ABC Radio and ABCTV , Done it again!

ABC TV Foreign Correspondent showing an anti-Turkish bias documantary without any of bit of Turkish side of the version...

Armenia / Turkey: Ghosts of the Past

Broadcast: 22/04/2008Reporter: Eric Campbell

LEAD STORYSERIES 17EPISODE 31

Synopsis

While the landings under fire at Gallipoli Cove on the western coast of Turkey in 1915 were seen to have helped forge Australia’s national identity, at the same time in Anatolia in central Turkey ethnic Armenians were being evicted, harassed and slaughtered. Respected historians say as many as a million people were killed and many more made refugees. (see extract*)While in some countries such as France, it is a criminal offence to deny the Armenian genocide, successive Turkish governments refuse to acknowledge it.

Two years ago Foreign Correspondent broadcast a report featuring Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most famous author who dared to speak of the genocide. Pamuk was convicted of insulting Turkey and later was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.The report also featured an interview with Hrant Dink, the publisher of an Armenian newspaper in Istanbul. A few months later Hrant Dink was dead, allegedly shot by a teenage ultra-nationalist.Turkey’s Prime Minister responding to news of Hrant Dink’s murder saying that “a bullet has been fired at democracy and freedom.” Eric Campbell went to meet Fuat Turgut, the lawyer representing Yasin Hayal, accused of being the mastermind behind Hrant Dink’s murder. Turgut acknowledges that his client provided the alleged killer with a gun and cash. Yasin Hayal’s father concedes in an interview with Campbell his son “might have been tricked because he loves his country and his nation.” The Dink case epitomises the hostility of some Turks towards fellow citizens who happen to be ethnic Armenians. Armenians feel that little will change unless Turkey acknowledges the root of the problem – the slaughter and forced expulsions of 1915 and 1916. Turkish MP Suat Kiniklioglu, a prominent member of his country’s Foreign Affairs Commission tells Campbell that any suggestion Turkey was responsible for genocide “my government finds very insulting.” On the other side of the border, closed by Turkey, Armenia’s Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian says the “genocide committed against the Armenian people was a huge tragedy and the sense of tragedy is being exacerbated with every passing day Turkey continues to deny.”In Armenia Eric Campbell interviews Dr Verijine Svazlian who has conducted hundreds of interviews with genocide survivors. “Gradually people opened up to me and acquired enough confidence to share some of the most horrifying, brutal and disgusting episodes of the massacres they were a witness to,” she said.Today there are a mere handful of survivors.

Mari Vardanyan, who is 102, remembers her grandfather being shot and the threat issued by Turks to the local priest. He was ordered to vacate his church or they would hang him and drink his blood.Around the world political argument continues over the Armenian genocide. Late last year US President George W. Bush rebuffed a proposal before Congress to pass a resolution formally recognising the genocide, for fear of jeopardising relations with Turkey, which is a key ally. Democrat presidential contenders, Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama are committed to recognising the Armenian genocide if elected President. * Extract from The Middle East, by Bernard Lewis, an authority on Islamic and Middle Eastern history.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1995In the spring of 1915 when Armenian rebels had gained control of Van, the British were at the Dardanelles, the Russians attacking in the East and another British force apparently advancing on Baghdad the Ottoman government decided on the deportation and relocation of the Armenian population of Anatolia – a practice sadly familiar in the region since biblical times. Some categories of Armenians, along with their families, were declared exempt from the deportation order; Catholics, Protestants, railway workers and members of the armed forces. But the great mass of Armenians in Anatolia extending far beyond the endangered areas and suspect groups, was included in both the deportations and its deadly consequences, The deportees suffered appalling hardship. In an embattled empire desperately short of manpower, neither soldiers nor gendarmes were available and the task of escorting the deportees was entrusted to hastily recruited local posses.

Estimates vary considerably as to the numbers of but there can be no doubt that least hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished, perhaps more than a million. Many succumbed to hunger disease and exposure; great numbers were brutally murdered either by local tribesmen and villagers, through the negligence or with the complicity of their unpaid, unfed and undisciplined escorts, or by the escorts themselves. The Ottoman central government seems to have made some effort to curb the excess.

The archives contain telegrams from high Ottoman authorities, concerned with the prevention or punishment of acts of violence against the Armenians. They include records of almost 1400 hundred courts martials at which the Ottoman civil and military personnel were tried and sentenced, some of them to death for offences against the deportees.
http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2008/s2207929.htm