The International Herald Tribune (France)
Friday, September 23, 2005
page 5 (A full page advertisement)
President:
Vice-President: Gregory H. Stanton (
Secretary-Treasurer: Steven Jacobs (
TO PRIME MINISTER RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN
TC Bashabanlik
Bakanliklar,
June 16, 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
We represent the major body of scholars who study genocide in North America and
* On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War 1, the Young Turk government of the
* The Armenian Genocide was the most well-known human rights issue of its time and was reported regularly in newspapers across the
* The Armenian Genocide is corroborated by the international scholarly, legal, and human rights community:
1) 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.
2) 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.
3) 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
4) 126 leading scholars of the Holocaust inluding 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.
5) The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (
6) 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 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
We believe that it is clearly in the interest of the Turkish people and their future as 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
June 7, 2005,
Contact:
Gregory H. Stanton, Vice President, International Association of Genocide Scholars; President, Genocide Watch;
James Farmer, Visiting Professor of Human Rights,