INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS TO TURKISH PRESIDENT ERDOGAN
(then Prime Minister)
To Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
TC Basbakanlik
Bakanliklar
Ankara, Turkey
FAX: 90 312 417 0476
June 13, 2005
Dear Prime Minister Erdogan,
We are writing you this open letter in response to your call for an
"impartial study by historians" concerning the fate of the Armenian
people in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
We represent the major body of scholars who study genocide in North
America and Europe. We are concerned that in calling for an impartial
study of the Armenian Genocide you may not be fully aware of the extent
of the scholarly and intellectual record on the Armenian Genocide and
how this event conforms to the definition of the United Nations Genocide
Convention. We want to underscore that it is not just Armenians who are
affirming the Armenian Genocide but it is the overwhelming opinion of
scholars who study genocide: hundreds of independent scholars, who have
no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries
and nationalities and the course of decades. The scholarly evidence
reveals the following:
On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk
government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its
Armenian citizens — an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a
million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation,
torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population
fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged
from its homeland of 2,500 years.
The Armenian Genocide was the most well-known human rights issue of
its time and was reported regularly in newspapers across the United
States and Europe. The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented by
thousands of official records of the United States and nations around
the world including Turkey’s wartime allies Germany, Austria and
Hungary, by Ottoman court-martial records, by eyewitness accounts of
missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by
decades of historical scholarship.
The Armenian Genocide is corroborated by the international scholarly, legal, and human rights community:
- Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he meant by genocide.
- The killings of the Armenians is genocide as defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
- In 1997 the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an organization of the world’s foremost experts on genocide, unanimously passed a formal resolution affirming the Armenian Genocide.
- 126 leading scholars of the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer placed a statement in the New York Times in June 2000 declaring the "incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide" and urging western democracies to acknowledge it.
- The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Jerusalem), and the Institute for the Study of Genocide (NYC) have affirmed the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide.
- Leading texts in the international law of genocide such as William A. Schabas's Genocide in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2000) cite the Armenian Genocide as a precursor to the Holocaust and as a precedent for the law on crimes against humanity.
We note that there may be differing interpretations of genocide—how
and why the Armenian Genocide happened, but to deny its factual and
moral reality as genocide is not to engage in scholarship but in
propaganda and efforts to absolve the perpetrator, blame the victims,
and erase the ethical meaning of this history.
We would also note that scholars who advise your government and who
are affiliated in other ways with your state-controlled institutions are
not impartial. Such so-called "scholars" work to serve the agenda of
historical and moral obfuscation when they advise you and the Turkish
Parliament on how to deny the Armenian Genocide. In preventing a
conference on the Armenian Genocide from taking place at Bogacizi
University in Istanbul on May 25, your government revealed its aversion
to academic and intellectual freedom—a fundamental condition of
democratic society.
We believe that it is clearly in the interest of the Turkish people
and their future as a proud and equal participants in international,
democratic discourse to acknowledge the responsibility of a previous
government for the genocide of the Armenian people, just as the German
government and people have done in the case of the Holocaust.Approved Unanimously at the Sixth biennial meeting of
THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS (IAGS)
June 7, 2005, Boca Raton, Florida
| President | First Vice-President | Second Vice-President | Secretary-Treasurer |
| Israel Charny (Israel) | Gregory H. Stanton (USA) | Linda Melvern (UK) | Steven Jacobs (USA) |
