AP News, April 10th, 2007
Fifty-three Nobel laureates are calling on Turkey and Armenia to open their border and resolve their differences over the mass killings of Armenians by Turks in the early 20th century.
In a letter released Monday by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, the group urged Turkey to end discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities and to abolish a section of its penal code which makes it a criminal offense to denigrate Turkishness.
They said Armenia should "reverse its own authoritarian course, allow free and fair elections and respect human rights."
The letter referred to the Jan. 19 slaying of Hrant Dink, a Turkish citizen of Armenian descent who edited the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos. The editor, who had made enemies among nationalist Turks by applying the genocide label to the mass killings of Armenians toward the end of the Ottoman Empire, was killed outside his office in Istanbul.
The laureates said the best tribute to Dink would be "through service to his life's work safeguarding freedom of expression and fostering reconciliation between Turks and Armenians."
The signers included Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner; J.M. Coetzee, the 2003 winner in literature; Mairead Corrigan Maguire and Betty Williams, the 1976 peace prize winners; and Wole Soyinka, the 1986 winner in literature.
"We do feel strongly that Turks and Armenians need to interact with each other," said David L. Phillips, executive director of the Wiesel Foundation. "The more they engage and trade personal stories, the deeper will be their understanding."
Turkey has denied the genocide claims and said Armenians were killed or displaced in civil unrest during the disarray surrounding the Ottoman Empire's collapse.
Calls to the Turkish mission to the United Nations and the Republic of Armenia's permanent representative to the United Nations seeking comment were not immediately returned.
U.S. lawmakers introduced a resolution in Congress earlier this year urging the U.S. government to recognize the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians at the end of World War I as genocide.
