The accusation against the Council followed its decision to grant police the power to arrest Anzac Day protesters.

The issue came to light on Anzac Day last year.

Richard Noble arrived at a service at Wellington's Pukeahu War Memorial Park holding a "recognise Armenian Genocide" banner. The war memorial is owned by the central government and no action was taken against him.

It was a different matter later that day when he took his banner to the Ataturk Turkish memorial. The memorial is situated on Council land above Wellington's south coast.

A police officer warned Noble he would be arrested if he displayed his banner there.

Between 664,000 and 1.2 million Armenian people were killed by the Ottoman - now Turkish - government between 1915 and 1916.

Their killing is recognised as genocide by 32 countries including the United States, Canada, France, Germany and Russia. New Zealand does not officially recognise it as genocide.

Police authority

Police had been granted the authority arrest by Council chief executive Barbara McKerrow.

She wrote to the police just before Anzac Day 2021, giving them long-term permission to trespass people from council land at the Cenotaph and Ataturk Memorial Park on Anzac days.

She stressed police must not breach the Human Rights Act and act reasonably.

Genocide

Genocide is defined by the United Nations as defined acts, including killing, "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group".

Last Thursday, Noble told the Council's Social, Cultural and Economic Committee that the permission to arrest protesters made the council "complicit in genocide denial.

"It is your authorisation, it is on your watch," he said.

Just hours later, an emailed statement from the council said it was liaising with the police about whether "any trespass delegation is appropriate and required".

The council says it supports people's rights to public protest as defined under the Bill of Rights.

All councillors were asked if the police authorisation should be altered.

"I strongly oppose this delegation given by council to police," Cr Iona Pannett says. "The right to peaceful protest against gross human rights is sacrosanct in our society and so should be rescinded."

Cr Ray Chung agrees: "I'm a very strong believer in the freedom of speech and as long as no damage is done and they're not inciting violence ... I'm fine with him being allowed to continue his protest without impediment."

Tim Brown, a paid member of the Free Speech Union, quoted: "I [may] disapprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it."

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade says it's important "historical injustices" like the Ottoman treatment of Armenian people were "acknowledged appropriately".

It supported "reconciliation" between Turkey and Armenia.

"For determining whether a particular situation constitutes genocide, Aotearoa New Zealand places great emphasis on the findings of international courts and tribunals."

Source

• Stuff

The passionate reaction is because The Promise, a $100-million movie starring Oscar Isaac and Christian Bale, has provoked those who deny that 1.5 million Armenians were massacred between 1915 and 1923 by the Ottoman Empire or that the deaths of Armenians were the result of a policy of genocide.

Thousands, many of them in Turkey, have flocked to IMDb to rate the film poorly.

Though many countries and most historians call the mass killings genocide, Turkey has aggressively refused that label.

Yet that wasn't the most audacious sabotage of The Promise, a passion project of the late billionaire investor and former MGM owner Kirk Kerkorian.

In March, just a few weeks before The Promise was to open, a curiously similar-looking film called The Ottoman Lieutenant appeared.

Another sweeping romance set during the same era and with a few stars of its own, including Ben Kingsley and Josh Hartnett, The Ottoman Lieutenant seemed designed to be confused with The Promise.

But it was made by Turkish producers and instead broadcast Turkey's version of the events — that the Armenians were merely collateral damage in World War I.

It was the Turkish knockoff version of The Promise, minus the genocide.

"It was like a reverse mirror image of us," said Terry George, director and co-writer of The Promise.

George, the Irish filmmaker, has some experience in navigating the sensitivities around genocide having previously written and directed 2004's Hotel Rwanda, about the early '90s Rwandan genocide. Continue reading

• Jake Coyle is a film writer and critic.

A century ago millions of men, women and children - including Assyrians and Greeks - were brutally tortured and exterminated upon the direct order and plan of the Ottoman Turkish government, thereby emptying the region of its indigenous populations and deliberately destroying millennia-old Christian heritage.

Armenians were martyred also because of their Christian faith and as recently as last year the Armenian Apostolic Church canonised all the victims of the genocide as saints.

It is tragic that the cycle of genocide continues to this day in various parts of the world. Part of the reason behind it is the impunity of the past crimes and the unwillingness of the international community to undertake meaningful measure to stop it.

Only by fully facing the tragedies of the past and dealing with them in a truthful and just manner can the humanity move forward.

These ideas are enshrined in the work of a 10th-century Armenian monk, St Gregory of Narek, whom Pope Francis proclaimed a Doctor of the Church for his invaluable contributions towards the Christian theology and community at-large.

St Gregory of Narek is best-known for his work the Book of Lamentations (also called Book of Prayers), which outlines profound ideas about the purification and sanctification of humanity.

The book is a monologue structured as a prayer to God "from the depths of the heart" in which St Gregory ascribes to himself all possible sins, exposing himself and confessing to God.

The saint suggests a way of human perfection through repenting to God.

This was a revolutionary idea aimed at dispelling the ignorance of the Middle Ages. Long before Martin Luther, St Gregory advocated direct communication with God. Centuries later this idea was to become the basis of Reformation. Continue reading

Sources

• Catholic Herald, from an article by Vahan Dilanyan, the Assistant to the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia.
• Image: Telegraph UK

Think of the mass deportations, starvation and extermination of perhaps 14 million people in Stalinist Russia and even more in Maoist China; the Holocaust of 6 million Jews under the Nazis, as well as gypsies, the handicapped and others; the massacres in Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica and Dafur.

Altogether tens of millions were killed or tortured in attempts to exterminate whole peoples and cultures.

But historians generally agree that first great genocide of the modern era - the model, in fact, for some subsequent ones - was "the great crime" of the Ottoman Empire, in which 1 to 1.5 million Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians were killed.

Where, we wonder, was God in all this?

Christians believe God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good - indeed, He is goodness itself - and so never directly intends or causes evil. Human beings, on the other hand, all too often choose evil: individually they commit sins, large or small, and in concert with others they sometimes commit grave atrocities.

Human beings, not God, are responsible for those misdeeds and the terrible effects on innocent victims.

Yet, still we wonder why God permits such things, even if He does not directly will them. One traditional answer (from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas) has been: that even when God allows evils to be perpetrated, He ensures some greater good can come from them.

That can be hard to see at the time - hard, even a century later. But eventually we see the divine hand bringing good out of evil and realize things might otherwise have been even worse. We witness the blood of martyrs seeding the Church and experience divine grace conquering hatred and cruelty with reconciliation and solidarity. As the Portuguese saying goes, God writes straight with crooked lines. Continue reading

Sources

• Archbishop Anthony Fisher, ABC Religion & Ethics
• Image: United Armenian Council

The fact that the church is even standing here — beautiful and steadfast in a place that was only recently the site of ruins — instills a sense of courage, says Armen.

And courage is something that is badly needed in these parts, especially in Diyarbakir.The city is located in southeastern Turkey, deep in the Anatolian mountain region. Diyarbakir is gray, loud and lackluster.

But it does have one special landmark — the stylishly restored St. Giragos Church, located in the Old Town, a labyrinth of crumbling homes and alleys that reverberate with children's shouts as they kick around a soccer ball.

It's a Christian-Armenian church, the first of its kind to be rebuilt and highly symbolic in a city like Diyarbakir.

The builders say that attempts were made to prevent the reconstruction, hinting that they may have been linked to some of the politicians involved in the project. Indeed, some felt provoked by the restoration of the church.

For others, the church is a symbol of a major political shift that has gripped Turkish society, a symbol of a willingness to confront its history.

The church also helps people to remember and reaffirm their true identity. People like Armen.

Armen Demirjan first trained to become a baker, then a truck driver, then a newspaper deliveryman and now as a parish clerk. In his early life, Armen had a different name: Abdulrahim Zarasaln.

But one day he found out that he is really Armenian and that the few members of his family who survived had been forced to convert to Islam. Armen then began a new life — one that consumed a lot of his energy. Continue reading

Source and Image

• Spiegel Online

These resulted in the deaths of up to 1,500,000 Armenians, perhaps 250,000 Assyrian Christians and 350,000 Pontian Greeks.

The Turkish government, a last relic of nineteenth-century nationalism, maintains its odious denial that genocide even occurred.

This is at odds with the mass of historical evidence, now reaching a torrent, confirming the planned extermination of a group of people that was carried out with such brutal success.

What is not well known is the role of doctors in the genocide - another ominous precedent for the Holocaust.

Our knowledge of this comes from the distinguished Armenian historian Vahakn Dadrian, who demonstrated that the genocide was largely directed and carried out by doctors, prominent members of the Ittihadist Party who came to power in a coup in 1908.

Medical personnel did not merely supervise proceedings; they were directly involved in the killings, often participating in torture.

The most prominent physicians were Dr Behaeddin Sakir and Dr Mehmett Nazim, who played pivotal roles in the establishment and deployment of the Special Organization units, extermination squads staffed by violent criminals released from prisons to undertake killings.

Sakir worked at one time as the chief physician of Soloniki Municipal Hospital and Nazim - described as "a doctor by profession and not without promise" - in what must be regarded as one of the most misguided appointments in the history of medicine, was the professor of Legal (Ethical) Medicine at Istanbul Medical School.

Utterly unrepentant to the end of his life, Nazim was thought to have been responsible for a million murders. Continue reading

• Robert M Kaplan in ABC Religion & Ethics

Robert M. Kaplan is a forensic psychiatrist and author.

I came to this conclusion after studying about 2,000 pages, entitled "persecuzioni contra gli Armeni", in both the Archives of the Apostolic Delegation in Constantinople and the Secretary of State in the Vatican Secret Archives for an upcoming book[1], many of them for the first time.[2]

There is no doubt that Eugenio Pacelli (who became Pius XII in 1939) was extremely well informed about this dark chapter of World War I.[3]

From 1914 he was Secretary of the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs of the Holy See's Secretariat of State. He became Undersecretary of State when Benedict XV named Cardinal Gasparri as Secretary of State.

In this position he had prime access to all information on the Armenian genocide and indeed we find his characteristic handwriting on several documents dealing with it.

Being responsible for several Papal relief initiatives during the War, he was well-informed about it. In several cases, the Apostolic Delegate in Constantinople, Msgr. Angelo Dolci, addressed Pacelli directly in his letters and reports to the Holy See.[4]

Later on, when Benedict XV appointed Pacelli as Nuncio to Bavaria, Pacelli was involved in a diplomatic intervention to prevent further massacres after the Russian retreat from northeastern Turkey following the Brest-Litovsk treaty.[5]

Indeed, all biographers of Pius XII agree that the wartime diplomacy of Pope Benedict XV served as a model for Pius XII's actions during World War II, when the "Pope of Peace"[6] served as his role model, especially in his stress on the Vatican's "impartiality".[7]

But what did Pius XII learn from his experience with the Armenian genocide? Continue reading

Sources

• MercatorNet
• Image: World War I in the Middle East

Now, in an annual event that grows in mythology and status in proportion to the passing of the years, is celebrated the shared combat ordeal of gallant "Johnny Turk" and the Bronzed Anzac.

And why not?

The Turkish forces, well prepared behind excellent defences, used their tactics to good effect, ably led by a professional officer who was to go on to bigger things, such as the fire destruction of Smyrna - namely, Kemal Ataturk.

But, pause for one moment to consider a slightly different scenario.

Let us suspend historical reality for the purposes of this exercise.

What if, say, instead of Gallipoli, the Anzac forces were going into combat with an SS Battalion somewhere in Poland during the Second World War?

Would we then, decades later, be joining up with our comrades in battle to celebrate what both sides had gone through, our enmities forgotten?

Can one commemorate the shared experiences with enemy forces who acted as the military arm of a state carrying out a terrible genocide at the same time?

For it was the night before the landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, then called Constantinople, when occurred the arrest, detention and subsequent liquidation of 625 intellectuals, priests and leading figures of the Armenian Empire.

This event is widely held to signal the onset of the first major genocide of the twentieth century, the most blood-drenched period in human history.

What followed was a mass murder of an entirely innocent group of citizens in the Ottoman Empire by means that are still horrifying to contemplate.

By the time Turkey sued for peace in 1918, up to 1.5 million Armenians had been slaughtered, decimating the population of a group of people who had lived in the Fertile Crescent since the dawn of human settlement. Continue reading

Sources

• ABC Religion & Ethics
• Image: The Guardian

The Pope alluded briefly to the Armenian genocide during a meeting with Armenian Catholic Patriarch Nerses Bedros XIX Tarmouni of Cilicia.

An estimated 1 to 1.5 million Armenians died between 1915 and 1918 in massacres, in concentration camps, and on forced marches. But the government of Turkey has steadfastly denied that a genocidal campaign took place.

In a formal protest to the Vatican, the Turkish government "expressed disappointment" over the Pope's remarks. It conveyed its displeasure to Vatican diplomatic representatives both in Ankara and in Rome.

The Pope's comment came when he met members of the delegation accompanying the Catholic patriarch and one of them said she was a descendant of Armenian genocide victims.

He responded: "The first genocide of the 20th century was that of the Armenians."

Several years earlier, while serving as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio described the killing and forced deportation of millions of Armenians as "the gravest crime of Ottoman Turkey against the Armenian people and all of humanity".

Commenting on the issue, the primate of the Armenian Apostolic Church's diocese of Gougark, Bishop Sebouh Chuljyan, said, "The Pope is speaking out a historical truth. Turkey needs to see the pains and should face the genocide."

The director of the Armenian National Committee of South America, Alfonso Tabakian, described the Pope's statement as "very important since his words transcend any state or religion".

Sources:

Hurriyet

Armenian Genocide (Wikipedia)

Image: Mahir Zeynalov