Canadian Turks launched a petition last month seeking the removal of all references to the Armenian Genocide from the 11th grade curriculum of Toronto high schools.
This petition is a part of Turkish denialists’ long-standing efforts to reverse the Toronto District School Board’s (TDSB) 2008 decision to educate students about the Armenian, Jewish, and Rwandan Genocides.
TDSB’s action followed the recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the Canadian Senate in 2002 and the House of Commons in 2004. In addition, since 2006, successive Canadian prime ministers have issued official annual statements acknowledging the genocide, despite intensive political pressure and economic blackmail by the Turkish government.
Back in 2008, a similar Turkish petition failed to sway TDSB to amend the genocide curriculum, after gathering more than 11,000 signatures, mostly from Turkey. Indeed, the Ankara government and its Turkish proxies in Toronto have done everything possible over the past seven years to undermine this curriculum.
Below are the baseless claims made by the Turkish petition against TDSB’s genocide curriculum, each followed by my rebuttal:
— Turkish petition: “As the Turkish/Turkic speaking parents of students attending the Toronto District School Board, we are deeply concerned about the negative impact of the current curriculum module on ‘Armenian Genocide’ and the learning resources adopted by the Board since 2008.”
My response: There has been NO violence or intimidation against a single Turkish student in Toronto schools even though the genocide curriculum has been taught there for several years. The reason is that Armenians do not hold today’s Turks responsible for the crimes committed by the government of Ottoman Turkey almost 100 years ago, except those who associate themselves with these crimes by their denial. The Republic of Turkey, on the other hand, as successor to the Ottoman Empire, is responsible for the continuing consequences of the Armenian Genocide. Denying the facts of the genocide has a far more serious negative psychological impact on Armenians than its inclusion in the curriculum on Turks. Furthermore, the truth cannot be concealed in order not to offend the sensibilities of those who wish to cover up historical facts. Would anyone advocate erasing all references to the Jewish Holocaust from history books not offend present-day Germans?
— Turkish petition: “The textbook on the genocide of the Armenians and other readers, such as Barbara Coloroso’s Extraordinary Evil, unremittingly discredits one community’s narrative over the other; and, adversely affects the students of TDSB with Turkish and Turkic heritages.”
My response: There cannot be two narratives or two versions of the proven facts of the Armenian Genocide. There can only be one version—the truth!
— Turkish petition: “We firmly believe that the values of mutual respect, understanding, and peaceful coexistence can be achieved through an honest and open dialogue on history. Moreover, fair and unprejudiced learning should be based on historical facts and not solely on the narratives of select communities while ignoring others. It should also be noted that there are no court decisions on any of these historical claims and the opinions of historians differ regarding the details and the definitions of these events.”
My response: “Mutual respect, understanding, and peaceful coexistence” cannot be achieved through distortions and lies. Only after acknowledging the truth and making appropriate amends can Canadian Turks talk about such lofty ideals. Furthermore, contrary to the Turkish claims, there are several court verdicts on the Armenian Genocide, starting with the Turkish Military Tribunals of 1919, and judgments by Argentinean, Swiss, and U.S. courts. Significantly, the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities adopted in 1985 a report acknowledging the Armenian Genocide. The ultimate arbiter of any genocide is the United Nations, since the Genocide Convention is a UN document.
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To sum up, this latest Turkish petition is a total failure since its initiator, the Federation of Canadian Turkish Associations, has so far collected less than 2,000 signatures out of a claimed membership of 200,000 in Canada. Interestingly, most of the signatories are not from Canada, but Turkey, where the petition has been widely circulated.
A more worthwhile initiative for Canadian Turks would be to start a petition urging the Turkish government to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide and make proper restitution to the descendants of this heinous crime on the occasion of the genocide’s centennial in 2015.
Harut Sassounian
Keep up the good work!
IT WILL ALSO BE GREAT THAT CANADIAN TURK STUDENTS BE ENCOURAGED TO STUDY AND LEARN THE TRUTH THAT THEIR ANCESTORS COMMITTED GENOCIDE, I AM ALMOST POSITIVE THAT SOME OF THESE TURKS HAVE ARMENIAN BLOOD IN THEM, WHICH THEY ARE NOT AWARE OF.
I am a US citizen, born and raised, and coming from Turkish origins. I understand that in the Armenian community, no one wants to acknowledge Turkish and Kurdish suffering in the hands of Armenian rebels. But this needs to be acknowledged. I understand you guys think people who subscribe to the “Shared Suffering” thesis of 1915-1923 do not want to give up any inches of soil or pay any compensation to Armenian deaths. I am one of those people who support that thesis and if I were to run for PM, I think it would be best for normalizing Turkey-Armenia ties to ratify the Kars Treaty, or something a little larger then that. I think by making territorial concessions such as the one I mentioned, this will help us to normalize ties. I support territorial and economic concessions as a US Citizen of Turkish background and even many Turkish scholars like Pamuk and Akcam and Hasan Cemal and many other scholars who have straightforward views of “Genocide” are not willing to make any territorial concessions.
We have to look at things at a fair manner, considering that there are many civil society movements emerging in Yerevan and Ankara. Look at the political struggle in Armenia to stop the corrupt economic system in Armenia which leads from people in Yerevan to moving out (I am talking about the Oligarchy system). Or, observe the Gezi Park movement, which is a movement where common citizens of Turkey (including even the Armenian community inside Turkey) joined to stop the AKP dark agenda (which includes arming terrorist squads which hijacked the Syrian protest movement, persecution of religious minorities, unrealistic vision of Turkey-EU relations, economic growth via selling all a nations whole assets, and so forth).
We can use all our civil society movements to hopefully build honest Turkish-Armenian ties by 2015, and have a fair interpretation of history, which requires fairness on both sides.
Gezi,
How is hundreds of years of Ottoman oppression of the Armenian nation, meaning occupying Armenian lands through rape, murder and force, equal suffering? Please tell me?
We will never be friend. Turks have no friends, History says so.
John@
I am not saying we have to be friends or whatever or Turkey has to be seek friends. You don’t get my point. I am just analysing events in a fair and benefical manner for both sides. If you want to dwell on the past and be hate filled, fine be my guest, there’s too much hate in this world and negativity.
The Armenian Genocide recognition and the Armenian territorial claims go hand-in-hand together and they can never be separated. Those who try to separate the two are the enemies of the Armenian nation no matter how conciliatory their rhetoric. The Armenian Genocide was the final phase and the final solution to the Armenian Question by the genocidal pan-Turkic and pan-Turanic fascist Turkish leaders. The Armenian Question was about the fate and the future of the Armenians and their provinces under Turkish occupation and the Armenian Genocide, preplanned and perpetrated by the Turkish government, was the answer to the Armenian Question. In other words, to get rid of the Armenian Question once and for all was to get rid of the Armenians themselves. Those who talk about the so-called “shared suffering” or “shared memory”, as coined by the Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, are wolves in sheep’s clothing.
There is a pattern here. For the first half a century of the establishment of the illegal and fascist state of Turkey in 1923, an institutionalized program of erasing all memory and evidence of the Armenian Genocide from the Turkish public was put in place by the secular Kemalist Republican Party through disconnecting modern Turkey from the old. Through methods such as reinventing the Turkish alphabet, thus making all material resource and communications surrounding the Armenian Genocide unintelligible by the modern and new Turkish generations. Also, through rewriting and falsifying Turkish history by either leaving out any mention of the Armenian existence in Western Armenia or speaking of them in derogatory terms in Turkish schools. Not to mention the staged massacres of thousands of “hidden” Armenians in the 1930s, as well as doing “cleanup operations” of the remaining Armenians by confiscating their properties through bogus discriminatory and racist laws and silencing all Armenian witnesses through threats.
In the 1970s and 1980s, according to the Turkish government and under the protection of the Cold War, there was no such thing as the Armenian Genocide. The Turkish ambassadors were the Turkish government agents abroad spreading lies and disrespecting the memories of 1,500,000 murdered Armenians. In the 1990s, the atrocities committed against the Armenians were the result of a “Civil War” and famine and many other fabricated scenarios. Since the beginning of early 2000, with AKP government in power, all of a sudden all the previous Turkish claims turned out to be lies, thus the introduction of cunning phrases such as “shared memory” by the Turkish FM Davutoglu. Of course, all this Turkish “softening” could never have happened without the decades of mainly Diasporan Armenian dedication to expose the Turkish lies and to tenaciously pursue the Armenian Genocide recognition in the world at large. Additionally, once a topic that was not only taboo in Turkey but punishable with imprisonment, is now a subject of open discussion and dissent from the decades-old fable planted into Turkish minds by their successive criminal governments. In this regard, a lot of credit goes to the late Hrant Dink who was murdered for reopening and exposing the truth of the Armenian atrocities, as well as the works of several Turkish intellectuals who were harassed and faced imprisonments, their offices were bombed and burnt, or became self-exiled abroad.
Having failed, through history falsification and indoctrination of the unsuspecting Turkish public and through bribe and blackmail of foreign leaders, to sweep under the rug the mass extermination and the eventual confiscation of the Armenian homeland in Western Armenia as a result, and to treat as a mere event in the Turkish past the physical elimination of the 10% of the 30 million Armenians of the Ottoman population, the Turkish leaders have finally come to the realization that this issue is not going to ever go away and they have no choice but to deal with it. It takes very little common sense, given the Turkish track record and the dead-end they are facing today, to realize that all this “shared suffering” mumbo-jumbo nonsense is nothing other than a ploy and planned scheme to try to evade, minimize and to even escape the consequences of the genocide the Turks committed on the indigenous Armenians in order to carve out and create a Turkey on the Armenian homeland but for the Turks only.
It is easy and rather convenient for the two-faced Turks to talk about the Armenian Genocide as “shared suffering” and separate it from territorial claims because, after all, there are no Armenians living on those territories anymore and that is simply because those territories were depopulated of the Armenians through mass murder only less than a hundred years ago. To the Armenians, the genocide acknowledgement and territorial claims are inseparable because one could not have happened without the other.
Your articles are always well articulated and bring up very sharp points. Bravo!
re Gezi-ist’s comment // January 8, 2014 at 8:39 pm //
interesting and thank you, this would be more worthwhile to be promoted in Turkey to start greater exposure for the matter…