Kurdish and Turkish intellectuals Mazlum Vesek and Burçin Gerçek are in Yerevan

The “Research Center on Western Armenian Issues” scientific-research foundation has
organized a meeting with them tomorrow.

Mazlum Vesek was born in 1984 in the Idil district of Şırnak Province. Since his university
years, he has been conducting research on literature and cinematography. His articles
have been published in various cultural journals and periodicals. He is also the author of
several books.

Burçin Gerçek was born in 1976 in Istanbul. After graduating from the Faculty of Political
Science and Public Administration at Marmara University, he continued his master’s
studies at the Faculty of Journalism of Robert Schuman University in Strasbourg. He later
worked for various periodicals published in France. He also collaborated with film director
Serge Avetikyan on the production of the documentary films “We Drank from the Same
Water” and “The Street Dogs of Istanbul”.

Burçin Gerçek’s book titled Against the Current: : “Those Who Defied Orders, Rescued
and Resisted During the Armenian Genocide” was published in Turkey in 2016.
Currently, Burçin Gerçek works at the Ankara bureau of AFP and is simultaneously
pursuing doctoral research at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at
Clark University in the United States.

At the Research Center on Western Armenian Issues, the intellectuals will present how a
Turkish author allegedly attempted to appropriate the Western Armenian writer Atrpet’s
work “Tzhvzhik”. According to the speakers, this attempt at appropriation is linked to efforts
to erase traces of the Armenian presence in the Ottoman Empire and to eliminate the
memory of the Armenian Genocide.

One of the speakers, Mazlum Vesek, will discuss his research concerning the exile stories
of Turkish and Armenian socialists Orhan Kemal and Zaven Biberyan, which, according to
him, share many similarities.