole pre-Nobel Prize saga of Orhan Pamuk, and related
cases, show, there are certain historical topics that are prone to
stir up a bit of… bad blood… in that part of the world – One of
them is, of course, the question of the status of the Kurdish
population. But chief among them is perhaps the festering sore that is
the Armenian genocide ()
.

As recent events have shown, it is a question that still provokes
deadly conflict. The murder of the Armenian journalist and editor
Hrant Dink, who had been the victim of even official persecution
( ison/honorarymembers/turkey/hrantdink/)
, is a glaring example of just how inflamed this topic really is.

And this is the hornet’s nest Stallone is planning to put his foot to.

( ink_large.jpg) The
star of such movies as, "Rocky", its recent sequel "Rocky Balboa", and
the decidedly non-pacifist "Rambo" is planning to shoot a movie based
on the book "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh"
( _Days_of_Musa_Dagh) about the
Armenian Genocide by the Austrian author Franz Werfel, according to
The Denver Post, via Filmstalker
( /2007/01/stallone_may_direct_armenian_g.ht
ml) .

During World War I, as the Ottoman Turkish empire fought Russian
forces, some of the Armenian minority in eastern Anatolia sided with
the Russians.

Turkey took reprisals. On 24 April 1915 it rounded up and killed
hundreds of Armenian community leaders.

In May 1915, the Armenian minority, two or three million strong, was
forcefully deported and marched from the Anatolian borders towards
Syria and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). Many died en route.

The issue has long been a contentious topic in Turkey, which claims
the 1915 events () were not
genocide, something that has become a bit of a problem in Turkish
relations to the European Union, which it hopes to join as a member,
due to the European Parliament’s decision
( tion.152/current_category.7/affirmation_detail.htm l)
to recognise as genocide the extermination of around 1.5 million
civilian Armenians in Turkey (the Ottoman Empire at the time) in 1915.

Late last year, French MPs also passed a bill making it a crime to
deny that the Ottoman Turkish empire committed genocide against
Armenians, a decision that delighted Armenians and infuriated the
Turks.

For years Stallone’s wanted to create an epic, and the book that
intrigues him is Franz Werfel’s "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,"
detailing the Turkish genocide of its Armenian community in
1915. (After futile attempts to turn the novel into a movie,
filmmakers finally succeeded in 1982, but it was a low-profile
production.)

French ships eventually rescued some Armenians, and Stallone has his
favorite scene memorized: "The French ships come, and they’ve dropped
the ladders and everybody has climbed up the side. The ships sail. The
hero, the one who set up the rescue, has fallen asleep, exhausted,
behind a rock on the slope above. The camera pulls back, and the ships
and the sea are on one side, and there’s one lonely figure at the top
of the mountain, and the Turks are coming up the mountain by the
thousands on the far side."

A pretty great shot.

The movie would be "an epic about the complete destruction of a
civilization," Stallone said. Then he laughed at the ambition. "Talk
about a political hot potato. The Turks have been killing that subject
for 85 years."

And the blow-back has not been slow in coming. UK daily The
Independent
( ple/pandora/article2162835.ece)
reports that the plans have attracted the wrath of the Turkish
community in Hollywood.

( an_genocide_turkey_large.JPG)
A group calling themselves the Association on Struggle Against
Armenian Genocide Acknowledgement is targeting Stallone with an angry
letters campaign urging him not to make the film.

"The book is full of lies, since the author got his information from
nationalist and radical Armenians," says the association’s chairman,
Savas Egilmez.

"We have already sent necessary documents about the mentioned days to
the producer of the film. Our allies will urge the producer not to
produce this film."

On the eve of the orchestration of his own genocide against the Jews,
Hitler took comfort from the fact that such an atrocity could
seemingly pass all but unnoticed to the outside world. "Who remembers
the Armenians?", he asked. Well, quite few, and more each day, seems
to be the answer.