U.N. Body OKs Report on Armenian Massacres

GENEVA —  A U.N. human rights body has voted to accept a new study backing charges that a million or more Armenians were massacred by Turkey’s Ottoman Empire during World War I, a U.N. statement said Friday.

The decision by the U.N. Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities came despite warnings that such a statement would encourage terrorist acts by Armenian separatists.

But Western diplomats noted that the acceptance decision contained no request for the study to be passed on to the main U.N. Human Rights Commission.

The Turkish government has repeatedly rejected the charges as unfounded, and Turkish delegates strongly attacked the report’s findings by British human rights expert Benjamin Whitaker.

In Ankara, Turkish officials voiced mixed feelings on the subcommission’s decision, pointing out that the panel merely took note of Whitaker’s report rather than endorsing it.

They said Turkey would have preferred that the panel had eliminated the paragraph in the report stating that Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were the victims of genocide.

They noted, however, that a reference to “divergent opinions” had been inserted in the subcommittee resolution.

The report, revising a 1978 study on prevention and punishment of genocide, was accepted by the subcommission Thursday by a 14-1 vote with four abstentions. The negative vote was cast by the Soviet Union. Bangladesh, Cuba, Jordan and Morocco abstained.

“The Armenians are naturally pleased, but the Turks have also been successful in blocking all further discussion of the genocide charge. They consider it as shelved.” one Western diplomat said.

Whitaker, who did not attend Thursday’s session, voiced cautious satisfaction at the vote. “Once published as a U.N. document, it makes very little difference to world opinion which body it came from,” he said.

Whitaker strongly defended his study against critics wanting to delete its most contentious paragraph, which cited nine instances of genocide this century, including what it called the 1915-1916 Ottoman massacre of Armenians.

“At least one million, and possibly well over half the Armenian population, are reliably estimated to have been killed or death-marched,” it read.

Whitaker estimated the Armenian population at the time at between two and three million.

Turkish delegate Ercument Yavuzalp last week rejected the report, asserting that the Ottoman authorities had acted legitimately to suppress an armed rebellion by Armenians. Whitaker noted the genocide charge was corroborated by U.S., German and British archives.

Yavuzalp warned that endorsement of the report would encourage Armenian militant separatists who in recent years have attacked Turkish targets and killed more than 50 Turkish diplomats and others.