Ankara started to execute threats? Armenian citizens being arrested in Turkey
15.10.2007 15:22 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Armenia’s representative in the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation, Karen Mirzoyan (residence in Istanbul), confirmed that Armenian citizens are being arrested in Turkey. “I have got information proving this fact. However, I am not competent for such kind of issues and cannot furnish a more precise information,” Karen Mirzoyan said, RFE/RL reports.

Irish Times newspaper reported that some 100 Armenians - illegal migrants - were detained in Turkey for further deportation to the homeland. “Their deportation is viewed as revenge to adoption of the Armenian Genocide resolution by the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee,” the newspaper said.

Meanwhile, Karen Mirzoyan said that Armenians who illegally resided in Turkey were detained “with a purpose of deportation over violation of visa regime.”

H.Res.106 to be brought to House floor before November 16
15.10.2007 13:48 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The U.S. House of Representatives Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer said he expects the House to pass the Armenian Genocide Resolution, H.Res.106 before Nov. 16, when Congress is slated to recess for the year.

Hoyer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, appearing today on separate news shows, said the threat of Turkish reprisals would not stop the vote. “I said if it passed the Committee that we would bring it to the floor,” Pelosi said on ABC’s This Week program.

Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, said on Fox News Sunday that he raised the issue repeatedly with Turkish leaders during his 26 years in Congress and “never once” did they say “this is the right time.”

He said that he and Pelosi met with the Turkish ambassador to remind him that the two countries are allies.

Pelosi, a California Democrat, said she has had no appeal from President George W. Bush to block the vote. “We’ve never had a conversation about it,” she said. “I’ve heard from the Secretary of State and others in the administration, but I’ve never heard from the President.”

“This resolution is one that is consistent with what our government has always said about what has happened - what happened at that time,” Pelosi said. “It is non-binding. It is a statement made by 23 other countries. We would be the 24th,” she said, Bloomberg news agency reports.

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Turkish Armenians concerned about consequences of H.Res.106 passage
15.10.2007 13:39 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ On 14 October, Mesrob Mutafyan, Patriarch of Turkish Armenians, voiced opposition to the Armenian Genocide Resolution which was approved by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Patriarch Mutafyan visited the Santa Clause Church in Demre town of the southern city of Antalya. He told reporters that the resolution became “a tool of domestic policy in the United States”, and called on people to exclude Turkish citizens of Armenian origin from discussions over the issue.

He promised to do everything in his power to prevent passage of the resolution by the full House.

Recalling that Prime Minister Erdogan earlier proposed Armenia to set up a joint commission of historians to deal with the issue, Mutafyan added that it was “a significant offer”, Anatolia News Agency reports.

Rice and Gates called on Pelosi not to put H.Res.106 on vote
13.10.2007 15:01 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a request to refrain from allowing the Armenian Genocide resolution to reach the House floor for a vote.

“This House resolution could harm American troops in the field, constrain our ability to supply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and significantly damage our efforts to promote reconciliation between Armenia and Turkey at a key turning point in their relations,” said Rice and Gates in the letter, Yerkir reports.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is searching for alternative ways for supplying its troops in Iraq if Turkey restricts U.S. use of Incirlic base. U.S. military can be deployed in Jordan and Kuwait.

As to the harm the resolution can do to the Armenia-Turkey relations, RA President Robert Kocharian said in Brussels, “it’s impossible to damage relations which do not exist.”

This is a blog to register Erkan Saka’s fieldwork days for his dissertation thesis project on Turkish journalism and the European Union (EU). He is a Ph.D candidate at the Anthropology Department of Rice University and an instructor at the Public Relations Department of Istanbul Bilgi University.

http://erkansaka.net/blog/archive/topics/armenian_issue/

Portion 1, THE DEBATE:

http://www.hairenik.com/HairenikTV/HA_TV_Clip117.htm

Portion 2, VOTING - First Half:

http://www.hairenik.com/HairenikTV/HA_TV_Clip118.htm

Portion 3, VOTING - Second Half, including COUNTING OF VOTES:

http://www.hairenik.com/HairenikTV/HA_TV_Clip119.htm

Additional clips on the US media’s reaction to this vote will soon be uploaded on the Hairenik Web TV.

Trial unnerves Turkey’s Armenians

A court in Istanbul has found two Turkish-Armenian journalists guilty of “insulting Turkishness” for reprinting an interview that referred to the mass killing of Ottoman Armenians by Turks in 1915 as genocide.

The ruling came one day after the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US Congress approved a resolution that recognises the killings as genocide, infuriating Ankara, which denies any such thing.

“I think this is the retaliation of the judiciary to that decision of Congress,” says Ozlem Dalkiran, who followed the trial for the Helsinki Citizens Assembly, a European human rights group.

“It’s a judicial scandal,” she says.

[…]

A nationalist backlash against the US Congress resolution on genocide is likely to stall things even longer.

That debate in America has also affected Turkey’s ethnic Armenian community.

Many people were frightened into silence by the murder of Hrant Dink. Now they are even more withdrawn.

“If this bill passes it will have an impact on us. But we are already facing problems,” says one ethnic Armenian.

“Someone threw a sound bomb into a schoolyard recently. People in all neighbourhoods here are now courageous enough to do such things.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7040976.stm