A serious problem for Turkey and the EU

[Grant]

Anyone who doubts the events at Musa Dagh and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 should read this article:

http://www.armenian-genocide.org/musa_dagh.html

FYI, the parents of the family who installed my dual pane windows four years ago were on the ship that sailed to Egypt.

And here is the continuing saga:
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Controversial columnist shot dead on Istanbul street
Ethnic Armenian's genocide comments had angered Turkey
- Sebnem Arsu, New York Times
Saturday, January 20, 2007


(01-20) 04:00 PST Istanbul -- Hrant Dink, a prominent newspaper editor, columnist and voice for Turkey's ethnic Armenians who was prosecuted for challenging the official Turkish version of the 1915 Armenian genocide, was shot dead as he left his office on a busy street in central Istanbul on Friday.

Television images showed Dink lying on the crowded sidewalk covered with a white sheet outside the office of his bilingual Turkish Armenian weekly, Agos. Officials said they detained three suspects. Investigators were reviewing surveillance tapes from nearby shops.

Dink, 53, a Turk of Armenian descent, often provoked widespread anger in Turkey for his comments on the genocide, which Turkey denies, saying the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians resulted from hunger and other suffering in World War I. He also angered some ethnic Armenians for opposing their demand that Turkey recognize the genocide as a condition of entry to the European Union.

Dink viewed entry as the clearest route to strengthening democracy in Turkey.

In recent articles, Dink described an increasing number of death threats against him. "I do not know how real these threats are," he wrote, "but what's really unbearable is the psychological torture that I'm living in, like a pigeon, turning my head up and down, left and right, my head quickly rotating."

Reaction to the daylight shooting, both in Turkey and abroad, was swift. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the shooting as a direct attack on Turkey's peace and stability.

"A bullet was fired at freedom of thought and democratic life in Turkey," he said in a nationally broadcast news conference. "Once again, dark hands have chosen our country and spilled blood in Istanbul to achieve their dark goals."

In an unusual show of anger and regret, the prime minister's remarks were echoed by the head of the armed forces, the president and other officials. The Armenian patriarch in Istanbul, Mesrob Mutafyan, declared 15 days of mourning for the small Armenian Christian population of Turkey.

Several thousand people marched from Dink's office to Taksim Square on Friday evening to protest the killing. Men, women and children held pictures of Dink, decorated his office door with flowers, waved black flags and chanted, "Shoulder to shoulder against fascism," and, "We are all Hrant; we are all Armenians."

European officials and human rights groups also expressed horror and called on Turkey to do more to protect free expression.

Dink was one of a number of intellectuals convicted under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which penalizes remarks against the state or the Turkish identity. It has been harshly criticized by the EU as a violation of freedom of expression.

Turkey has been changing some laws to try to meet the EU's membership criteria. It faced a setback last month, however, when ministers in Brussels decided to freeze talks on eight of 35 areas of discussion because of the refusal by Ankara to open Turkish airports and seaports to Cyprus, a member of the union.

Dink, a father of three, founded Agos in 1996. The bilingual community newspaper has a weekly circulation of 5,000.

Haluk Sahin, a columnist for the Radikal newspaper, a strong supporter of Dink's legal struggles, said Turkey had been hit in the heart.

"Those who wanted to harm Turkey couldn't have chosen a better target," Sahin said. "As opposed to other killings in the past, Turkish public reaction against this murder will show us where Turkey stands in the world."

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©2007 San Francisco Chronicle

[Niya]

Grant,

No one is denying that many Armenians were killed during that time. However, it was not a genocide. The Armenians want it to be classfied as such. World War 1 was going on at the time too, but the Armenians want to put all the blame of the killing on the Turks and claim genocide.

[Steeler [Crawler2]]

Niya
Genocide, not genocide, whatever. It's clear enough what was going on and who was doing what to whom.

[Niya]

Mad Mac, as I said, no-body is denying that a lot of Armenians were killed, but is was not GENOCIDE period.

[gurey25]

Western ideology infected the Muslim ummah and undermined what was left of the Osmanli Khalifate.
When western ideas of Racial superiority and nationalism filtered in and the ruling turks began feeling
superior, this started Arab nationalism, and fanned the flames of Kurdish and Armenian Nationalism,

the millet system was on its last legs and all it needed was WW1 to bring it to its knees.

Now when the Turks swallowed Western concepts of nationalism and racialism, naturally they would seek to build a National turkish state, and they would clear any "Obstacles" to that goal.
The Armenians were the biggest obstacle they were a large minority very urbanised and highly integrated unlike the Greeks and Kurds, they were just stupid enough to launch thier war of independance when the Osmanli sultanate was Dying.
Unlike the greeks, they did not have Greece and the Greek army directly aiding them,
and unlike the Kurds they did not have the mountains as friends, so extermination was to be expected.


Ironicaly the murder of nearly a million armenians didnt cause that much of a stir in the west,
maybe the horrors of WW1 made everybody used to carnage, or maybe the west turned their heads away during the slaughter becuase the Nationalist Westernized Turks were doing the job of dismantaling the last Islamic Khalifate.


Hitler when asked about the implications of the final solution, replyed
Who remembers the million armenians?

[Steeler [Crawler2]]

And the answer to Hitler's question was: The Armenians.

Who remembers the holocaust: Everybody. Esspecially the Jews and Arabs.