NATIONALIST TURKS PROTEST ARMENIA MOVE
Irish Examiner, Ireland
Sept 26 2005
HUNDREDS of Turkish nationalists chanting slogans and waving flags
protested over the weekend against a controversial academic conference
devoted to the WWI massacre of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey.
The conference had been due to open on Friday at two universities
in Istanbul but a last-minute court order blocked it, causing acute
embarrassment to the Turkish government just days before the start
of its EU membership talks.
Organisers then circumvented the court ban by moving the conference
to a third university in the city.
“This conference is an insult to our republic and to the memory of
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,” Erkal Onsel, head of the Istanbul branch of
the left wing but nationalist Workers’ Party, told protesters gathered
outside the private Bilgi University.
Ataturk is the revered founder of the modern Turkish Republic on the
ashes of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. Armenia and its supporters around
the world say 1.5 million Armenians died in a systematic genocide
committed by Ottoman Turkish forces between 1915 and 1923.
Ankara accepts many Armenians died on Turkish soil during and after
WWI, but says they were victims of a partisan conflict which claimed
even more Turkish Muslim lives as the Ottoman Empire was collapsing.
It denies any genocide.
Turkey is under pressure to change its stance if it is to become the
first Muslim country to join the EU.
The conference had originally been due to take place at Istanbul’s
Bosphorus University in May but was cancelled after Justice Minister
Cemil Cicek accused those backing the genocide claims of “stabbing
Turkey in the back”.
This time, with a nervous eye on Brussels as the clock ticks
towards the start of its long-delayed EU entry talks on October 3,
the government has strongly backed the conference. Despite a flurry
of EU-inspired reforms recently, promoting certain interpretations
of Turkish history can still be deemed a criminal offence under a
revised penal code.
The protesters said the organisers of the conference were not really
upholding freedom of speech.
“They don’t let us inside… they don’t give us a chance to put our
case. They forget those of the Turkish nation killed by Armenians,”
said Kemal Ermetin, who runs a nationalist magazine.
The protesters displayed photographs of what they said were Azeris
killed by Armenians in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh
during fighting in the early 1990s.
Turkey closed its border and cut diplomatic ties with tiny
ex-Soviet Armenia in 1993 to protest against Armenian occupation of
Nagorno-Karabakh, part of the territory of Azerbaijan, a regional
Turkic-speaking ally of Ankara.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress