Baskonsolos Muavinimiz Ali Findik bey’den
saduman gurbuz,
Baskan TURANT
CNN’de 4 Aralik’ta 1915 olaylarina iliskin ulkemiz aleyhinde yanli ve yanlis ifadeler iceren bir belgesel yayinlanmasi sozkonusu.
Belgeselin adi “Scream Bloody Murder”
Her ne kadar program dunyanin muhtelif yerlerinde yakin tarihte yasanan cesitli soykirim olaylarina deginmeyi planlasa da,
1915 olaylarindan da soykirim olarak bahsedecegi ve Ermeni iddialarina agirlikli olarak yer verecegi anlasiliyor.
Belgeseli Hazirlayan Amanpour ile yapilan mukalatin metnini asagida bulabilirsiniz. Ayrica belgesel hakkinda Armenian Reportor’da 2 Aralik’ta yayinlanan ayri bir haberin metnini de asagida bilginiz icin gonderiyorum.
CNN’e vatandaslarimizin bu konudaki tepkilerini iletmesi benzer yayinlarin tekrarlanmamasi acisindan onemli olacaktir.
email gruplariniza bu yonde bir bilgilendirmede bulunabileceginiz dusuncesiyle.
CNN tarafindan 4 Aralık 2008 tarihinde yayınlanmasi öngörülen “Scream Bloody Murder” belgeselini hazirlayan Christiane Amanpour ile
“The Armenian Reporter” isimli gazetenin editörunun yaptigi mulakatin metnini ;
“Christiane Amanpour: In her own words
by Vincent Lima
CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour on November 24 spoke to Vincent Lima, the editor of the Armenian Reporter, about the documentary Scream Bloody Murder, which will premiere December 4 at 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific time. A transcript follows.
Armenian Reporter: As horrid as the topic is, it’s wonderful that you are looking at genocide and at the people who have spoken up and spoken out about genocide during the fact.
Even today, nine decades after the Armenian Genocide in 1915-17, Armenians speak with reverence about Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador who warned that “a campaign of race extermination” was underway. And the State Department leaked his reports in order to raise awareness of the ongoing horrors.
That was great for humanitarian relief efforts but it didn’t stop the genocide. Have you found – in the course of your work on this program – that with the Genocide Convention, the world is better equipped to deal with genocide while it happens?
Christiane Amanpour: What you say is very important. When I was in Bosnia, that’s also precisely what happened. Ethnic cleansing and genocide was taking place and the world reacted with humanitarian relief. In a sense, they did the same in Rwanda, and also in Darfur. And this is a very important thing that you just raised. Because obviously humanitarian relief is no substitute for reversing these grave violations of [international] law . . . when innocent civilians are being killed.
So we have profiled individuals – people like Morgenthau, although we don’t profile him, but others in my time of covering these terrible things – who have had the courage to stand up and tell their governments . . . what was going on and how it needed to be stopped.
One of the people we look back on is Raphael Lemkin, who you may know coined the term genocide specifically after the Armenian Genocide and put that word right there in our vocabulary and lobbied very, very hard for the Convention that would [define] that word, which was enacted 60 years ago.
Armenian Reporter: Now, the fact that the Armenian Genocide is still negated by Turkey has generated pressure and created challenges for documentary makers in the past. What were the challenges you faced covering the Armenian Genocide as part of the program?
Christiane Amanpour: You’re absolutely right. The fact that Turkey still denies it officially is a problem. We didn’t find it so in our work, but it is an issue I know, especially for Armenia. We actually didn’t focus entirely on the Armenian Genocide. The way we focused on it was to use it as this amazing opportunity to show where the word came from and what it actually infers; the Armenian Genocide infers to the words of Raphael Lemkin and that was incredibly important for us to highlight that. We focused a lot on the events that I’ve covered during my lifetime.
Armenian Reporter: The goal of Raphael Lemkin, and ultimately, of the Genocide Convention, was to prevent genocide from being an ongoing scourge – and that hasn’t happened, as we were just saying. And you’ve spoken to many people about why, and what more can be done about it. Now, given the political will, what more do we need to do in countries big and small – in the United States and in Armenia, to take two examples – to end genocide, in practical terms?
Christiane Amanpour: Let me look at it from the bigger perspective. You talk about political will. I think it starts and ends there. It’s about political will. It’s about whether nations are ready to accept their obligation under the Genocide Convention or, indeed, under the Right to Protect [Doctrine], which was embraced by the United States not so many years ago. I believe strongly, it’s about mobilizing public opinion and I’ll tell you what I mean by that.
When I ask former U.S. officials who were in national security or the State Department during the Clinton administration – in which genocide happened in Bosnia and in Rwanda – I ask them why was there this collective failure to act, and some of them said to me, ‘Look, we need our public behind us. This is something very difficult for us to intervene when our national security is not directly threatened. We need our public behind us.’
This is why all my career I have been so serious about getting more and more international news on American television. I strongly believe that in the United States there is not a mature accounting and airing of international affairs, of international stories, of international news. And if people in the United States – the leading country in the world, the most powerful superpower – if the general public does not have this information and is not made more aware of what’s going on, then there will never be a mature foreign policy debate and there might not be a mature foreign policy enacted, so I think we have a vital mission and that is to sensitize public opinion. Now I will say that something incredible happened in the last few years over Darfur. The reason Darfur is an issue in the United States, perhaps more than in any other Western country is because it has become a grassroots issue on campuses, in NGOs, and even in places like Hollywood and such. Darfur has become a rallying cry, and I think this is amazing. It really is amazing. And that’s what gives me hope for the future.
Armenian Reporter: Ms. Amanpour, You’ve reported on many catastrophes, including manmade ones, including the genocide in Rwanda. Could you talk about a particularly poignant moment for yourself, as you’ve confronting the horrors of genocides?
Christiane Amanpour: I would say the most significant body of work I’ve done on this topic would be in Bosnia, and then in Rwanda. This is before we did this documentary. I covered these. What made a profound impact on me is not just the gut-wrenching suffering of those innocent civilians – and remember we’re talking about civilians – who were under attack for no other reason that what ethnic group or religion or what type of person they are. In other words, for who they are, not for what they did. What makes a profound impact, though, is the endurance of the human spirit, and the ability, despite the most violent crimes and the most egregious violations of human rights and human dignity, the endurance of these people to try to survive, and to survive without anger or hate and try to reconcile in the aftermath of these terrible crimes being done to them.
What also makes a huge impact is the very kind of people who we profile in this documentary: those heroes who risk everything. Ordinary people who’ve been put into an extraordinary situation, who nothing in their lives prepared them to stand up against these terrible crimes, who risk their lives, who risk their careers, their professions, and sometimes even their good names and their families’ happiness to stand up and confront this evil and scream as loud as they could to tell those who had the possibility to change something to change it. Now some of them were not listened to; sometimes they were. In the end in Bosnia – okay it took three or four years, but eventually the U.S. and the West intervened in Kosovo, they intervened before it became a genocide [in view] of the news, the public pressure, pictures that they couldn’t tolerate seeing again.
Armenian Reporter: I want to thank you very much, Ms. Amanpour. It’s very good of you to talk to us.
Christiane Amanpour: Thank you.”