HyeOctane

The Armenian group this month sent letters to more than 100 companies, including Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson, that are members of the American Business Forum in Turkey or the American Turkish Council, asking them to clarify their position on the genocide resolution.

“Our thought was that ABFT and ATC were being presumptuous in speaking for these companies,” said Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee. In recent days, Hamparian said Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson and Cargill have sent letters in response distancing their companies from the lobbying against the genocide resolution. Cargill, for one, said that it “does not have a position on the issue,” while Johnson & Johnson replied that “we would not engage in political issues of this nature,” according to copies of the letters. [Read More at the bottom of the press release]

More than 100 years later the U.S. Congress is at a similar crossroads on the very same issue. House and Senate Resolutions 106 call for American foreign policy to recognize the killings of Armenians by the former Ottoman Empire as “genocide.” The Republic of Turkey is the official successor state to the Ottoman Empire because of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

Being the official successor state is part of the reason for the Turkish government wanting to deny that the Armenian killings were a genocide, said Brian Kabateck, a senior partner in Kabateck, Brown & Keller, a law firm that has represented about a half-dozen Armenian-Americans in cases against U.S. insurance companies and banks that have denied claims and accounts to relatives of deceased Armenians who took out insurance and had accounts before they died in the Armenian Genocide. Kabateck said that the Ottoman state seized property and businesses and that Turkey would be responsible for reparations to Armenians and the nation of Armenia if they admitted that what the Ottoman state did was genocide. [Read More]

It is, I hasten to add, only one chapter in my book about the Middle East, but the fears of my Turkish friends were being expressed even before the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was so cruelly murdered outside his Istanbul office in January. And when you read the following, from their message to my London publishers HarperCollins, remember it is written by the citizen of a country that seriously wishes to enter the European Community. Since I do not speak Turkish, I am in no position to criticise the occasional lapses in Mr Osman’s otherwise excellent English. [Read More]

Atilla Yayla’s university has already suspended him amid allegations that he criticized Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, whose portrait hang in all government offices and his ideas are still the republic’s most sacred principles 68 years after his death.

Prosecutor Ahmet Guven on Tuesday filed charges against Yayla for ”insulting the legacy of Ataturk.” Yayla could receive up to three years in prison if tried and convicted. No trial date was set yet. [Read More]

Amb. Parris and the other opponents of honestly recognizing this crime are once again crying wolf. “Train wrecks” were loudly but falsely predicted before President Reagan’s 1981 public affirmation of the Armenian genocide, the 1984 designation by the House of April 24 as a day for its remembrance, as well as before the amendments passed by the House in 1996 and 2004 restricting U.S. aid to Turkey based on its denial of this crime against humanity.

Despite threats of retribution, Turkey has taken only token steps against the European Parliament, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Argentina, Austria, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland and other states and international bodies that have recognized the Armenian genocide.

In fact, despite all its threats in 2001 against France’s recognition of the Armenian genocide, trade between France and Turkey grew 22% the following year, and has grown by 131% over the past five years.

Kenneth V. Hachikian
Chairman
Armenian National Committee of America
Washington