TANER AKCAM: I CAN SHOW VERY EASILY GENOCIDAL INTENT OF OTTOMAN TURKEY
PanARMENIAN.Net
12.11.2007 13:39 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan was in
Washington to meet with President Bush to discuss mounting tensions
between the Turks and Kurdish rebel factions in Northern Iraq.
Also on the agenda was the Armenian Genocide resolution which passed
in the House Foreign Affairs Committee last month. The Medill News
Service spoke with two experts who have challenged Turkey’s position on
the Armenian question and asked them to respond to Erdogan’s comments.
Turkish scholar Taner Akcam, author of "A Shameful Act: The Armenian
Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility," is one of the
first Turkish academics to acknowledge and discuss openly the killings
of Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish government in 1915.
Edward Alexander is a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer and author,
born in New York to Armenian parents who fled Turkey.
"The evidence is overwhelming and to many Armenians, it is utterly
preposterous for anyone, especially the Turkish government, to deny
what is historical truth.
For my research, one of my sources was the German press. My other
source was the cables that were sent to Ambassador Henry Morgenthau,
the U.S. ambassador in Turkey at the time of the genocide. These
are documents that cannot be refuted. In addition, I did research
eye-witness reports in Merseburg, Germany," Alexander said.
For his part, Mr Akcam said, "Our Prime Minister is wrong because
we can prove the genocidal intent without any problems. One set of
documentation are the trials in Istanbul between 1919 and 1921. These
are the indictments, verdicts, hand-written testimonies and eye-witness
accounts which were recorded during that time. There is a lot of
evidence here showing the killing of the Armenians. The originals
of these documents are not known. We assume that they have been
destroyed after Turkish nationalists took over Istanbul. [Turkish
officials] only trust the documents in prime ministerial archive
today in Istanbul. I can show very easily, based on prime ministerial
archives, the genocidal intent of Ottoman Turkey. I will publish a
book in the Turkish language in 2008 where I am presenting more than
500 documents from prime ministerial archives in Istanbul."
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
