Ali Asker
2008-11-15 03:19:16 UTC
Joint Declaration: Enough with this Turkey!
On the occasion of the Dersim Conference held at European
Parliament on November 13, 2008, five Brussels organisations belonging
to different communities coming out from Turkey issued the following
joint declaration:
For three millennium, Anatolia has been the homeland or have
passed through it countless people. It is a land where coexisted and
coexist today Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Jews,
Zazas, as well as a number of other minorities such as Lazes,
Circassians, Pomaks, Yörüks, and others. Certain of these people and
the majority have adopted the Apostolic Christianity, others have
converted to Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy, some became Nestorians or
Chaldeans; while others turned Sunni Muslims, Shiites or Alevi
Muslims; and still others remained Yezidis or Mazdeists or kept their
shamanic beliefs.
This coexistence naturally led to disputes - sometime very violent
- but it led also and above all to a cultural closeness and to an
ethnic intermingling which challenge all ideologies that are based on
racial or linguistic purity: today, the overwhelming majority of
Turkey's inhabitants are of mixed origins.
However, the Ottoman Empire and then after it the Kemalist
republic have artificially reshaped the land's multy-ethnic identity
by reducing the dominated people into slavery, by denying their
identity, and then by promoting the doctrine of the Turkish "race" as
the "essential being". This fascist like thinking has led the
authorities perpetrate abominable mass murders such as:
* The Armenian and Assyro-Chaldean Genocide (1915-1916)
* The Koçkiri massacre of Kurds, Alevis and Kizilbachs
(1919-1921)
* The brutal expulsion of Greeks (1923-1924)
* Massacres of Kurds and Assyrians after the revolt of Sheikh
Said (1925-1928)
* The Dersim Massacre of Kurds, Alevis and Kizilbachs
(1935-1938)
* The iniquitous laws and the deportations of Armenians, Jews
and Greeks (1942)
* Pogroms of lstanbul and Izmir against Greeks, Armenians and
Jews (1955)
* War against Kurds (since 1984)
It has to be recalled, that since its creation, the Kemalist
republic targets and represses all political opponents to the regime,
whatever their ethnic origin, including Turkish democrats.
Lastly, the ultranationalist and genocide denial policies of
Ankara utilise the Turkish immigrants in the European countries and
with the complicity of certain local European political leaders incite
them to hatred towards the Armenian, Assyrian and Kurdish communities.
Facing this ideology to hate and its bloody consequences, the
peoples of Anatolia:
* Rebuke the idea of any racial of religious supremacy and
reaffirm their indefectible attachment to the individual fundamental
rights of all the Turkish citizens as well as to the collective rights
of the people living in this State;
* Reject the fiction of a monolithic Turkey as extolled by the
Turkish State and, on the contrary, call upon the State to pride on
the ethnic wealth and diversity of the Anatolian people;
* Ask again the Turkish State to rehabilitate itself in
rehabilitating the victims of its past exactions, in committing itself
on the path of the political recognition of these exactions and in
giving an end to their denial or glorification;
* Proclaim their conviction that the incapacity of Turkey to
progress on the path of democracy, as well as the state of economical
and social backwardness of its eastern provinces are closely linked to
the war conducted by this State towards its own citizens;
* Reaffirm their commitment to keep on the political struggle
so that Turkey recognize, denounce and disassociate from its past and
present crimes; to transform it into a democratic State which would
respect its minorities as its various political forces, united in
their diversity.
Association of the Democrat Armenians of Belgium
Associations of the Assyrians of Belgium
Kurdish Institute of Brussels
European Armenian Federation
Info-Turk Foundation
http://www.info-turk.be
On the occasion of the Dersim Conference held at European
Parliament on November 13, 2008, five Brussels organisations belonging
to different communities coming out from Turkey issued the following
joint declaration:
For three millennium, Anatolia has been the homeland or have
passed through it countless people. It is a land where coexisted and
coexist today Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Jews,
Zazas, as well as a number of other minorities such as Lazes,
Circassians, Pomaks, Yörüks, and others. Certain of these people and
the majority have adopted the Apostolic Christianity, others have
converted to Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy, some became Nestorians or
Chaldeans; while others turned Sunni Muslims, Shiites or Alevi
Muslims; and still others remained Yezidis or Mazdeists or kept their
shamanic beliefs.
This coexistence naturally led to disputes - sometime very violent
- but it led also and above all to a cultural closeness and to an
ethnic intermingling which challenge all ideologies that are based on
racial or linguistic purity: today, the overwhelming majority of
Turkey's inhabitants are of mixed origins.
However, the Ottoman Empire and then after it the Kemalist
republic have artificially reshaped the land's multy-ethnic identity
by reducing the dominated people into slavery, by denying their
identity, and then by promoting the doctrine of the Turkish "race" as
the "essential being". This fascist like thinking has led the
authorities perpetrate abominable mass murders such as:
* The Armenian and Assyro-Chaldean Genocide (1915-1916)
* The Koçkiri massacre of Kurds, Alevis and Kizilbachs
(1919-1921)
* The brutal expulsion of Greeks (1923-1924)
* Massacres of Kurds and Assyrians after the revolt of Sheikh
Said (1925-1928)
* The Dersim Massacre of Kurds, Alevis and Kizilbachs
(1935-1938)
* The iniquitous laws and the deportations of Armenians, Jews
and Greeks (1942)
* Pogroms of lstanbul and Izmir against Greeks, Armenians and
Jews (1955)
* War against Kurds (since 1984)
It has to be recalled, that since its creation, the Kemalist
republic targets and represses all political opponents to the regime,
whatever their ethnic origin, including Turkish democrats.
Lastly, the ultranationalist and genocide denial policies of
Ankara utilise the Turkish immigrants in the European countries and
with the complicity of certain local European political leaders incite
them to hatred towards the Armenian, Assyrian and Kurdish communities.
Facing this ideology to hate and its bloody consequences, the
peoples of Anatolia:
* Rebuke the idea of any racial of religious supremacy and
reaffirm their indefectible attachment to the individual fundamental
rights of all the Turkish citizens as well as to the collective rights
of the people living in this State;
* Reject the fiction of a monolithic Turkey as extolled by the
Turkish State and, on the contrary, call upon the State to pride on
the ethnic wealth and diversity of the Anatolian people;
* Ask again the Turkish State to rehabilitate itself in
rehabilitating the victims of its past exactions, in committing itself
on the path of the political recognition of these exactions and in
giving an end to their denial or glorification;
* Proclaim their conviction that the incapacity of Turkey to
progress on the path of democracy, as well as the state of economical
and social backwardness of its eastern provinces are closely linked to
the war conducted by this State towards its own citizens;
* Reaffirm their commitment to keep on the political struggle
so that Turkey recognize, denounce and disassociate from its past and
present crimes; to transform it into a democratic State which would
respect its minorities as its various political forces, united in
their diversity.
Association of the Democrat Armenians of Belgium
Associations of the Assyrians of Belgium
Kurdish Institute of Brussels
European Armenian Federation
Info-Turk Foundation
http://www.info-turk.be