The Kurdish and Armenian Genocides:
from Censorship and Denial to Recognition?
By Desmond Fernandes
Apec Press, Stockholm
ISBN: 978-91-89675-72-8 (918967572X)
£14.99
- Buy Online or Offline
"Turkey’s repression of the Kurds has been widely
documented - and is acknowledged as a major obstacle to Turkey’s
accession to the European Union. But what lies behind such repression?
Fernandes confronts the issue head on, forcing the reader to
probe a question that many in Turkey and elsewhere would rather
avoid: does the systematic repression of the Kurds amount to
genocide? Open discussion of this issue is critical if a long-term
resolution of the Kurdish issue is to be achieved" –
Nicholas Hildyard, Policy
Analyst.
"The book is an exceptionally important read
for anyone with a broad interest in human rights and social
justice. It has a scholarly account of the historical background
to the present awful situation of Turkish Armenians and Turkish
Kurds. In particular, the book provides a powerful comparative
analysis of the policies of the US, Israel and Turkey in terms
of their rationale for labelling human atrocities as genocide"
– Dr. Julia Kathleen Davidson, Research Fellow, Faculty
of Education, University of Glasgow and Membership Secretary
of Scotland Against Criminalising communities (SACC).
"In this important book, Desmond Fernandes exposes
the details of the sordid and largely hidden role of Israel
and the US Israel Lobby in preventing Congress from recognizing
the Turkish genocide of the Armenians –
Jeff Blankfort, Former
Editor, Middle East Labor Bulletin.
Among its Cold War victories the United States
certainly succeeded in its ambition to make the world safe for
nationalism. As identity politics is reprocessed as a function
of global capital, and rehabilitated as its natural ally, Desmond
Fernandes documents the fractured consequences of the ready-made
social fantasy" - Variant: Cross Currents in Culture.
"Desmond Fernandes writes for those who spoke
the truth and were murdered, those who spoke 200 days ago and
are still imprisoned, and for those who live in terror and in
silence, or who meet in nameless buildings, so that the words
‘GENOCIDE’, ethnic cleansing, or the Turkish military word ‘TEMIZLEME’,
may be heard as a siren call for the muted victims of the Turkish
state" - Diamanda Galás, Composer and Performer of Songs
of Exile, Vena Cava, Schrei X, Plague Mass and Defixiones, Will
And Testament.
"The international visibility of eminent novelists
like Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak ensures that their subtle criticism
of Turkish legal practices and political culture reaches a wide
international public. What is also needed for an understanding
of Turkey is detailed historical analysis and scholarly insight
into the perceptions and myths that contribute to the identity
and beliefs of key actors on the Turkish scene and in the wider
population. This is precisely what is provided by Fernandes,
both in his own work analysing the denial of Armenian genocide
and in his useful presentation of the significance, nationally
and internationally, of the work of Ahmet Kahraman. His book
and the cases cited by Fernandes, show how the nationalist Kemalist
cause is being ruthlessly promoted not only in Turkey but also
by the Turkish state elsewhere ... Machinations, covert and
overt, of a fundamentally unethical and reprehensible kind are
being increasingly exposed, initially for a Turkish readership
in the case of Kahraman’s book and now for an international
public" – Professor Robert Phillipson, Copenhagen Business
School, Denmark [from the Foreword to the book].
"Fernandes’ painstaking investigation sheds
much needed light on the collusion between the Turkish State
and the Israel lobby in preventing recognition of one of the
darkest episodes of the past century, the genocide of Ottoman
Turkey’s ethnic Armenians" - Muhammad Idrees Ahmad,
Spinwatch.
"[This is] a judiciously assembled vast, syntactic
mosaic ‘illustrating’ the total state terror inflicted upon
two ancient peoples of Anatolia/Asia Minor by a colonial usurper
power, first as an Empire then as a Republic. Desmond Fernandes
has laboriously integrated a vast amount of historical events,
scholarly data, secret documents, live witnesses, relevant literature
and even poetry ... [He] has hit the target: mainly encapsulating
the enormity of censorship, denial and recognition of that ultimate
crime of man’s inhumanity to man" - Genocide - Khatchatur
I. Pilikian [from the Epilogue].
Desmond Fernandes is a policy analyst
and former Senior Lecturer in Human Geography and Genocide Studies
at De Montfort University, England. He has published widely
in a number of journals and is co-author of Genozid an den Kurden
in der Türkei? - Verfolgung, Krieg und Zerstörung der ethnischen
Identität (2001, Medico International, Frankfurt).