VERC\u0130HAN Z\u0130FL\u0130O\u011eLU<\/p>\n
ISTANBUL – H\u00fcrriyet Daily News<\/p>\n
An anti-racism initiative will organize a series of protests and marches in Turkey on April 24, the date when some countries commemorate the alleged Armenian genocide in the last days of the Ottoman Empire.<\/p>\n
The commemoration march organized by the \u201cSay Stop to Racism and Nationalism!\u201d initiative will begin in Istanbul, while simultaneous demonstrations will also be held in the cities of Ankara, Bodrum, Bursa, Diyarbak\u0131r and \u0130zmir.<\/p>\n
Marchers will rally behind the slogan, \u201cThis pain belongs to all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n
The initiative that is behind the demonstrations was jointly founded by Turkish intellectuals and civil-society representatives from Istanbul\u2019s Armenian community immediately after the assassination of Hrant Dink, the Armenian-Turkish editor-in-chief of weekly Agos on Jan. 19, 2007.<\/p>\n
Prominent journalist and academic Cengiz Aktar described the initiative as \u201ca citizens\u2019 enterprise\u201d during an interview with the H\u00fcrriyet Daily News & Economic Review.<\/p>\n
\u201cSuch commemorations are now publicly staged; that is crucially important. The people of Turkey will face the painful chapters of history one step at a time. Many new names have now been added to the participants in last year\u2019s commemoration, and the circle is growing,\u201d said Aktar, who is also a columnist for the paper.<\/p>\n
Aktar was one of the leading names in the \u201cI apologize\u201d campaign launched in December 2008. Approximately 30,000 people, including many intellectuals and journalists, have signed the petition, which reads in part: \u201cMy conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Armenians were subjected to in 1915.\u201d<\/p>\n
Armenia claims up to 1.5 million Armenians were systematically killed in 1915 under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey denies this, saying that any deaths were the result of civil strife that erupted when Armenians took up arms for independence in eastern Anatolia.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
VERC\u0130HAN Z\u0130FL\u0130O\u011eLU ISTANBUL – H\u00fcrriyet Daily News An anti-racism initiative will organize a series of protests and marches in Turkey on April 24, the date when some countries commemorate the alleged Armenian genocide in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. The commemoration march organized by the \u201cSay Stop to Racism and Nationalism!\u201d initiative will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":774856,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-armenian-question"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/774856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}