Armenian Solidarity with the Victims of All Genocides,

Nor Serount Cultural Association,

Seyfo Centre

and

CHAK (Centre of Halabja)

Press Release

A Recognition of the Armenian Genocide made public in the House Of Commons

The 60^th anniversary of the United Nations Genocide Convention was marked in the House of Commons this week, on Tuesday 9th December 2008, by a public recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the Socialist Party of Kurdistan (PSK). Participating at the event were Professor Khatchatur Pilikian, author Desmond Fernandes, Akif Wan of the KNK and Adnan Kochar of CHAK.

The PSK statement read :

Turkey has not confronted its history and is adamant and stubborn in its behaviour. It is less than a century since the Armenian Genocide happened in front of the eyes of the world. This shameful act for humanity was condemned by the parliaments of many countries. Each time the Turkish government and its parliament has responded to these condemnations with anger. Excluding few conscientious intellectuals, the so called intellectuals and artists of Turkey have followed the footsteps of their politicians and tried to hide, deny, even falsify history and are using every trick in the book to blame the Armenians.

Of course, in Turkey, the example of a shameful act is not just the Armenian Genocide, but what was done to the Assyrians, Greeks and Kurds are crimes against humanity too. During the genocide of the Armenians, the Assyrians got their share in this slaughter (whole statement below).

 Author Desmond Fernandes described the way that Lemkin conceptualised the term "genocide". The Armenian 'genocide' - which he recognised, as such - had occured, he noted, without the perpetrators being brought to justice. Lemkin's conceptualisation of the term "genocide", and campaign to make it an international crime (through an international initiative that resulted in the United Nations' Genocide Convention being passed exactly 60 years ago), was aimed at trying to address precisely these types of concerns in a practical manner. Fernandes then outlined the way in which Armenians, Chaldeans-Assyrians, Greeks, Kurds and "Others", have been subjected to genocide - not only during the 1915-1918 period, but also during the so-called 'War of Independence' and Turkish republican period.

He provided case studies to highlight the nature of the genocides, and detailed the manner in which Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, a renowned genocide scholar, has reiterated the fact that Turkey still remains, in terms of the nature of ill-treatment of Kurds, in breach of two articles of the Genocide Convention.

Kurds, as Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and others have further shown, are also being subjected to 'linguistic' and ongoing 'cultural genocide'. Concerning the nature of targeting of "minorities" in Turkey, Fernandes outlined the manner in which Armenians, Kurds, Assyrians, Greeks and "Others" continue to be subjected to cultural genocide (just as "Greek Cypriots and 'Christian' Others" also continue to be subjected to cultural genocide in the north of Cyprus).

'Deep political' and 'deep state' linked circles continue to adopt ideological positions that are all too willing to engage and 'profit from' genocidal actions. Recent statements by the Turkish Prime Minister (4^th November 2008) and Vecdi Gönül, the Defence Minister, have merely encouraged those who advocate targeting of the 'non-Turkish Other'. Their positions, he noted, have been deeply criticised by the Society for Threatened Peoples, the Socialist Party of Kurdistan (see attached statement, in full), Arat Dink (the son of assassinated Hrant Dink), amongst other human rights campaigners, parties and organisations. Concerning the perspectives of two leading Kurdish parties over the 'cultural genocide' debate, he noted that Abdullah Ocalan was recently (in September 2008) quoted as saying:

I am warning the people against the cultural genocide and the dangers: I express my opinions.

Murat Karayilan has also been quoted (in Alternatif in September 2008) as referring to the "cultural genocide policies" of the state.

For the Socialist Party of Kurdistan (PSK):

The genocide against the Kurds has been ongoing since the time of the Ottoman Empire ... We can say that, all the things done to the Kurds, and at different times and places, ... are physical and cultural genocide.

The system that started this policy towards the end of the Ottoman Empire and that spread all through [the Turkish] Republican period wanted to exterminate tens of millions of Kurds through genocide, deportation and assimilation. Even if this has not been fully achieved, [to date], such policies had a huge destructive impact on the lives of the Kurdish people. Has the situation changed today? No. Today, Turkish statesmen are neither brave enough to confront their history nor to make real changes in their policies that are suitable for our times. They are disregarding world public opinion and international law and carrying on with their policies without fear. Today the system is using the terror that it had created, carrying on with its militarist and racist activities. It is resisting [initiatives aimed at] opening a peaceful path for a solution.

 Professor Khatchatur Pilikian in his major speech said:

The literary genius John Milton, whose 400^th anniversary of birth is exactly today, but it will be marked tomorrow at the Library, Conway Hall, once uttered this eye-opening remark in his Apology of 1648:

They who have put out the people's eyes, reproach them of their blindness.

Even in the first decade of our 21^st century, the oppressors' mantra has remained essentially the same:

'If you don't like to be oppressed, then accept your fate. If not, you better leave your abode, home and country. At best we will encourage such a move, and at worst we will force you to leave'.

In other words, you are not free to stay and try to change the status quo of iniquity. If you choose the latter and struggle for your human rights - enshrined in International Laws, Covenants and Conventions, not only as an individual, but also as a people, especially when diverse from the ruling and the oppressing class - then individual terror or even murder might be your Damoclean sword. Otherwise deportation and probably state terror leading to Genocide might befall your ethnic community.

That is exactly why the eminent Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was murdered in January last year. And that is what the recent Prime Minister of the Turkish Republic, Recep Erdogan really meant, on November 4^th this year, when he warned the disenchanted citizens of the Republic in general and the oppressed minorities in particular, saying:

Turkey consists of one nation, one flag and one land and that anyone who is not in agreement with this should leave the country.

On November 10^th 2008, less than a week after Erdogan's warning, his Defence Minister Vecdi Gönül, was in Brussels, marking the 70^th anniversary of death of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. Gönül's eulogy of Ataturk contained these revealing words:

Would it be possible today to maintain the same national State if the existence of Greeks in the Aegean region and of Armenians in several regions of Turkey had continued as before?

Curiously enough, the recent Defence Minister of Turkey chose to forget what Ataturk himself had thought about such state terror accomplishments. The Turkish historian and sociologist Taner Akcam informs:

Mustafa Kemal has dozens of speeches in which he defines the treatments reserved to Armenians as "cowardice", or "barbarity", and names these treatments "massacre" (See T. Akcam's The Genocide of Armenians and the Silence of the Turks, From Empire to Republic, A Shameful Act.)

We all know of course that Raphael Lemkin, who first coined the term "genocide" in 1943, did not mince his words, stating that genocide "happened so many times… First to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, Hitler took action." (Dadrian. History of the Armenian Genocide, p. 350).

According to the Turkish Justice Ministry, 1,700 people were tried in 2006 alone, under the racist Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. Prosecutors of the status quo have a field day in prohibiting so-called "insulting Turkishness", utilizing Article 301 to silence those valiant intellectuals who dare challenge the false premises of the official state denials of historical truths related with the Empire's and the Republic's tragic acts of ethnic and cultural annihilations. Hrant Dink himself was victimised by Article 301, before his assassination. Not surprisingly, therefore, that the eminent Turkish civil rights campaigner and publisher Ragip Zarakolu was found guilty of "insulting the institutions of the Turkish Republic". Just recently the BBC announced that a Turkish court has sentenced a Kurdish politician, the European Parliament's Sakharov human rights 1995 award winner, 47-year-old Ms Leyla Zana, to 10 years in prison. That is what the racist Article 301 of Turkey's penal code is all about - annihilating dissent and multiculturalism.

It is indeed refreshing to note that all the major Universal Declarations, International Charters and Conventions are not in agreement with the monolithic and rabid nationalism of the past and the present Turkish ruling elite, the like of Erdogan and Gönül, mentioned above ...

Here again Raphael Lemkin's thoughtful contribution is welcome:

I understood that the function of memory is not only to register past events, but to stimulate human conscience […] It became clear to me that the diversity of nations, religious groups and races is essential to civilization because every one of those groups has a mission to fulfill and a contribution to make in terms of culture.

All the above notwithstanding, UNESCO has been warning the world, for decades now, that the greatest shame of the current civilisation is the fact that thousands of children die of hunger every single day. Today that number has reached the staggering 44,000 hungry children dying each day of the year, as if a Hiroshima bomb is unleashed every single day just to kill children. I would like to pose the following: that the Goebbels' of this world, "releasing the safety-catch of their pistols" - in modern parlance cluster bombs & co, ill-Ltd - should also be seen responsible for the modern massacres of the innocents. Can there be any doubt that this child cleansing is also the unmentioned genocide of humanity, ongoing and an authentic one at that, which surely is the outcome of our own socio-economic and industrial military system, now coined with cynical panache as Globalisation, whereby tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, each averaging at least 20 times the destructive power of a Hiroshima bomb, are already in deployment all around the world.

Meanwhile billions pour into the pockets of the warmongers of modern metropolises. These warlords of Mammon would eventually thrive in an 'Inorganic Paradise' - a 'paradise' void of universal human rights and sustained by legalised torture; glorification of violence geared towards maximising profit at any cost; xenophobic state terror protected with religious fervour. And, topping as if the macabre orgy, genocide has been already tested, for a century now, to become the collateral damage of its inorganically modernised and sweat-shopped 'global village' of hunger and debt.

 Akif Wan of the Kurdish National Congress (KNK) spoke about present human rights abuses in Turkey, particularly about the 10-year sentence inflicted on Leyla Zana, the former MP.

Adnan Kochar , director of CHAK, spoke about the ecocide inflicted on the countryside of Kurdistan by the Turkish military.

During the questions,Lord Hylton said that the recent comments by the Turkish ministers seemed to disqualify Turkey from progressing towards EU membership. Andrew Pelling MP also participated and expressed his great interest in the issues.

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