SCHOLAR BACKS TURKISH-ARMENIAN GENOCIDE STUDY
Sargis Harutyunyan
Armenialiberty.org
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Sept 7 2009
Armenia — Hayk Demoyan, director of the Armenian Genocide
Museum-Institute, speaks at a news conference on September 7, 2009.
A well-known Armenian genocide scholar voiced support on Monday for
official Yerevan’s and Ankara’s plans to form a joint body tasked
with looking into the mass killings of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey.
The creation of such a body is a key provision of one of the two draft
protocols on the normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations that
were made public by the two governments last week. It is supposed to
engage in an "impartial scientific examination of historical documents
and archives" relating to the 1915-1918 massacres.
The idea of such a study appears to be unpopular in Armenia and its
worldwide Diaspora. Many Armenians — and political opponents of
President Serzh Sarkisian in particular — view it as a Turkish ploy
designed to discourage more countries from recognizing the deaths of
more than one million Armenians as genocide.
Hayk Demoyan, the director of the state-run Armenian Genocide
Museum-Institute in Yerevan, dismissed these concerns, claiming that
the Turkish-Armenian panel would only pose a threat to Turkey’s ruling
establishment that vehemently denies that the massacres constituted a
genocide. He said its Armenian members would gain access to Ottoman
archives dating back to the First World War and thereby be able to
uncover more evidence of what many international historians believe
was the first genocide of the 20th century.
Speaking at a news conference, Demoyan claimed that the purpose and
format of the study is different from the one proposed by Turkish
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a 2005 letter to then President
Robert Kocharian. "Reading the document and its formulations, we can
see that this is not what the Turkish side meant," he said.
Government critics found Demoyan’s arguments unconvincing,
however. Gegham Manukian, a historian affiliated with the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun), said they are at odds
with pro-government politicians’ assurances that the genocide issue
will not be the main focus of the Turkish-Armenian "sub-commission"
of historians. "That means that the genocide issue will be discussed
there after all," he told RFE/RL.
Manukian also stood by Dashnaktsutyun’s and other opposition parties’
that the Turks will now find it easier to keep foreign governments
and parliaments from issuing Armenian genocide resolutions.