Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News

Turkey Shoot
by Moscow Times, 31 March 2001
Posted: Tuesday, April 03, 2001 03:46 am CST

"Who now remembers the Armenians?" - Adolf Hitler

You're researching the history of genocide in the 20th century and you want some photos to illustrate the slaughter of 1 1/2 million Armenians by Turkish nationalists in 1915. You turn to one of the world's largest picture agencies, Hulton Getty, and ask permission to use the famous massacre photos in their archives. So what do you get?

Nothing.

Hulton Getty recently withdrew pictures of the Armenian genocide from its web site, preventing their use by the media, The Independent reports. It seems that someone objected to this stark evidence of Turkish atrocity - that someone being, er, the Turks.

One of the pictures, taken by the German poet Armin Wegner, showed an Armenian woman and two small children lying dead on a garbage heap: an eyewitness account. But in London this week, a Turkish Embassy official - identified only as "Korkmazhaktanir" - formally protested the picture's caption.

It was false, claimed Mr. K, because it said the dead Armenians were victims of the Turkish massacres. But it was obvious, he said, that the woman and children had starved to death; thus they could not have been "massacred" by Turkish troops. Somehow impressed by this feat of Byzantine logic -forced starvation is not murder, eh? - Hulton pulled the pictures.

The protest by the mysterious Mr. K is part of an ongoing Turkish effort to slaughter historical truth. Last month, the Turks canceled several huge contracts with French firms after President Jacques Chirac publicly acknowledged that the Armenian genocide actually took place. The Turks have also been endowing chairs of Ottoman studies at American universities willing to toe their revisionist line. (Princeton has signed on; Harvard declined.)

A few days later, however, the story took a new turn. Having pulled the photos, Hulton began to examine their history. They discovered the copyrights to the photos are actually owned by Wegner's widow, who is still alive and living in - uh-oh - Israel, where folks tend to take a dim view of whitewashing genocide. She has assigned the rights to an Armenian historical archive in Berlin, and officials there say journalists are more than welcome to the photos.

Looks like someone remembers the Armenians, eh, Adolf?

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