California District Court Finds Post—World War I Agreements with Turkey Trump California Armenian Genocide Statute

2008 ◽  
Vol 102 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-350
2013 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 522-553 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lerna Ekmekcioglu

AbstractThis article explores a forcible, wartime transfer of women and minors from one ethnic group to another, and its partial reversal after the war. I analyze the historical conditions that enabled the original transfer, and then the circumstances that shaped the reverse transfer. The setting is Istanbul during and immediately after World War I, and the protagonists are various influential agents connected to the Ottoman Turkish state and to the Armenian Patriarchate. The absence and subsequent involvement of European Great Powers determines the broader, shifting context. The narrative follows the bodies of women and children, who were the subjects of the protagonists' discourses and the objects of their policies. This is the first in-depth study to connect these two processes involved: the wartime integration of Armenian women and children into Muslim settings, and postwar Armenian attempts to rescue, reintegrate, and redistribute them. I explain why and how the Armenian vorpahavak (gathering of orphans and widows) worked as it did, and situate it comparatively with similar events. I highlight its uniqueness, and the theoretical possibilities that it offers toward understanding why and how women, children, and reproduction matter to collectivities in crisis.


PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1515-1518
Author(s):  
Hülya Adak

Since 2001, I Have Been Teaching Courses in Cultural Studies, European and Turkish Literature, Modern Drama, and Gender and sexuality studies at Sabancı University in Istanbul. During my fifteen years of teaching undergraduate and graduate students, the Armenian genocide was a particularly challenging theme to bring into the classroom. Even at Sabancı University, one of the rare liberal universities in Turkey to offer courses that challenge Turkish national myths, most students, including those who graduated from “liberal” high schools, had received a nationalist education and came to college either not knowing anything about the Armenian genocide or denying it altogether. Denial of the Armenian genocide is still pervasive in Turkey; 1915 is identified in history textbooks as the year of the Battle of Gallipoli, the most important Ottoman victory against the British and French naval forces during World War I. For most of the twentieth century and up until 2005, when the seminal Ottoman Armenians Conference opened a public discussion of the topic, silence regarding the deportation and genocide of the Ottoman Armenians prevailed. If denialist myths in Turkey acknowledge the deaths of the Ottoman Armenians, they justify such deaths as “retaliation” for the deaths of Turkish Muslims during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 or equate the massacres of Armenians with Turkish casualties of war from the same period. For instance, Talat Paşa, the mastermind behind the deportations and massacres of roughly one million Armenians in 1915-16, argues in his memoirs that an equal number of Turks were killed by Armenians during World War I and in its aftermath (51-56).


2020 ◽  
Vol 247 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-233
Author(s):  
Samuel Dolbee

Abstract In the contentious historiography of the Armenian genocide, the desert has been acknowledged by almost everyone as the endpoint of the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenian citizens in 1915 and the years that followed. Those who use the term ‘genocide’ suggest that this action was tantamount to a death sentence, while those who oppose the term claim that the desert exculpates the Ottoman state. This article unpacks the meaning of the Jazira region — one of the arid regions to which Armenians were sent — and suggests how Ottoman officials used the desert to kill and Armenians used it to survive, mostly as part of nomadic groups among whom they were somewhere between slaves and family members. The desert even came to shape the humanitarian rescue campaign in the wake of the genocide and World War I, as organizations worked to remove Armenian children from the desert and, subsequently, to transform the desert itself by establishing Armenian agricultural colonies. Yet some Armenians stayed, and remain to this day in the Jazira calling themselves Armenian Muslims in honor of their heritage. The desert not only shaped Armenian suffering and survival. The marginal environment also incubated a population of imperial survivors, whose existence did not fit comfortably with post-Ottoman national divisions, or the historiographies influenced by them.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 78-92
Author(s):  
Arkadiusz Machniak ◽  

Count Franciszek Xawery Pusłowski was born in France on June 16, 1875. He studied law, philosophy and art history. He was fluent in six languages. During World War I, he was arrested in Russia. As a result of efforts made by influential friends in 1918, he was released from captivity after the personal decision of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka. After the end of World War I, he participated in the Versailles peace conference. Until 1923, he served in the diplomatic corps. He was an opponent of Józef Piłsudski and his political camp. After being released from military and diplomatic service, he was active as a writer, publicist and social activist. He also led an intense social life. During World War II, he lived in Krakow. After the war, in 1945-1950, he was the vice-president of the Society of Friends of Fine Arts. He also worked as a sworn translator at the District Court in Krakow and as a lecturer at the AGH University of Science and Technology, the Jagiellonian University and the Krakow University of Technology. Despite the politically uncertain times, Pusłowski ran his salon in Kraków after 1945, where Kraków artists, journalists, sportsmen, soldiers and his students from Kraków universities used to visit. Count Pusłowski was famous for the fact that, thanks to his relatives living abroad, he had at his home excellent coffee and curiosities, rare for the post-war years, such as figs and pineapples. He remained under the interest of the communist security authorities, inter alia, due to international contacts and the art collection.


Monitor ISH ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 221-244
Author(s):  
Mateja Ratej

The study follows the trial of a Russian refugee, Vasily Chernyenko, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in September 1923 by the District Court in Maribor. As a house servant, he had been found guilty of the brutal murder of his employer, 26-year-old Julia Ganusova, and her 3-year-old son Rostislav in July 1923 in Ljutomer. A comprehensive criminal file, discovered by the author in the Regional Archives Maribor, reveals a stunning network of relationships within the Russian Ganusov family, as well as its ties with other Russian refugees and the Ljutomer locals. In the aftermath of World War I there were many Russians, including Julia’s husband, mechanical engineer Alexander Ganusov, who participated in the construction of the railway line Ormož – Ljutomer – Murska Sobota. The author views the story in the light of Freud’s suggestion that pathology is a structural, social deviation rather than an individual one.


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