International pressure on Turkey to recognize the 1915 massacre of more than one million Armenians as genocide is mounting on the eve of the 90th anniversary of the start of the killings.
As Armenians worldwide prepare to commemorate the murders today amid hopes that the US president, George W. Bush, will use the term genocide for the first time to describe the massacres -- Ankara faced growing calls to own up to the slaughter. Armenia's foreign minister, Vardan Oskanyan, said, "Without recognition of the fact of genocide and an admission that it was wrong, we cannot trust our neighbor, which has a tangible military weight."
Up to 1.5 million Armenians may have died as part of a plot hatched by Ottoman Turks to ethnically cleanse the region during the First World War.
An American diplomat at the time reported seeing Ottoman soldiers and Kurdish tribesmen "sweeping the countryside, massacring men, women and children and burning their homes. Babies were shot in their mothers' arms, small children were horribly mutilated, women were stripped and beaten."
The calls on Ankara to face up to its past have cast a shadow over the country's efforts to join the EU. Increasing numbers of EU politicians are demanding that Turkey accept that almost all of its Christian Armenian community died.
Speculation has been rife in the Turkish press that Bush will endorse the description of genocide in his annual statement condemning the massacres.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS