Armenian Eagle is the blog of Timothy Haroutunian writing as Armenian Eagle. This is the e mail he received from Obama re: Sen. Biden. We can see that Obama talks Turkey and picks a Duck to win and keeps the Armenian Eagle in the loop. An eye opener if anybody wants.
ERCUMENT Akman
WASHINGTON-–The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) welcomed Democratic Presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s announcement of longtime Armenian American issues supporter, Sen. Joe Biden as his choice for Vice-President. Sen. Biden, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been an outspoken advocate of U.S. reaffirmation of the Armenian Genocide and brings the principled international leadership needed to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.
“As we stated back in January, Armenian Americans, a community that is deeply committed to a moral U.S. foreign policy and constructive American engagement abroad, respect Senator Biden’s leadership and, today, we welcome his addition to the Democratic ticket,” said ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian.
Elected to office in 1972, Senator Biden has been a voice of moral clarity on issues of concern to the Armenian American community.
He has been a support for U.S. recognition of the Armenian Genocide, dating back to his work with Senator Bob Dole to pass the Armenian Genocide Resolution (S.J.Res.212) in 1990, and stronger U.S.-Armenia relations.
Sen. Biden was also a perennial supporter of Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act, adopted in 1992, which restricted U.S. assistance to Azerbaijan due to its ongoing blockades of Armenia and Nagorno Karabagh.
In May, 2007, Sen. Biden, in response to a question from the Los Angeles Times editorial board about the Armenian Genocide Resolution (S.Res.106), said: “I support it, and the reason is simple: I have found in my experience that you cannot have a solid relationship with a country based on fiction. It occurred. It occurred.” Senator Biden has been cosponsor of every resolution reaffirming the Armenian Genocide introduced in the Senate over the past 20 years.
In July, 2008, Sen. Biden reiterated his commitment to securing U.S. and Turkish recognition of the Armenian Genocide in connection with the nomination of U.S. Ambassador to Armenian Marie Yovanovitch. “Recognition by the United States of the Armenian Genocide is not the final goal. The real goal is the recognition of Turkey – of the Turkish Government – of the Armenian Genocide and the establishment of a common Turkish-Armenian understanding of the events and tragedy that took place,” stated Sen. Biden.
The ANCA endorsed Senator Obama in the Democratic primaries and will announce its general election endorsement decision following the Democratic and Republican primaries. The ANC of Iowa had endorsed Sen. Joe Biden in his presidential election bid prior to the Iowa primary earlier this year.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Obama-Biden CIFTINE PELOSI’YIDE ILAVE EDINCE UCGENIN AYAKLARI TAMAMLANMAKDA.. OBAMANIN BASKANLIGI SAYET GERCEKLESIRSE .. HEPIMIZ ACI BIR SURPRIZE SIMDIDEN HAZIRLANALIM … tf
Elected to office in 1972, Senator Biden has been a voice of moral clarity on issues of concern to the Armenian American community.
He has been a support for U.S. recognition of the Armenian Genocide, dating back to his work with Senator Bob Dole to pass the Armenian Genocide Resolution (S.J.Res.212) in 1990, and stronger U.S.-Armenia relations.
Sen. Biden was also a perennial supporter of Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act, adopted in 1992, which restricted U.S. assistance to Azerbaijan due to its ongoing blockades of Armenia and Nagorno Karabagh.
In May, 2007, Sen. Biden, in response to a question from the Los Angeles Times editorial board about the Armenian Genocide Resolution (S.Res.106), said: “I support it, and the reason is simple: I have found in my experience that you cannot have a solid relationship with a country based on fiction. It occurred. It occurred.” Senator Biden has been cosponsor of every resolution reaffirming the Armenian Genocide introduced in the Senate over the past 20 years.
In July, 2008, Sen. Biden reiterated his commitment to securing U.S. and Turkish recognition of the Armenian Genocide in connection with the nomination of U.S. Ambassador to Armenian Marie Yovanovitch. “Recognition by the United States of the Armenian Genocide is not the final goal. The real goal is the recognition of Turkey – of the Turkish Government – of the Armenian Genocide and the establishment of a common Turkish-Armenian understanding of the events and tragedy that took place,” stated Sen. Biden.
The ANCA endorsed Senator Obama in the Democratic primaries and will announce its general election endorsement decision following the Democratic and Republican primaries. The ANC of Iowa had endorsed Sen. Joe Biden in his presidential election bid prior to the Iowa primary earlier this year.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Robert Fisk
Saturday, 23 August 2008
It’s a tiny book, only 116 pages long, but it contains a monumental truth, another sign that one and a half million dead Armenians will not go away. It’s called My Grandmother: a Memoir and it’s written by Fethiye Cetin and it opens up graves. For when she was growing up in the Turkish town of Marden, Fethiye’s grandmother Seher was known as a respected Muslim housewife. It wasn’t true. She was a Christian Armenian and her real name was Heranus. We all know that the modern Turkish state will not acknowledge the 1915 Armenian Holocaust, but this humble book may help to change that. Because an estimated two million Turks – alive in Turkey today – had an Armenian grandparent.
As children they were put on the death marches south to the Syrian desert but – kidnapped by brigands, sheltered by brave Muslim villagers (whose own courage also, of course, cannot be acknowledged by Turkey) or simply torn from their dying mothers – later became citizens of the modern Turkey which Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was to set up. Yet as Maureen Freely states in her excellent preface, four generations of Turkish schoolchildren simply do not know Ottoman Anatolia was between a quarter and a half Christian.
Heranus – whose face stares out at the reader from beneath her Muslim headscarf – was seized by a Turkish gendarme, who sped off on horseback after lashing her mother with a whip. Even when she died of old age, Fethiye tried to record the names of Heranus’s Armenian parents – Isguhi and Hovannes – but was ignored by the mosque authorities. It was Heranus, with her razor-sharp memory, who taught Fethiye of her family’s fate and this book does record in terrible detail the now familiar saga of mass cruelty, of rape and butchery.
In one town, the Turkish police separated husbands, sons and old men from their families and locked the women and children into a courtyard with high walls. From outside came blood-curdling shrieks. As Fethiye records, “Heranus and her brothers clung to their mother’s skirts, but though she was terrified, she was desperate to know what was going on. Seeing that another girl had climbed on to someone’s shoulders to see over the wall, she went to her side. The girl was still looking over the wall; when, after a very long while, she came down again, she said what she had seen. All her life, Heranus would never forget what came from this girl’s lip: ‘They’re cutting the men’s throats, and throwing them into the river.’”
Fethiye says she wrote her grandmother’s story to “reconcile us with our history; but also to reconcile us with ourselves” which, as Freely writes, cuts right through the bitter politics of genocide recognition and denial. Of course, Ataturk’s decision to move from Arabic to Latin script also means that vital Ottoman documents recalling the genocide cannot be consulted by most modern-day Turks. At about the same time, it’s interesting to note, Stalin was performing a similarly cultural murder in Tajikistan where he moved the largely Persian language from Arabic to Cyrillic.
And so history faded away. And I am indebted to Cosette Avakian, who sent me Fethiye’s book and who is herself the granddaughter of Armenian survivors and who brings me news of another memorial of Armenians, this time in Wales. Wales, you may ask? And when I add that this particular memorial – a handsome Armenian cross embedded in stone – was vandalised on Holocaust Memorial Day last January, you may also be amazed. And I’m not surprised because not a single national paper reported this outrage. Had it been a Jewish Holocaust memorial stone that was desecrated, it would – quite rightly – have been recorded in our national newspapers. But Armenians don’t count.
As a Welsh Armenian said on the day, “This is our holiest shrine. Our grandparents who perished in the genocide do not have marked graves. This is where we remember them.” No one knows who destroyed the stone: a request for condemnation by the Turkish embassy in London went, of course, unheeded, while in Liverpool on Holocaust Day, the Armenians were not even mentioned in the service.
Can this never end? Fethiye’s wonderful book may reopen the past, but it is a bleak moment to record that when the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was prosecuted for insulting “Turkishness”, Fethiye defended him in court. Little good it did Dink. He was murdered in January last year, his alleged killer later posing arrogantly for a picture next to the two policemen who were supposed to be holding him prisoner. It was in Dink’s newspaper Agos that Fethiye was to publish her grandmother’s death notice. This was how Heranus’s Armenian sister in America came to read of her death. For Heranus’s mother survived the death marches to remarry and live in New York.
Wales, the United States, even Ethiopia, where Cosette Avakian’s family eventually settled, it seems that every nation in the world is home to the Armenians. But can Turkey ever be reconciled with its own Armenian community, which was Hrant Dink’s aim? When Fethiye found her Aunt Marge in the US – this was Heranus’ sister, of course, by her mother’s second marriage – she tried to remember a song that Heranus sang as a child. It began with the words “A sad shepherd on the mountain/Played a song of love…” and Marge eventually found two Armenian church choir members who could put the words together.
“My mother never missed the village dances,” Marge remembered. “She loved to dance. But after her ordeal, she never danced again.” And now even when the Welsh memorial stone that stands for her pain and sorrow was smashed, the British Government could not bring itself to comment. As a member of the Welsh Armenian community said at the time, “We shall repair the cross again and again, no matter how often it is desecrated.” And who, I wonder, will be wielding the hammer to smash it next time?
Turkish President Abdullah Gul will face street protests if he accepts his Armenian counterpart’s invitation to visit Yerevan and watch the upcoming match between the national football teams of the two countries, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) reiterated on Thursday.
President Serzh Sarkisian extended the invitation to Gul earlier this summer to underscore his desire to improve Armenia’s historically strained relations with Turkey. Ankara offered to engage in a “dialogue” with Yerevan shortly after he took office in April.
Dashnaktsutyun, which is represented in Sarkisian’s coalition cabinet and has traditionally favored a harder line on Turkey, makes no secret of its disapproval of the invitation. Aghvan Vartanian, a leader of the nationalist party, reaffirmed its plans to stage demonstrations against what would be the first-ever visit to Armenia by a Turkish head of state.
“If President Gul visits Armenia to watch the game, there will be meetings, protests and calls against Turkey,” Vartanian told a news conference. “But that will not be organized only by Dashnaktsutyun.”
“We have problems with Turkey and solutions to those problems relate to the future, rather than the past,” he said.
Vartanian made clear that Sarkisian can not force Dashnaktsutyun to reconsider its plans. “Dashnaktsutyun has always been an independent political force and has expressed its positions on various issues regardless of what others will think,” he said.
Dashnaktsutyun leaders earlier expressed concern about Sarkisian’s stated readiness to accept, in principle, Turkey’s proposal to form a commission of Turkish and Armenian historians that would jointly examine the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. They said Turkish recognition of the massacres as genocide is a necessary condition for normalizing bilateral ties.
Over the past two years, the Armenian Weekly has published dozens of interviews with and articles written by Turkish dissident scholars, journalists, and human rights activists in an effort to provide a first-hand account of political and civil society developments in Turkey.
Starting this week, and for the first time in the history of post-genocide Armenian print media, we take another major step in that vein: An Istanbul-based Turkish journalist and human rights activist starts a column in the Weekly.
The bi-weekly column, titled “Letters from Istanbul,” will deal with Turkish political and social issues, in general. The columnist, Ayse Gunaysu, is a familiar name to the readers of the Weekly. She contributed articles to the April 24 special publications in 2007 and 2008.
Gunaysu is a professional translator and human rights advocate. She has been a member of the Committee Against Racism and Discrimination of the Human Rights Association of Turkey (Istanbul branch) since 1995, and was a columnist in a pro-Kurdish daily from 2005–07.
The Weekly welcomes her to the long and distinguished list of columnists in its 75-year history. We appreciate her courage in accepting our invitation to regularly contribute to the Weekly.
Below is Gunaysu’s first column
By Ayse Gunaaysu
It’s not the first time that a mainstream newspaper in Turkey features a highly provocative front page headline making an unfounded accusation that would obviously incite public hatred and animosity towards the “other.”
I’m talking about Hurriyet, one of the biggest circulation newspapers in Turkey. It’s front page headline on Aug. 3 named the PKK—the outlawed Kurdish armed organization—as the perpetrator of the July 28 bombing in Istanbul that killed 17 people. The news item reported in detail how one of the nine suspects detained—the “bomber”—entered Turkey illegally and how he watched, in cold blood, people dye in the explosion.
What the readers of Hurriyet—whose logo reads “Turkey belongs to Turks”—couldn’t learn from their newspaper was that, after a thorough police and then public prosecutor’s interrogation, the court had detained the suspects not on charges related to the July 28 bombing but because they were members of an outlawed organisation. The court ruling for the arrest of the suspects had made no mention of the bombing at all. This was because there was practically no evidence to accuse any of the nine persons taken in custody of being the bomber or being linked in any way with the bombing. The daily Taraf, interviewing the family and the employer of the suspect, reported in its Aug. 5 issue that the alleged bomber did not enter Turkey illegally, but was, in fact, a textile worker working uninterruptedly in the same factory for the past seven years and living with his family.
On the same page, next to this news item, Ahmet Altan, son of the legendary Labour Party member of the Turkish parliament in the 1960’s, starts his column by saying that the fundamental aim of justice is not to catch a criminal but to protect the innocent. Justice, he continues, catches and punishes the criminal for the sake of protecting the innocent. And the biggest fear of justice is to punish an innocent. With his usual forceful style, he uses “is” instead of “should be,” just to underline that using the format “should be” is not enough in formulating such a vital principle and that this should be an axiom, a categorical, rather than a conditional rule.
However, despite the fact that the court ruling is open to all, the Minister of Interior and other government spokespersons declared the suspect as the bomber, without making any reference to Taraf’s counter-arguments.
Several newspapers, including Taraf and Radikal, reported that the PKK had disowned the bombing and condemned it. The group’s spokesperson had clearly stated that the bombing had nothing to do with the “Kurdish liberation movement,” and that they were against the killing of civilians and believed this looked like one of the secret operations staged many times in the past.
Hurriyet’s headline and the provocative report supporting the Minister’s statement is not just an example of poor reporting practice. This is a country where the ongoing armed clashes for the past 30 years has triggered, every now and then, mass aggressions on Kurdish immigrants trying to make a living in the cities far away from their war-stricken home villages. Several times in the outskirts of big cities, Kurdish laborers working at terribly low wages without any social security have been the target of lynch attempts following rumors that they were linked with the PKK. The buildings of the DTP, the Kurdish party represented in parliament with 17 deputies, have at times been attacked by ultra-nationalists, and several years ago a bus carrying DTP members was destroyed by stone-throwing mobs yelling anti-Kurdish slogans in Gebze, a district of Istanbul, leaving dozens of people injured. More recently, a conference hall where the DTP held a meeting was blockaded for hours by thousands of people, with police doing nothing about it, and a DTP member dying of a heart attack in the process. In other words, Hurriyet knew very well that such an accusation, proven to be unfounded by the court ruling, carried the potential of triggering a new surge of anti-Kurdish sentiment among ultra-nationalists.
But, yes, this is not the first time. For decades, semi-official Turkish newspapers provoked hatred towards the “enemies of the nation”—sometimes the “communists,” many times the “disloyal minorities,” and frequently the “Kurdish separatists.” Throughout many tragic events in the history of Turkey, not to mention the minor ones, headlines in newspapers have served as a catalyst in stirring frantic masses to action.
Turkish readers were introduced to the history press’s role in various incidents of ethnic and religious mass aggression towards non-Muslims in Rifat Bali’s book Cumhuriyet Yillarinda Turkiye Yahudileri: Bir Turklestirme Seruveni, roughly translated to Jews of Turkey in the Republican Period: A Story of Turkification (Iletisim, 1999).
I’m not even talking about the ultra-nationalist and ultra-Islamist newspapers’ routine hate speech here, but the practice of one of the biggest dailies in Turkey. The routine hate speech in extremist publications includes open insults aimed at Armenians, Jews, and Kurds and personal attacks on religious leaders of minorities. But while there are laws protecting Turkishness from being insulted, there are none that protect non-Turks from insult in Turkey.
These are the days when, for the first time in this country’s history, a legal case is under way against figures who were pointed out by human rights advocates for years as having dark ties with the “special war machine” within the state, what is known in Turkey as the “deep state.” These are the times when the DTP, the independent Istanbul deputy Ufuk Uras, and various other opposition circles are calling for a deeper investigation that would pave the way for some kind of partial catharsis and a much better democracy, rather than a superficial washing of the hands of the most visible criminals already known very well by some. In the midst of such unpredictability, some people—like the editors of Hurriyet—further blur the public’s perception by means of unfounded accusations against the nation’s hate figures such as the PKK and the Kurds. After all, inciting hatred and animosity is the best, most efficient, and most sustainable means of manipulation.