BEIRUT CONFERENCE TO DISCUSS ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
by Daniel Bardsley, dbardsley@thenational.ae

The National
rticle?AID=/20090903/FOREIGN/709029835/1002/FOREIG N
Sept 3 2009
UAE

A conference to discuss what is termed the Armenian genocide will be
the first gathering of its kind in the Middle East to bring together
Armenian, Turkish and Kurdish views.

Participants at the two-day event in Beirut, which starts today,
will discuss how the international community and international law
should recognise the First World War events.

Armenia asserts that as the war was ending 1.5 million people died
when Ottoman authorities drove Armenians from a region of eastern
Anatolia that was known as Western Armenia.

Armenia and its diaspora, along with many other countries and
individual US states, describe the massacres as genocide, although
Turkey does not, and insists the death toll was much lower and that
many Muslim Turks died in what it says was wartime unrest. This week
Armenia and Turkey announced plans to establish diplomatic relations
for the first time.

Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 in protest against
Armenia’s support for the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh,
previously controlled by Azerbaijan. But this week, Turkey said it
hoped to open the border by the end of the year, and the two countries
have given themselves six weeks to finalise accords over establishing
relations before presenting them to their respective parliaments.

The protocol to establish diplomatic ties does not detail how the
genocide accusations will be dealt with, although one suggestion from
the Turkish side has been that a historical commission is established
to look into the issue.

Issues being focused on at the academic conference, titled The Armenian
Genocide and International Law, include genocide denial in Turkey,
alleviating the consequences of genocide and how the massacres have
affected Kurdish-Armenian relations.

Another subject is the evolution of the Armenian genocide denial in
the Turkish press, which is likely to note that media in Turkey now
more readily use the term genocide than before.

Beirut has one of the largest Armenian communities in the Middle East.

Antranig Dakessian, a conference organiser and executive secretary
of the Haigazian Armenological Review, published by Beirut’s Armenian
university, Haigazian University, said the conference was not debating
whether the massacres were genocide. Instead, it will look at the
reasons behind what Mr Dakessian called "genocide denial".

Such events as the conference were important for ensuring the killings
that occured as the Ottoman Empire crumbled were not forgotten,
he said.

"When you are in such a terrible situation or your grandparents have
undergone such a condition, you would like the world to share with
you," he said.

Also, he said, the impunity of those responsible for the genocide
has encouraged other people to commit genocide.

However, Mr Dakessian, a Lebanese-Armenian whose grandparents came from
what was Western Armenia, said the event would consider issues such
as how genocide should be dealt with by the international community
to prevent recurrences.

Mr Dakessian said the conference would not be preoccupied with the
question of whether the killings were genocide, since for Armenians
this was historical fact.

"The Armenian genocide is an established reality," he said. "We have to
overcome that issue of whether it occurred. We’re trying to highlight
how to deal with the consequences."

Another organiser, Vera Yacoubian, executive director of the Armenian
National Committee Middle East, and the great-granddaughter of
Armenians driven from former Western Armenia, said similar conferences
have been held before in Europe or the United States, but not in the
Middle East.

She said she believed some Turkish participants do not recognise the
killings as genocide, so the conference would see a variety of views
expressed. "They may say there were massacres," she said. "We have
people at the conference [who hold these views], but I’m not sure if
they will say these things at the conference. I hope they do."
From: Baghdasarian