Panel Discussion To Explore Relations Between Turks, Kurds, And Armenians

WALTHAM, Mass. (A.W.)—On April 20, a panel discussion entitled “Subjects and Citizens: (Un)Even Relations between Turks, Kurds, Armenians” will be held at Bentley University’s Adamian Academic Center, Wilder Pavilion, on 175 Forest St. in Waltham. The event, organized by Bentley University’s Global Studies Department and the Armenian Review, begins at 7 p.m.

The panel is made up of a group of leading scholars and commentators, including Ugur Umit Ungor (University of Sheffield, UK), Bilgin Ayata (Johns Hopkins), Henry Theriault (Worcester State College), and Dikran Kaligian (Regis College). Asbed Kotchikian (Bentley Unversity) will moderate. Weekly editor Khatchig Mouradian will deliver opening remarks.

The panel aims at looking at the history and examining the power relations between Armenians, Kurds, and Turks after the apparent homogenization of eastern Anatolia as a result of the mass killings and deportations of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. The panel will discuss these relations and the prospects of rapprochement among the three groups.

Ugur Umit Ungor is a lecturer at the University of Sheffield. He was born in 1980 and studied sociology and history at the Universities of Groningen, Utrecht, Toronto, and Amsterdam. His main area of interest is the historical sociology of mass violence and nationalism in the modern world. He has published on genocide, in general, and on the Rwandan and Armenian Genocides, in particular. He finished his Ph.D., titled “Young Turk Social Engineering: Genocide, Nationalism, and Memory in Eastern Turkey, 1913–1950” at the department of history of the University of Amsterdam.

Bilgin Ayata is completing her Ph.D. at the department of political science at John Hopkins University, Baltimore. Her research interests include the politics of displacement, trans-nationalism, social movements, and migration. Her dissertation examines the displacement of Kurds in Turkey and Europe. She currently lives in Berlin.

Henry C. Theriault earned his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1999 from the University of Massachusetts, with a specialization in social and political philosophy. He is currently associate professor of philosophy at Worcester State College, where he has taught since 1998. Since 2007, he has served as co-editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal “Genocide Studies and Prevention” and has been on the Advisory Council of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. His research focuses on philosophical approaches to genocide issues, especially genocide denial, long-term justice, ethical analyses of perpetrator motivations, and the role of violence against women in genocide.

Dikran Kaligian is a visiting professor in the history department at Regis College and managing editor of “The Armenian Review.” He received his doctorate from Boston College. He is the author of Armenian Organization and Ideology under Ottoman Rule: 1908-1914 (Transaction Publishers, 2009).

Asbed Kotchikian is a lecturer in political science and international relations at Bentley University. His area of research includes the foreign policies of small states, the modern political history of the post-Soviet south Caucasus, and issues of national identity.

The event is free and open to the public.

State University of Yerevan about the Kurdish-Armenian relations

GARNIK ASATRIAN
State University of Yerevan, Armenia

Kurdish and Armenian

The earliest, irregular and sporadic contacts between Armenians and Kurds date back
approximately to the 11th -12th centuries AD. However, it was not until the movement of Kurds to various parts of Mesopotamia and Armenia had grown into mass migration in the first half of the 16th century that the Armenian-Kurdish relationships became active. Since that period and up until the late 1920s - prior to the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire - these two peoples had been in close and constant contact. As a result, in some Western Armenian provinces a certain Armeno-Kurdish ethno-linguistic situation emerged, characterised by widespread Armenian-Kurdish bilingualism, which could not but leave obvious traces – local dialects of both languages, to some extent, influenced one another.

Judging from the existent linguistic materials, the influence of Armenian on Kurdish appears to
have been much greater as it manifests itself not only in vocabulary, but also in phonetics, and
partially, word formation. Meanwhile, the influence of Kurdish on Armenian, or, more precisely, on the Western Armenian dialects, was limited to vocabulary, and to a lesser degree as well. This can be explained by the fact that Armenian had somewhat become a sort of substrate language for the Kurmanji dialects spoken in the historical Western Armenian areas.

The Armenian-Kurdish linguistic relationships were in the form of direct contacts; they did not
affect other linguistic aspects of public life, and were exemplified only on the dialect level.
The paper presents the analysis of the Armeno-Kurdish linguistic connections, particularly the
interrelations between the Western Armenian dialects and the Kurdish dialects of the same area.