On Monday, February 27, the Armenian National Institute (ANI) launched a Turkish-language version of its popular website documenting the facts and acknowledgments of the Armenian Genocide available at www.turkish.armenian-genocide.org.
The ANI site is visited over four million times a year and the number of people accessing from Turkey is substantial. As Turkey regularly censors foreign and domestic websites and the ANI English site has been hacked by denialists, the new ANI Turkish site was designed to give access to broader Turkish-language audiences, both in the Republic of Turkey and outside. The Turkish-language site will parallel many of the most commonly used features of the ANI site. For its first phase, the Turkish site features translations of official documents from countries around the world that formally recognize the Armenian Genocide.
The resolutions, laws, and declarations from countries that have historically recognized the Armenian Genocide can now be read in Turkish. They range from the May 24, 1915 Joint Allied Declaration that invoked crimes against humanity at the time the genocide was being committed to more recent parliamentary resolutions, including the 2016 German Parliament resolution that recognized the historic events and admitted German responsibility in the matter. Earlier this month the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany upheld the validity of the resolution.
Audiences in Turkey are also unaware of the voluminous Turkish records that confirm the facts of the Armenian Genocide. In 2004 the proceedings and legal analysis by the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), commissioned by the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission, was published in Turkish and several books have appeared in print since, but there is a massive gap in resources for Turkish speakers.
The ICTJ legal opinion in Turkish is available on the new website, which also includes a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section and a photographic collection. Additionally, a section for entries from the Encyclopedia of Genocide addressing several aspects of the Armenian Genocide is currently under construction.
The site will have new features that will be of particular interest to Turkish readers. The Institute is looking forward to expanding the site in the same systematic manner and by the same objective standards by which the ANI site was created.
The new site also features the ANI map keyed in Turkish, and links to other popular features, such as its digital exhibits and online museum.
Founded in 1997, the Armenian National Institute (ANI) is a 501(c)(3) educational charity based in Washington, D.C., and is dedicated to the study, research, and affirmation of the Armenian Genocide.
Artak Beglaryan, Spokesperson of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR/Artsakh) Prime Minister, has launched a flash mob calling on Armenians to spend their summer vacations in Artsakh.
“We already are taking some [respective] steps,” Beglaryan told Armenian News-NEWS.am. “A flash mob with the ‘Yek [Come to] Artsakh’ hashtag, which has started in the Facebook social site, is one of these steps; but it’s not the only one.”
Artak Beglaryan and his friends will soon try to call on well-known Armenians to urge their followers to come to the NKR in summer.
Numerous Armenians have already joined this call by the Artsakh PM’s spokesperson, and they urge people, through social networking websites, to visit Artsakh in summer.
More than 16 thousand foreign tourists have visited the NKR in 2015 alone, and this is 13 percent more than the previous year’s indicator.
According to those in charge, the Artsakh hospitality as well as historical and cultural sites draw tourists to this republic.
Turkey’s Presidency of Telecommunication and Communication (TİB) has blocked access to Russia’s state news agency website Sputnik, without issuing prior notification, citing “legal consideration” of a law regarding crimes committed through online broadcasts.
“After technical analysis and legal consideration based on Law No. 5651, an administration measure has been taken for this website (sputniknews.com) according to decision No. 490.05.01.2016.-56092, dated 14/04/2016, of the Presidency of Telecommunication and Communication,” reads an error message that appears when users attempt to access the website from Turkey.
Sputnik Turkey editor-in-chief Mahir Boztepe announced the blockage on his Twitter account, adding that Turkish users were denied entry not only to the agency’s Turkish website but also to all its websites in 31 languages.
“Access blockage to Sputnik from TİB. No justification, many pretexts,” Boztepe tweeted, adding a message addressed to the Turkish media: “Do not fear, these days shall pass.”
No one was available for comment at Turkey’s telecoms and Internet regulatory agency, Reuters reported.
In a statement, Sputnik’s top editor, Margarita Simonyan, described the block as “a further act of harsh censorship” in Turkey and said the site had been blocked late on April 14, hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin made comments criticizing “some political leaders” in Turkey.
Turkey faced strong criticism from both the European Parliament and the U.S. State Department on April 15, after the former’s progress report and the latter’s annual human rights report slammed the country for a sharp deterioration in civil rights and liberties.
Relations between Ankara and Moscow have been tense since Nov. 24, 2015, when the former downed a Russian warplane on the Turkish border with Syria, citing an airspace violation. Turkey claims that it warned the Russian aircraft multiple times before shooting it down, while Russia denies any warnings reaching its side.
Following the jet downing, Putin imposed sanctions on Turkey and trade between the two countries has plummeted.
In complying with a request made by the Turkish president’s son, Ankara blocked websites detailing alleged criminal connections between him and a businessman recently arrested in the United States.
Turkey blocked 21 news websites detailing the US criminal case related to Bilal Erdogan, son of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
On March 22, Turkish national Reza Zarrab was arrested in the United States for fraud, money laundering and evading sanctions against Iran. Zarrab was previously implicated in a 2013 Turkish corruption scandal, which was tied to Bilal Erdogan, who was tied to the indictment though a connected businessman, Sıtkı Ayan.
The websites, including those of the newspapers Haberdar and Cumhuriyet were blocked, but no warning or court order was given prior to the block. It was only after the websites were blocked that officials sent notes to Haberdar.
— US Attorney Bharara (@PreetBharara) March 22, 2016
Along with information about the connections between Bilal Edogan and the criminal case, newspapers cited fragments of a leaked wiretaps of a conversation between Bilal and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, made during the 2013 anti-corruption operation.
The number of websites blocked in Turkey is approaching 68,000 with the recent addition of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo’s official site, as well as specific pages from the country’s most popular Internet forums.
The latest bans came after the government appealed to a local court, citing blasphemy laws. The Feb. 27 ruling of the Ankara Gölbaşı Civil Court of Peace came soon after the Telecommunications Directorate (TİB), a government body, filed a criminal complaint.
The ruling imposes a blanket ban on the websites of Charlie Hebdo and Turkey’s first atheism association, while blocking individual pages of Ekşi Sözlük (Sour Dictionary) and İnci Sözlük (Pearl Dictionary), two hugely popular forums, as well as pages on news website T24, which recently published the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons.
The court imposed sanctions on a total of 49 websites, ruling that they “humiliated the religious values of the people.”
In its criminal complaint, the TİB claimed that “insults against religious and holy values could breach public peace.” It enforced the court’s ruling for many of the targeted websites on March 3, although it acted quicker for a number of others.
Article 216 of the Turkish Penal Code stipulates prison sentences for blasphemy, as well as “provoking the people for hate and enmity or degrading them.” Linguist Sevan Nişanyan was sentenced in May 2013 to 13.5 months in prison for a blog post and world-renowned pianist Fazıl Say was sentenced to 10 months in jail for a tweet, both for violating Article 216.
Atheism Association Spokesperson Onur Romano issued a statement on March 3, inviting people to visit ateizmdernegi.org or ateizmdernegi.org.tr, two mirror domains that are still accessible in Turkey.
“They haven’t told us what exactly we did wrong according to the law. Please take a look and tell us what we did wrong,” Romano said.
67,600 and counting
Although it is the first digital ban targeting the Atheism Association, which is less than a year old, other “convicts” have previously experienced similar sanctions.
Ekşi Sözlük and İnci Sözlük, two online dictionaries in which any user can send not-always-objective-nor-factual entries, have been routinely targeted by Turkish authorities. Ekşi Sözlük was blocked in 2007 and İnci Sözlük in 2011.
Certain pages of Charlie Hebdo’s website, on the other hand, had been blocked in Turkey for hosting Prophet Muhammad cartoons on Jan. 14, soon after 12 of its employees were murdered at the magazine’s headquarters in Paris.
More than 67,600 websites are currently blocked in Turkey, according to the independent monitoring website, Engelli Web.
In 2014, the TİB blocked 22,645 websites without a court order, according to the Human Rights Association’s (İHD) latest report citing Engelli Web.
Since Ankara imposed or threatened to impose blanket bans on Facebook and Twitter, both social media platforms have been complying with the requests of Turkish officials to remove or withhold controversial content, whether or not there is a court ruling.
It took less than a year for a Turkish court to block the website of the country’s first official atheism association, the Hurriyet Daily News reports.
The Association of Atheism, the first of its kind in any Muslim-majority country, was officially founded in Istanbul’s Asian-side neighborhood of Kadıköy in April 2014. The Gölbaşı 2nd Civil Courts of Peace in Ankara has finally blocked the association’s website, according to the group’s statement on March 3, 2015.
As of March 4, Turkish internet users could not have access to www.ateizmdernegi.org without using tools to bypass blockings, such as a VPN.
“Three months ago, the European Space Agency managed to put Philae on a one-km wide comet named 67P, which has a speed of 135,00p km/h, after a 3,907-day-long journey to a location 500 million km away,” the association’s statement said. “Meanwhile, courts in Turkey are still busy with blocking websites, citing laws with vague expressions and trying to make a certain belief dominate the others.”
The court ruling cites Article 216 of the Turkish Penal Law, which forbids “provoking the people for hate and enmity or degrading them.”
The Association of Atheism also described the court’s decision as “a historic example of accumulating legislative, executive and judicial powers in one hand,” claiming that Turkey is “drifting away from the level of modern civilizations as fast as its judiciary system drifts away from reason.”
The association had recently declared in a statement it was officially recognized by the European Union and invited by universities and think-tanks to speak at their events. Morgan Elizabeth Romano, the association’s vice president, had stressed in her recent addresses that Turkey’s free speech problems are worsened with the implications of Article 216.
In an interview with daily Agos last year, the founders of the association, Tolga İnci and Ahmet Balyemez, said they thought there should be a place to provide legal support to people facing problems as atheists.
Only three weeks after its foundation, the association had to install a panic button, which is directly connected to the police center near its headquarters in Istanbul, due to death threats.
In the past, the Turkish government or the courts had blocked access to several popular websites, including YouTube and Twitter. More than 66,000 websites are still blocked in Turkey.
“Year100.org does more that just shed light on the past and its place in memory and scholarship today; it is, in its broadest sense, a centralized indicator of directions that scholarship and community can take,” said Salpi Ghazarian, Director of the Institute of Armenian Studies.
The site is in three languages: English, Armenian and Turkish. The purpose is to reach a broad range of scholars, students and anyone wanting more information about the Genocide itself, or trying still to understand its causes and consequences, and the ways in which it is remembered, studied and discussed.
The content on Year100.org is significantly enhanced by the presentation of images by Armenian photographers.
“The variety of types of events – readings, concerts, books, conferences, exhibitions, lectures – and the variety of locations from South America to Southeast Asia — will also spur further sharing by communities, institutions, organizations thus broadening the reach and impact of each activity, and supporting deeper inquiry into the subject,” concluded Ghazarian.
A German-language site was launched on the genocide of Armenians in 1915 – www.genozid1915.de.
The new site offers a variety of information on genocide, including videos and archive documents, and speaks of the Armenian community of Germany and its efforts to achieve recognition of the genocide by Germany.
News from around the world on the issue of genocide, including the case of Perincek, are posted on the website established by the Committee for the