Tag: Davutoglu

Turkish EU Minister on the Armenian Genocide Controversy

‘We Are Very Sensitive About This Issue’

Photo Gallery: 3 Photos

DPA

In a SPIEGEL interview, Ankara’s Minister for European Affairs Egemen Bagis discusses Turkey’s journey to the West and his country’s dispute with the United States over a resolution on the genocide of the Armenians recently passed by Congress.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Bagis, why does Turkey still need a minister for European Union affairs? Isn’t Europe a dead issue in your country?

Bagis: Absolutely not. My government is investing more energy in the reform process than any other government. In 2013 we will be ready for accession.SPIEGEL: But do Turks share your enthusiam? Three out of four Turks believe that the EU wants to divide your country and spread Christianity.

Bagis: I have other figures: If Turkey held a referendum today on accession, 60 percent would vote for it. On the other hand, only 40 percent of Turks believe that accession will definitely take place. In Europe it is the other way round: Forty percent want to take Turkey in, but 60 percent believe the country will join the EU one day.

SPIEGEL: In other words: There is skepticism on both sides.

Bagis: Let’s put it this way: Some countries like Malta apply for membership and are in the next day. Others need a little more time. I have no problem with the fact that some Europeans say they want negotiations with an open-ended outcome. Today everything has an open-ended outcome, even Catholic marriages.

SPIEGEL: Turkey has been seeking EU membership since 1959. Is it not humiliating to be held at bay for so long?

Bagis: No, because we also made mistakes. There have been three military coups since 1959, and many Turkish government’s didn’t have a clear vision or idea of Europe. It was the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that first made the necessary constitutional amendments between 2002 and 2004 so that we could finally start accession negotiations.

SPIEGEL: Only 17 percent of Germans support Turkish membership in the EU.

Bagis: Believe me, one day Europeans will have to appeal to the Turkish public to support EU membership. Europe has many problems. Tell me, for example, how the EU plans to solve its energy crisis without Turkish help? A large part of the future energy resources Europe needs will flow through Turkey. And tell me how you are going to solve your economic and demographic problems? The average age in Europe is 40, while in Turkey it is 28. Where are you going to get your work force from? Who is supposed to pay your pensions?

SPIEGEL: As long as declared opponents of Turkish accession like German Chancellor Angela Merkel and France President Nicolas Sarkozy are in office, you won’t get very far with such arguments.

Bagis: I am very thankful that German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle has publicly stated that he wants accession talks to continue. With regards to President Sarkozy: He used this horrible, insulting phrase, “privileged partnership” …

SPIEGEL: … a term that was actually coined by Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union party.

Bagis: But Sarkozy repeated it often enough. My government has only one answer: We will only accept full membership — nothing more, nothing less. We want the same chances as every candidate country.

SPIEGEL: Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, said: “The Turks have only ever gone in one direction — towards the West.”

Bagis: And that is still true. But at the same time, we are also a bridge and have four strong pillars, one in each direction …

SPIEGEL: … of which you recently pulled out two by recalling your ambassadors to the United States and Sweden. The move was triggered by the decision of a Congressional committee to pass a resolution recognizing the death of more than a million Armenians in 1915-16 as genocide. A similar resolution was passed by Sweden’s parliament.

Bagis: With this decision, Sweden has become slave to a thesis that, unfortunately, is based on falsehoods. The voting in the US on the so-called genocide was a success for Turkey. The Congressman from California, who got support from the Armenian lobby, made a fool out of himself. He tried to scratch the back of every Representative in the corridors of Congress in order to get their vote. But then he only won by a single vote.

SPIEGEL: Still, a Congressional committee approved the resolution.

Bagis: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton later declared that the resolution will not be passed by the entire House of Representatives. As you know, the French parliament passed a similar law on the so-called Armenian genocide in 2006. Afterwards there was a ban on French airforce flights over Turkey. We are very sensitive about this issue.

SPIEGEL: What options do you have if the Americans do, in the end, recognize the genocide officially? Would you want to close the Incirlik airbase? Leave NATO?

Bagis: I will leave that up to your readers’ imagination. But allow me to remind you of one thing: Seventy percent of the logistical support for the Iraq deployment comes through Incirlik.

SPIEGEL: Why is it so difficult for Turkey to recognize the genocide of the Armenians?

Bagis: It is up to the historians, not politicians, to judge what happened in the past. Politicians look into the future. We have offered to create a joint commission of historians together with the Republic of Armenia — so far without success. Besides, you should know that the Ottoman Empire was an ally of the German Reich. Nothing that happened back then happened without consultations with the Germans.

SPIEGEL: If you dont accept the word “genocide,” then how can you have a “Genocide Museum” in the city of Igdir in eastern Turkey, dedicated to the Turks who died in 1915?

Bagis: That’s very easy: Every action leads to a reaction. But I don’t want to rule out the possibility that, someday, this museum could be transformed into a “Museum of Coexistance” or a “Museum of Mutual Pain.” I do not want to deny that the Armenians went through very difficult times …

SPIEGEL: You call it “difficult times”? We are taking about 1.5 million Armenians who perished between 1915 and 1917.

Bagis: According to American historian Justin McCarthy, 600,000 Armenians died at the time — and at the same time, 2 million Kurds and Turks. There was a civil war in Turkey, right in the middle of World War I.

SPIEGEL: The interior minister at that time, Talat Pascha, told the then US ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, that the “physical extermination” of the Amernians was a necessary goal of the war.

Bagis: According to McCarthy, this quote isn’t entirely accurate. But I am not a historian. I wasn’t there, you weren’t there. Why don’t we leave this question to a mutual commission of historians comprised of Armenians and Turks?

SPIEGEL: There was a time when Turkey seemed further along the road toward confronting its past. In 1919, the three men mainly responsible for the Armenian genocide — Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha and Cemal Pasha — were all sentenced to death in absentia. Atatürk wanted nothing to do with them. Nevertheless, there are still three large, magnificent tombstones for these men in Istanbul.

Bagis: It is traditional in our culture to commemorate the dead. Like all of us, these men surely did some good and some bad things in their lives and for their country.

SPIEGEL: Is Turkey worried the Armenians will demand reparations?

Bagis: You know, there are an estimated 100,000 illegal Armenian immigrants in our country, who work here providing care for the elderly and children. For me, this shows that there is no hate between our people. On the contrary: We are attempting to achieve rapprochement, there is a peace process between our countries …

SPIEGEL: … which is stagnating at the moment.

Bagis: That is not our fault. We have attempted to bridge our differences; we want to open all archives. But when you see that the other side is blocking all your attempts, it makes you skeptical.

SPIEGEL: This issue represents one of the few on which the AKP government, the military and the secular elite are all on the same page. Doesn’t that bother you?

Bagis: No. My government focuses on solving problems. We want good neighborly relations, also with Armenia.

SPIEGEL: Turkey’s new foreign policy earned considerable praise, but the country’s domestic policies have been enigmatic for some people in the West. Isn’t your government overplaying its hand in its power struggle with the army? You are no longer arresting only potential putschists, but also critics of the government.

Bagis: The investigations in the so-called Ergenekon case, where men are suspected of having planned a putsch against the government, are an issue for the judiciary. In the latest progress report, the European Union assesses the investigation as an opportunity for Turkey to further democratize itself.SPIEGEL: Others see signs of continuing Islamization. Restaurants are losing their alcohol licenses, young people are being harassed for holding hands in public and Family Minister Aliye Kavaf has described homosexuality as a “disease.”

Bagis: I do not agree with her, I do not consider homosexuality to be a disease. But I am neither a historian nor a doctor. Besides, I really don’t think that Turkey has become more conservative. It just so happens that the conservatives are a lot more visible today than they were previously.

Interview conducted by Bernhard Zand and Daniel Steinvorth
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/turkish-eu-minister-on-the-armenian-genocide-controversy-we-are-very-sensitive-about-this-issue-a-683701.html

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April 12, 2010
Soyak: Armenian Diaspora Ready for Cooperation with Turkey

SATURDAY, 03 APRIL 2010 10:38

Giving an interview to TurkishNY, Co-chairman of the Turkish-Armenian Business Development Council Kaan Soyak said that contribution that bilateral trade between Turkey and Armenia can make should not be ignored in the process of normalization of relations.

Stressing that there is political will towards normalization of relations both in Armenia and Turkey, Soyak said, “The most important factors for normalization of relations between two countries are considered as genocide resolutions and Nagorno-Karabakh problem. We want the economical dimension of the ties to come to the surface in shaping the relations between two countries.”

Pointing out that the volume of trade between two countries is about $200 mln despite closed borders, Soyak implied that Armenian diaspora is ready to cooperate with Turkey and said, “It is important that a big part of Armenian diaspora supports opening of borders. In that case, businessmen of Anatolia will be able to cooperate with Armenian diaspora in Russia, Middle Asia, Arabian countries, Europe, North and South America and even Far East without having any communication problem.” Stressing that volume of trade between Turkey and Armenia might reach to $1 bln with opening of state border, Soyak said, “It would be inevitable for the region to turn into a trade center with the opening of borders. Commercial relations will be the factor that provides reconciliation between two communities.”

Underscoring that Turkey should not ignore influence of Russia over Armenia and Azerbaijan in its efforts towards resettlement of Nagorno-Karabakh problem, Soyak said, “In my opinion, resettlement of Nagorno-Karabakh problem may be achieved in two years. Russia may solve the problem in some extent to relieve Turkish community on Nagorno-Karabakh problem, which would make normalization of relations between Turkey and Armenia possible. On the other hand, even if such formula can be implented, the comprehensive solution to the problem will be dependent to the other developments in Caucasus, especially to the resolution of S. Ossetia and Abkhazia issues. Such a temporary solution for Nagorno-Karabakh is towards the interests of Russia as investments of Russia in Armenia cannot be operated because of closed borders.”

The full text of the interview of Co-chairman of the Turkish-Armenian Business Development Council Kaan Soyak can be found in Turkishny.com in Turkish language.

April 4, 2010
Desperate Turkish Tactics to Woo Diaspora on the Eve of April 24

[sassoun@pacbell.net]

The Turkish government has been receiving a succession of bad news in recent weeks. Its persistent policy of denial of the Armenian Genocide suffered serious setbacks when the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Swedish Parliament, and Catalonia’s regional Parliament in Spain adopted resolutions acknowledging the Armenian Genocide.

Turkish denialists are terrified by these official acknowledgments on the eve of the 95^th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. They are even more alarmed by the fact that the Parliaments of Bulgaria, Israel, Serbia, Spain, and Great Britain are about to consider similar resolutions in April.

The Turkish leadership was under the mistaken impression that the Protocols signed with Armenia six months ago would end any further action on the Armenian Genocide by the international community. In fact, Turkey had viewed these Protocols as a last ditch effort to stem the tide of such acknowledgments in the future. Its devious strategy almost worked, as the genocide resolutions in both Spain and the U.S. Congress were adopted by a mere one vote majority. The opponents of these resolutions specifically cited the “reconciliation” between Armenia and Turkey as their reason for voting against them.

Alarmed by these developments, and distracted by serious internal problems, the Turkish government has initiated, perhaps a little too late, a series of actions, hoping to prevent further defeats on the Armenian Genocide issue.

These actions range from using harsh, bullying tactics against countries that dare to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, and a soft approach to mislead the international community into thinking that the Turkish government is being more accommodating towards Armenians.

Among the Turkish bullying tactics against countries acknowledging the genocide are:

— Recalling its ambassador;

— Canceling military contracts; and

— Boycotting the purchase of consumer goods.

Last week, Turkish officials added a new twist, threatening to sue the more than 20 countries that have already acknowledged the Armenian Genocide. This is one of the many bluffs Turkish leaders use from time to time to discourage additional countries from acknowledging the Genocide. I truly hope that Turkey would carry out this threat, as it would create worldwide publicity for the mass crimes committed against Armenians. Any fair-minded non-Turkish court would immediately dismiss such a frivolous lawsuit!

Turkey’s more clever tactics, using soft gloves at the advice of western public relations agents, include:

— Renovating a couple of historic Armenian churches, while thousands of others are converted to mosques, stables, residences or simply ruined.

— The “gracious” gesture of allowing religious services to be performed once a year for a limited number of people and limited duration to be determined by Turkish authorities, at the 10^th century Holy Cross Armenian Church at Akhtamar Island, on Lake Van. This world famous house of worship is officially designated as a touristic site, not a church!

— Reviewing the possibility of lifting the ban on children of refugees from Armenia to attend private Armenian schools in Istanbul.

— A “show” meeting held last week between Prime Minister Erdogan and the head of Istanbul’s Sourp Prgich Armenian hospital, who was wrongly named as the leader of Turkey’s Armenian community. This meeting was more akin to a slave being summoned by his master. Afterwards, Bedros Shirinoglu dutifully told the Turkish media that “1915” was nothing more than a feud between two loving friends, instigated by third parties! He said that his grandfather was among the victims, but so were many Turks! Shirinoglu blamed himself and asked for Erdogan’s forgiveness for the latter’s threat to deport 100,000 Armenian refugees, saying that the inflated figure was his own fault, not the Prime Minister’s.

— Finally, Foreign Minister Davutoglu came up last week with a new ploy to divide the Armenian Diaspora, after having limited success in his attempt to split the Diaspora from Armenia with the Protocols. Davutoglu announced that the Turkish authorities will initiate “dialog” with “reasonable Diaspora Armenians,” meaning Armenians who do not mind selling out the Armenian Cause for their own ego and personal gain. The Turkish Foreign Minister stated that contacts will be established with Armenian “intellectuals, universities, and civil societies.”

Clearly, Turkish officials are resorting to all possible means, including the continued exloitation of the defunct Protocols, to discourage additional countries from acknowledging the Armenian Genocide.

Armenia and the Diaspora must remain vigilant and united, especially in the weeks leading up to the 95^th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, in order not to fall victim to Turkish machinations, inducements and entrapments.

March 30, 2010
Bad things happen when empires fall apart
Harking back to Armenia in 1915 will only drive modern Turkey into China’s arms

Norman Stone

The Times

March 8, 2010

The best thing said about the Armenian tragedy was a sermon delivered in the main church in Constantinople in 1894, more than 20 years before it happened. Patriarch Ashikyan had this to say: “We have lived with the Turks for a thousand years, have greatly flourished, are nowhere in this empire in a majority of the population. If the nationalists go on like this [they had started a terrorist campaign] they will ruin the nation.”

That Patriarch was quite right, and the nationalists shot him (and many other notables who were saying the same thing).

Now a US Congressional committee has had its say, by voting to recognise as “genocide” the mass killing of Armenians by Turkish forces that began in 1915, during the First World War.

Is the committee right? When the First World War broke out there were Armenian uprisings and the Patriarch’s fears were realised. The population in much of the territory of today’s Turkey was deported in cruel circumstances that led to much murder and pillage.

But genocide? No, if by that you mean the sort of thing Hitler did. The Armenian leader was offered a job in the government in October 1914 to sort things out (he refused on the ground that his Turkish was not up to it). The Turks themselves put 1,600 men on trial for what had happened and executed a governor. The British had the run of the Turkish archives for four years after 1918 and failed to find incriminating documents. Armenians in the main cities were not touched. Documents did indeed turn up in 1920, but they turned out to be preposterous forgeries, written on the stationery of a French school.

You cannot really describe this as genocide. Horrors, of course, happened but these same horrors were visited upon millions of Muslims (and Jews) as the Ottoman Empire receded in the Caucasus and the Balkans. Half of its urban population came from those regions and, in many cases, the disasters of their families occurred at Armenian hands.

Diasporas jump up and down in the politics of the United States — as an American friend says of them, when they cross the Atlantic, they do not change country, they change planet.

Braveheart is, for the Scottish me, a dreadful embarrassment. I have to explain to Kurdish taxi drivers that the whole film is wicked tosh that just causes idiots in Edinburgh to paint their faces and to hate the English, whereas there cannot be a single family in Scotland that does not have cousins in England.

But what will be the effect of the resolution in Turkey? The answer is that it will be entirely counterproductive. Yes, the end of the Ottoman Empire was a terrible time, as the end of empires generally are: take the Punjab in 1947, for instance.

Disease, starvation and massacre carried off a third of the population of eastern Turkey, regardless of their origin. But of all the states that succeeded the Ottoman Empire, Turkey is by far the most successful; you just have to look at its vital statistics to see as much, starting with male life expectancy which not so long ago was a decade longer than Russia’s.

Turkey is in the unusual position of doing rather well. She has survived the financial mess, her banks having had a drubbing some years before, and exports are humming. The Turks are not quite used to this, and this shows with the present Government, which (as the Prime Minister’s unfortunate anti-Israeli outburst at Davos a year ago showed) can on occasion be triumphalist.

This Government has been remarkably successful, not least in getting rid of the preposterous currency inflation that made tourists laugh, but it should not be allowed to forget the bases of Turkey’s emergence: the strength of the Western connection, the link with the IMF, the presence in the West of tens of thousands of Turkish students, many of them very able.

However, every Turk knows that, during the First World War, horrible things happened, and for Congress to single out the Armenians is regarded in Turkey simply as an insult.

The Turkish media is full of tales about the resolution, and there has been a great deal of dark muttering about it. There are Turks who agree that the killings amounted to genocide, and there has been an uncomfortable book, Fuat Dundar’s The Code of Modern Turkey, as some of the government at the time did indeed think of ethnic homogeneity (though not the killing of children).

But the dominant tone is more or less of contempt: who are these people, to orate about events a century ago in a country that most of them could not find on the map? It all joins with resentment at US doings in Iraq, and in the popular mind gets confused with the Swiss vote against minarets or Europe’s ridiculous admission of Greek Cyprus to their Union.

In practice the Turks are being alienated, and will be encouraged to think that the West is doing another version of the Crusades, that “the only friend of the Turk is the Turk”, and other nationalist nonsense of a similar sort. Nowadays Turkey does not need the Western link as before: trade and investment have been switching towards Russia and Central Asia; the Chinese are quite active in Ankara. Is that what we want to achieve, in a country that is otherwise the best advertisement for the West that anyone could have imagined back in 1950?

Norman Stone is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University of Oxford and head of the Russian-Turkish Institute at Bilkent University, Ankara

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Norman Stone

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Prof. Dr. Norman Stone (d. 1941 Glasgow, İskoçya) Yakınçağ’da Orta ve Doğu Avrupa tarihi konularında uzman İskoç tarihçidir.

Babasının savaşta ölmesi üzerine Glasgow Academy’ye burslu olarak kabul edildi.^[1] 1959-1962 yılları arasında Cambridge’de okuyan Stone, master çalışlmasını 1962-65 yıllarında Viyana ve Budapeşte’de, Orta Avrupa Tarihi üzerine yaptı. 1965’ten itibaren Cambridge’de Rus ve Alman Tarihi okutmanlık yaptıktan sonra Trinity College’de çalıştı. 1984’te Oxford’da Modern Tarih profesörü oldu. 1984-1997 yılları arasıda Oxford Üniversitesi’nde yakınçağ tarihi konusunda profesör olarak ders verdi. Daha sonra Bilkent Üniversitesi’nde görev yaptı. Hala Bilkent Üniversitesi’nde göreve devam etmektedir.

Norman Stone’un Wolfson Ödülü’ne layık görülen The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (1975) dışınndaki eserleri: “Hitler” (1980), “Europe Transformed 1878-1919” (1983) ve “The Atlantic Revival 1970-1990” sayılabilir. Norman Stone’un bilimsel çalışmalarının odak noktasını, geçmiş ve günümüzdeki Rus-Türk ilişkileri oluşturmaktadır.

1985’e kadar Britanya basınında sürekli yorumlarda bulundu. Aynı zamanda Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ve The Wall Street Journal gazetelerinde yazdı. 1987-1992 yılları arasında The Sunday Times gazetesinde düzenli köşe yazarı olarak makaleler yazdı. 1987-1990 yılları arasında İngiltere Başbakanı Margaret Thatcher’a dış politika danışmanlığı yaptı.

Norman Stone; Almanca, Rusça, Macarca, Lehçe, Fransızca ve Türkçe biliyor. Stone,^[2] yaşamını Türkiye ile İngiltere arasında geçirmektedir.

Yayımlanmış eserleri
- The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (1975), ISBN 0-340-12874-7
- Hitler (1980), ISBN 0-340-24980-3
- Europe Transformed, 1878-1919 (1983), ISBN 0-00-634262-0; 2nd ed. (1999), ISBN 0-631-21507-7
- Czechoslovakia: Crossroads and Crises, 1918-88 (1989), ISBN 0-333-48507-6
- The Times Atlas of World History (1989), ISBN 0-7230-0304-1 (ed.)
- The Other Russia (1990), ISBN 0-571-13574-9, Michael Glenny ile
- World War One: A Short History (2007), ISBN: 1846140137 Allan Lane
Referanslar
1. ^ Millard, Rosie (5 August 2007) Britain’s a terrible bore, that’s why I left, The Times.
2. ^ Turkish delights, The Times.
Dış bağlantılar
- Russia – Getting Too Strong for Germany
March 30, 2010
Turkish Lobby Distributes Brochures In Washington DC Against Armenian Allegations

Thursday, 25 March 2010

Turkish lobby in Washington DC, holds efforts to inform Congressmen against Armenian allegations to prevent so called Armenian genocide resolution which was passed in the Foreign Affairs Committee of U.S. House of Representatives to go further. Turkish lobby has prepared a brochure entitled “Armenian Fabrications, can you believe this?” to inform Congressmen and related circles in Washington against so called Armenian genocide.

The first page of the brochure shows the piece of artwork by the famous Russian artist Vasily Vereshchagin entitled “Apotheosis of war” (1871 Prussia-France war). It is told that the painting of Russian artist is used by Armenians as a propaganda materialto deceive the unsuspecting public. The following page in the booklet shows how the photograph of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk is used by Armenian lobbies. It is proved that how Armenians changed the photo by photomontage and placed human corpses before Ataturk’s feet by cutting of little puppies from the scene.

What did Hitler tell?

The brochure also shows how Nazi leader Hitler, who committed a genocide against Jews, is also used by Armenians to falsify the historical truth. It is stressed that there is no historical proof that Hitler said, “There is no one that remembers genocide of Armenians today”, alhough it is used by Armenian authors very often as a support to their allegations.

Numbers Game

In the section entitled as “Numbers game”, it is shown how Armenian lobbies increased the number of “genocide” victims constantly. While the number of victims of so called genocide was “1 million” in 2000, today it is told that 1,5 million Armenian people were massacred by Turks. Refering to Ottoman Empire’s census data, booklet states that population of Armenians in all over the empire was 1,294,851. It is asked that how it could be possible to massacre more Armenians than Armenian population.

Turkish Victims

The brochure also commemorates Turkish diplomats and their families who are murdered by Armenian terrorists. The booklet provides information about Armenian terror in 1970 and 80’s and Turkish people that are murdered by Armenian terrorists.

March 28, 2010
Dear Turkic-Americans in California,

Senator Simitian, an Armenian legislator in California, introduced yet another anti-Turkish bill, SJR 26. Help oppose it by sending sample letter below (AS PREPARED BY US TURCIC NETWORK), OR YOUR OWN LETTER.

If you are a California resident, please send this letter, and urge everyone else you know in California to do the same. Thank you.

Dear California Assembly and Senate members,

I am deeply concerned by the introduction of SJR 26 (so-called “Armenian genocide” resolution), which would further contribute to a one-sided approach of a genuine historical controversy to which the United States is not even a party. (To read more about the bill, click this link here).

The resolution in question would spur a historical allegation of “Armenian genocide” that has not been historically or legally substantiated to this date. In fact, on August 20, 2009, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reached an important verdict, that an obscure California law from 2000 which codified the allegations of “Armenian genocide”, was unconstitutional, and interfered with the federal government’s foreign affairs powers. Hence, both the Executive and the Judicial Branches are of the opinion that the allegations of “Armenian genocide” are neither helpful, nor correct.

Numerous American scholars, all experts in the history of the Ottoman Empire, dispute Armenian allegations, leading to the conclusion that while Armenian civilian losses during World War I were tragic, the events of 1915 were not tantamount to genocide. Armenians did not suffer alone, millions of Turks and others also lost their lives during the same period from similar causes, including being massacred by Armenian rebel bands.

It also flies in the face of the recent history, when it was Armenia that committed an undeniable crime against humanity on February 25-26, 1992, in the Azerbaijani town of Khojaly, where hundreds of innocent civilians were viciously massacred in one night by the Armenian army. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has even deported Armenian combatants from US soil on the grounds of committing “crimes against humanity” against Azerbaijani civilians. Armenia to this day ethnically cleansed and occupies 16% of Azerbaijan.

As a Turkic-American, I must question how would SJR 26’s passage foster peace, tolerance and dialogue among the many ethnic communities represented in our state. If anything, it would create tensions among the strong Turkic-American community and the Armenian community.

SJR 26 also jeopardizes American national interests and security, as it damages US-Turkish relations. Turkey, a NATO member, is a key strategic and military ally of the US. Turkey is the United States’ 39th largest trading partner, with bilateral trade totaling some $15 billion last year. A chunk of that growing trade turnover affects our state, too.

Ultimately, the message is clear: complex history of faraway lands from a century ago ought not to be legislated – especially in the current state of our jobless economy. Only through genuine dialogue can Turks and Armenians reconcile their diametrically opposed narratives in a mutually acceptable manner, and that is up to Turkey and Armenia, not any third party to decide.

In light of the above, I would respectfully urge you to OPPOSE the SJR 26, which not only defeats the goal of inter-ethnic harmony but also runs counter to the foreign, trade and national security policy of the United States. Let us instead concentrate on jobs, taxes, deficit, healthcare, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Palestine-Israel conflict, and other truly important issues that require consideration and action from state legislature, as well as often require cooperation from such allies as Turkey.

Sincerely,

March 26, 2010