Turkey should recognize the Assyrian genocide of 1915

[Balci]

where else to flee at ? Iraq, former fascist state, now in war and terror.

Iran, with a mad priest at the top, who kill every Kurd he comes over

Syria in the southwest, not a too good place to be either.

and those who had enough money or contacts, fled to Europe or USA, of course, not everyone can't afford that, So the best solution is to be in Turkey.

AND DON'T deny, that you turks have killed Kurdish civilians.

[zurderer]

We Turks? Okey. Dont deny, You kurds are terrorist.

My friend, They can flee kurdish cities like diyarbakır. They went istanbul, izmir. So It looks like, Turks dont hate them too much. Otherwise, They will never enter that cities.

[Balci]

wtf, Turks not hating us ?! now you are WRONG AGAIN

we Kurds, terrorists ? just because we fight for freedom and freedom of expression our own culture ? do NOT think so, and don't blame EVERYONE for PKK's actions, not everyone likes PKK's action, and want a PEACEFUL solution.

Unlike you, who hates us, without exception.

[zurderer]

wtf, Turks not hating us ?! now you are WRONG AGAIN

Tell this to 10 million kurds who immigrated Turkish cities. Maybe,than they will return kurdistan?

do NOT think so, and don't blame EVERYONE for PKK's actions, not everyone likes PKK's action,

well, look who is talking. You can blame everyone but I cannot? How childish.. my terrorist friend.

Unlike you, who hates us, without exception.

Still, childish..

We turks? hah..

[Balci]

wtf, Turks not hating us ?! now you are WRONG AGAIN

Tell this to 10 million kurds who immigrated Turkish cities. Maybe,than they will return kurdistan?

do NOT think so, and don't blame EVERYONE for PKK's actions, not everyone likes PKK's action,

well, look who is talking. You can blame everyone but I cannot? How childish.. my terrorist friend.

Unlike you, who hates us, without exception.

Still, childish..

We turks? hah..

As usual, you are both ignorant and dumb.

I blame those who HURT OTHER FOR SOMEONES SAKE, if it so is PKK or the Turkish government, I don't care, war won't help anyone.

Long live a peacefull solution, but you or PKK won't support it.

Peace

[zurderer]

As usual, you are both ignorant and dumb.

Good argument. Ops, is this an argument?

I blame those who HURT OTHER FOR SOMEONES SAKE, if it so is PKK or the Turkish government, I don't care, war won't help anyone.

You said Turks.. You accused Turks with killing kurds. Also you accused Turks with hating kurds. are you aware of what are you saying?

Long live a peacefull solution, but you or PKK won't support it.

Bla bla bla. It is you who insult me, not otherwise. Peacefull funny guy...

[Balci]

Zurd, do me one favor, grow up.

As said earlier, learn to read, and THEN you could be a part of a forum.


''You said Turks.. You accused Turks with killing kurds. Also you accused Turks with hating kurds. are you aware of what are you saying? ''

ohh.. yes ?

You hate us, and you KILL us.

[zurderer]

[Diri]

Let's not be unfair...

There are some Turks who are fascist pricks... And there are some Turks who are liberals...

And there are some Turks who are humanists...

There are communist Turks etc...

Don't generalize... "Turk" is not a Person, with ONE head and ONE body...

One of my uncles is married to a very smart Turkish lady... She tells her daughters: You are Kurds...

[K4L_2007]

Theres not much room for improvement to the brain of yours here..

Ofcourse you deny all the rasism and opression to kurds
ofcourse you dont believe the government has burned 3000 villages
ofcourse the armenians couldnt be annihilated
ofcourse its our lands since ottoman empire owned it
ofcourse the kurds arent real people, their just turks from "turkeys" mountains

Ofcourse the kurds have it great, they live great lives in Turkey and none of them are complaining. (who dares to?)
Ofcourse they dont want independence, which minority would want that?
Ofcourse PKK is a terror-organisation, they just killed 3 people on a bus. Is this the gratitude we get for trying so much to help the mountainturks?

This is what most turkish parents tell their children.

What good would it do to the turkish government to show all of this to its citizens, what it does to other people? Ofcourse they deny it. Just because they dont show it to you, doesnt it mean they dont do it.

You are living in a dreamworld, not four other ethnicities.. (greeks/kurds/assyrians/armenians)


You want proof? Why dont you go and tell turkish media to get proof of PKKs "bombings" before they publish it to the people. They are all based on assumptions, still it shows the rest of the world as if they are facts, while the kurds have no propaganda to defend themselves with.

[Darkseid]

how many kurds did we kill? Please give some numbers and proofs. Neutral one please..

It is funny, when Kurd were so much hated by Turks, They fleed turkish land and more than 50% of Kurds live at Turkish cities.

Actually land is land. No one owns it. It is the Dran, which you call Allah that dictates who has the right to which land and who does not.

The Dran is a mysterious presense that no one can rightfully understand and therefore no one has the rightful say in the matter about anything. But if you open yourself to the Dran and understand the Dran for what it really is then you would have a say in the rightful manner of what should be done in terms of ownership.

It doesn't really matter what faith you belond to in order to understand the Dran, even an athiest can become a Draneian or one that understands the Dran (Allah/God/Brahma/Jesus/Dao/Cosmic Presense/The Jedi Force/Whatever). Draneism is not to be confused as a religion. It is rather a belief unitarian movement concentrated on the acceptance of the Dran (not technically as god, but as something to unite everyone for the greater good of co-existence, prosperity, individualism, and happiness).

To rightfully understand the Dran as whatever it is you believe, you must understand the ways of the Dran.

Only by understanding the ways of the Dran can you become a Draneian and a rightful individual empowered by the Dran to accomplish the greater good that needs to be done in this world.

I made a list of those in another thread and there are more codes of Draneian conduct that must be understood rather than followed to become one with the Dran.

But as the sole Draneian and I can say that the Kurds, Assyrians, and several other oppressed people are going to be saved through the returning of the messiah. So Kurds, there is hope. But it won't come until near or after 2012.

[King Ashurbanipal]

Turkish soldiers posing proudly with the decapitated heads of Armenian community leaders, 1915

The Turkish Genocide Of Assyrians And Armenians

(AINA) -- In March 2003 the Swedish organisation "Levande historia" arranged a seminar in the town of Uppsala with the theme "The genocide on Armenians and other Christian groups in 1915". I attended in my capacity as a legal expert on international law, but the two most important contributions were presented by two historians, Klas-Göran Karlsson from the university of Lund, and David Gaunt from the university college of Södertörn. They both confirmed that genocide, in a general sense, had taken place in the then Ottoman empire during the First World War.

The strange thing with this seminar in Uppsala was that Turkey's embassy in Stockholm had sent a historian from Ankara to give a contrasting picture to the picture they suspected the seminar would confirm. The discussion between the historians reached a complete deadlock and the event was commented on later by Turkey's largest newspaper, describing Swedish scientists with derisive words of abuse.

This controversy should never have taken place from a purely historical point of view because the scientific research done on this issue is relatively clear.

There are very many witnesses from 1915: missionaries who were there in the Christian areas; consuls from western countries who reported back to their embassies about what happened; German military attachés who reported in the same way; and the American ambassador Morgenthau in Constantinople who gave reports about his contacts with the government of the Young Turks, especially about a conversation with Turkish war minister Enver Pasha, in which the minister assured that what took place was ordered by the government.

A document was published already in 1916 entitled The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916 by James Bryce, British expert in political science, and Arnold Toynbee, a historian. Bryce had previously been ambassador to the USA and had led an investigative commission during WWI about alleged war crimes in occupied Belgium. Toynbee was in the beginning of his career as a world famous historian.

Johannes Lepsius, a German missionary in Anatolia, was given a task by the authorities in Berlin during the same period of time. He was ordered to compile German diplomatic correspondence concerning Armenia. The documentation of Lepsius was published in 1919 in Potsdam. A number of scientific works published in modern times have completed the picture. Prof. David Gaunt published his book Massacres, Resistance, Protectors 2006. It covers the fate of all the Christian groups of eastern Anatolia during WWI.

It all started in Constantinople on 24th April 1915 when several hundred leading Armenian intellectuals were arrested, deported and murdered. It was assumed that their Orthodox belief made them friends of the Russians and thus a security risk. Orders followed demanding cities and villages in the east to be emptied on their Christian population. The Armenians were to be removed southwards and death marches and massacres followed. The camps they were removed to in the Syrian desert were not any new settlements; they were an end station of starvation, assault and misery.

The western allies issued a proclamation on 24th May 1915 in which they described what was going on as a"crime against humanity and civilisation", announcing court proceedings against guilty individuals after the war. No such court proceedings, apart from a few exceptions, ever took place, but the expression "crime against humanity" was coined.

According to The United Nations Convention on Genocide ratified in 1948, the affected population must constitute an ethnically or religiously definable group in order for the term genocide to be applied to them. This criterion is fulfilled retroactively in the case of the Assyrians and Armenians.

It also requires an intention from the perpetuators to annihilate the group entirely or partly. This criteria of intention is the most difficult to prove. Yet I advocate that the research of history has been able to prove since long time ago such an underlying political purpose: to clear the Ottoman Empire from foreign elements and build a homogenous Muslim state.

The order of the regime of the Young Turks from April 1915 to clear cities and villages from Armenian elements is documented. The following order, on how to handle the people who are driven together and deported, is lost, probably destroyed in an early stage. But the certainty of the existence of such a brutal order, in practise an order for partial annihilation, is made clear from a later order by Talat Pasha, Minister of Interior, to the governor in Diyarbekir. It is made clear in a telegram from Constantinople from 12th July 1915 that the regime needs to put itself in a more positive light because of the international protests. Talat Pasha issues directives saying that the killings which are lacking in discrimination against Christian groups (in general) must stop, i.e. the special treatment issued for the Armenians must not befall the Assyrians. This was the meaning of the telegram; the genocide committed against the Armenians was acknowledged, but it was not to spread to other Christian groups.

The Swedish word for genocide, folkmord, has been used by Hjalmar Branting (a famous Swedish prime minister) during an Armenia-meeting on 27th March 1917. He said:

"We are not talking about minor assaults but about an organized and systematic genocide (folkmord), worse than we have ever witnessed in Europe. It has been about annihilating the population of the entire area, drive the survivors out in the desert with the expectation that they will not endure but that their bones will whiten in the desert sand. This genocide is unparalleled among all appalling acts of the war. Our hearts have ached when we have read about it."

(Socialdemokraten, the official publication of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, 28th March 1917).

There was no juridical term for these events during WWI, but the term used by the allies "crime against humanity" was to gain political validity through the regulations of the Nuremberg trials in 1945. What a Swedish government, minister, parliament or parliamentarian committee could say about the Armenian and Assyrian tragedy is that it is about massacres that were described as a crime against humanity in 1915 and which could today, from a juridical point of view, be described as genocide. The current Turkish republic has no juridical responsibility for these events as it is a successor state of the Ottoman Empire, but today's Turkey has a democratic identity to guard and it has a responsibility to make sure that freedom of speech is functioning. To be able to freely debate the past and sometimes take a moral responsibility for the damage inflicted on others is a feature of civil democratic societies.

An investigation was launched in 1997 in Sweden to find out about our trade revenue from Germany during the Second World War. A report named "The Nazi gold and the Bank of Sweden" (SOU 1998:96) established that gold ingots had been received from looted occupied countries and we had even possibly received gold taken from teeth from the death camps in the east. Sweden then gave around 40 million kronor to the Jewish centre in Stockholm as a form of moral compensation.

Swiss banks had enriched themselves in a corresponding way during the war. As the years passed the banks even incorporated the bank accounts of murdered Jews with their own funds. A storm of protests in the USA in 1998 led the Swiss banks to form a solidarity fund to be used for compensation of survivors. A court in New York announced later that one of the banks would pay compensation amounting to 1.25 billion dollars.

There are more examples of how a debate in democratic states has led to compensation. The money itself cannot compensate for lost lives, but the willingness to pay compensation marks guilt and responsibility and a will for reconciliation. The fact that one is recognized as a victim, as an object of a historical and massive injustice, gives a confirmation of ones identity from the perspective of the affected group.

It is obvious that an open discussion in Turkey about the events of 1915-1918, without any obstacles from article 301 of the Turkish penal code, would benefit Turkey's application for EU membership.

Our politicians are eager to claim that the Assyrian and Armenian genocides are an issue for the historians. But the same thing is not claimed about the Holocaust. The fact that the events of 1940-45 are an issue for politicians and diplomats was recently confirmed by the United Nations General Assembly when it adopted a resolution condemning all denials of the Holocaust. But Seyfo, the year of the sword as it is called by Assyrians (1915), is considered immature for political judgements. I like to uphold that the historians have done their job and they have done it well when it comes to the genocides of 1915-18. They cannot point to documents from any Turkish equivalence to the Wannsee-conference, but they have collected enough material to show there was a deliberate intention to commit what we today call genocide. One cannot ask scientists to agree totally; they have not agreed totally regarding the Holocaust either. But the stage of knowledge about the Assyrian and Armenian genocides is not insufficient to the degree that allows timid politicians to hide behind arguments of claimed indistinctness.

With this said, I do not claim that now is the right occasion to mediate historical truths on the international stage. It might not be the correct time. But it is concurrently time for our politicians to inform themselves about the factual matter and handle it in a moral manner. What we today call genocide did really take place in the eastern part of the Ottoman Empire year in 1915 and even the years that followed. Furthermore, the affected were different Christian groups -- Armenians and Assyrians. It is time for our politicians to acknowledge that serious historians have confirmed this historical writing and that there is no reason to question their conclusion.

By Prof. Ove Bring

Prof. Ove Bring is one of Sweden's foremost legal experts on international law. He is a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague and a member of the International Law Delegation of the Swedish Foreign Office. This speech was delivered by him during the conference on the Assyrian genocide in the Swedish parliament on 30th January 2007.

Translated from Swedish by Munir Gultekin.

Editor's note: the following speech was delivered to the Swedish Parliament on January 1, 2007

[Darkseid]

That is nothing compare to how Native Americans were treated when the white settlers came.

[Balci]

Let's not be unfair...

There are some Turks who are fascist pricks... And there are some Turks who are liberals...

And there are some Turks who are humanists...

There are communist Turks etc...

Don't generalize... "Turk" is not a Person, with ONE head and ONE body...

One of my uncles is married to a very smart Turkish lady... She tells her daughters: You are Kurds...

actually Diri, I wish i could think the same, but all Turks deny us, the NKP (norges kommunistiske parti) has a Turkish leader, and he HATES kurds, no way around, he hates us, even he is a socialist and a communist. Turkish children are grown up to hate us, trough education and propaganda.

[Rumtaya]

That is nothing compare to how Native Americans were treated when the white settlers came.

A crulty is a crulty, you cant say that this is not to be compared!
You even can´t imagine how the people feeling were!