INTERRUPTING THE NUCLEAR SERIES FOR THIS ONE TIMELY PROGRAM:
Interviewing the last exiled survivors of the 1915 genocide before they died in old folk homes in Beirut, Lebanon, where Robert Fisk lives, he has acted more like a historian than a journalist. As the Middle East correspondent for the London Independent, Fisk travelled to massacre sites, compiled lists of victims, as well as of officials who planned the extermination of Armenians in the Ottoman empire. He also identified the rare supporters who refused orders to kill, often at risk of their own lives.
In this 2001 talk to Armenian Americans in San Francisco Fisk presented some of that history and proposed an extraordinary plan to break the silence. Now, almost 15 years later, not much has changed and his account is as urgent as before. To this day Turkey denies that this was government planned genocide in spite of the orders by Talat Pasha, the Ottoman interior minister, and Fisk calls that "close to a criminal lie".
But - for the first time in 100 years - Turks within Turkey outnumbered Armenians in large public events to demand recognition of the facts of their past that will define how to move into the future. In 2015 Fisk traveled to Turkey to report on Armenians from around the world coming to Turkey and recalling the genocide of their ancestors. All setting an example how to begin a conversation about genocide that defines the history and the present of many other countries, foremost among them the US and the Genocide of Native Americans.
Thanks to Jeffrey Blankfort for the recording.
Robert Fisk, author and Middle East correspondent of the London Independent, spoke before the Armenian National Committee in San Francisco in March 2001.
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