Haaretz columnist David Stavrou – who has also been presenting to the Genocide Seminar which is conducted by our Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide Jerusalem – has published a major new article in Haaretz entitled “And If They Used Israeli Weapons.” Stavrou describes a horrifying raid and genocidal massacre in a village in northern Myanmar, and reports that he was relieved to discover it contained no evidence of weapons purchased from Israel. However, Stavrou observes that there still is reason for a “particular concern to Israeli readers.”

He writes, “It is known that in the past, Israel had extensive ties with the regime in Myanmar, and weapons, cyber systems, vehicles and drones of Israeli manufacture were and are used by the army… Israel is one of the world’s largest arms exporters.  In spite of that, they cannot ratify the Arms Trade Treaty – a multilateral pact that regulates the international trade in conventional arms – as did most western democracies.  Israel is also refraining from setting regulations to monitor the activity of intermediaries, especially former senior defense establishment officials.”

Stavrou is aware of the work of the new non-profit organization, Yanshuf, (see story on this website) and reports that when they requested position statements on Israeli arm sales from the various political parties, only Meretz replied.

Stavrou concludes that all of Israeli society would benefit from enjoying “an international reputation as the nation of startups, drip agriculture and Copaxone, rather than as a nation of ‘masters of war.’”

For the full article in Haaretz, click here.

Obituary to a Great American Armenian, VARTAN GREGORIAN

Vartan Gregorian, President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, formerly President of Brown University, Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, and President of the New York Public Library has passed away at the age of 87.

Dr. Gregorian was the recipient of the American Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was born to Armenian parents in Tabriz, Iran, went on to receive his secondary education at the Armenian College in Beirut, Lebanon, and in 1956 moved to attend Stanford University where he was awarded a PhD some years later.

The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide Jerusalem celebrates Dr. Gregorian’s outstanding intellectual leadership and inspiration.  As director of the Institute, I recall with great appreciation my first meeting with Dr. Gregorian at his office at the New York Public Library where we sat together and formulated a preliminary basic list of ‘instructions’ for how to deny a genocide.  Over the many years that followed of my work on the process of denial of the Armenian Genocide and any and all specific genocides, this serious-satirical series of templates, and the warmly inspiring spirit of Dr. Gregorian, continued to be a major basis for the development of further understanding of denial.

In more recent years, as president of the Carnegie Foundation, Dr. Gregorian was the driving force in generating substantial financial support for development by our Institute of a new model for communicating news about genocide and genocide scholarship around the world (our web magazine from 2010-2012, GPN Genocide Prevention Now – selections from this website can be seen at https://www.ihgjlm.com/a-classification-of-denials-of-the-holocaust-and-other-genocides-updated-2012/.

The New York Times commented, “Dr. Gregorian was a fighter: proud, shrewd, charming, a brilliant historian and educator who rose from humble origins to win… sheaves of honors” (April 16, 2021).

“Templates for Gross Denial of a Known Genocide: A Manual,” in The Encyclopedia of Genocide, volume 1, page 168.

1. Question and minimize the statistics.
2. Attack the motivations of the truth-tellers.
3. Claim that the deaths were inadvertent
4. Emphasize the strangeness of the victims.
5. Rationalize the deaths as the result of tribal conflict.
6. Blame “out of control” forces for committing the killings.
7. Avoid antagonizing the genocidists, who might walk out of “the peace process.”
8. Justify denial in favor of current economic interests.
9. Claim that the victims are receiving good treatment.
10.Claim that what is going on doesn’t fit the definition of genocide.
11.Blame the victims.
12. Say that peace and reconciliation are more important than blaming people for genocide.

“One is Either for Human Life or Not!”

A major part of this review will also be published in the California Courier.

Review of Israel Charny’s New Book, Israel’s Failed Response to the Armenian Genocide: Denial, State Deception, Truth versus Politicization of History.

 Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021.

.by Tessa Hofmann 

Review of Israel Charny: Israel’s Failed Response to the Armenian Genocide: Denial, State Deception, Truth versus Politization of History. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021, 267 p. by Tessa Hofmann

In this extremely remarkable anthology, Israel Charny describes with obvious pain, palpable even after nearly 40 years, how a first conference on the Holocaust and genocide, including the Armenian Genocide, initiated by him and others, was blocked, obstructed, and nearly prevented by the Israeli government in the spring of 1982. National institutions such as Yad Vashem played a decisive and deeply deplorable role in this process.

Promises made were revoked, which naturally put the organizers under enormous logistical and time pressure. Only now, based on newly declassified state records, Charny found that the boycott campaign was essentially spearheaded by the Israeli government itself, while the protest and attempts at prevention of lectures on the Armenian Genocide on the part of Turkey served Israel as a welcome pretext and reason for its interventions. Allegedly, Jewish lives and the escape route of Jews from Iran and Syria via Turkey were threatened by Turkey should the planned conference result in the presentation of six “Armenian” lectures – among a total of 150! The Israel Foreign Ministry demanded of Charny and his colleagues compliance, and as the tension mounted the Foreign Ministry also commanded disinviting all Armenian speakers. This was out of the question for Israel Charny. With exemplary civil courage he resisted all attempts at intimidation.

The international conference, nevertheless well attended by 300 participants, took place despite all Turkish and Israeli interventions and became a milestone in the history of genocide studies, since it was not only the first academic conference on the Holocaust, but also on genocide research. And for the first time, renowned Armenian scholars addressed the genocide committed against their ancestors on such an occasion.

But what motives underlie the Turkish and Israeli obstruction of academic and memorial events for genocide victims in the first place? To this day, not only the government of the Republic of Turkey, but also a large part of Turkish opinion leaders deny that there was an Ottoman genocide of indigenous Christians, i.e., of fellow citizens at all; according to official Turkish interpretation, there is no evidence of a state intention to exterminate. Nevertheless, as dissident Turkish academics such as Taner Akçam have pointed out, the state-planned, organized, and executed extermination of Armenians, Greeks, and other indigenous Christians constitutes the founding crime of the Republic of Turkey.

In Chapter 7 of the book reviewed here, Turkish human rights activist, publicist, and publisher Ragıp Zarakolu explains the efforts of his country to deny this crime, which was so central to the formation of the Republic of Turkey, with fear of a return of survivors: Zarakolu writes: “The 1915 genocide became the backbone of the nation and national state building in Turkey. Recognition of the Ottoman Genocide could do great damage to the myths of the state-founding nationalist ideology. I defined another aspect of Turkish denialism as ‘Israel syndrome,’ that is: ‘One day the Armenians may come back to their homeland like the Jews.’ Turkish nationalism had this fear before the Israel Republic was born. One of the signers of the Lausanne Peace Treaty, Dr. Riza Nur, wrote in his memoirs, which were kept at the British Museum, ‘Topal Osman mobs were burning and destroying the churches and cemeteries in Pontos region, I approve this, to finish the hope of comeback.’” (p. 172)

The crucial difference between ‘mere’ expulsion across the nearest state border and deportations to the distant Anatolian interior was already established by the Young Turkish regime during the Balkan Wars: The Greek Eastern Thracians who had merely been expelled to Greece returned undesirably after the end of the war. Of the Eastern Thracian Greeks deported to Anatolia, however, almost one-half died of epidemics, starvation, and forced labor. This genocidal test run served as a blueprint for the deportations of Armenians that were carried out almost nationwide as death marches behind the smokescreen of the Great War.

Turkish scholars, publicists and human rights advocates who dared to critically research and comment on the genocide(s) of roughly three million Christians in the Ottoman Empire and in Ottoman-occupied northwestern Iran in 1914 and 1918 risk prosecution, imprisonment or exile, as the biographies of Taner Akçam and Ragıp Zarakolu make clear.

But what drove the Israeli government as well as government-affiliated or government-dependent institutions such as Yad Vashem to obstruct an academic or historical-political discussion of the Ottoman genocide since 1982? Israel Charny suspects that the real driving force is the antagonism between those who consider the Holocaust a unique and therefore singular event and ‘heretics’ who, like Charny himself and numerous other prominent Jews, consider the extermination of European Jews in World War II to be a quite comparable or even repeatable crime. For these ‘generalists,’ each genocide has both individual unique characteristics, but at the same time also commonalities with other genocides.

The term Holocaust itself, of course, originated in U.S. and European journalism of the late 19th/early 20^th centuries and referred to the Armenian persecutions under Sultan Abdül Hamit II and the Young Turks, which often included the burning alive of Christian victims. Zionist activist Eytan Belkind, who served as an officer in the Ottoman army, described one such holocaust in World War I, which he witnessed: “Armenians were ordered to gather thistles and thorns and pile them up into a high pyramid. Then they tied all the Armenians there hand to hand, about five thousand of them, and arranged them into a ring around the thorn pyramid and set it on fire…. The cries of the unfortunate victims, burning to death in the great fire, could be heard for miles around.”[1]

As Elie Wiesel told the German genocide researcher Gunnar Heinsohn in a letter, Wiesel adopted the term Holocaust for the Shoah in 1958, which was initially related to Armenian or Christian victims.[2] Wiesel will presumably have known that the term Holocaust was a paraphrase of the Armenian extermination in earlier decades and frequently used long before Lemkin’s design of the term genocide.

The inclusive, generic approach represented by Israel Charny, Yair Auron, Benny Morris, Dror Ze’evi, and other Israeli and Jewish colleagues, respectively, can draw on prominent antecedents regarding the comparability of the two serial World War II genocides: Russian Jewish poet Ossip Mandelstam emphasized the kinship of fate between Jews and Armenians, calling Armenia the “younger sister of the Hebrew Earth.” Centuries of persecution and diaspora were meant by this. The Austrian Jewish novelist Franz Werfel also saw in the Ottoman extermination of Armenian Christians a warning to European Jews of the danger they were about to face. For the Polish-Jewish jurist and historian Raphael Lemkin, who became the principal author of the United Nations Genocide Convention, the ‘religious genocide’ of the Armenians, along with the Shoah, provided the empirical basis for Lemkin’s definition of genocide. Of the five offenses that have been considered genocide under international law since 1948, all the rest, with the exception of birth control, were committed against the Ottoman Christians as early as World War I.

I have not only read the book edited and to a large extent also written by Israel Charny with great interest, but find it important and useful reading for all those who deal theoretically or practically with questions of memory culture, history policy, genocide prevention and related educational work. Above all, the personal principles of the author, scholar and distinguished colleague Israel Charny are impressive and inspiring. It consists in addressing even the darkest and most agonizing chapters of one’s own national history. “Charny is a brave scholar-one of the rare academics who risks speaking about Israeli crimes such as the State of Israel selling weapons to other governments that commit genocide or about crimes toward the Palestinian people during the War of Independence-the Nakba,” writes Yair Auron, author of The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide in his Foreword. (p. XVIII).

Israel’s sales of weapons to states that commit genocide or are considered potential perpetrators of genocide or are engaged in wars of aggression have included Guatemala, whose “Silent Genocide” against the Maya took place in 1981-1983, Rwanda, Serbia, Sudan, and currently Myanmar, as well as Azerbaijan, which is apparently seen by Israel as a strategic partner against Iran and whose Jewish population may be playing the role of hostage. The drones that Israel provided to Azerbaijan (along with Turkey) played a crucial role in the war of aggression against the Armenian-populated Republic of Artsakh.

Israel Charny, Yair Auron, Michael Berenbaum, and Ragıp Zarakolu show us the way to achieve such academic and human rights integrity, revealing at the same time the adversities its bearers may face. An exclusive understanding of the genocide of the European Jews leads, as Israel Charny convincingly demonstrates, not only to questionable decisions regarding the Ottoman genocide in terms of remembrance policy; other genocides committed in more recent times are not recognized either. In terms of remembrance and history policy, Israel apparently takes a generally indifferent, passive position when it comes to the suffering of non-Jews. Charny writes: “After seeing previously secret and classified documents of Israel’s Foreign Ministry that detail Israel’s policy efforts with regard to the inclusion of information about the Armenian Genocide—and for that matter the inclusion of information about any other people’s genocide—also in the influential US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, I am shocked to the core by the realization that much of our policy is indeed generated and backed up not only by a misunderstanding of the significance of the Holocaust in relation to other genocides. It is also more generally a powerful entree into understanding much more deeply the construction of genocidal thinking and practice in the human mind and behavior, where we identify open and shut arrogance, disregard for historical truths, and, frankly, ugly efforts to achieve a national/cultural superiority over other peoples” (p. 103).

The justifications for the Israeli government’s refusal to ‘recognize’, or better condemn genocides other than the Shoah appear arbitrary. In November 2018, when the Knesset rejected a motion to recognize the genocide of the Yazidis, the Israeli deputy foreign minister justified his government’s rejection on the grounds that – allegedly – the United Nations had not yet ‘recognized’ this genocide (p. 114). In the case of the refusal to recognize the Ottoman Armenian Genocide, however, it did not help that the United Nations had already passed a resolution to that effect in 1985.

Caveat

As a German reviewer, I find it difficult to reproduce Israel Charny’s criticism of the Israeli government without a cross-reference to my country too. Against the historical background of millions of crimes against the Jews of Europe – the official Israel’s doctrine of the uniqueness and incomparability of the Holocaust is in force in German bourgeois media and among mainstream intellectuals. There exist further similarities: Germany has very belatedly recognized, 101 years post factum, the genocide of its Ottoman WW1 ally against its Armenian, Syriac, as well as the Greek Orthodox nationals (usually paraphrased as ‘other Christians’), but to this day has not brought about legislative recognition of the first genocide of the 20th century. I am referring here to the genocide of up to 100,000 Herero, 10,000 Nama and an unknown number of San in the then German colony of “Southwest,” today’s Namibia, in the years 1904-1908. This led to the accusation in the critical German public that the German legislature was pointing its finger accusingly at third states, but was not self-critical enough to measure its own genocidal guilt and responsibility with the same yardstick. It should also be mentioned that, although Germany officially and fully acknowledges its historical responsibility toward the Jews without reservation and accordingly engages in intensive educational work in and out of school, a growing proportion of the population nevertheless believes that it is now enough to admit guilt, repent and atone.

As a researcher and as a human rights activist who has been dealing with the crime of genocide for more than 40 years and who has worked for the reappraisal or ‘recognition’ of the Ottoman genocide crimes, similar to my colleague Israel Charny, I have been exposed to Turkish disruptive and obstructive maneuvers many times. The Struggle Committee Against Baseless Armenian Genocide Claims (ASIMKK), established in Turkey in 2000, requires, among other things, Turkish diplomats abroad to prevent, if possible, all public events about the Ottoman genocide in their respective jurisdictions. When I, together with a Turkish and an Armenian colleague, submitted a petition to the German Bundestag in April 2000 for legislative condemnation of the Armenian Genocide, the result was a defamation campaign in the largest Turkish daily newspaper, “Hürriyet”; among other things, I was referred to as the head of the German secret service, who had the special mission of fomenting interethnic hatred among the peoples of Turkey and the South Caucasus. Politicians and academics in Germany with similar ambitions of genocide ‘recognition’, especially those of Turkish origin, have faced similar experiences of defamation and intimidation. The German government and its authorities generally watched this extraterritorial activity of the Turkish NATO ally impassively. The first Bundestag resolution on the Ottoman genocide, passed in 2005, at least admitted German “complicity” in the “massacres” and “expulsions,” as the Ottoman genocide was paraphrased in Germany at the time. Only two months after the Bundestag had pronounced the G-word, so feared by Turkey, in a second resolution on June 2, 2016, government spokesman Seibert, to reassure Turkey, declared this resolution to be legally non-binding.

To conclude, this book by Israel Charny strongly renews the call for recognition of the Armenian Genocide. It is remarkable and inspiring writing.

About the reviewer:

– Prof. h. c. Dr. phil. Tessa Hofmann is a philologist (Slavic and Armenian studies), sociologist and genocide researcher with a focus on the Ottoman genocide. She has numerous publications on the history, culture and contemporary situation of Armenia.

[1]   Quoted from the letter to the editor by Hannes Stein (Jerusalem), published in the FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINEN ZEITUNG, 4 August 1998. Eytan Belkind was the brother of the Palestinian-born Zionist Naaman Belkind (1889-1917) and joined him in the Nili espionage group founded in 1915 to support the British; it was crushed by the Ottoman authorities in the fall of 1917.

[2] Heinsohn, Gunnar: Lexikon der Völkermorde. Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1998, p. 174f.

Endorsements by GREGORY H. STANTON, ARCHBISHOP MOURAN MANOOGIAN -Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem, YAIR AURON, SHMUEL REISS MD, HARUT SASSOUNIAN, SAMUEL TOTTEN, TANER AKÇAM, NAOMI CHAZAN, and ROBERT WILLIAM FISK.

☻’Nobel Prize’
GREGORY H. STANTON, Founding President Genocide Watch, Research
Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention, George Mason University
Israel Charny has single-handedly produced at least half of the seminal ideas in the history of genocide studies and genocide prevention. I wish there were a Nobel Prize in Genocide Studies. If there were, he should get the first one.

☻ Brilliant
ARCHBISHOP MOURAN MANOOGIAN, Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem
You have brilliantly captured over a hundred years of evasions and denials by the Turkish Government for the Genocide that extinguished the lives of a million and a half Armenian souls. Armenians also lost a thousand years of their culture. This monumental crime against the Armenian nation must be recognized. To do less calls into question the integrity of all those victims of similar crimes, regardless of origin. It is ironic that the person who coined the word “Genocide” in 1944, Rafael Lemkin, was himself of Jewish faith, and the State of Israel should have been the FIRST nation to recognize the Armenian Genocide, and I am sure things since then would have been different in the world. I heartily congratulate you for deftly exposing the many contradictions in our world towards our nation’s Genocide, and pray that your book will serve the purpose to wake up Israeli politicians.

☻Important, Original and Brave
From the Foreword by YAIR AURON, Prof. Emeritus, Open University of Israel, author of The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide
This is a very important, courageous and original book. The attitude of the book towards the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust is the closeness between the two. The two consist of a paradigm of genocide and evil in our world. The book describes Israeli government leaders who succumbed to Turkish demands and attempted to close down the 1982 conference that was a milestone event in the struggle against denials of historically known genocides. With intellectual integrity, Charny criticizes the disrespect of the State of Israel to other genocides. When you deny another’s genocide, you betray your own genocide; when you deny genocide of the present or of the past, you prepare the ground for a new one. It also presents a particularly fascinating in-depth picture of Elie Wiesel’s complicated role in the process. .Charny is a brave scholar — one of the rare academics who risks speaking about Israeli crimes such as the State of Israel selling weapons to other governments that commit genocide or about crimes toward the Palestinian people during the War of Independence –the Nakba. This is a significant text that will probably be of wide interest in the world, and at the same time it will probably be an unexpected text for many people in Israeli society.

☻Relentless Yet Respectful
SHMUEL REIS, MD, MHPE, Family Physician; Academic Director, Center for Medical Education, Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Hebrew University Jerusalem; Conference Coordinator, International Workshop on Study of Medicine in and after the Holocaust
We applaud Prof. Charny’s relentless yet respectful crusade and especially this seminal book that sheds disturbing light on our country’s deplorable mishandling of the issue, yet nevertheless upholds a hope for its positive transformation. Like many others I am unable to comprehend official Israel turning a blind eye to the Armenian Genocide by Turkey. No realpolitik can justify such immoral conduct, nor the false claim that it may cost Jewish or Israeli lives. As a scholar of Medicine’s role in the Holocaust, my colleagues and I summon health professionals to become Genocide Watchers and do their utmost to identify and prevent such calamities. We also call on all health professionals to incorporate in their professional identity the dangers of the inherent potential for abuse of power in HealthCare. These obligate a full and transparent acknowledgement of the Armenian Holocaust (in which unfortunately once again physicians played a decisive role).

☻Fascinating, Patriotic, Yet Honest
HARUT SASSOUNIAN is the Publisher of the California Courier, an outstanding Armenian-American newspaper; he is formerly President of the United Armenian Fund and currently President of Armenia Artsakh Fund which have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the development of Armenia
Dr. Israel Charny dissects the Israeli government’s unscrupulous and shameful non-recognition of the Armenian Genocide with the precision of an academic scalpel. He uses the Israeli Freedom of Information Act to reveal the ugly political untruths from never before seen archival documents of Israel’s Foreign Ministry about the Israeli government’s dishonest response in a failed attempt to block an academic conference held in 1982 in Israel on the Jewish Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and other genocides. Even though he is a patriotic Israeli citizen, Dr. Charny places his humanitarianism ahead of his nationalistic feelings. This book vindicates him as an honest scholar and a good human being who exposes the lies of his own government, insisting that Israel should have been the first country to recognize the Armenian Genocide, not the last!

☻A Classic –Fascinating, Revelatory
SAMUEL TOTTEN, Prof. Emeritus, University Arkansas, author Genocide Pioneers, and a pioneer of field work in an ongoing genocide
Israel’s Failed Response to the Armenian Genocide is bound to be a classic in the literature of genocide studies. It is a fascinating, disturbing and revelatory work. The book addresses the planning and implementation of the first international conference ever held on the subject of genocide (other than the Holocaust), and (2) Turkey’s all-out efforts to pressure the State of Israel which capitulated and pressured Charny to disinvite all Armenians who accepted an invitation to speak and attend the conference. To assert that Charny’s stance was courageous doesn’t even begin to speak to the courage he displayed. A must read for anyone interested in what it means to take a moral stand and not bend, and for anyone interested in the history of the founding of the field of genocide studies.

☻ A Must Read, Intensely Poignant and Meaningful
TANER AKÇAM, Professor, Genocide Studies, Clark University, author of Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegram’s and the Armenian Genocide
The book you are holding is a must-read. Here are the Turk, Armenian, and Jew coming together to deliver an intensely poignant and meaningful message to us all: Those who would deny the reality of a genocide perpetrated upon others largely lose their credibility when speaking of genocides perpetrated against themselves. These writings and documents show us those who would deny the Armenian genocide on the pretext of “national security” are indirectly admitting their own capability of potentially carrying out precisely such a crime themselves.”

☻Unwavering Equality of All Human Beings
NAOMI CHAZAN, Prof. Emerita, Political Science, Hebrew University Jerusalem, Past Deputy Speaker Israeli Knesset and Former Director Truman Peace Institute, Hebrew University Jerusalem
Israel Charny’s book revisits one of the turning points in the study of human barbarity: The First International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide held in Tel Aviv in 1982. In what amounts to a historical whodunnit he shows how systematic attempts to isolate the Holocaust experience of World War II from the Armenian genocide that preceded it at the height of World War I were deflected and a new norm of comparative genocide studies was established. Since then, the specificities of each attempt at eradicating a group because of its beliefs, ethnic background or geographic origin—be they Jews, Armenians, Yazidis, Bosnians, Tutsis, Rohingyas or any other people—are studied within the context of features common to a long list of efforts to eliminate marginalized and discredited communities. This change—which now has been picked up by Black Lives Matters and similar movements—owes a great deal to the courage of Professor Charny and his colleagues, who stood up to immense political and pschological pressures to insist on the unwavering equality of all human beings—not only in life and sickness, but also in death and remembrance.

☻ Fierce Indignation –A Great Piece of Work
ROBERT WILLIAM FISK, Middle East Correspondent of the London Independent
Israel Charny is one of those indefatigable scholars – Jonathan Swift is another – whose fierce indignation are necessary to our age and who fight the most necessary battles at the right moment. Charny’s latest work proclaims that every genocide is unique but that none has the right to claim unique suffering; and that denial is the final stage of genocide. He thus speaks to the future as well as the past. . He holds his own Israeli government to account for its failure to acknowledge the 1915 Armenian mass murders as a genocide. He even proves that the Israeli authorities invented threats to the Jewish community in Turkey in 1982 in a vain attempt to curtail a Jerusalem Holocaust and genocide conference he helped to arrange — and thus curtail all discussion on the Armenian genocide. At the same time, he makes no cheap shots–he admires Israel even when he undermines its outrageous denial.

☻ Major Importance, Revealing, Moving
BEN KIERNAN, Whitney Griswold Professor of History, Yale University, Founding Director of the Genocide Studies Program, 1994-2015
This book tells an important and fascinating story. Drawing on revealing, newly-declassified Israeli documents, it deals with a major moment not only in the formation of the field of genocide studies but in global intellectual history, not to mention behind-the-scenes diplomatic skullduggery. This was a key point at which states, scholars, and public figures were challenged to come to terms over the past and future of genocide, the meaning for its surviving victims, and its continuing threat to humankind. The book movingly illuminates these challenges, interactions, successes and failures, personal and political. The author deserves congratulations on his pioneering role in the unfolding events, and for assembling this conclusive, multifaceted account. The Foreword and the various contributed chapters are written by a stellar team of highly qualified, respected scholars and authors. I very strongly recommend this book.

Ahlander, Johan; Koleka, Benet; Erkoyun, Ezgi. (December 9, 2019). Turkey joins Nobel ceremony boycott in protest against Handke. Reuters.
https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1YD1HA

(Reuters) – Turkey said on Monday it would join Albania and Kosovo in boycotting the Nobel awards ceremony in protest against 2019 literature prize laureate Peter Handke, who has been criticized for backing late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.

The Swedish Academy’s choice of the Austrian Handke has been widely criticized since he expressed support for and attended the funeral of Milosevic, the former Serbian president who died in detention at the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague in 2006.

Milosevic was charged with war crimes in connection with atrocities and ethnic cleansing committed by Serb forces in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo during the 1990s wars triggered by the disintegration of federal Yugoslavia. He died in jail before a verdict was reached in his five-year-long trial.

Turkey’s ambassador to Sweden, Hakki Emre Yunt, told Turkish broadcaster Hurriyet on Monday he would not attend the awards ceremony on Tuesday, joining Kosovo and Albania in the action.

“Consistent with our initial reaction, we have also instructed the Ambassador of Albania to Sweden to boycott the Nobel Prize ceremony for (Peter) Handke,” Acting Albanian Foreign Minister Gent Cakaj wrote on Twitter.

“Justification of war atrocities during the Yugoslavia break-up must not be rewarded. This will solely strengthen the state of denial that must be overcome and strongly condemned,” he said.

A spokeswoman for the Albanian Foreign Ministry confirmed it was the country’s official position.

Handke will be formally handed the 9 million crown ($935,000) award on Tuesday, before attending the traditional Nobel banquet later the same day. All ambassadors to Sweden are invited to the ceremony and the banquet.

A defiant Handke on Friday dismissed questions about his support for Milosevic during a news conference in Stockholm.

The prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were created and funded in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and have been awarded since 1901.