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ANCA Presses State Department on Exclusion of Genocide from Website

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  • ANCA Presses State Department on Exclusion of Genocide from Website

    Armenian National Committee of America
    888 17th St., NW, Suite 904
    Washington, DC 20006
    Tel: (202) 775-1918
    Fax: (202) 775-5648
    E-mail: [email protected]
    Internet: www.anca.org

    PRESS RELEASE

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
    June 9, 2004
    Contact: Elizabeth S. Chouldjian
    Tel: (202) 775-1918

    ANCA PRESSES STATE DEPARTMENT ON CONTINUED EXCLUSION OF
    ARMENIAN GENOCIDE FROM OFFICIAL WEBSITE ON ARMENIAN HISTORY

    -- State Department Website's History of Armenia Fails
    to Make any Mention of the Systematic Destruction and
    Exile of the Armenian Population between 1915 and 1923

    WASHINGTON, DC - In a detailed letter sent today to Secretary of
    State Colin Powell, Armenian National Committee Of America (ANCA)
    Chairman Ken Hachikian pressed the State Department to end its
    practice of excluding any mention of the Armenian Genocide from the
    history section of its official website on Armenia.

    The State Department website features Background Notes on one
    hundred ninety-eight nations. Each entry includes a brief
    historical review. The historical section for Armenia makes no
    mention of Ottoman Turkey's systematic destruction of over one and
    a half million Armenians, or the "demographic disaster" described
    by the Library of Congress as having "shifted the center of the
    Armenian population from the heartland of historical Armenia." The
    ANCA issued an action alert on this issue in January of this year.

    Hachikian's letter was written in response to a State Department
    letter, dated May 6th, sent to Joe Dagdigian, Chairman of the
    Merrimack Valley ANC chapter. Dagdigian had earlier written a
    letter, dated April 20th, documenting a series of serious
    shortcomings in the State Department website on the history of
    Armenia. Dagdigian noted, in part, that:

    The historical survey of Armenia omits any reference
    to the Armenian Genocide committed by Ottoman Turkey
    beginning in 1915. To recount nearly 3,000 years of
    Armenian history without the inclusion of this
    cataclysmic and relatively recent event in the history
    of the Armenian people is inexcusable. Rather than
    contributing to an understanding of the region, it
    obscures the region's history and fails to provide the
    background necessary for understanding current
    Armenian and regional issues.

    In response to Dagdigian's letter, John Fox, the Director of the
    Office of Caucasus and Central Asian Affairs, noted that:

    Country background notes on the State Department's
    web-site were designed to provide interested readers
    with concise and up-to-date information regarding key
    economic and political issues in the country, as well
    as travel conditions and commercial opportunities.
    Country background notes also provide a very brief
    introduction to the country's history. Typically,
    each background page will collapse over 2,000 years of
    history into 3-4 concise paragraphs. Consequently,
    even episodes of great historical importance are often
    not treated in our background notes.

    Hachikian, responding to this letter from John Fox, wrote a sharply
    critical letter to Secretary Powell spelling out the historical
    inaccuracy, the basic inconsistency, and the moral bankruptcy of
    the State Department's position of excluding the Armenian Genocide
    from its history of Armenia. In this letter, Hachikian wrote that:

    Rather than acknowledging and taking steps to correct
    this obvious error - or even indicating a willingness
    to review this flawed document, the State Department's
    letter, signed by John Fox of the Office of Caucasus
    and Central Asian Affairs, instead, sought to reduce
    this issue of profound historical and contemporary
    significance to a simple consideration of space.

    The Hachikian letter then provides an in-depth review of the
    assertions made in the State Department letter, concluding that,
    "we find it plainly disingenuous, if not outright dishonest, to
    imply that the exclusion of the Armenian Genocide is based on space
    considerations." Hachikian added, that, "it is clear that this
    historically inaccurate refusal to even acknowledge the
    premeditated extermination between 1915 and 1923 of fully two
    thirds of all Armenians by Ottoman Turkey and the exile of a nation
    from its historic homeland of more than three thousand years,
    represents another very sad chapter in the State Department's
    complicity in the Turkish government's ongoing immoral campaign to
    deny the Armenian Genocide."

    Hachikian closed his letter by sharing with Secretary Powell, "how
    truly regrettable I find it to have to engage in word-counts to
    illustrate the ridiculous and reprehensible lengths to which the
    State Department goes to help the government of Turkey to deny the
    undeniable - the crime of genocide committed against the Armenian
    nation. In the interest of basic morality, historical accuracy,
    and the State Department's credibility, on behalf of the American-
    Armenian community, I ask you to immediately correct this obvious
    and insulting 'error.'"

    Armenian Americans can express their concern about the Armenia
    Background Notes by visiting the following link on the ANCA website.
    http://www.anca.org/anca/actionalerts.asp?aaID=72

    The full text of the ANCA letter to Secretary Powell is provided below.

    #####

    Text of ANCA letter to the State Department - June 4, 2003

    June 4, 2004

    The Hon. Colin Powell
    Secretary of State
    U.S. Department of State
    2201 C St NW 7th Floor
    Washington, DC 20520

    Dear Secretary Powell:

    I am writing to share with you our grave concerns regarding the
    State Department's response (see attached) to the letter that our
    Merrimack Valley Armenian National Committee Chairman, Joe
    Dagdigian, sent on April 20th to Under Secretary Margaret Tutwiler,
    regarding the Country Profile of Armenia on the State Department's
    website.

    I refer specifically to the point raised by Mr. Dagdigian that the
    State Department's "historical survey of Armenia omits any
    reference to the Armenian Genocide committed by Ottoman Turkey
    beginning in 1915. To recount nearly 3,000 years of Armenian
    history without the inclusion of this cataclysmic and relatively
    recent event in the history of the Armenian people is inexcusable.
    Rather than contributing to an understanding of the region, it
    obscures the region's history and fails to provide the background
    necessary for understanding current Armenian and regional issues."

    Rather than acknowledging and taking steps to correct this obvious
    error - or even indicating a willingness to review this flawed
    document, the State Department's letter, signed by John Fox, the
    Director of the Office of Caucasus and Central Asian Affairs,
    instead, sought to reduce this issue of profound historical and
    contemporary significance to a simple consideration of space. In
    his response, Mr. Fox specifically noted that, because "typically,
    each background page will collapse over 2,000 years of history into
    3-4 concise paragraphs. . . even episodes of great historical
    importance are often not treated in our background notes."

    Although we are deeply troubled - morally, historically, and on
    humanitarian grounds - by the Department's willingness to dismiss
    the Armenian Genocide in this fashion, we, nonetheless, took a
    serious look at the defenses offered in Mr. Fox's letter. First,
    we surveyed the lengths of each of the one hundred ninety-eight
    Background Notes on the Department's website (see attached list).
    Next, we examined the entries for nations that are universally
    understood to have suffered genocidal crimes. And, finally, we
    reviewed each entry against the standard that "even episodes of
    great historical importance" are often not included in Background
    Notes due to space considerations. Based on this review, we
    discovered the following:

    1) Space considerations:

    At three hundred three words, the history section in the Armenia
    Background Notes is among the shortest of all the one hundred
    ninety-eight nations on the State Department's Background Notes
    website. While we appreciate that word length does not necessarily
    correlate to the merits of a particular historical overview, we
    observe, in light of Mr. Fox's comments about space limitations,
    that fully one hundred sixty-eight entries are larger than
    Armenia's, many being substantially larger. For example, the entry
    on Honduras is five times larger, while the one for Bangladesh is
    ten times the size of Armenia's entry; fifty-seven countries are
    over one thousand words.

    Given that the length of the Armenian Background Notes history
    section is less than half the average word-count of eight hundred
    sixty-two words, we find it plainly disingenuous, if not outright
    dishonest, to imply that the exclusion of the Armenian Genocide is
    based on space considerations.

    2) Other instances of genocide

    Unlike in the Armenian case, the Department of State does properly
    address the issue of genocidal campaigns in the Background Notes of
    three other nations, namely Cambodia, Israel, and Rwanda, whose
    people experienced genocide in the 20th Century. The relevant
    portions of these Background Notes are provided below:

    Cambodia: "The regime controlled every aspect of life
    and reduced everyone to the level of abject obedience
    through terror. Torture centers were established, and
    detailed records were kept of the thousands murdered
    there. Public executions of those considered
    unreliable or with links to the previous government
    were common. Few succeeded in escaping the military
    patrols and fleeing the country. Solid estimates of
    the numbers who died between 1975 and 1979 are not
    available, but it is likely that hundreds of thousands
    were brutally executed by the regime. Hundreds of
    thousands more died of starvation and disease--both
    under the Khmer Rouge and during the Vietnamese
    invasion in 1978. Estimates of the dead range from 1.7
    million to 3 million, out of a 1975 population
    estimated at 7.3 million."

    Israel: "Mounting British efforts to restrict this
    immigration were countered by international support
    for Jewish national aspirations following the near-
    extermination of European Jewry by the Nazis during
    World War II."

    Rwanda: "The killing swiftly spread from Kigali to
    all corners of the country; between April 6 and the
    beginning of July, a genocide of unprecedented
    swiftness left up to 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus
    dead at the hands of organized bands of militia­
    Interahamwe. Even ordinary citizens were called on to
    kill their neighbors by local officials and
    government-sponsored radio. The president's MRND
    Party was implicated in organizing many aspects of the
    genocide."

    3) Exclusion of "episodes of great historical importance"

    In Mr. Fox's letter, he notes that "even episodes of great
    historical importance" are not included in Background Notes due to
    space considerations. This apparent effort to excuse the absence
    of any mention of the Armenian Genocide prompted us to review other
    entries in order to determine if this standard was applied
    uniformly. While the Department could not find the space, even in
    a sentence or two, to deal with a central event in modern Armenian
    history, it did manage to include the following entries for other
    countries:

    Papua New Guinea: "Early garden crops--many of which
    are indigenous--included sugarcane, Pacific bananas,
    yams, and taros, while sago and pandanus were two
    commonly exploited native forest crops. Today's
    staples - sweet potatoes and pigs - are later
    arrivals, but shellfish and fish have long been
    mainstays of coastal dwellers' diets."

    Lithuania: "...the Roman historian Tacitus referred
    to the Lithuanians as excellent farmers."

    Mali: "Malians express great pride in their
    ancestry."

    Based on this review of the Department's response, it is clear that
    the exclusion of the Armenian Genocide from the Background Notes
    entry for Armenia is not, as Mr. Fox implied in his letter, based
    on space considerations. Rather, it is clear that this
    historically inaccurate refusal to even acknowledge the
    premeditated extermination between 1915 and 1923 of fully two
    thirds of all Armenians by Ottoman Turkey and the exile of a nation
    from its historic homeland of more than three thousand years,
    represents another very sad chapter in the State Department's
    complicity in the Turkish government's ongoing immoral campaign to
    deny the Armenian Genocide.

    By any historical standard, the Armenian Genocide represents an
    important chapter in world history and a major milestone in the
    life of the Armenian nation. The Library of Congress Country Study
    of Armenia, which estimates the number of Armenians killed in the
    Armenian Genocide at up to two million, describes the Genocide as
    "a demographic disaster that shifted the center of the Armenian
    population from the heartland of historical Armenia." The
    exclusion of the Armenian Genocide from any history of Armenia,
    however brief, is morally and historically inexcusable.

    I will close by sharing with you how truly regrettable I find it to
    have to engage in word-counts to illustrate the ridiculous and
    reprehensible lengths to which the State Department goes to help
    the government of Turkey to deny the undeniable - the crime of
    genocide committed against the Armenian nation. In the interest of
    basic morality, historical accuracy, and the State Department's
    credibility, on behalf of the American-Armenian community, I ask
    you to immediately correct this obvious and insulting "error."

    I would be pleased to meet with you personally to discuss this
    matter in greater detail.

    Sincerely yours,

    [signed]
    Kenneth V. Hachikian
    Chairman
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