The Blue Book (2009)

In this age of information it is absurd that there are still many discrepancies between what historians hold as facts and politicians would have us believe as truths. The Blue Book is an observational documentary, which scrutinizes one of these cases. In 2005 The Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) sent a petition to the British Parliament, asking the latter to apologize for its 1916 publication, "The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-1916". This report was the first account of the Armenian Genocide using eyewitness testimonies. The TGNA wanted the British Parliament to declare it as false, and based on forgeries. The petition was signed by all of the members of the Assembly, including Erdogan the then Prime minister, and Gül the foreign secretary in 2005. Five years earlier in 2000, Ara Sarafian a British historian, had republished the Parliamentary report "The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-1916", also known as the Blue Book. When Sarafian heard about the petition he started a campaign defending the original work and the integrity of his republication. This campaign took him to Turkey where at a symposium titled "New approaches to Turkish-Armenian Relations"; he confronted the deniers of the Armenian Genocide and the architects of the 2005 petition. While there Sarafian met and discussed the issue with number of academics, including historians from the state sponsored Turkish Historical society. He became center of media attention and was invited to take part in a discussion with a historian from the Turkish Historical Society (TTK) on a television program. Throughout the program the Turkish Historian held to the deniers' position, but during the commercial break while still being filmed for this documentary he commented that the Petition sent by the TGNA did not have any academic merit and it was purely a political exercise.