TANER AKCAM: US POSSESSES A "GUN THAT CAN ONLY SHOOT ONCE"

PanARMENIAN.Net
15.02.2010 11:39 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Having the US Congress or the President declare
what happened in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 a genocide is like a
"golden bullet", a Turkish scholar said.

"The US possesses a ‘gun that can only shoot once’. Here’s the
question: is it better to shoot that bullet or to keep the gun loaded
with it and use it as a threat continuously? I believe the US has
chosen the second option for years. The US understands that this
‘gun’ is good for only one shot and is holding back because once
the ‘bullet’ has been released it loses its power and meaning. For
this reason, it seems that rather than shooting off that "gun loaded
with one bullet", it serves the US’s purposes to use it as a threat
every year," professor Taner Akcam, the author of "A Shameful Act:
The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility"
book, told PanARMENIAN.Net.

"This game has become boring. I think we will see it this year again.

The US will use 1915 as a threat and will try to get Turkey to
compromise. This year’s compromise could be to put the Armenian
Turkish Protocol into action," he said.

"A Turkey that is threatened with the resolution cannot exercise any
pressure on Armenia for the Karabakh issue. Until the end of April
the Armenian government is in a very comfortable position. Most likely
they won’t make any move in Karabakh, will maintain their position and
simply wait for Turkey to fend off the ‘genocide threats’ by coming to
the table and accepting the Protocols. My basic fear is that Turkey
still doesn’t consider normalization of its relation with Armenia
to be a priority and makes it contingent to Azerbaijan’s demands and
this is not a healthy policy," prof. Akcam said.

The Armenian Genocide (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic
destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during
and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and
deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to
lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths
reaching 1.5 million.

To date, twenty countries and 44 U.S. states have officially recognized
the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars
and historians accept this view. The Armenian Genocide has been also
recognized by influential media including The New York Times, BBC,
The Washington Post and The Associated Press.

The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the
Genocide survivors.

Taner Akcam (October 23,1953, Turkey) is a Turkish historian,
sociologist and publicist. He is one of the first Turkish academics to
acknowledge and discuss openly the Armenian Genocide committed by the
Ottoman government in 1915. Akcam studied at the Middle East Technical
University in Ankara. In 1976 he was arrested and sentenced to 10 years
imprisonment as the editor-in-chief of a political journal. He escaped
prison one year later. He has been living in the Federal Republic
of Germany since early 1978 as a political refugee. Currently he
belongs to the scientific staff of the Hamburg Foundation to promote
science and culture, working at the Hamburg Institute for Social
Research. Today, Akcam is currently a Visiting Associate Professor
of History at the University of Minnesota.