Turkish Court Rejects Lawsuit Against ‘Pro-Armenian’ Writer

A Turkish court on Friday dropped a lawsuit against novelist Orhan Pamuk, rejecting a compensation demand by nationalists from the author for claiming that Turkey had killed more than 1 million Armenians and more than 30,000 Kurds. Nationalist lawyer Kemal Kerincsiz and five other nationalists were seeking 6,000 Turkish Lira (US$4,500) each from Pamuk accusing him of "insulting, humiliating and making false accusations." Pamuk was quoted as telling a Swiss newspaper that "Thirty-thousand Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it."

The Genocide against the Armenians 1915-1923 and the relevance of the 1948 Genocide Convention

Report by Professor Alfred De Zayas, ex-secretary of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, Visiting Professor of Law, Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales, Genève. "The rivalries between European powers and Russia toward the end of the 19 th Century, the accession to the Ottoman throne of Sultan Abdul Hamid II and the resultant ethnic and religious fanaticism deliberately fuelled by the Sultan's policies led to the persecution of Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire, particularly the Armenians, who were subjected to various forms of discrimination and abuse, culminating in many massacres and eventually in the mass-scale slaughter in 1896 in which more than 150,000 Armenians were killed. This trend continued even after the Young Turks came to power in 1908, deposing the Sultan and promising an era of freedom and equality. The massacres of Adana and other towns of Cilicia in 1909, presumably beyond the control of the Young Turk government, claimed the lives of some 30,000 Armenians in the course of a few days (1) . But it was under the cover of the First World War that the genocide of the Armenian communities in Turkey was to take place, a complex of massacres and deportations that took the lives of some 1.5 million Armenians."