DR. DAVID GAUNT TO GIVE CALIFORNIA LECTURES ON GENOCIDE OF ARMENIANS AND ASSYRIANS

ArmRadio.am
30.04.2007 14:42

Dr. David Gaunt, Professor of History at Södertörn University
College, Stockholm, Sweden, will give a series of lectures in
California entitled "Massacres and Resistance: The Genocide of the
Armenians and Assyrians Based on New Evidence from the Archives"
from May 3 through 11. The lectures will be co-sponsored by the
National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) and
the Assyrian American National Federation (AANF) in conjunction with
a number of Armenian and Assyrian academic and community groups.

The lectures will be based on findings from Dr. Gaunt’s
recently-published book Massacres, Resistance, Protectors:
Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I"

Dr. Gaunt will detail how the persecution of Armenian and Assyrian
Christian minorities was organized on the national and local levels
in places where Armenian and Assyrian populations overlap. Case
studies involve the Turkish occupation of Urmia and its surrounding
villages, the Assyrian tribes in Hakkari, the massacres of Armenians
in Diyarbekir and Mardin, the massacres of Syriacs in the hundreds
of villages in Tur Abdin, the successful armed resistance mounted by
the villagers of Azakh and Ayn Wardo, and the victory of Andranik’s
Armenian and Assyrian volunteers at the battle of Dilman.

Gaunt’s work is based on unique access to hundreds of documents in
the archives of Istanbul and Ankara, as well as documents of Iranian,
Russian, Arabic, Armenian, Assyrian, French, and German origin. Most
of these documents have never been published before. In addition,
nearly forty persons were interviewed about their experiences of the
war period. The Turkish documents confirm events and decisions of
what was believed to have happened, but for which evidence has been
lacking. In some ways the new documents fill in the blank spaces in
the history of genocide.

–Boundary_(ID_DwhVVvczlGbazJ/vrEjH1Q)- –