GERMAN POLITICIANS ARE ADVISED TO STAY AWAY FROM TURKISH CHAUVINISM

PanARMENIAN.Net
19.08.2009 19:45 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Turkey’s refusal to allow the Armenian singer Aram
Tigran to be buried in the Kurdish metropole of Diyarbakir has been
described by the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) as "revealing
chauvinism".

"We recommend German politicians of all parties to defy political
correctness and to distance themselves from a Turkish nationalism
of this kind, whether it shows itself in Ankara or in the German
community of Turkish descent", said the GfbV chairperson, Tilman Zulch.

Aram Tigran, who died in Athens at the age of 75, was buried on
Monday in Brussels. The Kurdish mayor of Diyarbakir, Osman Baydemir,
had earth from his city transported to Belgium to fulfil the last
wish of the artist. Kurds had saved the life of his father during the
genocide against the Armenians in Turkey in 1915. He fled with them
to Syria and settled in the town of Qamischli, which was inhabited
mainly by Kurds. There his son Aram Tigran was born in 1934.

Aram Tigran was an outstanding interpreter of contemporary Kurdish
music and sang mainly in Kurmanci Kurdish, but also in Armenian,
Aramaic, Greek and Arab. The musician emigrated in the 60s to then
Soviet republic of Armenia and lived from the beginning of the 90s
mainly in Greece and Belgium. It was only shortly before his death that
he was able for the first time to visit the province of Diyarbakir,
the old homeland of his forebears.

"In Germany too the chairperson of the Turkish community in
Germany, Kenan Kolat, would evidently like to make sure that the
young German generation does not discover what happened in 1915 in
eastern Anatolia", commented Tilman Zulch. For Kolat recently said
that the guidelines for teachers in Brandenburg schools presented a
psychological burden for Turkish school-children and were therefore
a danger for inner peace. The guidelines deal with the genocide in
the Osman Empire of 1915/16, to which about 1.5 million Armenians and
about 500,000 Christian Assyrian Arameans fell victim. Many Kurdish
Agas took part in the crime, who were organised in the paramilitary
so-called Hamidiye militia (today’s village guardians).

The following rule of Kemal Ataturk resulted in the murder of at least
200,000 Christians in the region around the port of Smyrna, today’s
Izmir, and in eastern Thrace in the European part of Turkey. Other
estimates bring the figure up to 350,000 Christians murdered. At least
two million Greek Orthodox, but also Armenian and Assyrian Aramean
Christians from Pontos, Cappadocia and Ionia and Arab Christians from
the region around Alexandrette, today’s Iskenderun, were driven out at
this time. The number of Christians in the total population of today’s
Turkey fell within 50 years from 20 percent to about 0.1 Percent.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress