February 6th, 2007 by
International Herald Tribune
U.S. officials will reassure the Turkish foreign minister, currently visiting Washington, that they will try to quash a proposed resolution in Congress condemning as genocide the early 20th century killings of Armenians.
In talks with Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, U.S. officials also will discuss Turkish worries that the United States is not doing enough to prevent Kurdish rebels from operating in Northern Iraq.
The meetings come at a tense moment for relations between the United States and Turkey, a moderate Muslim democracy and NATO ally crucial to U.S. operations in Iraq.
President George W. Bush’s administration is alarmed that the suggested congressional resolution could disrupt efforts to repair strains stemming from perceptions in Ankara that regional instability caused by the U.S.-led war in Iraq have harmed Turkish interests.
The administration has opposed previous attempts by members of Congress to pass resolutions recognizing the 1915-1919 killings in Anatolia of up to 1.5 million Armenians as an organized genocide. A resolution introduced in the House of Representatives in January is thought to stand a much better chance of passing a floor vote. [Read More]
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February 6th, 2007 by
A senior Istanbul police officer has been suspended from his post for reportedly ignoring a tip about a threat against an ethnic Armenian journalist’s life about a year ago, newspapers said Tuesday.
The Interior Ministry suspended intelligence chief Ahmet Ilhan Guler late Monday as part of the government’s investigation into the killing of Hrant Dink.
Guler was suspended for not reporting a tip to his superiors that came 11 months before the deadly attack, the Daily Sabah newspaper reported Tuesday.
Dink was gunned down in broad daylight on Jan. 19 outside his bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper, Agos. A 17-year-old Turkish nationalist has been charged with his death.
The 52-year-old journalist had angered Turkish nationalists with repeated assertions that the mass killings of Armenians around the time of World War I were genocide.
More than 100,000 people marched at Dink’s funeral, many of them demanding that Turkey abolish a law that makes it a crime to insult Turkey or the Turkish national character. [Read More]
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February 4th, 2007 by
Last week, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank) engaged in what has become a biannual congressional ritual: Introducing a nonbinding resolution instructing the president of the United States to call Turkey’s Ottoman-era slaughter of Armenians a genocide. Unlike in years past, however, this time the symbolic but important legislation actually has a legitimate chance at passage.
Two recent developments have created momentum. First, the Democratic Party, which has historically been more sympathetic to the resolution, now controls Congress. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) in particular has taken a keen interest in bringing the matter to a vote. Second, a 17-year-old gunman last month executed in cold blood the respected Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink on a crowded Istanbul street.
[Read More]
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February 3rd, 2007 by
The banners read “We are all Armenians” at the funeral in Istanbul last week for Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist shot in January by a young nationalist assassin. “We are Turkish. We are all Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,” nationalist football fans chanted in reply from terraces across the country, referring to modern Turkey’s founder.
As Dink’s tragic death and the polarised reactions to it demonstrate in the most graphic way, the ongoing reckoning with events now nearly a century old remains a huge factor in Turkey itself. It is not merely that, fairly or unfairly, its pursuit of European Union membership is generating international pressure on the government to recognise the Armenian genocide. The issue polarises the country internally as well and raises more acutely than any other issue the question of how tightly it remains within the ideological grip of its founding fathers. [Read More]
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February 2nd, 2007 by
Chicago Tribune
The Turkish media published photographs and video on Friday of police posing with a teenager charged with killing an ethnic Armenian journalist, and newspapers denounced the officers for treating the suspect as a “hero.”
The photographs show 17-year-old nationalist Ogun Samast holding out a Turkish flag and posing with officers, some in uniform. Behind Samast, a poster with another Turkish flag carries the words of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the revered founder of modern Turkey: “The nation’s land is sacred. It cannot be left to fate.”
Samast is charged with the Jan. 19 killing of Hrant Dink, a 52-year-old ethnic Armenian journalist who had angered Turkish nationalists with repeated assertions that the mass killings of Armenians around the time of World War I was genocide. [Read More]
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February 1st, 2007 by
An official at the Istanbul governor’s office said 18 people have been given bodyguards since Dink’s death.
Sara Whyatt, a program director at PEN, the global association that fights for writers’ interests, says what makes Turkey particularly unusual is the number of fiction writers who are targeted.
Novelist Elif Shafak faced trial under article 301 for comments on Armenians and Turks made by one of her fictional characters. Both Shafak and Pamuk have bodyguards.
Turkey’s government strongly condemned Dink’s murder and vowed to bring the culprits to justice. But it has resisted calls, including from the EU, to scrap 301 and said insulting national identity is a crime in other European countries too.
[Read More]
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February 1st, 2007 by
Orhan Pamuk of Turkey, the 2006 Nobel laureate in literature, has canceled a trip to Germany, but his publisher declined to confirm a newspaper report that Mr. Pamuk feared he might be assassinated, Agence France-Press reported yesterday. The newspaper Kölner Stadt- Anzeiger said Mr. Pamuk believed he might be killed, as was Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor gunned down in Istanbul on Jan. 19. Like Mr. Pamuk he had challenged the official Turkish version of the 1915 Armenian genocide. Mr. Pamuk’s German publisher, Hanser, gave no reason for the cancellation of his visit, which was to have taken him to the Free University in Berlin for an honorary doctorate before lectures in Hamburg, Cologne and Munich. A spokesman for the German interior ministry said the government had no information on any threat to Mr. Pamuk.
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February 1st, 2007 by
Democratic and Republican lawmakers have introduced a resolution urging the government to recognize as genocide the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians at the end of World War I.
The measure is likely to touch raw nerves in Turkey, which rejects the charge that genocide was at the root of the deaths. The Bush administration has warned that even congressional debate on the matter could damage relations with Turkey, a vital Muslim ally and member of NATO.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a co-sponsor, acknowledged that the resolution might harm U.S.-Turkish relations in the short term. Nevertheless, he said, “I’m optimistic that the relationship will go on. We will move beyond this.”
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