PRESS RELEASE
ARPA Institute
18106 Miranda St. Tarzana, CA 91356
Contact: Hagop Panossian
Tel: (818) 586-9660
E-mail: [email protected]
Web:
ARPA Institute presents the Lecture/Seminar:
`Massacres, Resistance, Protectors of the Armenians
and Assyrians in the 1915 Genocide" " by Dr. David
Gaunt, on Friday, May 11, 2007 at 7: 30 PM at the
Merdinian School auditorium.
The Address is 13330 Riverside Dr., Sherman Oaks, CA
91403. Directions: on the 101 FWY exit on Woodman, go
north and turn right on Riverside Dr.
Abstract: The lecture will discuss what happened to
the Armenian and Assyrian populations living in the
provinces of Diyarbakir, Bitlis, Van and Iranian
Azerbaijan during World War I. This will be based on
extensive use of primary sources in Turkish, Russian,
Iranian as well as Western archives. Also previously
unused witness testimonies and oral history will be
used. This is a region where Armenians and Assyrians
lived side by side in the cities and had rural
villages close to each other. Often the Armenians
would be seized first and the Assyrian sources explain
what happened, then came the turn for the Assyrians.
In some places both groups put up a common defense,
for instance Antranik’s volunteer brigades had
Assyrians fighting side by side with the Armenians.
Some Assyrian tribes joined the Russian army that was
on its way to relieve Van and fought with the Turks.
The greater part of the massacres, ethnic cleansings
and other atrocities occurred between May and
September of 1915, and the extent of population loss
was close to 90% in the Diyarbakir province. The
latter was also used as killing fields for deportation
caravans coming from the north. The lecture will be
based on the recent book Massacres, Resistance,
Protectors: Muslim-Christian relations in Eastern
Anatolia during World War I (Piscataway, N. J.:
Gorgias Pres 2006).
David Gaunt is professor of history at Södertörn
University College in Stockholm, Sweden. This
university is in the midst of one of the largest
Assyrian Diaspora communities in the world. He is a
social historian and has previously written primarily
on the Scandinavian workers movement, and family
history. A few years ago he began with genocide
studies and edited Resistance and Collaboration in the
Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (Bern
2004).
For more Information Please call Dr. Hagop Panossian
at (818) 586-9660