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Ottawa: Unveiling of monument to restore Canada relations with Turke

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  • Ottawa: Unveiling of monument to restore Canada relations with Turke

    Globe and Mail, Canada
    Sept 19 2012

    Unveiling of monument intended to restore Canada's relations with Turkey

    by PATRICK MARTIN


    At 3:15 on Thursday in Ottawa, the Foreign Ministers of Canada and
    Turkey are to lift the cover off a striking new public monument said
    to honour all diplomats who have been killed by terrorists. But the
    commemorative gesture carries diplomatic risks of its own.

    Its location, at the very spot where a Turkish diplomat was
    assassinated 30 years ago, allegedly by Armenian terrorists, suggests
    to some it is one act of terror that is being singled out, and one
    country, Turkey, that is being placated.

    Everything depends on the wording of the plaque being revealed Thursday.

    Turkey has harboured a grudge against Canada since 2006 when the newly
    elected government of Stephen Harper officially recognized the killing
    of Armenians during the First World War as an act of genocide by the
    Ottoman Turks. That official recognition pleased Canadian Armenians no
    end, but Turkey was so incensed it withdrew its ambassador to Ottawa
    for a time.

    Thursday's monument unveiling is the last in a series of Canadian
    gestures intended to restore good relations with a nation of growing
    importance in an unstable region, and Turkey's Foreign Minister, Ahmet
    Davutoglu, has made his first trip to Canada for the occasion.

    Canada's Armenian community, however, fears the reconciliation is
    coming at its expense and that the unveiling of this monument will
    reopen old wounds.

    It was Aug. 27, 1982, and Colonel Atilla Altikat, military attaché at
    the Turkish embassy, was on his way to work. He stopped for a red
    light at Island Park Drive, near the Ottawa River, and another car
    stopped nearby.

    Witnesses said a lone gunman emerged from the second vehicle, went to
    the passenger side of Col. Altikat's car and fired some 10 shots from
    a 9mm handgun through the window, killing the diplomat. The gunman ran
    into the cover of some nearby bushes and the driver of his car sped
    away.

    It was one of three attacks on the Turkish embassy and its personnel
    between 1982 and 1985, and one of more than a dozen assassinations of
    Turkish diplomats in the decade 1977-86 carried out in capitals around
    the world.

    It was the only time a foreign diplomat had been killed on Canadian
    soil, and the killer never was found. And while an Armenian group,
    Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide, claimed responsibility, no
    one ever was charged.

    `The monument will help bring closure,' said Lale Eskicioglu, of the
    Council of Turkish Canadians. `This was a horrible attack - an
    innocent man killed in the streets of the city where we chose to raise
    our children.'

    `Our children now are in school together,' said, Ms. Eskicioglu,
    referring to children of Turkish and Armenian ancestry. `We want them
    to be friends.'

    It's not that easy, says Aram Adjemian, an Armenian community leader
    and adviser to Liberal Senator Serge Joyal.

    `In my opinion, the erection of the monument is simply a new tactic
    aimed at legitimizing the Turkish government's denial of the genocide
    of Ottoman Armenians, rather than the stated goal of honouring all
    fallen diplomats,' he said.

    He points to the secretive nature by which the monument was
    constructed as evidence of an ulterior motive.

    No public announcement was made and the monument's components,
    sculpted in Turkey, were flown to Canada in some 40 crates and
    assembled without publicity. All this was done, according to the
    Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, to avoid stirring up the Armenian Canadian
    community.

    `Such secretive manipulations of historical events, clearly done for
    highly partisan and purely political purposes, are highly unhelpful,
    if not downright harmful, to the process of dialogue between us,' said
    Mr. Adjemian.

    `The wording on the plaque is crucial,' said an equally apprehensive
    Roupen Kouyoumdjian, Executive Director of the Armenian National
    Committee of Canada. `We have no objection to a monument that
    denounces terrorism in all its forms - Armenians have been victims of
    terrorism too, state terrorism.'

    `But the wording must not be selective, singling out one incident,' he
    said, clearly concerned that it will point a finger at the Armenian
    community that has long argued for international recognition that what
    befell its ancestors at the beginning of the last century constituted
    genocide.

    Ms. Eskicioglu, who organized the annual memorials for Col. Altikat
    for the past several years, admitted she was greatly troubled when the
    Canadian government two years ago gave official recognition to the
    Armenian genocide.

    `I think it should have been left to the historians to sort out,' she
    said, `not the politicians.'

    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/unveiling-of-monument-intended-to-restore-canadas-relations-with-turkey/article4555832/



    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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