Cyprus-Forum.com

[bill cobbett]

Has Egemen Bagis has gone way beyond decency if these reports of his making light of what is called the Assyrian Genocide, sometimes also called the Unknown Genocide or Chaldean or Syriac Genocide or Seyfo, are true...???

Some background...

The Assyrian Genocide took place towards the end of the Ottoman Empire bewteen 1890, through the First World War and up to 1925, more or less contemporary with the Armenian Genocide.

Here are some current accounts of the time...

The Los Angeles Times... " carried the story of a Syrian, or most likely an Assyrian, merchant from Urmia who stated that his city was ‘‘completely wiped out, the inhabitants massacred,’’ 200 surrounding villages ravaged, 200,000 of his people dead, and hundreds of thousands of more starving to death in exile from their agricultural lands. In an article entitled ‘‘Native Christians Massacred,’’ the Associated Press correspondent reported that in the vicinity of Urmia, ‘‘Turkish regular troops and Kurds are persecuting and massacring Assyrian Christians.’’ Close to 800 were confirmed dead in Urmia, and another 2,000 had perished from disease. Two hundred Assyrians had been burned to death inside a church, and the Russians had discovered more than 700 bodies of massacre victims in the village of Hafdewan outside Urmia, ‘‘mostly naked and mutilated,’’ some with gunshot wounds, others decapitated, and still others carved to pieces..."

The New York Times reported on 11 October... "that 12,000 Persian Christians had died of massacre, hunger, or disease; thousands of girls as young as seven had been raped or forcibly converted to Islam; Christian villages had been destroyed, and three-fourths of these Christian villages were burned to the ground.[25] The Times of London was perhaps the first widely respected publication to document the fact that 250,000 Assyrians and Chaldeans eventually died in the Ottoman genocide of Christians, a figure which many journalists and scholars have subsequently accepted"....

German Missionaries reported...
..."There was absolutely no human power to protect these unhappy people from the savage onslaught of the invading hostile forces. It was an awful situation. At midnight the terrible exodus began; a concourse of 25,000 men, women, and children, Assyrians and Armenians, leaving cattle in the stables, all their household hoods and all the supply of food for winter, hurried, panic-stricken, on a long and painful journey to the Russian border, enduring the intense privations of a foot journey in the snow and mud, without any kind of preparation... It was a dreadful sight,... many of the old people and children died along the way..."

and

..."The latest news is that four thousand Assyrians and one hundred Armenians have died of disease alone, at the mission, within the last five months. All villages in the surrounding district with two or three exceptions have been plundered and burnt; twenty thousand Christians have been slaughtered in Armenia and its environs. In Haftewan, a village of Salmas, 750 corpses without heads have been recovered from the wells and cisterns alone. Why? Because the commanding officer had put a price on every Christian head... In Dilman crowds of Christians were thrown into prison and driven to accept Islam..."

In just two Turkish provinces alone (Diyarbakır and Mardin) some 190,000 people either lost their lives, disappeared or were driven into refugee-ship elsewhere.

The Genocide Scholars Association recognises the Assyrian Genocide.

The State of Sweden along with a number of regional governments as far away as OZ also recognise the Assyrian Genocide.

What has this to do with Egemen Bagis...???

Well, there have been some leaks of comments allegedly made by Bagis at a meeting in Sweden a few weeks ago.

It's reported by the Assyrian TV Channel that during a meeting with Assyrians of the Diaspora in Sweden this past mid-January at the Turkish Embassy in Sweden, Bagis compared the Assyrian Genocide to masturbation, during a discussion with a Swedish parliament member at the event organised by Assyrians.

Asbarez.com also writes that Bagis, who was attending an event organized by several Assyrian organizations in the Swedish capital turned to Swedish MP Yilmaz Gerimo and said...

... “What are you Assyrians looking to gain by using the Seyfo question as masturbation and trumpeting it in the media and the Swedish Parliament?”

The reporter Dikran Ego, who was at the meeting, says that... Bagis himself broke the uncomfortable silence that followed by apologizing to the Turkish Ambassador to Sweden, Zergun Koruturk, saying that perhaps his remarks were inappropriate to say in the presence of a woman-the Swedish parliament member, Gerimo.

[Demonax]

Indeed. The sleazy Mr. Bagis has something of a reputation as a genocide denier:

This is not the first time that Bagis has insulted the victims of the many Genocides committed by Turks. The controversial official has repeatedly denied the Armenian genocide. Last year Swiss prosecutors investigated Bagis’s words and his diplomatic status to see if charges could be filed against him for genocide denial. Switzerland has a law that penalizes genocide denial.

http://armenianow.com/genocide/44214/tu ... n_genocide

[bill cobbett]

Yes, thank you Demon for that... wanted to refer to the Denial of the Armenian Genocide as well... but the OP was getting a little lengthy.