Turk dismissed in Netherlands for using term deportation instead of genocide

PanARMENIAN.Net - Arman Sag, a Turkish contributor to Dagelijkse Standaard Dutch portal was dismissed because of using the term 'deportation' instead of the Armenian Genocide in his article. Besides, Sag said "Turks never committed a genocide."



After numerous complaints received by the editorial staff from the Armenian community of the Netherlands, editor-in-chief urged Sag to apologize. The journalist for his part said he neither denied nor confirmed the fact of the Genocide in his article, Hurriyet reported.



The Armenian Genocide (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths reaching 1.5 million. 



The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.



The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, denies the word genocide is an accurate description of the events. In recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as genocide.



To date, twenty countries and 44 U.S. states have officially recognized the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars and historians accept this view. The Armenian Genocide has been also recognized by influential media including The New York Times, BBC, The Washington Post and The Associated Press. 



The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the Genocide survivors.