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University of Connecticut Human Rights
Institute The Human Rights Institute wishes to register its strong objections to the event scheduled for Saturday April 7th by the UConn-Turkish Students Association which includes the showing of a 2005 documentary film "Sari Gelin". The basis of the film Sari Gelin is a denial of the Armenian genocide that occurred in the Ottoman Empire between 1915-18. The film refers to the "unfounded allegation of genocide" and the "non-existent genocide". It seeks to absolve responsibility and shift blame onto the victims by including statements from interviewees such as such as "Whatever happened to the Armenians was the result of the miscalculations of Armenian leaders", and "The Ottoman government was put in a very difficult position". The film will be followed by remarks by Bruce Fein, an attorney who has published numerous pieces denying the Armenian genocide. As a propagandist and revisionist piece of film-making, Sari Gelin does not seriously address the overwhelming weight of evidence that Ottoman government officials carried out a conscious, systematic and widespread policy to physically destroy its Armenian minority population through deportation, murder and starvation. The 1948 UN Genocide Convention definition of genocide as intent to destroy in whole or in part a national group unambiguously applies to the acts of Ottoman officials and their agents in 1915-18. There is a widely shared consensus among governments, international human rights organizations, scholars and historians that the death of 1 million Armenians constitutes genocide, a consensus that was recently restated by the International Association of Genocide Scholars in their letter of March 7, 2007 to the US Congress. We urge those interested in this question, and UConn students in particular, to seek other, more reliable, sources of information about the Armenian Genocide including Peter Balakian's The Burning Tigris, Vahakn Dadrian's "The History of the Armenian Genocide" and Taner Akcam's "A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility". It is our view that the event sponsored by the Turkish Student Association runs counter to the stated commitment of the University of Connecticut to human rights, which requires that the truth about mass human rights violations be openly acknowledged. The recurrence of genocide since the Armenian Genocide of 1915-18 in contexts such as The Holocaust, the Balkans, Rwanda and Darfur compel us to press for the historic acknowledgment of crimes and to oppose genocide denial in all of its forms. Professor Richard A. Wilson
Gladstein
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