Armenian Genocide Not Only Armenian but Also Turkish Issue

PanARMENIAN.Net - November 6 a forum titled "Three Turkish Voices on the Ottoman Armenians" took place on the UCLA campus on November 6. The program was organized by Professor Richard Hovhannisian, Armenian Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Armenian History at UCLA, with the cooperation of the G.E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies. About 800 people including journalists, public figures and ordinary people attended the conference. Three Turkish historians, lectors of different universities Taner Akcam, Elif Shafak and Fatma Miige Gocek gave lectures on the following topics "A New Assessment of the Ottoman Documents", "Memory and Literature" and "The Recent Istanbul Conference on the Ottoman Armenians". Dr. Taner Akcam of the Department of History, University of Minnesota, gave examples of the important evidence that can be found in the archives despite extensive purging. Dr. Elif Shafak of the Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of Arizona is also a novelist who writes and publishes both in Turkish and in English. The daughter of a member of the Turkish diplomatic corps, she has reflected: "Faced with hatred, I hated back. But that was as far as my feelings went. It took me years to ask the simple question: Why did the Armenians hate us?" Dr. Fatma Miige Gocek of the Department of Sociology and Program in Women's Studies, University of Michigan was among the organizers of that conference that convened belatedly in September and has also been a co-organizer of Armenian-Turkish workshops in Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Salzburg, Austria, RFE/RL reported.