Turkish Forum

Tag: Nagorno-Karabakh

  • Desperate Turkish Tactics to Woo Diaspora on the Eve of April 24

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

    sassounian34

    [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 95th 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 10th 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 95th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, in order not to fall victim to Turkish machinations, inducements and entrapments.

  • Bad things happen when empires fall apart

    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

    ============================================================

    Norman Stone

    Vikipedi, özgür ansiklopedi

    Git ve: kullan, ara

    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
  • Turkish Lobby Distributes Brochures In Washington DC Against Armenian Allegations

    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.
  • NEO-CONS AND GENOCIDE-DENYING CORRUPT LACKEY POLITICIANS SHOULD BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

    NEO-CONS AND GENOCIDE-DENYING CORRUPT LACKEY POLITICIANS SHOULD BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

    appo1
    By Appo Jabarian

    USA Armenian Life Magazine
    March 24, 2010

    In early March, the political wrangling between the righteous and
    corrupt politicians in Washington before, during and after the voting
    by the House Foreign affairs committee sparked a series of articles
    critical of genocide-denying corrupt U.S. politicians both in the
    House and the White House.

    In a 12 March article in Huffington Post, Stephen Zunes wrote that
    failure to acknowledge the genocide “is a tragic affront to the
    rapidly dwindling number of genocide survivors as well as their
    descendents. It’s also a disservice to the many Turks who opposed
    the Ottoman Empire’s policies and tried to stop the genocide, as
    well as the growing number of Turks today who face imprisonment by
    their U.S.-backed regime for daring to publicly concede the crimes
    of their forebears. For example, Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist
    who … was prosecuted and fled into exile to escape death threats
    after making a number of public references to the genocide.

    “Some opponents of the resolution argue that it is pointless for
    Congress to pass resolutions regarding historical events.

    Yet there were no such complaints regarding resolutions commemorating
    the Holocaust, nor are there normally complaints regarding the
    scores of dedicatory resolutions passed by Congress in recent years,”
    added Zunes.

    Opponents of the resolution also falsely argue that its passage by the
    Congress can harm the U.S.-Turkey relations. “The United States has
    done much greater harm in its relations with Turkey through policies
    far more significant than a symbolic resolution acknowledging a
    tragic historical period. The United States clandestinely backed
    an attempted military coup by right-wing Turkish officers in 2003,
    arming Iraqi and Iranian Kurds with close ties to Kurdish rebels in
    Turkey who have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Turkish
    citizens. The United States also invaded neighboring Iraq. As a result,
    the percentage of Turks who view the United States positively declined
    from 52 percent to only 9 percent,” asserted Zunes.

    The Obama administration, also controlled by the neo-cons, insists that
    “this is a bad time to upset the Turkish government.

    However, it was also considered a ‘bad time’ to pass the resolution
    back in 2007, on the grounds that it not jeopardize U.S. access to
    Turkish bases as part of efforts to support the counter-insurgency
    war by U.S. occupation forces in Iraq. It was also considered a ‘bad
    time’ when a similar resolution was put forward in 2000 because the
    United States was using its bases in Turkey to patrol the ‘no fly
    zones’ in northern Iraq. And it was also considered a ‘bad time’
    in 1985 and 1987, when similar resolutions were put forward because
    U.S. bases in Turkey were considered important listening posts for
    monitoring the Soviet Union during the Cold War. For deniers of the
    Armenian genocide, it’s always a ‘bad time,’” he pointed out.

    In 1981, at a time when the neo-cons failed to control the White
    House, President Ronald Reagan brushed off strong diplomatic protests
    from Turkey and used the term genocide in relation to Armenians,
    yet U.S.-Turkish relations did not suffer.

    How come U.S. acknowledgement of the Jewish Holocaust does NOT upset
    the German government, which also hosts critical U.S. bases?

    “Obama is sending a message to future tyrants that they can commit
    genocide without acknowledgement by the world’s most powerful
    country.” In 1994, the Clinton administration “refused to use the word
    ‘genocide’ in the midst of the Rwandan government’s massacres of over
    half that country’s Tutsi population, a decision that contributed to
    the delay in deploying international peacekeeping forces until after
    the slaughter of 800,000 people. … The Obama administration’

    s
    position on the Armenian genocide isn’t simply about whether to
    commemorate a tragedy that took place 95 years ago. It’s about where
    we stand as a nation in facing up to the most horrible of crimes,”
    confronted Zunes.

    In a March 16 HuffingtonPost.com article, titled “Why the Armenian
    Genocide Matters,”, Writer of words and music, rider of waves, world
    traveler Robbie Gennet wrote: “You may ask yourself why the Armenian
    genocide currently matters, or more accurately, why Turkey is so
    resolute against it being recognized as such. One would think after
    almost a hundred years, an official apology for killing or displacing
    2 million Armenians would be a welcome and long overdue occasion for
    Turkey to make peace with Armenia    . … Germany has made great steps to
    publicly acknowledge and profusely apologize for the Jewish Holocaust,
    even paying reparations, making holocaust denial and the display of
    symbols of Nazism a criminal offense and establishing a National
    Holocaust Memorial Museum in Berlin. But Turkey? They won’t even
    allow the US to label the Armenian genocide as such or acknowledge
    it in any way. Here is why: land.”

    She outlined: “Take a look at a map of pre-genocide Armenia here, here
    and here. What you will notice is that a huge chunk of what is now
    Turkey was then considered Armenia. If the 1915 Turkish actions were
    indeed recognized as a genocide, current day Armenia could potentially
    petition for the return of its land. Note that this may even include
    the area known as Cilicia, a separate but ethnically connected entity
    bordering the Mediterranean Sea that dates back to the Kingdom of
    Cilician Armenia in the early part of the second Millenium. These
    historically grounded lands could rightfully be considered Armenian if
    they could establish that they were unlawfully taken from them via the
    genocide.     The evidence is there and so is the history. Armenia itself
    was officially named way back in 512 BC when it was annexed to Persia,
    while Cilicia was established as a principality it 1078. After years
    of struggle under Turkish, Kurdish and Mongol rule, the Ottoman Empire
    ruled Armenia from 1453-1829, after which the Russian Empire ruled
    through the rest of the 19th century. After the Genocide and WWI,
    what’s left of Armenia was annexed by Bolshevist Russia and became
    part of the Soviet Union from 1922-1991, after which Armenia declared
    its independence. But let’s back up for a moment for a glimpse at
    what happened during WWI”.

    She revealed: “In 1913, three so-called Young Turks took over the
    Turkish government via a coup with a goal of uniting all of the
    Turkic peoples in the region and creating a new Turkish empire called
    Turan with one language and one religion. They wanted to expand their
    borders eastward but standing in their way was historic Armenia. Hence,
    the Armenian Genocide.”

    Gennet asserted: “Judging from Turkey’s recalcitrance to discuss or
    acknowledge it, that stain may never go away. But that doesn’t mean
    it will ever be forgotten, no matter how much Turkey wishes it would
    fade into history. Though they would like to take advantage of the
    world’s collective amnesia, the internet has made it impossible to
    forget and erase” the facts of the genocide by Turkey. In answer to
    Adolph Hitler’s infamous quote, “Who still talks nowadays about the
    Armenians?” she rebutted: “We all do, Mr. Hitler, and long after your
    genocidal dreams have faded, long after the last survivors of those
    inflicted generations have passed, they will not be forgotten.”

    Turkish writer Lale Kemal interestingly wrote in Today’s Zaman:
    “Turkey has currently been paying the price of sweeping under the
    carpet its chronic and historic problems, such as the events of 1915,
    in which, it is claimed, over 1 million Armenians were subjected
    to a genocide campaign under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, the
    predecessor to modern Turkey.     … The Armenian Diaspora has moved
    tobring this topic to the agenda of the Spanish Parliament after the
    regional Catalonian Parliament passed a bill recognizing the events
    as Armenian genocide. … The adoption of the genocide resolution
    by the Committee on Foreign Affairs has already set an encouraging
    example for Sweden to be followed by Britain.”

    Speaking of the Turkish-occupied Armenian lands, Kemal wrote: “But
    Ankara believes that adoption of such a resolution by the full US House
    would have a snowball effect, raising the danger that Armenians will
    initiate legal measures seeking land and compensation from Ankara.”

    “While awareness of anti-Semitism is fortunately widespread enough
    to marginalize those who refuse to acknowledge the Holocaust,
    tolerance for anti-Armenian bigotry appears strong enough that it’s
    still considered politically acceptable to deny their genocide,”
    lamented Zunes.

    The U.S. congressional mid-term elections in November is the number
    one source for pre-occupation among the incumbent congressional
    candidates in battle-ground districts and states.

    Armenian Americans and their friends across the nation should move to
    politically punish the deniers. Denial of the crime of any genocide –
    from Turkish-occupied Western Armenia and Cilicia to Darfur, should
    be made politically unaffordable. The neo-cons and their lackeys do
    not understand the language of morality. But they readily comprehend
    the language of deterrence.

  • US Azerbaijanis campaign for elimination of funding for Nagorno-Karabakh

    US Azerbaijanis campaign for elimination of funding for Nagorno-Karabakh

    [ 25 Mar 2010 07:24 ]
    Washington. Isabel Levine–APA. US Congressman Frank Pallone Jr. along with 27 pro-Armenian members of Congress sent a letter to the chair and ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Department of State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs, Azerbaijani Diaspora in US (USAN) told APA’s Washington DC correspondent.

    The congress members want to influence the State-foreign operations and related programs appropriations bill for the Fiscal year of 2011. They request that the subcommittee supports Congress’s funding request for US assistance to Armenia. Their argument is that Armenia is a very special partner of US and the bilateral relations will expand.

    They also continue to push for parity in military assistance between Armenia and Azerbaijan, opening contacts between the US and Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as increasing funding for Nagorno-Karabakh for humanitarian and developmental aid.

    Funding in the Fiscal Year 2010 Omnibus bill provided US$41 million for Armenia and US$8 million for Nagorno-Karabakh.

    In order to prevent this, the US Azerbaijanis Network decided to hold their own campaign, according to which every Azerbaijani American and whoever else, who wishes to support them, writes a letter to Congress members asking to eliminate the Fiscal Year 2011 funding for Nagorno-Karabakh and reduce aid to Armenia. Azerbaijanis also demand increasing the amount of the US funding for Azerbaijan.

  • More than 100 protesters took to the streets of Istanbul on Friday, March 19, 10

    More than 100 protesters took to the streets of Istanbul on Friday, March 19, 10

    demonsration against Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Istiklal Avenue in Istanbul on March 19, 2010

    Ermeni forumlarindan ulasan bilgiler:

    Turks Forum <turksforum.nl@gmail.com>


    A demonsrator holds a placard reading ”You are not alone” during a demonsration against Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Istiklal Avenue in Istanbul on March 19, 2010. Protestors took the streets accusing Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of racism over his threat to deport illegal Armenian workers in a row over the recognition of Armenian claims of a genocide by Ottoman Turks.
    Photograph by:     Bulent Kilic, AFP/Getty Images

    . com/news/ Turks+protest+ Armenian+ deportation+ threat/2703368/ story.html
     tar.com/news/ Turks+protest+ Armenian+ deportation+ threat/2703368/ story.html
    http://rawstory. com/news/ afp/More_ than_100_ protest_Turkish_ PM_s__03192010. html

    Agence France-Presse  – March 19, 2010 4:03 PM

    A demonsrator (C) holds up a placard that reads, “You are not alone”‘ during a demonsration on Istiklal Avenue, in Istanbul. More than 100 protestors took to the streets of Istanbul Friday, accusing Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of racism over his threat to deport illegal Armenian workers.
     e.ca/Article. aspx?ID=77481&L=en


    ISTANBUL – More than 100 protesters took to the streets of Istanbul Friday, accusing Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of racism over his threat to deport illegal Armenian workers.

    Between 100-150 demonstrators marched along the Istiklal Avenue, the main commercial street on the European side of the city, carrying banners with the inscription “You are not Alone” in Turkish, English, Armenian and Kurdish, an AFP photographer said.

    “Tayyip should be deported! A world without nations, borders and classes,” chanted the demonstrators gathered at the call of a non-governmental organization campaigning for immigrants’ rights.

    A statement, distributed to the press, accused Erdogan of treating Armenian immigrants as a pawn in Ankara’s protests against some foreign parliament’s recognition of Armenian claims of genocide by Ottoman Turks.

    “We strongly condemn Erdogan . . . and those who share his racist and discriminatory mentality,” the statement added.

    The demonstration ended peacefully.

    In comments criticized at home and abroad, Erdogan said his government could expel thousands of illegal Armenian workers if foreign parliaments continue to pass votes branding the World War I-era massacres of Armenians as genocide.

    Resolutions recently voted to that effect in the United States and Sweden “adversely affect our sincere attitude” towards illegal Armenians, Erdogan told the BBC Turkish service on Tuesday.

    “There are 170,000 Armenians in my country. Of these, 70,000 are citizens, but we are tolerating the remaining 100,000 . . . If necessary, I may have to tell them to go back to their country . . . I am not obliged to keep them here,” he charged.

    The exact number of illegal Armenians in Turkey are unknown, but researchers say there are between 10,000 to 20,000 of them, adding that Turkish authorities tend to inflate the figures to put pressure on Armenia.

    Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin perished in a systematic extermination campaign during 1915-1918 as the Ottoman Empire fell apart.Turkey categorically reject the genocide label and argues that the toll is grossly inflated.