Category: Armenian Question

Parliamentary Elections:

By Appo Jabarian                                                                                             
Executive Publisher / Managing Editor USA Armenian Life Magazine

Friday,  May 22, 2009
Along with Russia, the European Union and China, the United States anxiously follows developments in the June 7 Lebanese parliamentary elections. The elections will decide who will run the country for the next four years. Will it be the pro-western ruling coalition or the tri-partite opposition alliance formed mainly by Lebanese Shiites, Christian Maronites, and Lebanese Armenians?   In a May 11 article in the Lebanese Daily Star, titled “Rival Lebanese Christian factions now hold political cards in Levant,” Anthony Elghossain, a J.D. candidate at The George Washington University Law School, wrote: “Unfolding in a playground open to the ambitions of regional and international powers alike, the Lebanese election is likely to impact American policy with respect to Syria and Iran.”   Elghossain added: “On the one hand stands former Lebanese President Amin Gemayel’s Phalange party and former militia leader Samir Geagea’s Lebanese Forces (LF). Both parties are hostile to Syrian interference in Lebanese affairs, and are currently part of a coalition supported by the United States and the West. On the other hand stands a camp that revolves around former General Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement (FPM). At a crossroads, the FPM advocates for Lebanese sovereignty and a Christian voice in the political system.”   He underlined that the election outcome “in the pivotal Metn region,” the district which will produce the Christian leader to be reckoned with, will be decided by “the crucial Armenian swing vote.”
In the evening of June 7, that Christian leader may be Mr. Aoun. And that can happen thanks to his alliance with the most popular Armenian Lebanese political party ARF Tashnagtsutiun. The March 8 opposition leader Michel Aoun, the head of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), and his allies won six of the district’s eight seats in 2005 with the backing of the Armenian Lebanese voters.
In a related May 13 news story, Osama Safa, the director of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, said that the Metn district has not only electoral significance and political weight, but also cultural importance.
Safa clarified: “With the polls less than a month away the several lingering questions in the Metn district will only be answered on election day. Two of the remaining wild cards are how the inclusion of independents, loyal to President Michel Suleiman, on the March 14 list will affect the contests and how voters in the Armenian community, numbering around 8,000, will swing. … The powerful Armenian Tashnag party has thrown its support behind Aoun and the FPM list. … The influence of the Armenian party is already clear. Tashnag candidate Hagop Pakradounian, on the opposition list, is running uncontested.”
Speaking in Beirut in late April, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said her visit to Lebanon aims to send a “strong signal” for “fair and transparent” elections in the country. She added that “Lebanon is facing a new challenge in the upcoming elections,” and the Lebanese should choose their representatives “away from foreign meddling, violence and fear,”
www.chinaview.cn reported.
On May 12, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov urged the international community to accept the result, regardless of who wins. He clarified that the mistake that was committed when Hamas won the Palestinian elections a few years ago should not be repeated, a reference to the international isolation of the Hamas government that many saw as prolonging and intensifying the Middle East conflict. In a statement to the Russian Interfax information services, he said “If the international community had acknowledged the victory of Hamas, the actions of Hamas would be different today,” reported The Daily Star.
On May 16 Robert Fisk wrote in London’s The Independent: “I went to take a look at Madeleine Albright [former U.S. Secretary of State- Ed.] the other day. She turned up in Beirut as part leader of the National Democratic Institute, one of those Washington gigs that checks up on the freedom of elections in dodgy countries. …The Americans are hoping that the ‘democrats’ who currently hold a majority – Saad Hariri’s Future movement, jolly old Jumblatt’s Druze and a clutch of Maronites – will win the day.”
Fisk added: “Most of my Lebanese colleagues, listening to Mrs. Albright, came away with a deep suspicion: that if the Lebanese elections bring the friendly ‘democrats’ back to power, the National Democratic Institute and its other poll-sniffers will announce a fair and free election. But if the Hezbollah and their allies move into power, it will suddenly be discovered that the Lebanese poll was ‘deeply flawed.’ And then, I suppose, we would all be ‘threatened with fresh elections’.”
The Hezbollah-led “opposition will win the elections, all statistics show it,” said the head of Hezbollah parliamentary block MP Mohammad Raad pledging to guard the “position, role and identity of Lebanon,” stressing that the opposition is committed to “preserve Lebanon and its strong position in the region. … [The] Lebanese are facing two choices, either reconciliation with the enemy [Israel], or preserving a strong Lebanon,” referring to the Lebanese pro-western ruling coalition’s rejection of the “armed resistance against Israel,” wrote the Chinese Xinhua news agency.
The anticipated outcome in Metn has already produced a pre-election development that might cause cracks in the Hariri-led Future Movement. On May 15, Lebanon’s Premier Fouad Siniora highlighted the need for strong ties with Syria. During a ceremony to lay the foundation stone for the Medayrej-Taanayel highway, he stated: “We are laying the cornerstone for the Beirut-Damascus road which we always wanted to be free from obstacles.”
A win by the tri-partite opposition alliance mainly between the Lebanese Shiites, Christian Maronites, and the Armenian Lebanese could shake Pres. Obama’s Mideast policy, and the deciding votes lay in the pockets of thousands of Lebanese-Armenian citizens.
The overwhelming majority in the Lebanese-Armenian municipality of Bourj Hammoud and the entire Metn region always votes in favor of Tashnagtsutiun. And one can clearly tell how the Lebanese-Armenian vote may ultimately contribute to altering the U.S. Policy in the Middle East.

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The Los Angeles Chapter of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) traditionally invites as guests to its “Annual Meeting” (banquet) members of the local consular corps and leaders of various religious and ethnic groups.

On April 22, when I attended AJC’s annual gathering, I was surprised to see that the keynote speaker was Dr. Christian Stocks, the Consul General of Germany. Despite the fact that the German government has long acknowledged the Holocaust and paid substantial compensation to the victims’ families, many Jews still feel uncomfortable dealing with Germans or visiting Germany.

I soon discovered that the German Consul General was not only the honored guest, but also the recipient of AJC’s prestigious “C.I. Neumann Lifetime Achievement Award.”

I was not the only one to be taken by surprise. When the German Consul General took the podium, he admitted that he was so astonished by AJC’s invitation that he was “speechless for a few seconds.”

Dr. Stocks’ 45 minute-long empathetic remarks amply demonstrated why the AJC was fully justified in honoring this distinguished diplomat. His words deeply touched those in attendance — many of whom were Holocaust survivors and descendants.

As the only Armenian in the room, I could not help but make a mental comparison between the remorseful way the German Federal Republic has reacted to the Holocaust and the Turkish government’s incessant denials, lies and distortions of the Armenian Genocide.

I wondered if the day would ever come when a righteous and enlightened Turkish leader would acknowledge the Armenian Genocide and make amends, paving Armenians to similarly honor a Turkish diplomat! Should that day come, Turkish leaders would be the recipients of many accolades, not just from Armenians, but people around the world.

Ironically, the current Turkish Consul General in Los Angeles was also at this banquet. I wondered what thoughts were going through his head, as he listened to his German counterpart’s deeply apologetic speech, and whether he wished he could make similar remarks someday to an Armenian audience!

I have reprinted below brief excerpts from the German Consul General’s lengthy speech. While reading these remarks, if you substitute Germany and Germans for Turkey and Turks; and Israel and Jews for Armenia and Armenians, you would get a sense of how I felt, on the eve of April 24, listening to the representative of one repentant government, while the representative of another unrepentant and denialist state was sitting just a few feet away:

“Yesterday, on Yom Ha-Shoah or Holocaust Memorial Day, Jews all over the world commemorated the victims of the Holocaust. They remembered the attempt to eradicate an entire people; they remembered the murder of six million European Jews, murdered by Germans, at German hands, on German command. Millions of people were humiliated, defrauded of their rights, persecuted and murdered because they were born Jews….

“The Shoah’s cruel effects continue to this day. There is almost no Jewish person anywhere in the world unaffected by it. And because it was Germans that committed or instigated these crimes, I simply cannot begin my speech without paying my profound respects to the Holocaust survivors and their families, and to those who have not survived, to those who have perished, and to those who have no graves where we can mourn them.

“And I join the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, who said in her speech to the Knesset last year, celebrating the 60th birthday of the State of Israel, and I quote: ‘The Shoah is a source of great shame for us Germans. I bow before the victims; I bow before the survivors and before all those who helped them to survive….’

“Former Israeli ambassador to Germany, Avi Primor, once asked: ‘Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame? Only the Germans had the bravery and the humility.’ Let me add on a personal note: The crime itself was so horrendous, that not a million memorials would be sufficient to constantly remind us of the past….

“Last year, in his message of greeting on the 60th Anniversary of the Founding of the State of Israel, Federal President Horst Köhler said: ‘We accept this responsibility for the past and for the future. This means that the citizens, politicians and leaders of society must raise their voices against denial or trivialization of the Shoah and against intolerance, racism and anti-Semitism. It means we must not look away; rather we must see and act. And it means we preserve and pass on the memory so that future generations also will remain vigilant…. Only those who take responsibility for the past can gain trust for the future.’

“Synagogues that had been gutted by fire during Kristallnacht have been restored or received extensive makeovers. New synagogues and cultural centers like those in Munich and Dresden are now centers of flourishing Jewish life. You again find Jewish schools and colleges.”