ARMENIAN PUBLICIST REACTS TO TURKISH PRIME MINISTER’S REMARKS
ARMENPRESS
Mar 20 2007
YEREVAN, MARCH 20, ARMENPRESS: A prominent Armenian writer and
publicist Bakur Karapetian, who is also chairman of Shushi charity
organization, addressed today an open letter to Turkish prime minister
Recep Erdogan, which he said was prompted by a remark Erdogan made
recently in Baku during a conference on Azerbaijani and Turkish
diasporas saying that ‘Nagorno-Karabakh is our bloody gash."
"Nagorno-Karabakh, which you call ‘a gash’ had to take arms to
save itself from being subjected to genocide,’ Karapetian says in
his letter. He says Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh rose to fight for
their freedom from Baku not only because of the former Soviet Union’s
wrong national policy, but also because of the policy of its former
leader Heydar Aliyev, whose ultimate goal was to drive all Armenians
of Nagorno-Karabakh out of their homeland.
Bakur Karapetian says Azeri leaders have misled also their own
people. "You call Azeris a Turkic people, but they in fact are part of
an Iranian people, who mixed with invading Turkic tribes from Central
Asia and adopted their language. Azeris will have to get rid of this
wrong perception of their origin’ he says.
Karapetian’s letter has also references to another historical Armenian
land of Nakhichevan, now an Azeri exclave whose Armenian population
was driven out by Heydar Aliyev. "It proceeded without blood, but it
is what is called white genocide.," he says.
He then says he is surprised at Turkish authorities’ persistent desire
to hid Turkey’s true history from their own people . Karapetian doubts
Turkish and Azeri authorities’ strive to usurp the history and culture
of peoples who originated and lived for millennia in Asia Minor.