No Turkish products were used in the construction of this building...
We believe in putting conscience before business and we haven't just preached it, we've practiced it.
Any self-respecting human being would refuse to do business with a party who does not respect him/her for who he or she is, regardless of whether he or she is on the purchasing or selling end. Why then would Armenians today, do business with Turkish companies, when the Turkish nation, represented by its government, not only continues to deny the 20th century's first genocide, not only continues to occupy the Armenian ancestral lands, but actively conducts a policy of threatening the very existence of the Armenian nation and Armenia as a country.
Would Jews conduct business with German companies today, had Nazi Germany continued to exist to date and continued its holocaustal policies of the 1940's?
In April 2009, we were sent a letter by the Schindler elevator company's district office in Istanbul, Turkey, and asked to meet during their planned upcoming visit to Yerevan and discuss the possibility of purchasing our elevators from them. Below was our answer to Schindler Turkey.
Dear Aysa,
Thank you for writing to me about your products and services. In principal, I am interested in your elevators and in fact, in the coming months we will be needing 5 elevators on our construction project.
While we could have most probably cooperated as businesspeople of neighboring countries, I cannot, with a clear conscience, do business with a Turkish company or any company operating in or out of Turkey. In the following lines, I will attempt to explain the reasons behind my position.
I am a 3rd generation survivor of the Armenian Genocide. Except for my grandfather and his little brother, who were just boys in 1915, their entire family, including 6 siblings, mother and father, along with our entire village of 350 people, were massacred by regular Turkish army infantrymen, in June of 1915. What happened in my ancestral village in Tigranagert in 1915, was very much representative of what was carefully organized and perpetrated by the government of Ottoman Turkey in the entire territory of my 4000 year old homeland.
I recently visited Western Armenia, called "Eastern Turkey" today, and was appalled to see that in the past 90 years, the successive governments of Turkey, including the current government, have gone through great lengths, to systematically destroy, erase and wipe out, thousands of years of Armenian history and culture from Western Armenia. Hundreds of churches have been blown up, destroyed, neglected, many more have been carefully and cleverly converted to mosques and are being presented to foreign tourists as historical mosques built by Turks 1000-1500 years, ago. Ironically, the invading Turks or their predecessors, the Seljouks, didn't actually arrive in Armenia until the 13th century. In the historic Armenian capital of Ani, only 6 Armenian churches out of more than 40, were left half standing, and are presented as Georgian or Greek churches by the Turkish tourist guides... In the Armenian town of Garin (today's Erzeroum), the two historic Armenian churches located on the city's main square, were both converted to Mosques, represented to tourists as built by Turkish rulers, as the official Turkish Tourism Ministry plaques state. In recent years, the Turkish government organized the renovation of the Armenian St. Khach Church of Akhtamar in Van. Considering the Turkish government's hostile policy towards independent eastern Armenia, towards the precious Armenian cultural history, considering the continued forceful denial of the Turkish government of the first Genocide of the 20th century, the renovation of the Akhtamar Church, was merely and clearly a political act. The same Turkish government has been, for years and is continuing to today, destroy and misrepresent thousands of other Armenian churches in and around Van and the other Western Armenian territories. The Akhtamar church was clearly a publicity stunt, one that served the Turkish government's interests.
To me, as a human being who belongs to one of the oldest and richest civilizations on earth, it is not just about the brutal genocide perpetrated against my family, my country, my whole nation. It is not just about the loss of the homes and lands my family has owned and flourished on for thousands of years. It is not just about the loss of my 4000 year old homeland and with it, the opportunity I was denied to live, create and prosper peacefully in it. It is about all of that and much more. It is a matter of human dignity and justice. It is a matter of conscience, one that prevents us, businessmen of neighboring countries, from working with each other.
Dear Aysa, I don't know you personally and you might not care or feel associated with the words I have written to you. Whatever the case, I thank you for taking the time to read these lines, and if you wish, feel free to forward them on to whoever you think would perhaps understand them and maybe even appreciate them, for I have not a single drop of animosity or vengeance in me towards the Turkish people.
Respectfully yours,
Vicken Arabian