Zaruhi Postanjyan: “We condemn!”
Zaruhi Postanjyan, a member of the Armenian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has addressed a letter to PACE members and ambassadors of the Committee of the Ministers of the Council of Europe.
"The Genocide and the Great Dispossession perpetrated between 1894 and 1923 by the Turkish governments (Ottoman, Young Turk and Kemalist) against the Armenian people are substantiated by irrefutable witness accounts which are being kept in the official archives of France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Great Britain, Russia, US, Canada and other countries of the world.
Turkey is the present legal successor of the country which has perpetrated these crimes. Even though it has been presiding the Committee of the Ministers of the Council of Europe for the last six months or so and has a representative who presides the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and talks in the name of that organization about high values, human rights and democracy, Turkey continues to deny the crime perpetrated against the Armenian people and against humanity and continues its policy of cultural genocide and discrimination against its non-Turkic people, in order to submit them to assimilation, etc.
Using the chair of the Council of Europe, Turkish officials such as Ahmet Davutoğlu, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Abdullah Gül encourage and promote impunity and discrimination, turn into derision and offend on the ground of their nationality delegates who ask them unwelcomed questions, such behavior being orchestrated by Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu himself, under vehement Turkish applauses. Taking advantage of his official position, to avoid the unwelcomed questions which might be addresses to the Prime Minister of his country, the latter had even granted himself the right to disrupt the actual talking order of the delegates who had taken turns, wishing to speak.
Therefore, the values expressed in the addresses of the President, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister of Turkey to the Council of Europe are contradicted by their very own true behavior. Obviously, these personalities, show discrimination, promote intolerance, do not bear values common to all humans, and are against respecting the dignity of their fellow man.
The words and the deeds of Turkish officials are most certainly fundamentally contradictory. For example, Turkish leaders talk about:
-Turkish-Armenian reconciliation, but they give the order to dismantle the Armenian-Turkish friendship monument erected in Kars,
-they talk about peace, but, for approximately 20 years now, the Turkish-Armenian border remains closed, a state which according to international law is equivalent to a war declaration against the neighboring country,
-they talk about respecting the rights of every religious and ethnic group, but they do not sign and ratify the European framework convention for the protection of national minorities and the European charter for regional or minority languages,
-they talk about the right to free speech but they keep article 301 of their criminal code using it against free speech,
-they talk about free elections, but they keep unchanged the 10% threshold of votes for political parties to get into Parliament,
-they pledge not to hamper the activity of journalists when 57 journalists are imprisoned in Turkish jails, http://www.osce.org/fom/76374,
-they talk about religious and faith freedom, but they do not grant a legal status to the Armenian Apostolic and Greek Orthodox churches and do not return the churches and the surrounding properties which rightfully belong to the latters,
-they talk about tolerance while their Prime Minister threatens to expulse Armenians from Turkey,
-they pledge to respect the judicial system, but they do not conduct appropriate investigation on Hrant Dink's assassination case, etc.
By underlining once more on the eve of the 96th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide and of the Great Dispossession the denial policy and the double-faced behavior of the leaders of Turkey and of the Turkish officials acting in and addressing International Organizations, I signal again the alarm that present-day Turkey is not ready for a global and direct confrontation with the black pages of its History."
