THE ARMENIAN COMMUNITY RESPONDS TO TURKISH AMBASSADOR
J-Wire Jewish Australian News Service
March 19 2010
Earlier this week, the Turkish Ambassador Oguz Ozge addressed the
Capital Jewish Forum in Canberra and spoke of the 1915 Armenian
genocide. The Armenian community has responded to his remarks.J-Wire
would like to establish two points before publishing the response.
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more appropriate forum.
The response from the Armenian community:
from Varant Meguerditchian
President
Armenian National Committee of Australia Inc
We write to you in reference to the recently posted article ‘Turkish
Ambassador speaks to Canberra group’. The article primarily touches
upon a visit by members of the CJF to the Turkish Embassy in Canberra
whereby the members of the Jewish Community were introduced to
aspects of Turkish culture. The article also includes the denial of
the Armenian Genocide in a speech delivered by the Turkish Ambassador
to those present at the reception.
We want to underscore that it is not just Armenians who are affirming
the Armenian Genocide but it is hundreds of independent scholars,
who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many
countries and nationalities and the course of decades. The scholarly
evidence reveals the following:
On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk
government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its
Armenian citizens – an unarmed Christian minority population. More
than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing,
starvation, torture, and forced death marches. Another million fled
into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from
its homeland of 2,500 years.
The Armenian Genocide is corroborated by the international scholarly,
legal, and human rights community:
1) Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide
in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the
Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he meant
by genocide.
2) The killings of the Armenians is genocide as defined by the 1948
United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide.
3) In 1997 the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an
organization of theworld’s foremost experts on genocide, unanimously
passed a formal resolution affirming the Armenian Genocide.
4) 126 leading scholars of the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel and
Yehuda Bauer placed a statement in the New York Times in June 2000
declaring the "incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide" and urging
western democracies to acknowledge it.
5) The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Jerusalem), the
Institute for the Study of Genocide (NYC) have affirmed the historical
fact of the Armenian Genocide.
6) Leading texts in the international law of genocide such as William
A. Schabas’s Genocide in International Law (Cambridge University Press,
2000) cite the Armenian Genocide as a precursor to the Holocaust and
as a precedent for the law on crimes against humanity.
7) Lead Genocide Scholars in Australia including Prof. Colin Tatz,
Prof. Robert Manne, Dr. Paul Bartrop and Dr. Donna-Lee Frieze have
studied and produced scholarly works affirming the historical reality
of the Armenian Genocide. The Australian Institute for Holocaust and
Genocide Studies based at the University of NSW, Shalom College is
each year, host to an ‘Armenian Genocide Commemorative Lecture’.
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