Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News

Turkish group fights genocide measure
by Lesli A. Maxwell, Fresno Bee, March 20, 2001
Posted: Friday, March 30, 2001 02:21 am CST

Yolo County organization disputes Armenian massacre.

SACRAMENTO -- As he's done faithfully every year since serving in the state Legislature, Sen. Chuck Poochigian is ushering a measure that would make April 24 California's date to remember the Armenian genocide.

And as they've done every year, lawmakers on a Senate committee voted to back the resolution without debate or dissent.

But Monday, a little-known organization of Turkish citizens from Yolo County told committee members they shouldn't vote for the measure because doing so "promotes hatred against Turkish people." The organization disputes that an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were victims of an Ottoman Empire-ordered genocide 86 years ago, instead calling the deaths in the post-World War I era a "great human tragedy" that cost millions of Muslim, Greek, Turk, Arab and Kurd lives as well as Armenian ones.

It's the first time Poochigian and other lawmakers have heard opposition to the annual resolution, they said.

The group's singular voice of opposition at the Capitol mirrors a much larger one heard in Washington, D.C., where a similar resolution by Rep. George Radanovich, R-Mariposa, was yanked at the request of President Bill Clinton last fall. Turkish leaders warned that the resolution would damage U.S. business and diplomatic relations.

Poochigian, a Fresno Republican whose maternal great-grandparents were tortured and killed during the massacres between 1915-1923, refuted assertions by the Turkish Cultural Organization of Yolo County that a powerful Armenian-American lobby in California is forcing a revision of history.

"There has been denial for many, many years," Poochigian said. "It's really laughable to suggest that Armenian lobbying efforts are somehow nefarious. The facts are the facts and have been such since the horrific events occurred."

Poochigian said a generation of Turkish people who weren't alive during the rule of the Ottoman Empire are the ones trying to rewrite history.

"There has been a whole generation taught to believe that the genocide didn't occur. That intensifies and brings passion to the question because we don't want the history of these people to be altered or revised through anyone's efforts."

Many historians have concluded that the massacres and starvation in Armenia amounted to genocide -- commonly thought of as a systematic destruction of a people. The European Parliament, the Russian Duma and the French National Assembly have adopted resolutions explicitly citing the Armenian Genocide.

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