Armenian diaspora to hold congress in Sevres

Friday, July 22, 2011

VERCİHAN ZİFLİOĞLU

ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News

Leading diaspora Armenians will meet in the historical French city of Sevres in December for the Congress of Western Armenians to draft a series of demands from Turkey in relation to the events of 1915.

“Western Armenians have demands from Turkey. A people and a country were annihilated at the beginning of the 20th century,” Jean-Varoujan Gureghian, a French citizen of Armenian descent and a member of the congress, recently told the Hürriyet Daily News by e-mail.

Some 200 prominent individuals from the Armenian diaspora are expected to attend the congress, which was first held 90 years ago.

Armenians from all corners of the world will be attending the congress, Gureghian said, adding that their demands were going to be presented through lawyers first to Turkey, as well as to the rest of the world, in accordance with international law.

“The commemoration of the 100th anniversary of ‘Mezs Yeghern’ [the name Armenians give to the mass killing of their Ottoman kinsmen in 1915] will undoubtedly be as ostentatious as the commemoration of its 50th anniversary held in 1965,” Gureghian said.

The 100th anniversary of Mezs Yeghern in 2015 will also be on the congress’s agenda, he added.

The city of Sevres is best known in Turkey for the treaty that bears its name. The Sevres Treaty, which would have left Turkey mainly as a rump state, was signed between the ailing Ottoman government and the Allied powers shortly after World War I in 1920 but never went into effect. Instead, it was later replaced in 1923 by the much more generous Treaty of Lausanne, which roughly determined Turkey’s present-day borders.

“Turkish and Armenian peoples lived in peace during the Ottoman era until the time of the genocide. In fact, many Turks saved thousands of people by putting their own lives on the line during the bitter events. [Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant] Dink was like a symbol of that friendship. The enemies of friendship killed him,” Gureghian said.

Dink, the chief editor of the weekly Agos, a newspaper in both Armenian and Turkish, had been working to re-establish ties between Turks and Armenians until he was shot in the back and killed on Jan. 19, 2007. His assassination provoked widespread sympathy in the country and brought together people from different backgrounds to demand that all those involved in the murder be brought to justice.

Differentiating the diaspora issue and Turkish-Armenian rapprochement, Gureghian said: “Armenia is an independent republic. As such, it must consider the future of its own people and establish good relations with its neighbors, including Turkey.”