Chance Encounters....

Two days ago I began reading My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, one of my favorite writers. Pamuk, Turkey's most famous modern novelist weaves a beautiful story out of sex, murder, art, and religion against the rich tapestry of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious Ottoman Empire.

In yesterday's NY Times I came across an article discussing charges brought against Pamuk in Turkey for "public denigration" of Turkish identity for bringing attention to the Armenian genocide, during World War I. Pamuk faces three years in prison if he returns to Turkey, a potentially embarrassing prospect as Turkey tries to court the EU in its bid for membership.

This morning I picked up Samantha Power's "A Problem From Hell" America and the Age of Genocide to read on the train on my way to brunch with an old friend and a Tulane "refugee" at Cafeteria in the West Village. The first chapter discusses in detail the American inaction and complacency in the Armenian Genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks, particularly Mehmed Talaat, the former Turkish Interior Minister. Inaction and narrow geopolitical concerns allowed over a million Armenians to be murdered or expelled from Turkey. Afterwards Turkey waged a public relations campaign to improve its image culminating in the installation of Attaturk's ultra-nationalist regime. Talaat tried to leave his past behind him, and may have gotten away with his "crimes against humanity" had an Armenian student, Soghomon Tehlirian, not walked up behind him on the street in Berlin and shot him in the head.

The murder of Talaat and the Armenian extermination caught the attention of Raphael Lemkin a Polish Jew studying linguistics in Lvov, who wondered "It is a crime for Tehlirian to kill a man, but not a crime for his oppressor to kill more than a million men..."this is most inconsistent." (17)
Lemkin later went on to coin the word "genocide" and warn the world about the likelihood of another mass race and ethnic based extermination, shortly before Hitler began his campaign. To this day Turkey denies genocide took place, the United States has been a passive witness to the genocidal killings of Jews in Europe, Bosnian Muslims in Srebenicia, the victims of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and the Tutsi's in Rwanda, every time paying lip service to "Never Again."

How is this relevant to the Civil Procedure I should be reading now???
Fullerton has expertise in international human rights law.
Ok, lame excuse, I just thought the bizarre coincidence of 3 days worth of random reading complimenting each other so beautifully were worth mentioning. At the expense of civil procedure of course.