Enver Pasha
One of the triumvirate rulers
publicly declared on 19 May 1916...
The Ottoman Empire should be cleaned up of the Armenians and the Lebanese. We have destroyed the former by the sword, we shall destroy the latter through starvation.
Enver Pasha's reply to US Ambassador Morgenthau who was deploring the massacres against Armenians and attributing them to irresponsible subalterns and underlings in the distant provinces:
You are greatly mistaken. We have this country absolutely under our control. I have no desire to shift the blame onto our underlings and I am entirely willing to accept the responsibility myself for everything that has taken place.
Talaat Pasha, Minister of the Interior
September 6, 1916. - To the Government of Aleppo.
It was at first communicated to you that the Government, by order of the Jemiet had decided to destroy completely all the Armenians living in Turkey...An end must be put to their existence, however criminal the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex nor to conscientious scruples.
Talaat Pasha said, after the German Ambassador persistentlybrought up the Armenian question in 1918:
What on earth do you want? The question is settled. There are no more Armenians.
Talaat PashaIn a conversation with Dr. Mordtmann of the German Embassy in June 1915...
Turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate its internal foes, i.e., the indigenous Christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention.
Henry Morgenthau (U.S. Ambassador to Turkey)
The real aim of deportations is killing and burglary. In reality, it was a new way to eradicate a nation. When Turkish powers were giving out the order for deportation, they sentenced a whole nation to death, (1916).
Arnold Toynbee (noted British historian)
All these atrocities have been committed toward Armenians even though they have not done anything to invite them, (1915).
Anatole France (French author)
Armenia is dying, but it will survive. The little blood that it still has left is precious blood that will give birth to a heroic generation. A nation that does not want to die, does not die, (1916).
Fritof Nansen (Norwegian public figure)
The massacres that started in 1915 have nothing to compare with the history of mankind. The massacres by Abdul Hamid are minor in comparison to what today's Turks have done, (1916).
Jacques de Morgan (French scientist)
The deportations of Western Armenians are nothing but concealed race extermination. There is no language rich enough to describe the horrors of it, (1917).
Valerii Brusov (Russian poet)
Turks continued their previous policy. They would not stop committing massive and most awful massacres that even Leng Timur would not dare to do, (1916).
Fayez el Husein (Arab publicist)
Who can describe the feelings that an eyewitness experiences when he thinks of this heroic and unfortunate nation. Its courage and spirit surprise the world. A nation that yesterday was one of the most energetic and progressive nations of the Ottoman Empire is becoming a memory, (1917).
Joseph Markwart (German scientist)
Even after proclamation of the Constitution, the main slogan of the Turkish policy has been "Without Armenians there will be no Armenian problem, (1919).
Dr. Martin Niepage, From the Horrors of Aleppo, seen by a German eyewitness,
translated by the New York Times publication (its magazine) Current History Vol. 5 Nov. 1916 pp 335-37.
The German Consul from Mosul related, in my presence, at the German club at Aleppo that, in many places on the road from Mosul to Aleppo, he had seen children's hands lying hacked off in such numbers that one could have paved the road with them.
Henry Morgenthau U.S. Ambassador to Turkey (1914-1916)
When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race: they understood this well, and in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact.
John Loftus
Genocide & Human Rights (1992)
There is a strong circumstantial case that the vice consul to Armenia, von Scheubner, was the man who carried the lesson of the Holocaust forward from the Armenians and transmitted it to Hitler, that Hitler recalled it formulated it as part of his foreign policy as early as 1931, a decade before the Jewish Holocaust was to be released in full fury. The essence of what Hitler understood was indifference. To put it crudely, it takes one hundred people to kill each child in a genocide: one to pull the trigger, but ninety nine to shrug their shoulders. It was this legacy of indifference, this lack of deterrence that led Hitler to make his famous statement, 'Who now remembers the Armenians?'
Henry Morgenthau,U. S. Ambassador to Turkey, 1914-1916.
One day Talaat made what was perhaps the most astonishing request I had ever heard. The New York Life Insurance Company and the Equitable Life of New York for years had done considerable business among the Armenians. The extent to which this people insured their lives was merely another indication of their thrifty habits.
'I wish,' Talaat now said, 'that you would get the American life insurance companies to send us a complete list of their Armenian policy holders. They are practically all dead now and have left no heirs to collect the money. It of course all escheats to the State. The government is the beneficiary now. Will you do so?' This was almost too much, and I lost my temper.
'You will get no such list from me,' I said, and I got up and left him.
From a speech presented to the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress
February, 1915
It is absolutely necessary to eliminate the Armenian people in its entirety, so that there is no further Armenian on this earth and the very concept of Armenia is extinguished.
Yossi Beilin Israeli
Deputy Foreign Minister.April 27, 1994 on the floor of the Knesset in response to a TV interview of the Turkish Ambassador
It was not war. It was most certainly massacre and genocide, something the world must remember... We will always reject any attempt to erase its record, even for some political advantage.
Gerald Ford
Addressing the US House of Representatives
Mr. Speaker, with mixed emotions we mark the 50th anniversary of the Turkish genocide of the Armenian people. In taking notice of the shocking events in 1915, we observe this anniversary with sorrow in recalling the massacres of Armenians and with pride in saluting those brave patriots who survived to fight on the side of freedom during World War I. - Congressional Record, pg. 8890
George W. Bush
President of United States
Presidential Message on Annihilation of Armenians U.S. Newswire April 24, 2001.
Today marks the commemoration of one of the great tragedies of history: the forced exile and annihilation of approximately 1.5 million Armenians in the closing years of the Ottoman Empire. These infamous killings darkened the 20th century and continue to haunt us to this day. Today, I join Armenian Americans and the Armenian community abroad to mourn the loss of so many innocent lives. I ask all Americans to reflect on these terrible events. While we mourn the tragedy that scarred the history of the Armenian people, let us also celebrate their indomitable will which has allowed Armenian culture, religion, and identity to flourish through the ages. Let us mark this year the 1700th anniversary of the establishment of Christianity in Armenia. Let us celebrate the spirit that illuminated the pages of history in 451 when the Armenians refused to bow to Persian demands that they renounce their faith. The Armenian reply was both courageous and unequivocal: "From this faith none can shake us, neither angels, nor men, neither sword, fire or water, nor any bitter torturers." This is the spirit that survived again in the face of the bitter fate that befell so many Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire. Today, that same spirit not only survives, but thrives in Armenian communities the world over. Many Armenian survivors and their descendants chose to live in the United States, where they found safety and built new lives. We are grateful for the countless ways in which Armenian Americans continue to enrich America's science, culture, commerce and, indeed, all aspects of our national life. One of the most important ways in which we can honor the memory of Armenian victims of the past is to help modern Armenia build a secure and prosperous future. I am proud that the United States actively supports Armenia and its neighbors in finding a permanent and fair settlement to the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute. I hope that this year we will see peace and reconciliation flourish in the south Caucasus region between Armenia and all its neighbors. efforts by the Armenian people to overcome years of hardship and Soviet repression to create a prospering, democratic, and sovereign Republic of Armenia. Let us remember the past and let its lessons guide us as we seek to build a better future. In the name of the American people, I extend my heartfelt best wishes to all Armenians as we observe this solemn day of remembrance.
http://www.armenocide.am/
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Friday, August 1, 2008
Armenia's painful past
From Brian Todd
CNN
Friday, April 29, 2005
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- We shudder at images from Darfur, Sudan, wince at memories of Rwanda and look at grainy pictures of the Holocaust and say "never again."
Nearly forgotten is a brutal campaign from nearly a century ago, that historians say may not have been a model for those genocides, but certainly provided a rationale.
"The fact that a state could in fact carry this out under the eyes of the international community and get away with it, became in fact a hallmark of what the 20th century, the tragic 20th century, was really all about," says Charles King, author of "The Black Sea: A History."
Adolf Hitler himself was reported to have made a reference to it in 1939, as he prepared to invade Poland. He was quoted as saying, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
In April, 1915, the Ottoman Empire, which covered the general area of what is now Turkey, was battling on two fronts in World War I, and was disintegrating in the process.
Armenians, long part of that empire, were restless for independence -- and were getting encouragement from Russia.
The Ottoman Turks, fearful of a Russian invasion on their eastern front, saw the Russian-Armenian alliance as a huge threat and targeted the Armenian population inside their borders.
"They embarked on an extermination plan by deporting the entire population, close to -- a little under 2 million Armenians -- in the empire into deserts and by killing and starvation and disease," says Harut Sassounian, editor of "The Armenian Genocide."
Between 1915 and 1923, Armenian leaders were rounded up in cities and executed; villagers were uprooted en masse and driven south toward the deserts of what are now Syria and Iraq. Many were shot or butchered outright by Turkish forces, but most died in forced marches.
The numbers -- to this day -- are still in dispute. Armenians say 1.5 million were killed. The Turkish government says not more than 300,000 perished and that Armenians weren't the only victims.
"These few years both sides suffered [and lost an] incredible number of people to war, to famine, to harsh climate," says Turkish Ambassador to the United States Faruk Logoglu.
Objective historians say the Armenian death toll is likely between 600,000 and 1 million.
The fight is not only over numbers, but also a word.
Neither the Turkish government, nor any U.S. president, except Ronald Reagan, has ever called this event "genocide."
Sassounian is the grandson of survivors.
"I describe it as a deep wound in the psyche of every Armenian that is not healing, is not going away, because it's like an open wound as long as that denial is there," Sassounian says.
The U.S. government says between 60,000 and 146,000 people have died in Darfur, Sudan, over the past two years, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell called that a genocide.
Historian King believes what happened to the Armenians was genocide by any definition, but "labeling it genocide among politicians has very severe political ramifications, particularly in terms of the U.S. relationship with Turkey -- an important strategic partner in southeast Europe and the wider Middle East," says King.
As Armenians mark the 90th anniversary of their darkest days, many say all they want is acknowledgement.
The Turks say they're willing to set up a commission to examine the historical record.
Two countries with a closed border and no formal relations -- still haunted by a distant tragedy.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/04/29/armenia.past/index.html?iref=newssearch
CNN
Friday, April 29, 2005
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- We shudder at images from Darfur, Sudan, wince at memories of Rwanda and look at grainy pictures of the Holocaust and say "never again."
Nearly forgotten is a brutal campaign from nearly a century ago, that historians say may not have been a model for those genocides, but certainly provided a rationale.
"The fact that a state could in fact carry this out under the eyes of the international community and get away with it, became in fact a hallmark of what the 20th century, the tragic 20th century, was really all about," says Charles King, author of "The Black Sea: A History."
Adolf Hitler himself was reported to have made a reference to it in 1939, as he prepared to invade Poland. He was quoted as saying, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
In April, 1915, the Ottoman Empire, which covered the general area of what is now Turkey, was battling on two fronts in World War I, and was disintegrating in the process.
Armenians, long part of that empire, were restless for independence -- and were getting encouragement from Russia.
The Ottoman Turks, fearful of a Russian invasion on their eastern front, saw the Russian-Armenian alliance as a huge threat and targeted the Armenian population inside their borders.
"They embarked on an extermination plan by deporting the entire population, close to -- a little under 2 million Armenians -- in the empire into deserts and by killing and starvation and disease," says Harut Sassounian, editor of "The Armenian Genocide."
Between 1915 and 1923, Armenian leaders were rounded up in cities and executed; villagers were uprooted en masse and driven south toward the deserts of what are now Syria and Iraq. Many were shot or butchered outright by Turkish forces, but most died in forced marches.
The numbers -- to this day -- are still in dispute. Armenians say 1.5 million were killed. The Turkish government says not more than 300,000 perished and that Armenians weren't the only victims.
"These few years both sides suffered [and lost an] incredible number of people to war, to famine, to harsh climate," says Turkish Ambassador to the United States Faruk Logoglu.
Objective historians say the Armenian death toll is likely between 600,000 and 1 million.
The fight is not only over numbers, but also a word.
Neither the Turkish government, nor any U.S. president, except Ronald Reagan, has ever called this event "genocide."
Sassounian is the grandson of survivors.
"I describe it as a deep wound in the psyche of every Armenian that is not healing, is not going away, because it's like an open wound as long as that denial is there," Sassounian says.
The U.S. government says between 60,000 and 146,000 people have died in Darfur, Sudan, over the past two years, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell called that a genocide.
Historian King believes what happened to the Armenians was genocide by any definition, but "labeling it genocide among politicians has very severe political ramifications, particularly in terms of the U.S. relationship with Turkey -- an important strategic partner in southeast Europe and the wider Middle East," says King.
As Armenians mark the 90th anniversary of their darkest days, many say all they want is acknowledgement.
The Turks say they're willing to set up a commission to examine the historical record.
Two countries with a closed border and no formal relations -- still haunted by a distant tragedy.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/04/29/armenia.past/index.html?iref=newssearch
Avoiding the G-word
The EU has come up with a new term to describe the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman forces in 1915
David Cronin
guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday May 21 2008
Article history
This week the European parliament will seek to introduce a new euphemism for genocide into the lexicon of international relations. Diplomats who follow MEPs' advice will no longer have to run the risk of offending countries with a dishonourable history by uttering the 'g' word. They can, instead, refer to the most egregious crimes against humanity as "past events".
That is the phrase our fearless elected representatives use in a report they are about to formally endorse on Turkey's efforts to join the European Union. Although it advocates a "frank and open discussion" between Turkey and Armenia about "past events", the report is anything but frank and open about what those events could be.
In the absence of more explicit guidance, I can only assume the "events" in question were the slaughter of some 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman forces in 1915. There is ample evidence to suggest that this was the 20th century's first holocaust and that it partly inspired the efforts to exterminate Europe's Jews that Hitler initiated two decades later. No less a personage than Winston Churchill described the "massacring of uncounted thousands of helpless Armenians, men, women and children together, whole districts blotted out in one administrative holocaust". Political bodies across the world have passed resolutions recognising that a genocide occurred, including the European parliament itself back in 1987 (a fact conveniently omitted from the new report).
The question of whether the terms "genocide" or "holocaust" can be applied to the plight of the Armenians is not a purely historical or academic one. It is painfully pertinent to modern-day Turkey.
Last year Hrant Dink, the editor of Agos, a bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper, was murdered by extreme nationalists. He had been prosecuted under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which made it a criminal offence to utter anything that could be construed as denigrating Turkishness. Dink was under no illusions that he was charged because he was prepared to address the Armenian genocide.
In 2005, the Nobel prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk told a Swiss newspaper that "30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were murdered" in Turkey during the previous century and that "hardly anyone mentions it, so I do".
For bravely trying to break a taboo, Pamuk also found himself facing charges, though these were later dropped on a technicality.
Pamuk and Dink are the most high-profile victims of article 301, a law that has also been evoked to muzzle academics, human rights activists, even students and singers. Foreigners have been affected, too. The Turkish translation of Robert Fisk's mighty tome The Great War for Civilisation - which contains a harrowing account of unearthing Armenian skeletons in the Syrian desert - hit the shelves with zero marketing, because its publishers were scared of the reaction it would otherwise receive.
Last month, the Turkish assembly agreed to modify the law, reportedly to placate the EU's most powerful institutions. Out went the crime of insulting Turkishness. In came the crime of insulting the Turkish nation.
Several analysts have concluded - rightly - that this amendment is cosmetic and ambiguous. Yet according to the European commission, it is "very much a welcome step forward". The socialist grouping in the European parliament, which includes Britain's Labour MEPs, has made a similar statement ahead of this week's debate.
It is ironic that MEPs are indicating they may settle for something less than a total repeal of article 301. One MEP, the Dutch Green Joost Lagendijk, has been investigated under its provisions for accusing the Turkish army of inflaming tensions in the largely Kurdish south-east of the country during 2005.
Don't get me wrong. I'm in favour of Turkey joining the EU, once it chalks up significant improvements on its human rights record. And I consider it repugnant how right-wing politicians in France, Germany and Austria have opposed Turkey's accession efforts so that they can pander to an anti-Muslim bias for selfish electoral reasons.
But assaults on elementary rights like free expression have to be opposed whenever and wherever they occur. When alterations to laws designed to stifle democratic dissent are quite patently piecemeal, they should be criticised, not applauded.
And is it too much to ask from our elected representatives that they call a spade a spade and a genocide a genocide?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/21/avoidingthegword
David Cronin
guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday May 21 2008
Article history
This week the European parliament will seek to introduce a new euphemism for genocide into the lexicon of international relations. Diplomats who follow MEPs' advice will no longer have to run the risk of offending countries with a dishonourable history by uttering the 'g' word. They can, instead, refer to the most egregious crimes against humanity as "past events".
That is the phrase our fearless elected representatives use in a report they are about to formally endorse on Turkey's efforts to join the European Union. Although it advocates a "frank and open discussion" between Turkey and Armenia about "past events", the report is anything but frank and open about what those events could be.
In the absence of more explicit guidance, I can only assume the "events" in question were the slaughter of some 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman forces in 1915. There is ample evidence to suggest that this was the 20th century's first holocaust and that it partly inspired the efforts to exterminate Europe's Jews that Hitler initiated two decades later. No less a personage than Winston Churchill described the "massacring of uncounted thousands of helpless Armenians, men, women and children together, whole districts blotted out in one administrative holocaust". Political bodies across the world have passed resolutions recognising that a genocide occurred, including the European parliament itself back in 1987 (a fact conveniently omitted from the new report).
The question of whether the terms "genocide" or "holocaust" can be applied to the plight of the Armenians is not a purely historical or academic one. It is painfully pertinent to modern-day Turkey.
Last year Hrant Dink, the editor of Agos, a bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper, was murdered by extreme nationalists. He had been prosecuted under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which made it a criminal offence to utter anything that could be construed as denigrating Turkishness. Dink was under no illusions that he was charged because he was prepared to address the Armenian genocide.
In 2005, the Nobel prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk told a Swiss newspaper that "30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were murdered" in Turkey during the previous century and that "hardly anyone mentions it, so I do".
For bravely trying to break a taboo, Pamuk also found himself facing charges, though these were later dropped on a technicality.
Pamuk and Dink are the most high-profile victims of article 301, a law that has also been evoked to muzzle academics, human rights activists, even students and singers. Foreigners have been affected, too. The Turkish translation of Robert Fisk's mighty tome The Great War for Civilisation - which contains a harrowing account of unearthing Armenian skeletons in the Syrian desert - hit the shelves with zero marketing, because its publishers were scared of the reaction it would otherwise receive.
Last month, the Turkish assembly agreed to modify the law, reportedly to placate the EU's most powerful institutions. Out went the crime of insulting Turkishness. In came the crime of insulting the Turkish nation.
Several analysts have concluded - rightly - that this amendment is cosmetic and ambiguous. Yet according to the European commission, it is "very much a welcome step forward". The socialist grouping in the European parliament, which includes Britain's Labour MEPs, has made a similar statement ahead of this week's debate.
It is ironic that MEPs are indicating they may settle for something less than a total repeal of article 301. One MEP, the Dutch Green Joost Lagendijk, has been investigated under its provisions for accusing the Turkish army of inflaming tensions in the largely Kurdish south-east of the country during 2005.
Don't get me wrong. I'm in favour of Turkey joining the EU, once it chalks up significant improvements on its human rights record. And I consider it repugnant how right-wing politicians in France, Germany and Austria have opposed Turkey's accession efforts so that they can pander to an anti-Muslim bias for selfish electoral reasons.
But assaults on elementary rights like free expression have to be opposed whenever and wherever they occur. When alterations to laws designed to stifle democratic dissent are quite patently piecemeal, they should be criticised, not applauded.
And is it too much to ask from our elected representatives that they call a spade a spade and a genocide a genocide?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/21/avoidingthegword
Orhan Pamuk
guardian.co.uk,
Thursday June 12 2008
1952-
"When my sales went up my welcome from the Turkish literary scene disappeared"
Birthplace
Istanbul, Turkey
Education
From an American school in Istanbul Pamuk went on to study architecture at Istanbul Technical University for three years. He then enrolled on a journalism course at Istanbul University in order to put off his military service.
Other jobs
Although Pamuk's family did not approve of his decision to abandon his architectural studies in order to become a full-time writer, his father did support him with 'pocket money' until he was 32. He also spent three years as a visiting scholar in Iowa.
Did you know?
In 1998 Pamuk refused to accept the prestigious title of "state artist" from the Turkish government. He said that if he accepted it he could not "look in the face of people I care about".
Critical verdict
Although Pamuk started writing full-time in the mid 1970s, he did not achieve popular success until the 1990s - and then he swiftly became the fastest-selling author in Turkish history. He is unusual in achieving both mass market success and critical acclaim for his complex, post-modern novels which tackle big themes - cultural change, identity crises, east v west, tradition v modernity - head-on. International recognition of his work came more recently, with the Irish Impac award in 2003, followed by the German book trade Peace prize and the French Prix Médicis étranger. He was also widely believed to have been a serious contender for the 2005 Nobel prize for literature, which went to Harold Pinter. However, it is for his political travails that Pamuk's name is becoming best known outside his home country. Following remarks made during an interview with a Swiss magazine in February 2005 concerning the alleged genocide of Kurds and Armenians in Anatolia between 1915 and 1917, he was charged by Turkish state prosecutors with "insulting Turkishness" - a new offence which carries a prison sentence of up to three years as a penalty. Pamuk's trial opened on December 16 2005 and was immediately rescheduled for February 7 2006. Tensions over the case in Turkey are running high - Pamuk has said that he was initially forced to flee the country because of a hate campaign being waged against him - but there has also been an international outcry, with Amnesty International, PEN (the worldwide association of writers) and a collection of renowned authors (including Gabriel García Márquez, John Updike, Gunter Grass and Umbert Eco) denouncing Turkey's actions.
Recommended works
Pamuk is best known outside his own country for his two most recent novels - My Name is Red (2000) and Snow (2002, English translation 2004). The former, which won the Impac award, is a murder mystery and love story set among the artistic intrigues of the Islamic miniaturists of the Ottoman court in 16th-century Istanbul. A rich and complex work narrated by a range of voices, it explores the tension between east and west, Islam and Christianity. The critically-acclaimed Snow, a thriller set in the 1990s that features a poet who is caught up in a military coup, is the first of Pamuk's novels to tackle politics directly. While either of these would be a reasonable introduction to Pamuk's style and primary concerns, new readers may be better advised to start off with The White Castle (1985). An allegory of two doppelgangers, it is his shortest and arguably most accessible work, but its focus on identity-swapping introduces a key theme of Pamuk's work. Meanwhile, there is no better introduction to Pamuk's own background than Istanbul: Memories and the City, the writer's love letter to the city of his childhood and memoir of his early life.
Influences
Pamuk acknowledges the influence of Dante on his novel The New Life and Joyce's Ulysses on The Black Book. John Updike has compared Pamuk's intellect and descriptive skill to Proust, but writers more commonly cited as the progenitors of Pamuk's style of postmodern narrative trickery are Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Garcia Márquez and Salman Rushdie.
Now read on
Staying within Turkey, another well-known writer-in-translation is Yasar Kamal. Try his Mehmet, My Hawk, the story of a boy growing up in Anatolia. For background on the country, Lords of the Horizon: a History of the Ottoman Empire by Jason Goodwin is worth a dip. The same author has a novel due out, too - The Janissary Tree is described as a detective thriller set in 19th-century Istanbul. Ranging more widely on the fiction front, Panos Karnezis's tale of a dissolute Greek army brigade making their way across the Anatolian desert, The Maze, may appeal, as may his short story collection, Little Infamies. Umberto Eco would, of course, be a safe choice. Readers who are attracted by Pamuk's political stance may like to explore the poetry of the late Nazim Hikmet, who brought modernism to Turkish literature but was stripped of his Turkish nationality in 1959 for criticising the political system.
Adaptations
In 1992 Pamuk wrote the screenplay for a film, Gizli Yuz, which was derived from his novel Kara Kitap (published in 1990, translated as The Black Book in 1995).
Useful links
Background
·Comprehensive website
· Wikipedia entry on Pamuk
· Pamuk's Impac award citation
· Pamuk on Istanbul
· Pamuk's letter to The New Yorker on the subject of his trial
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/12/orhanpamuk
Thursday June 12 2008
1952-
"When my sales went up my welcome from the Turkish literary scene disappeared"
Birthplace
Istanbul, Turkey
Education
From an American school in Istanbul Pamuk went on to study architecture at Istanbul Technical University for three years. He then enrolled on a journalism course at Istanbul University in order to put off his military service.
Other jobs
Although Pamuk's family did not approve of his decision to abandon his architectural studies in order to become a full-time writer, his father did support him with 'pocket money' until he was 32. He also spent three years as a visiting scholar in Iowa.
Did you know?
In 1998 Pamuk refused to accept the prestigious title of "state artist" from the Turkish government. He said that if he accepted it he could not "look in the face of people I care about".
Critical verdict
Although Pamuk started writing full-time in the mid 1970s, he did not achieve popular success until the 1990s - and then he swiftly became the fastest-selling author in Turkish history. He is unusual in achieving both mass market success and critical acclaim for his complex, post-modern novels which tackle big themes - cultural change, identity crises, east v west, tradition v modernity - head-on. International recognition of his work came more recently, with the Irish Impac award in 2003, followed by the German book trade Peace prize and the French Prix Médicis étranger. He was also widely believed to have been a serious contender for the 2005 Nobel prize for literature, which went to Harold Pinter. However, it is for his political travails that Pamuk's name is becoming best known outside his home country. Following remarks made during an interview with a Swiss magazine in February 2005 concerning the alleged genocide of Kurds and Armenians in Anatolia between 1915 and 1917, he was charged by Turkish state prosecutors with "insulting Turkishness" - a new offence which carries a prison sentence of up to three years as a penalty. Pamuk's trial opened on December 16 2005 and was immediately rescheduled for February 7 2006. Tensions over the case in Turkey are running high - Pamuk has said that he was initially forced to flee the country because of a hate campaign being waged against him - but there has also been an international outcry, with Amnesty International, PEN (the worldwide association of writers) and a collection of renowned authors (including Gabriel García Márquez, John Updike, Gunter Grass and Umbert Eco) denouncing Turkey's actions.
Recommended works
Pamuk is best known outside his own country for his two most recent novels - My Name is Red (2000) and Snow (2002, English translation 2004). The former, which won the Impac award, is a murder mystery and love story set among the artistic intrigues of the Islamic miniaturists of the Ottoman court in 16th-century Istanbul. A rich and complex work narrated by a range of voices, it explores the tension between east and west, Islam and Christianity. The critically-acclaimed Snow, a thriller set in the 1990s that features a poet who is caught up in a military coup, is the first of Pamuk's novels to tackle politics directly. While either of these would be a reasonable introduction to Pamuk's style and primary concerns, new readers may be better advised to start off with The White Castle (1985). An allegory of two doppelgangers, it is his shortest and arguably most accessible work, but its focus on identity-swapping introduces a key theme of Pamuk's work. Meanwhile, there is no better introduction to Pamuk's own background than Istanbul: Memories and the City, the writer's love letter to the city of his childhood and memoir of his early life.
Influences
Pamuk acknowledges the influence of Dante on his novel The New Life and Joyce's Ulysses on The Black Book. John Updike has compared Pamuk's intellect and descriptive skill to Proust, but writers more commonly cited as the progenitors of Pamuk's style of postmodern narrative trickery are Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Garcia Márquez and Salman Rushdie.
Now read on
Staying within Turkey, another well-known writer-in-translation is Yasar Kamal. Try his Mehmet, My Hawk, the story of a boy growing up in Anatolia. For background on the country, Lords of the Horizon: a History of the Ottoman Empire by Jason Goodwin is worth a dip. The same author has a novel due out, too - The Janissary Tree is described as a detective thriller set in 19th-century Istanbul. Ranging more widely on the fiction front, Panos Karnezis's tale of a dissolute Greek army brigade making their way across the Anatolian desert, The Maze, may appeal, as may his short story collection, Little Infamies. Umberto Eco would, of course, be a safe choice. Readers who are attracted by Pamuk's political stance may like to explore the poetry of the late Nazim Hikmet, who brought modernism to Turkish literature but was stripped of his Turkish nationality in 1959 for criticising the political system.
Adaptations
In 1992 Pamuk wrote the screenplay for a film, Gizli Yuz, which was derived from his novel Kara Kitap (published in 1990, translated as The Black Book in 1995).
Useful links
Background
·Comprehensive website
· Wikipedia entry on Pamuk
· Pamuk's Impac award citation
· Pamuk on Istanbul
· Pamuk's letter to The New Yorker on the subject of his trial
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/12/orhanpamuk
Publisher convicted of insulting Turkey
· Hearing followed book on Armenian genocide
· Five-year sentence likely to be reduced to fine
Robert Tait in Istanbul
The Guardian,
Friday June 20 2008
Article history
The publisher of a book by a British author acknowledging the 1915 Armenian genocide has been convicted under Turkey's notorious Article 301, despite reforms intended to make the law less draconian.
A judge sentenced Ragip Zarakolu to five months in prison after ruling that The Truth Will Set Us Free, written by George Jerjian, "insulted the Turkish republic".
The conviction came despite a letter of support from the author to the court arguing that his book was intended to forge a "new understanding of history between Turks and Armenians".
Translated into Turkish in 2005, Jerjian's book tells the story of the slaughter of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman forces during the first world war through the eyes of his Armenian grandmother, who survived largely thanks to the protection of a Turkish soldier.
Turkey disputes allegations that the Armenians' deaths were a result of deliberate genocide.
Zarakolu, who was acquitted of a separate charge of insulting Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern Turkish state, has been freed on appeal.
He is not expected to serve time after the judge ruled that his sentence could be reduced to a fine, citing good behaviour.
The case, which has lasted more than three years, prompted MEPs, human rights organisations and the international writers' group Pen to campaign on Zarakolu's behalf.
His conviction is the first since Turkey's Justice and Development party (AKP) government revised Article 301 in April under pressure from domestic and foreign critics, who saw it as the country's most significant restriction on free speech.
The altered law banished the crime of insulting "Turkishness" and reduced the maximum sentence from three to two years.
The law also laid down that all prosecutions need prior approval from the justice minister.
The law was first introduced by the AKP in 2005 and has been used to prosecute 60 writers and journalists, including the Nobel prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk, who was charged after telling a Swiss newspaper that no one in Turkey dared mention the Armenian deaths or those of 30,000 Kurds.
The charges against Pamuk were subsequently dropped.
Article 301 was used to prosecute Zarakolu for the publication of another book on the Armenian question, Dora Sakayan's An Armenian Doctor in Turkey: Garabed Hatcherian, My Smyrna Ordeal of 1922.
Zarakolu, 60, whose human rights activities earned him two spells in prison during the 1970s, has faced official harassment for numerous publications over the years. Ultranationalist radicals firebombed the premises of his publishing company in 1995.
The law was also used against Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor who was shot dead by a nationalist extremist in Istanbul last year.
Dink, who campaigned for recognition of the crimes against Armenians, was prosecuted three times and convicted once. The last charges were dropped after his murder.
Zarakolu and his late wife Aysenur established the Belge publishing house in Istanbul in 1977.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/20/turkey
· Five-year sentence likely to be reduced to fine
Robert Tait in Istanbul
The Guardian,
Friday June 20 2008
Article history
The publisher of a book by a British author acknowledging the 1915 Armenian genocide has been convicted under Turkey's notorious Article 301, despite reforms intended to make the law less draconian.
A judge sentenced Ragip Zarakolu to five months in prison after ruling that The Truth Will Set Us Free, written by George Jerjian, "insulted the Turkish republic".
The conviction came despite a letter of support from the author to the court arguing that his book was intended to forge a "new understanding of history between Turks and Armenians".
Translated into Turkish in 2005, Jerjian's book tells the story of the slaughter of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman forces during the first world war through the eyes of his Armenian grandmother, who survived largely thanks to the protection of a Turkish soldier.
Turkey disputes allegations that the Armenians' deaths were a result of deliberate genocide.
Zarakolu, who was acquitted of a separate charge of insulting Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern Turkish state, has been freed on appeal.
He is not expected to serve time after the judge ruled that his sentence could be reduced to a fine, citing good behaviour.
The case, which has lasted more than three years, prompted MEPs, human rights organisations and the international writers' group Pen to campaign on Zarakolu's behalf.
His conviction is the first since Turkey's Justice and Development party (AKP) government revised Article 301 in April under pressure from domestic and foreign critics, who saw it as the country's most significant restriction on free speech.
The altered law banished the crime of insulting "Turkishness" and reduced the maximum sentence from three to two years.
The law also laid down that all prosecutions need prior approval from the justice minister.
The law was first introduced by the AKP in 2005 and has been used to prosecute 60 writers and journalists, including the Nobel prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk, who was charged after telling a Swiss newspaper that no one in Turkey dared mention the Armenian deaths or those of 30,000 Kurds.
The charges against Pamuk were subsequently dropped.
Article 301 was used to prosecute Zarakolu for the publication of another book on the Armenian question, Dora Sakayan's An Armenian Doctor in Turkey: Garabed Hatcherian, My Smyrna Ordeal of 1922.
Zarakolu, 60, whose human rights activities earned him two spells in prison during the 1970s, has faced official harassment for numerous publications over the years. Ultranationalist radicals firebombed the premises of his publishing company in 1995.
The law was also used against Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor who was shot dead by a nationalist extremist in Istanbul last year.
Dink, who campaigned for recognition of the crimes against Armenians, was prosecuted three times and convicted once. The last charges were dropped after his murder.
Zarakolu and his late wife Aysenur established the Belge publishing house in Istanbul in 1977.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/20/turkey
Turkey’s Killing Fields
By GARY J. BASS
Published: December 17, 2006
In July 1915, the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire sent Washington a harrowing report about the Turks’ “systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations.” He described “terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage and murder, turning into massacre.” A month later, the ambassador, Henry Morgenthau — the grandfather of the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau — warned of an “attempt to exterminate a race.”
The Young Turk nationalist campaign against the empire’s Armenian subjects was far too enormous to be ignored at the time. But decades of government-backed denial have created what amounts to a taboo in Turkey today. Instead of admitting genocide, Turkish officials contend the Armenians were a dangerous fifth column that colluded with Russia in World War I; many Armenians may have died, they say, but there was no organized slaughter. Turkish writers who challenge this line, like the novelists Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, have risked prosecution for insulting Turkish identity. And on the diplomatic front, when Turkey should be polishing its credentials for eventual European Union membership, it is mired in historical fights; this May, for instance, it pulled out of a NATO military exercise to protest the Canadian prime minister’s acknowledgment of the genocide.
“A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility,” by Taner Akcam, is a Turkish blast against this national denial. A historian and former leftist activist now teaching at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, Akcam is often described as the first Turkish scholar to call the massacres genocide, and his impressive achievement here is to shine fresh light on exactly why and how the Ottoman Empire deported and slaughtered the Armenians. He directly challenges the doubters back home, basing his powerful book on Turkish sources in the old Ottoman script — including the failed Ottoman war crimes tribunals held after World War I. Although he bolsters his case with material from the American, British and German archives, he writes that the remaining Ottoman records are enough to show that the ruling party’s central committee “did deliberately attempt to destroy the Armenian population.”
Akcam closely links the 1915 genocide with World War I. The Unionists, as the nationalist leaders were known, dreaded the partition of their empire by the European great powers. Not only did they suspect the Armenians of dangerous disloyalty, Akcam writes, but massacres of Muslims in Christian regions of the faltering empire before World War I had fostered a desire for vengeance.
While never excusing the atrocities, Akcam does argue that the Turkish leaders chose genocide in a mood of stark desperation. Staggered by a series of early military defeats, and by the Allied onslaught at Gallipoli, they fully expected their empire — driven out of so much of its vast territories over the past two centuries — to collapse. The Turkish heartland of Anatolia was threatened — as was Constantinople.
The fiercest Ottoman enemy was Russia, which had nearly seized Constantinople in a bloody 1877-78 war and had a storied history of trying to foment uprisings against Ottoman rule. The Turkish nationalist line puts great weight on the internal menace of pro-Russian Armenians. But Akcam argues that there was little real danger from the Armenian uprisings, which were limited and directed mostly against the deportations. (British officials considered the Armenians militarily useless and thus refused to encourage the uprisings.) Akcam allows that the evacuation of Armenians may have been justified by military necessity in areas where the Armenian revolutionaries were strong — but not throughout the empire.
The killings were a colossal undertaking. Paramilitaries and Interior Ministry gendarmes slaughtered Armenians en masse, while the Interior Ministry under Talat Pasha, who coordinated the campaign, arranged for the deportation of untold thousands more to the blazing Syrian deserts. Many of the deportees were massacred along the way, and those who survived were left without food, shelter or medicine, in what Akcam calls “deliberate extermination.” Akcam cites Ottoman Interior Ministry papers that chillingly call for keeping Armenians to less than 5 or 10 percent of the population. A postwar Turkish investigation found that some 800,000 Armenians perished.
After the war, Britain pressured the defeated Ottoman government into setting up its own war crimes tribunals. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk himself, the founder of the present Turkish republic, once said that the Unionist leaders “should have been brought to account for the lives of millions of our Christian subjects ruthlessly driven en masse from their homes and massacred.” Today, those who deny the genocide have to dismiss these trial records as mere victor’s justice. Akcam uses the records as important evidence, though he frowns on Britain’s imperialist ambitions and cultural biases.
This dense, measured and footnote-heavy book poses a stern challenge to modern Turkish polemicists, and if there is any response to be made, it can be done only with additional primary research in the archival records. In 1919, a British general hoped the Ottoman war crimes trials would “dispel the fog of illusions prevailing throughout the country.” Eighty-seven years later, the murk still lingers.
Gary J. Bass, the author of “Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals,” is writing a book on humanitarian intervention.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/books/review/Bass.t.html?scp=25&sq=armenian%20genocide&st=cse
Published: December 17, 2006
In July 1915, the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire sent Washington a harrowing report about the Turks’ “systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations.” He described “terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage and murder, turning into massacre.” A month later, the ambassador, Henry Morgenthau — the grandfather of the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau — warned of an “attempt to exterminate a race.”
The Young Turk nationalist campaign against the empire’s Armenian subjects was far too enormous to be ignored at the time. But decades of government-backed denial have created what amounts to a taboo in Turkey today. Instead of admitting genocide, Turkish officials contend the Armenians were a dangerous fifth column that colluded with Russia in World War I; many Armenians may have died, they say, but there was no organized slaughter. Turkish writers who challenge this line, like the novelists Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, have risked prosecution for insulting Turkish identity. And on the diplomatic front, when Turkey should be polishing its credentials for eventual European Union membership, it is mired in historical fights; this May, for instance, it pulled out of a NATO military exercise to protest the Canadian prime minister’s acknowledgment of the genocide.
“A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility,” by Taner Akcam, is a Turkish blast against this national denial. A historian and former leftist activist now teaching at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, Akcam is often described as the first Turkish scholar to call the massacres genocide, and his impressive achievement here is to shine fresh light on exactly why and how the Ottoman Empire deported and slaughtered the Armenians. He directly challenges the doubters back home, basing his powerful book on Turkish sources in the old Ottoman script — including the failed Ottoman war crimes tribunals held after World War I. Although he bolsters his case with material from the American, British and German archives, he writes that the remaining Ottoman records are enough to show that the ruling party’s central committee “did deliberately attempt to destroy the Armenian population.”
Akcam closely links the 1915 genocide with World War I. The Unionists, as the nationalist leaders were known, dreaded the partition of their empire by the European great powers. Not only did they suspect the Armenians of dangerous disloyalty, Akcam writes, but massacres of Muslims in Christian regions of the faltering empire before World War I had fostered a desire for vengeance.
While never excusing the atrocities, Akcam does argue that the Turkish leaders chose genocide in a mood of stark desperation. Staggered by a series of early military defeats, and by the Allied onslaught at Gallipoli, they fully expected their empire — driven out of so much of its vast territories over the past two centuries — to collapse. The Turkish heartland of Anatolia was threatened — as was Constantinople.
The fiercest Ottoman enemy was Russia, which had nearly seized Constantinople in a bloody 1877-78 war and had a storied history of trying to foment uprisings against Ottoman rule. The Turkish nationalist line puts great weight on the internal menace of pro-Russian Armenians. But Akcam argues that there was little real danger from the Armenian uprisings, which were limited and directed mostly against the deportations. (British officials considered the Armenians militarily useless and thus refused to encourage the uprisings.) Akcam allows that the evacuation of Armenians may have been justified by military necessity in areas where the Armenian revolutionaries were strong — but not throughout the empire.
The killings were a colossal undertaking. Paramilitaries and Interior Ministry gendarmes slaughtered Armenians en masse, while the Interior Ministry under Talat Pasha, who coordinated the campaign, arranged for the deportation of untold thousands more to the blazing Syrian deserts. Many of the deportees were massacred along the way, and those who survived were left without food, shelter or medicine, in what Akcam calls “deliberate extermination.” Akcam cites Ottoman Interior Ministry papers that chillingly call for keeping Armenians to less than 5 or 10 percent of the population. A postwar Turkish investigation found that some 800,000 Armenians perished.
After the war, Britain pressured the defeated Ottoman government into setting up its own war crimes tribunals. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk himself, the founder of the present Turkish republic, once said that the Unionist leaders “should have been brought to account for the lives of millions of our Christian subjects ruthlessly driven en masse from their homes and massacred.” Today, those who deny the genocide have to dismiss these trial records as mere victor’s justice. Akcam uses the records as important evidence, though he frowns on Britain’s imperialist ambitions and cultural biases.
This dense, measured and footnote-heavy book poses a stern challenge to modern Turkish polemicists, and if there is any response to be made, it can be done only with additional primary research in the archival records. In 1919, a British general hoped the Ottoman war crimes trials would “dispel the fog of illusions prevailing throughout the country.” Eighty-seven years later, the murk still lingers.
Gary J. Bass, the author of “Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals,” is writing a book on humanitarian intervention.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/books/review/Bass.t.html?scp=25&sq=armenian%20genocide&st=cse
Swiss Convict Turkish Politician for Denying Armenian Genocide
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 10, 2007
LAUSANNE, Switzerland, March 9 — A prominent Turkish politician was convicted Friday of breaching Swiss antiracism laws by saying that the early 20th-century killing of Armenians could not be described as genocide.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry reacted swiftly to the decision, saying in a statement that it was saddened by the Swiss court’s ruling to punish the politician, Dogu Perincek, leader of the Turkish Workers’ Party, and to ignore “his freedom of expression.”
Mr. Perincek was ordered to pay a fine of $2,450; an additional penalty of $7,360 was suspended.
He was charged with breaking Swiss law by denying during a visit to Switzerland in 2005 that the World War I era killings of up to 1.5 million Armenians amounted to genocide. He has since repeated his statements, including at his trial this week.
In Turkey it is a crime to use the word genocide to describe the killings.
Mr. Perincek accused the judge of “racist hatred” toward Turkey and said he would appeal the verdict to Switzerland’s supreme court.
If necessary, Mr. Perincek told Turkey’s government-run Anatolia news agency, he would take his case to the European Court of Human Rights.
In his closing statement, Judge Pierre-Henri Winzap described the defendant as an intelligent and cultivated person but added that to deny the Armenian genocide was an arrogant provocation because it was an accepted historical fact. Most Western governments consider the killings genocide.
Switzerland’s antiracism legislation has previously been applied to Holocaust denial.
The case has caused diplomatic tension between Switzerland and Turkey, which insists that Armenians were killed in civil unrest during the tumultuous collapse of the Ottoman Empire and not in a planned campaign of genocide.
In its response to the verdict the Turkish Foreign Ministry called into question the legitimacy of the Swiss law and said the case was “inappropriate, baseless and debatable in every circumstance.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/world/europe/10swiss.html?_r=1&scp=10&sq=armenian%20genocide&st=cse&oref=slogin
Published: March 10, 2007
LAUSANNE, Switzerland, March 9 — A prominent Turkish politician was convicted Friday of breaching Swiss antiracism laws by saying that the early 20th-century killing of Armenians could not be described as genocide.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry reacted swiftly to the decision, saying in a statement that it was saddened by the Swiss court’s ruling to punish the politician, Dogu Perincek, leader of the Turkish Workers’ Party, and to ignore “his freedom of expression.”
Mr. Perincek was ordered to pay a fine of $2,450; an additional penalty of $7,360 was suspended.
He was charged with breaking Swiss law by denying during a visit to Switzerland in 2005 that the World War I era killings of up to 1.5 million Armenians amounted to genocide. He has since repeated his statements, including at his trial this week.
In Turkey it is a crime to use the word genocide to describe the killings.
Mr. Perincek accused the judge of “racist hatred” toward Turkey and said he would appeal the verdict to Switzerland’s supreme court.
If necessary, Mr. Perincek told Turkey’s government-run Anatolia news agency, he would take his case to the European Court of Human Rights.
In his closing statement, Judge Pierre-Henri Winzap described the defendant as an intelligent and cultivated person but added that to deny the Armenian genocide was an arrogant provocation because it was an accepted historical fact. Most Western governments consider the killings genocide.
Switzerland’s antiracism legislation has previously been applied to Holocaust denial.
The case has caused diplomatic tension between Switzerland and Turkey, which insists that Armenians were killed in civil unrest during the tumultuous collapse of the Ottoman Empire and not in a planned campaign of genocide.
In its response to the verdict the Turkish Foreign Ministry called into question the legitimacy of the Swiss law and said the case was “inappropriate, baseless and debatable in every circumstance.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/world/europe/10swiss.html?_r=1&scp=10&sq=armenian%20genocide&st=cse&oref=slogin
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