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INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS

Dear Prime Minister Erdogan:

We are writing you this open letter in response to your call for an

`impartial study by historians' concerning the fate of the Armenian

people in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

We represent the major body of scholars who study genocide in North

America and Europe. We are concerned that in calling for an impartial

study of the Armenian Genocide you may not be fully aware of the

extent of the scholarly and intellectual record on the Armenian

Genocide and how this event conforms to the definition of the United

Nations Genocide Convention. We want to underscore that it is not

just Armenians who are affirming the Armenian Genocide but it is the

overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide: hundreds of

independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and

whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of

decades. The scholarly evidence reveals the following:

On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk

government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its

Armenian citizens - an unarmed Christian minority population. Morethan

a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing,

starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the

Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient

civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years.

The Armenian Genocide was the most well-known human rights issue of

its time and was reported regularly in newspapers across the United

States and Europe. The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented by

thousands of official records of the United States and nations around

the world including Turkey's wartime allies Germany, Austria and

Hungary, by Ottoman court-martial records, by eyewitness accounts of

missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by

decades of historical scholarship.

The Armenian Genocide is corroborated by the international scholarly,

legal, and human rights community:

1) Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term

genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and

the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he

meant by genocide.

2) The killings of the Armenians is genocide as defined by the 1948

United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the

Crime of Genocide.

3) In 1997 the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an

organization of the world's foremost experts on genocide, unanimously

passed a formal resolution affirming the Armenian Genocide.

4) 126 leading scholars of the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel and

Yehuda Bauer placed a statement in the New York Times in June 2000

declaring the `incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide' and urging

western democracies to acknowledge it.

5) The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Jerusalem), and the

Institute for the Study of Genocide (NYC) have affirmed the historical

fact of the Armenian Genocide. 6). Leading texts in the international

law of genocide such as William A. Schabas's Genocide in

International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2000) cite the Armenian

Genocide as a precursor to the Holocaust and as a precedent for the

law on crimes against humanity.

We note that there may be differing interpretations of genocide-how

and why the Armenian Genocide happened, but to deny its factual and

moral reality as genocide is not to engage in scholarship but in

propaganda and efforts to absolve the perpetrator, blame the victims,

and erase the ethical meaning of this history.

We would also note that scholars who advise your government and who

are affiliated in other ways with your state-controlled institutions

are not impartial. Such so-called `scholars'work to serve the agenda

of historical and moral obfuscation when they advise you and the

Turkish Parliament on how to deny the Armenian Genocide. In preventing

a conference on the Armenian Genocide from taking place at Bogacizi

University in Istanbul on May 25, your government revealed its

aversion to academic and intellectual freedom-a fundamental condition

of democratic society.

We believe that it is clearly in the interest of the Turkish people

and their future as a proud and equal participants in international,

democratic discourse to acknowledge the responsibility of a previous

government for the genocide of the Armenian people, just as the German

government and people have done in the case of the Holocaust.

Approved Unanimously at the Sixth biennial meeting of

THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS (IAGS)

June 7, 2005, Boca Raton, Florida

Contacts: Israel Charny, IAGS President; Executive Director, Institute

on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem, Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia

of Genocide, 972-2-672-0424; encygeno@mail.com

Gregory H. Stanton, IAGS Vice President; President, Genocide Watch,

James Farmer Visiting Professor of Human Rights, University of Mary

Washington; 703-448-0222; genocidewatch@aol.com