Category: Main Issues

  • Cyprus and the myth of Humpty Dumpty

    Cyprus and the myth of Humpty Dumpty

    CYPRUS MAIL

    01.01.2015

     

    Dervish Eroglu &  Nicos Anastasiades with UN in between

    By Gavin Jones

    WHEN we were children, many of us were brought up with and inspired by the magical tales of the Greek myths which were dominated by such characters as Hercules with his 12 labors, Jason searching for the Golden Fleece, Perseus battling the multi-headed Gorgon Medusa and a host of other wonderful adventures. In all probability, at an early age these stories gave us the impetus to take up reading as a worthwhile pursuit and helped us to fire our imagination and open our eyes to the many wonders and possibilities that surrounded us.

    In the modern Hellenic world, the propensity for myth-making and exaggeration is very much alive and well and ever more so in its eastern outpost, Cyprus. Hardly a day goes by when some Minister or worthy announces that some fantastical project or discovery will soon come to pass and that the island’s current woes will be a distant memory: gas extraction; LNG terminal; pipelines to Egypt, Israel, Greece and all points of the compass; hubs for medical tourism, port facilities and other such ‘hubs’; tourist resorts complete with seaplane facilities; Chinese trade exhibition hall; Qatari hotel, apartment and shopping mall; the overall recovery of the economy and the upward trend of the banking sector. The list is endless.
    We then come to the long running national issue, more commonly known as the Cyprus Problem. Of all the fables that have been bandied about over the decades, those concerning this issue must surely take pride of place as it’s been the most prolific in terms of wishful thinking and myth generation as we enter 2015.

    In the wake of the general consensus between Makarios and Denktash over 35 years ago that the island should become a bizonal, bi-communal federation, what has been achieved since? Absolutely nothing. Apart, that is, from plenty of mud-slinging and yet more myth-making. Greek Cypriot politicians have implored the refugees to remain strong as a solution would soon be forthcoming. The Church reinforced this view. In addition, the retort ‘All refugees to their homes’ is another cruel fallacy along with the inference that those refugees resorting to the Immovable Property Commission in the north were as good as traitors to the ‘patriotic’ cause.

    The reality is that successive Greek Cypriot governments and politicians have made it abundantly clear that they’ve never been serious about a settlement and have merely gone through the motions for both domestic and international consumption. As for occasional references by these same politicians that the Turkish Cypriots are their ‘brothers’, this is fanciful in the extreme and ranks as insincerity in its crudest form.

    That other great folklore that’s often quoted is that Greek and Turkish Cypriots lived in perfect harmony with one another and that any discord was encouraged and fomented by perfidious Albion during the EOKA struggle years. Television programes such as Biz/Emeis foster this idea with octogenarian Cypriots recalling how each community used to visit one another’s houses and attended their respective religious festivals together.

    All well and good but the reality was rather different. The village in the Karpas peninsula where my mother and grandmother were born was mixed and while there was no open hostility between the two communities, by and large they led very separate existences. To reinforce this reality, there was no intermarriage (There were exceptions but these were extremely rare occurrences).
    The modus operandi of the Legislative Council confirms the above. This body was set up by the British colonial administration with the express aim of allowing a certain degree of involvement in the running of the island by the ‘natives’.

    In the 1920s and early 1930s, there were 12 GC elected members, of whom my grandfather was one, and 3 TC members. Unsurprisingly, each community as often as not voted along partisan lines. Furthermore, my grandfather who was a passionate advocate of ENOSIS, Union with Greece, often clashed with his TC colleagues in the Council as they stated that Turkey had a much better claim on Cyprus. (These exchanges are there in black and white via the Cyrus Research Centre publication, ‘Texts and Studies of the History of Cyprus’. The nearest equivalent would be Hansard which publishes the daily goings-on in the British parliament).

    In conclusion, the social and political differences between the two principal communities have existed since time immemorial and those who currently govern the island continue to ignore them and pursue the myth that Humpty Dumpty, barring one or two adjustments, can politically be put back together again and return to his former status and position on the wall. In the context of Cyprus, the reality is that there were always two such characters who fell off it. And even if their respective shells are indeed put back together again, ultimately they’re more likely to be sitting at opposite ends of the same wall rather than side by side – if not on two different walls.

     

     Kufi Seydali

     

  • There Was and There Was Not

    There Was and There Was Not

    A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

    by Meline Toumani

    There Was and There Was Not

    Hardcover, 286 pages, Henry Holt & Co, List Price: $28 | purchase

    NPR Summary

    Documents the author’s experiences as an Armenian-American who was raised in a close-knit community and her provocative decision to move to Istanbul to learn the realities of Turkish citizens she was taught to hate.

    Read an excerpt of this book

    Excerpt: There Was And There Was Not

    There Was and There Was Not

    1

    When We Talk About What Happened

    I had never, not for a moment, imagined Turkey as a physical place. Certainly not a beautiful place. But it was all I could do to get through my first taxi ride from the Istanbul airport into the city—the first of perhaps a hundred on that route, as I came and went and came back again and again over the span of four years before I was finished—without letting the driver see me cry. I shifted a bit so that my face would not be visible in the rearview mirror.

    The sight of water was what did it. Istanbul is a city laced by three seas: the Marmara, the Bosphorus Strait, and the Black Sea. This struck me as utterly absurd. From as early as I knew anything, I had known Turkey only as an idea: a terrifying idea, a place filled with people I should despise. Somehow, through years of attending Armenian genocide commemorations and lectures about Turkey’s denial of the genocide, of boycotting Turkish products, of attending an Armenian summer camp whose primary purpose seemed to be to indoctrinate me with the belief that I should fight to take back a fifth of the modern Turkish state—somehow in all of that, it never occurred to me to wonder what Istanbul, or the rest of Turkey, looked like. And here it was, a magnificent, sea-wrapped city, as indifferent to my imagination as I had been to its reality.

    Was it anger I felt, something like what James Baldwin described when he recalled descending in a plane to the American South for the first time and seeing the stunning red hills of Georgia below him? “This earth had acquired its color from the blood that dripped down from the trees,” Baldwin wrote. I felt something like that, and the thought that now formed in a place I didn’t know I still had within me was: how, after everything they’ve done, do they get to have a place that looks like this?

    No, that’s not true. Anger was only what I was supposed to feel, what I perhaps even hoped to rekindle, when I arrived in Turkey, alone, looking out the window as the water chased the road all the way to my hotel. What I actually felt was loss. Not the loss of a place, of a physical homeland—that was for others to mourn. This had never been my homeland. The loss I felt was the loss of certainty, a soothing certainty of purpose that in childhood had girded me against life’s inevitable dissatisfactions; a certainty that as a college student and later as a journalist in New York City had started to fray, gradually and then drastically; a certainty whose fraying began to divide me uncomfortably from the group to which I belonged, from other Armenians. The embracing, liberating expanse of Istanbul’s waters, and the bridges that crossed them, and the towers on hills that rose up and swept down in every direction, made me realize upon sight that I had spent years of emotional energy on something I had never seen or tried to understand.

    This was 2005. I had come to Turkey that summer because I am Armenian and I could no longer live with the idea that I was supposed to hate, fear, and fight against an entire nation and people. I came because it had started to feel embarrassing to refuse the innocent suggestions of American friends to try a Turkish restaurant on the Upper East Side, or to bristle when someone returned from an adventurous Mediterranean vacation, to brood silently until the part about how much they loved Turkey was over. I came because being Armenian had come to feel like a choke hold, a call to conformity, and I could find no greater way to act against this and to claim a sense of myself as an individual than to come here, the last and most forbidden place.

    Does it sound like I’m exaggerating? Is there such a thing as nationalism that is not exaggerated?

    * * *

    WHEN WE TALK about what happened, there are very few stories that, once sifted through memory, research, philosophy, ideology, and politics, emerge unequivocal. But there are two things I know to be true.

    One: I know that if your grandmother told you that she watched as her mother was raped and beheaded, you would feel something was yours to defend. What is that thing? Is it your grandmother you are defending? Is it the facts of what happened to her that you are defending, a page in an encyclopedia? Something as intangible as honor? Is it yourself that you are defending? If the story of the brutality that your grandmother encountered were denied or diminished in any way, you would feel certain basic facts of your selfhood extinguished. Your grandmother, who loved you and soothed you, your grandmother whose existence roots you in the world, fixes you somewhere in geography and history. Your grandmother feeds your imagination in a way that your mother and father do not. Imagination is farsighted; it needs distance to discern and define things. If somebody says no, what your grandmother suffered was not really quite as heinous as you’re saying it is, they have said that your existence is not really so important. They have said nothing less than that you don’t exist. This is a charge no human being can tolerate.

    Two: I know that if somebody tells you that you belong to a terrible group of people, you will reject every single word that follows with all the force of your mind and spirit. What if somebody says to you that your history is ugly, your history is not heroic, your history does not have beauty in it? Not only that, you don’t know your history. What you have been taught by your mother and your father and your teachers, it’s false. You will retreat to a bomb shelter in your brain, collapse inward to protect yourself, because what has been said to you is nothing less than that your entire understanding of who you are is in danger. They will have said to you that your existence is without value. You, who wondered now and then what the meaning of your life was, who made a soft landing place for those worries by allowing yourself to feel a certain richness about where you came from and who and what came before you, will be left empty. The story you thought you were a part of does not exist. Neither do you exist.

    Those accusations and their consequences are the first truths we must recognize when we talk about what happened between Armenians and Turks in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. A century after those events, Armenians and Turks—in Turkey, in Armenia, and especially in the widespread diasporas of both countries—believe in two radically different accounts of what happened. “Believe.” It is not a matter of faith, yet it might as well be for the power that these clashing narratives hold.

    What did happen? I will tell you—but I am Armenian. It is almost impossible for me to talk about this history. Not because I find it painful to talk about—for me to claim that particular pain would be self-indulgent—but because the terms of the conversation have evolved to leave me no satisfactory options. To tell the Armenian version of the story goes against every instinct in me, not because I disagree with it—I do not—but because I know that even if I wanted to believe that the thing in question did not fit the definition of genocide, it would be impossible for me to find my way into that belief. Even if you wanted to believe that I am objective, it would be impossible for you to do so. I also know the pleasure of healthy contrarianism; so when I encounter an outsider who has been intrigued by the Turkish version of this history, I understand his desire to fancy himself open to an alternative point of view. But then I find myself inflamed, needing to convince him all the more. I am doomed to be what is known as an unreliable narrator. I hate the way it feels.

    Newspaper articles dispense with the controversy in the first or final paragraph of any news report concerning Turkey and Armenia:

    “Turkey denies that the deaths constituted genocide, contending the toll has been inflated and the casualties were victims of civil war. It says Turks also suffered losses in the hands of Armenian gangs” (AP).

    “Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks but denies that up to 1.5 million died and that it amounts to genocide, as Armenia views it” (Reuters).

    “The Turkish government says massacres took place in the context of clashes that related to Armenian groups supporting Russia against Turkey during World War I” (Bloomberg).

    This expository shrug is the peace that copyeditors the world over have made with the issue that, more than any other, defines the collective psychology of Armenians and of Turks, defines their educations, the development of their cultures, their political horizons, and—let me not call it any less than it is—their souls. Because what else but your soul can we speak of when, one hundred years later in your otherwise liberal and tolerant life, the very sound of the name of a country makes your head blur and your limbs tighten?

    Now and then governments get involved, by participating in what Armenians refer to as “recognition.” In my life, this general word, “recognition,” with its various potential applications in the vast and flexible English language, had by the time I was eleven or twelve come to denote, with Pavlovian consistency, only one thing: recognition of the Armenian genocide.

    Recognition: It is sought and secured anywhere possible, from the city council of Milan to the parliament of New South Wales, Australia. It has been granted in the form of official resolutions, commemorative statements, and board decisions from institutions large and small, including the European Union and at least twenty countries, forty-three US states, various American cities from Santa Fe to Minneapolis, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the New York Times. Their usage of the word genocide is tracked on lists that are ranked and counted each year in the run-up to April 24, Armenian genocide remembrance day.

    For Armenians, recognition is not only institutional; tacit acknowledgment is expected on an individual basis, too. There was the thesis committee in college who reviewed my eighty-page paper about—what else could it be about?—the genocide; and there were friends (the subject has a way of coming up if you are Armenian) and boyfriends, too, and God help them if they tried to tease or argue.

    Recognition means all of that, but what it really means is the United States Congress, that mysterious holdout, at once powerfully stubborn and surprisingly malleable and, as of yet, unwilling to fully appease the Armenians. Recognition means an official shift in terminology by the US president and the State Department, and one administration after another has withheld reprieve. On another level of importance, separated by an order of magnitude that straddles the realms of the possible and the inconceivable, recognition means Turkey.

    To some Armenians, recognition means reparations from Turkey: to the true zealots, land; to the slightly more pragmatic, money. To most, it simply means the official usage of the word genocide. To me, it came to mean that I could no longer stand to attend any Armenian gathering, because it seemed that whether it was a poetry reading, a concert, or even a sporting match, it was always, ultimately, about the genocide.

    Or was it? At some point I started to wonder. Not about what had happened, exactly, and not about whether the term genocide was applicable. It is clear that between 1915 and 1923, in Ottoman Turkey, a history-shifting number of Armenians, probably between eight hundred thousand and one million, were killed outright or driven to death on the watch of a government that was supposed to protect them; another million or so survived deportation to the Syrian desert or fled just in time to avoid it. These events echoed but exceeded earlier pogroms against Armenians, in the 1890s and 1909. The violence happened in fits and starts and was entangled with, though not fully explained by, the circumstances of World War I; and was complicated by the degrees to which different regional leaders throughout Turkey obeyed or defied central orders. In a few of the hundreds of towns and villages affected, Armenian nationalist committees seeking greater rights or independence staged violent resistance, and as a result, about thirty thousand Turks and Kurds were killed by Armenians, too. Of the 2.5 million Armenians then living in the Ottoman Empire, a few thousand men in border cities joined the Russian army against the Turks. When the fighting was over, only two hundred thousand Armenians were left in Ottoman lands, lands Armenians had called home for twenty centuries. Armenians had faced genocide. And the empire that had contained and then expelled them was itself dissolved and reborn as the Republic of Turkey.

    What I started to wonder about was whether “recognition”—propagating the usage of the word genocide to every corner of the world like a smallpox shot—was what we really needed. Arguments for recognition spoke of “justice” or “honoring the memory,” but these had turned into hollow platitudes for me. Claims that human rights were at stake seemed disingenuous; and when Armenian lobbying groups yoked the cause to a platform of saving Darfur, it seemed motivated more by PR than conscience. Then there was that well-intentioned but unattainable promise, the favorite argument of first and last resort, repeated over and over by scholars and laymen alike: “Never again.” That if a tragedy were recognized by the world, if massacre were transfigured into punishment and compensation, such a horror would not be repeated. Doesn’t all evidence suggest that this is untrue?

    Let me put it less coldly: I wondered whether our obsession with genocide recognition was worth its emotional and psychological price. I wondered whether there was a way to honor a history without being suffocated by it, to belong to a community without conforming to it, a way to remember a genocide without perpetuating the kind of hatred that gave rise to it in the first place. And as I questioned the underlying needs that drove my own community, I wanted to understand what drove Turks to cling to their view. Why couldn’t they admit it? This was the simple (or simplistic) question that took me to Turkey.

    In both Armenian and Turkish, a particular phrase signals the start of a story: “There was and there was not.” In Armenian, Gar u chgar. In Turkish, Bir varmis bir yokmus. There was, and also there was not, a long time ago, in a place far away, an old man, a talking horse, a magical kingdom. Once there was, and once there wasn’t. It is an acknowledgment not only of the layers and complexities of truth in a given story, but of the subordination of a storyteller to the tale she tells. It is my way of saying that this is where we find ourselves now—locked in a clash of narratives that confuses outsiders, frustrates officials, stifles economies, and warps identities—and no matter what was or was not, this is where we must begin.

    Copyright © 2014 by Meline Toumani

    =================

    Author Explores Armenian Genocide ‘Obsession’ And Turkish Denial

    Listen to the Story

    6 min 17 sec
    Earlier this year, protestors in Los Angeles called for recognition of, and reparations for, the 1915 Armenian genocide executed by Ottoman Turks.

    Earlier this year, protestors in Los Angeles called for recognition of, and reparations for, the 1915 Armenian genocide executed by Ottoman Turks.

    David McNew/Getty Images

    Writer Meline Toumani grew up in a tight-knit Armenian community in New Jersey. There, identity centered on commemorating the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I, a history that’s resulted in tense relations between Armenians and Turks to this day.

    In her new book, There Was and There Was Not, Toumani recounts her attempts to understand Turkey and the Turkish people — people she was always taught were her bitter enemy. She also explores what she calls the Armenian community’s “obsession” with genocide recognition, which she herself harbored.

    “There would be moments where I felt almost embarrassed by a certain deep-seated prejudice in me,” Toumani tells NPR’s Eric Westervelt. “For example, if a friend comes back from vacation in Turkey and they’re talking about it and I’m kind of bristling or brooding and just waiting for that to be over because I know that I can’t say what I feel — which is, you know, ‘I would never go to Turkey. The Turks, you know, killed the Armenians in 1915.’”


    Interview Highlights

    There Was and There Was Not
    There Was and There Was Not

    A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

    by Meline Toumani

    Hardcover, 286 pages purchase

    More on this book:

    • NPR reviews, interviews and more
    • Read an excerpt

    On why she decided to move to Turkey, a sort of forbidden place for Armenians

    I’d have these feelings rise up in me and they didn’t fit anymore in the life that I had created, which was otherwise very progressive and intellectually oriented. And that was when I decided I kind of need to explore this. And through a series of events, it entered my mind that exploring it would mean going to Turkey, talking to Turks; not to try to take seriously the Turkish version of the history of the genocide, but just to understand how does it happen that another group of people have learned this history in a completely different way leading to a completely different conclusion? And is there any way that we can connect if I find the right way to talk about it, or the right way to listen about it?

    On being attacked on Armenian-American news sites for taking on this project

    It’s actually surprisingly painful given that I’ve just written a book that describes the kinds of attitudes that lead to that kind of criticism. … I knew that there would be people who would feel that way, and yet part of what my book is about is this incredible tension between belonging to a community and trying to individuate from it.

    And it’s sad for me to see that some people are so threatened that they’re not even willing to engage, because most of the people publishing those attacks haven’t read the book. In fact, one of them celebrates the fact that he hasn’t read it and in the same breath calls for a boycott.

    On how people in Turkey reacted when they learned she was Armenian

    I was perhaps recklessly optimistic in thinking that things wouldn’t be quite as bad in Turkey regarding the Armenian issue as I had been taught to believe. … In some ways, they were even worse. The thing that shocked me the most was the fact that on a daily basis, you know and this is over the course of two and a half years of living there, people would find out that I was Armenian and sometimes the reaction would be so blunt: “Well, I guess you came here to prove that there was a genocide. I want you to know that I don’t believe that that’s what happened.” Or something like that. And those moments were really jarring and made it very difficult for me to ever really relax. There was a lot of stress in my daily life.

    And I want to be clear, of course, that I also had the opposite reactions, you know. There was a young man who I met outside of a restaurant with some friends, just totally at random on a Saturday night, and when he found out I was Armenian he put his hand over his heart and he said, “I want to welcome you back to your country and I want to apologize on behalf of the Turkish nation.”

    So I would have every manner of reaction, but to be honest, most of the reactions ranged from pretending I hadn’t said anything at all to saying something sort of blunt and harsh.

    On where relations between Turks and Armenians stand today

    It was a few years ago already that I left Turkey. And in the time since then, there have been some big changes. For example, on April 24, 2014 — which was the 99th-year commemoration of the Armenian genocide — in Istanbul you had several events commemorating the genocide openly and without any kind of the contorted language that you might have had in the past.

    Also [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan made a statement that was very much falling short but at the same time really breaking new ground in acknowledging that something tragic had happened to the Armenians. And although he, you know, was very careful not to call it a genocide and to say everyone suffered and to use a lot of the same rhetoric that he has always used, I consider it a major step.

    =====================================================

    Meline Toumani: Genocide and Narrative Ambiguity

    meline toumani
    photo: Mark Smith

    Born in Iran and ethnically Armenian, Meline Toumani grew up in a close-knit Armenian community in New Jersey, where the genocide of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turkish government in 1915 and hatred of the Turks were defining facts of life. In 2005, Toumani did the unthinkable and moved to Istanbul on a quest to understand how to remember a genocide without being crippled by it.

    You went to Turkey because you “could no longer live with idea that I was supposed to hate, fear and fight against an entire nation and people.” Could you describe the process that led you to that position?

    Coming from a family that was not directly involved in the genocide and that had a very strong sense of Iranian-Armenian ethnicity gave me a little bit of space to question and look from the outside. At home our identity was many things, but it wasn’t really about hating Turkey or being obsessed with the genocide. But when I participated in community activities, which was all the time, it came to me that this was a dominant part of our identity as a community. Since I didn’t have that direct experience and I didn’t have a grandmother who had told me some horrific story about what she had suffered, I had one foot in and one foot out.

    So, without questioning the reality of the genocide, you began to wonder whether focusing on genocide recognition was helpful for your community?

    I definitely wasn’t questioning what happened. When you’ve been immersed in something like that for your entire life, it’s a part of you. But it began to feel to me that the community was not psychologically well.

    A lot of that manifested for me in looking at creativity and expression within the community. The [genocide] narrative was holding us hostage. As an Armenian, whatever you do has to serve that in some way–through your volunteer work or as a playwright or a musician or whatever. You’re not just addressing the history or the culture. You’re addressing this political impasse. A piece of writing that sets out with a political agenda is going to be limited from the beginning. You can’t explore its emotional and psychological dimensions freely.

    Early on in my work I tried to frame it in a political way: “genocide recognition campaigns are bad for Armenia because it’s creating a climate in which diplomatic relations can’t be established.” I was trying to establish a geopolitical argument for why genocide recognition was problematic, but it’s more about an existential condition than it is about a political argument.

    At one point you use the phrase “soft recognition”: the idea that you can make changes one person at a time. Is that where you started when you got to Turkey? I don’t think it’s where you ended.

    I’m very glad that you understood that. That is where I started and that’s not where I ended. I had this vision that if there were just a certain way to portray the Turks to the Armenians and a certain way to portray the Armenians to the Turks, and if I could behave in a certain way as an Armenian among Turks, I could open up some speech where people would realize that the other side wasn’t so bad.

    Then [Armenian journalist] Hrant Dink was assassinated. He was the ultimate case of someone really trying to connect and he was murdered because of it. Not in spite of it but exactly because of it. That moment had a huge impact on me. I was well into the project, and it really threw me for a loop as to what was I really doing here. Especially when I went back to Turkey and experienced discrimination and intolerance for Armenians every single day in so many ways large and small, spoken and unspoken. My intention was to be diplomatic and tactful and pleasant in talking to people and not offend anyone and not be too belligerent with Turks because I wanted to open up the pathway to communicate.

    After two and a half years–this comes toward the end of the book–I realized I had to get out of there because I’d completely lost track of what I believe in. That led to a lot of self-questioning about what set me off into this project in this first place. The way I ended the book is that it really wasn’t about Turkey or Armenia or the genocide, but about how to find a way to individuate yourself.

    Your title, There Was and There Was Not, has such a fairy-tale quality.

    I’ve been waiting a long time to tell somebody about the title!

    When I first started, the working title was “Silence and Madness.” The idea was that you have this overwhelming silence on the subject on the part of Turkey and this growing madness in the Armenian diaspora and these two things play off of each other. As I got further and further into the work, I realized silence wasn’t relevant any more in Turkey. Hrant Dink was murdered and suddenly there wasn’t silence anymore.

    Then I was sitting with my parents at a café in Yerevan [Armenia]. We had been shopping in the outdoor market and my mom had bought a bunch of books. She opened one and started reading from it in Armenian: “There was and there also was not.” I heard that a million times growing up in stories. The previous week in Istanbul, in a Turkish class, we had been reading a story that started, “There was and there also was not.” I suddenly was struck that we started the stories in exactly the same way. I told my parents about having read that in my Turkish workbook. My dad said, “That’s your title!” We looked at each other–you can’t say that because that’s like you’re saying there was a genocide and there wasn’t a genocide. Then I realized it captured exactly what I was trying to do with the book in all sorts of ways.

    I felt at first hamstrung by the fact that I’m an Armenian telling the story and [thus] expected to be an unreliable narrator. I was really attached to the narrative ambiguity of what happens when someone tells you a story and they tell you at the outset that there was and there was not. The storyteller puts that on you from the beginning and you have to sit with it the entire time.

    What do you hope readers will take away from your book?

    My biggest fear, to the extent that I want to reach Armenian and Turkish readers and have an impact on the conversation between the communities, is that the people who read only the first two chapters will completely misunderstand. Armenians who read the first chapters will think I’m some kind of traitor and hate me for it. And the Turks who only read the first two chapters will think, “Oh great, Armenians are just as crazy as we thought.”

    You answered in terms of Armenian and Turkish readers. What about other readers?

    Often the immigrant experience comes to us in a cute package, like My Big Fat Greek Wedding. “Oh look at the funny old grandmother in her black widow costume and the aunt who’s trying to feed you.” That’s a very real part of the immigrant experience in America in a lot of ethnic groups, but it underplays the extreme existential crisis that comes from having that kind of bifurcation in your life. This is not a cute clichéd thing about bringing egg rolls to school when all the other kids have sandwiches. There is crisis in a lot of different parts of your life and your psyche when you have that experience. Perhaps I darken it a bit? –Pamela Toler

    ============================================================

    Metropolitan Books: There Was and There Was Not by Meline Toumani
    Metropolitan Books: There Was and There Was Not by Meline Toumani
    Metropolitan Books: There Was and There Was Not by Meline Toumani
    Metropolitan Books: There Was and There Was Not by Meline Toumani

    There Was and There Was Not

    by Meline Toumani

    In 2005, Armenian-American journalist Meline Toumani traveled to Turkey–a place she had previously known only as “a terrifying idea”–with the intention of studying Armenia-Turkey relations for a month or two, three at the most. She stayed for two years, with the help of regular “visa runs” over the border. The result of her immersion in a culture she had been trained to “hate, fear and fight” is There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia and Beyond, an engaging and deeply personal exploration of ethnicity, nationalism, history and identity.

    The conflicting Armenian and Turkish narratives regarding the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 defined the Armenian diaspora community of Toumani’s childhood. On the one hand, Turkey has historically denied that the massacre existed, or minimized the scale of the deaths. On the other hand, the Armenian community focuses substantial energy on campaigns designed to pressure the Turkish government to recognize the massacre as genocide. Toumani had reached the point where the dominance of the genocide narrative felt like an artistic and emotional chokehold. She set out to Turkey in an attempt to answer two questions: How could she honor her history without being suffocated by it, and why do Turks cling to their version of the events of 1915?

    Toumani brings the reader along on a voyage of discovery that begins with her growing doubts about the emotional, psychological and political costs of the Armenian diaspora’s focus on Turkish recognition of the genocide; it ends with Toumani defying rules about neutrality in the press box by screaming her support of Armenia at a World Cup match between Armenia and Turkey in Istanbul. In between, she tells a story riddled with unreliable narrators, unreliable listeners, lost memories, lost history, false assumptions and real places transformed by the imagination. She establishes the constantly shifting ground of her experience at the beginning when her plane lands in Istanbul and she realizes she has never imagined Turkey as a physical place. She is stunned by the country’s beauty and charmed by what she describes as the “particular sweetness of Turkish manners”; she actively enjoys learning the Turkish language. (The contrast between Toumani’s phobia about speaking Armenian and her delight in learning Turkish is typical of her skilled use of irony and reversal to enrich her narrative.) At the same time, she is repeatedly dismayed and occasionally enraged by the ways in which Turkey erases traces of the Armenian past: the opening ceremony of a newly renovated Armenian church as a UNESCO world heritage site that makes no reference to Armenians; a museum visit in which she discovers that hundreds of years of Armenian civilization in Anatolia don’t appear on the time line or the map; brochures and travel guides that describe Armenian artifacts in southeastern Turkey but never identify them as Armenian.

    Moving between Turkey and the Republic of Armenia, Toumani shares her experiences of events as important as the assassination of Turkish-born Armenian journalist and civil rights activist Hrant Dink and as small as the street vendors calling their wares on the street outside her apartment. She finds friends and allies among the Turkish activists, journalists, scholars and lawyers who have taken up the Armenian issue, often at the risk of prison or worse. She speaks to millionaires, dentists and cab drivers; Turkish scholars dedicated to cooperating across ethnic lines and Turkey’s official historian; Turkish-Armenians and Armenians from the former Soviet republic; Kurds, Turkish nationalists and an ethnic Turk who refuses to identify himself as Turkish. She encounters Turks who are uncomfortable with the fact that she is Armenian and Turks who struggle to find a point of connection (described by Toumani as the “narcissism of small similarities”).

    Over the course of the book, the clear-cut oppositions with which Toumani begins her project become more nuanced. Even the unity of the Armenian community itself becomes more complex as she examines the different concerns of the diaspora; Turkish-Armenians (described by members of the diaspora community as Bolsahay–a term that avoids describing them as Turkish) and citizens of the Republic of Armenia; those whose families survived the genocide and those whose families were not directly involved; and the ideological divide between those who support the activist Dashnak Party of the Republic and those who do not.

    There Was and There Was Not is neither a history of the genocide nor an examination of its political ramifications for the modern world. It is the story of one woman’s attempt to understand her community, its fundamental assumptions, and herself. Written in a conversational style that is by turns heart-wrenching and unexpectedly funny, There Was and There Was Not will appeal not only to those interested in questions of the Armenian genocide but to readers interested in the larger questions of how individuals define themselves within communities and how communities define themselves. –Pamela Toler

    Metropolitan Books/Holt, $28, hardcover, 9780805097627, November 2014

    Metropolitan Books: There Was and There Was Not by Meline Toumani

  • THE ADDRESS DELIVERED BY MR. TAL BUENOS

    THE ADDRESS DELIVERED BY MR. TAL BUENOS

    24. November 2014
    NEW SOUTH WALES PARLIAMENT
    AUSTRALIA

    I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, who are the traditional custodians of this land on which we are gathered. I would also like to pay my respect to the elders past and present of the Eora nation and extend that respect to other Aboriginal people present.

    I would also like to acknowledge, the presence of the Members of Parliament here with us, and other distinguished guests.

    I would also like to thank the New South Wales Parliament and the Parliamentary Friends of Turkey for inviting me to speak in this parliament.

    This is my first time here in Australia. Upon arrival yesterday, I heard some stories about sharks. Considering the media here, I imagined how interesting it would be for a headline to read “Genocide denier attacks shark,” and in the story the “genocide denier” would be quoted as saying “what shark?”

    WAS IT A GENOCIDE?

    Well, was it a genocide? Why is this even asked? Why do people want to characterize an event without having to study what happened… a century ago? And – how about this for a preliminary question – what is genocide?

    Genocide is a characterization of an event. Genocide is not the event itself. It is an epithet, not a name of an event. It is a legal characterization given to an event if the event falls within the meaning of the term as defined in the Convention adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948.

    According to Article 2, genocide means an act committed with “intent to destroy,” and the group that is being destroyed is either national, ethnical, racial or religious, and is destroyed as such. That’s what it says. Notice the “as such.” Notice that “political” is not mentioned as a group identifier. The victims of a response to a rebellion are not victims of genocide, no matter what. If you do not want your wife, your husband, your child or your next door neighbour to be burdened by your own act of rebelliousness, then the time to think of it is before committing an act of rebelliousness against the state. The intent on the part of the state in cases of a reaction to rebellion is to maintain sovereignty, not to destroy a group of people. Remove the political condition of rebellion, and you shall also remove whatever state aggression happens as a result. No rebellion, no deportations, no massacres. The rebelling group, though it may have a national, ethnical, racial, or religious identity, is a political group once its purpose is to replace the sovereign, once its intent is to destroy the state in its current existence. In the Armenian case in World War One, the Armenian leadership was leading a rebellion under the intention – shared by its sponsors, the Entente – to destroy the Ottoman state. The Ottoman state, was not trying to destroy the Armenian people – and it is a fact that many Armenians in Anatolia were left unharmed – rather, the Ottoman state was trying to save itself, and to survive as a sovereign.

    Considering the weight of the legal characterization that is genocide, a responsible person would not use genocide as a name, unless it was legally determined to be genocide, and Article 6 of the Convention states that persons charged with genocide “shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to those Contracting Parties which shall have accepted its jurisdiction.” These are exact words, and they mean that only suitable courts may charge a person with genocide. Neither of the types of tribunals stated in the article have ever declared that what happened to the Armenians in 1915-16 was genocide, that’s one point. Another point is that persons are to be charged with genocide, not a nation. The third point is that if you look at the wording you see that there was a clear forward-view to the term genocide. Meaning, it was designed to prevent future – future – genocides, and that’s the “shall” part. “Shall” has a clear tense-distinction. Future. That was the idea that was put to paper. Genocide was something to be prevented from happening in the future. It was not designed to become a source for a disingenuous discourse that consists of false accusations about the past.

    WHOSE FAN ARE YOU?

    Now that we have a decent grasp of what genocide is by definition, let us consider the difficulty of characterizing an event in general. It could be any event. There is a difference between facts that make an event and the characterization of the event. We might be looking at the same thing and characterize it differently. It happens in sports regularly. In soccer. I am from Israel, and in Israel to this day, the thought of Australia brings to mind one name: Charlie Yankos. People know him here? Charlie Yankos? Well that name still keeps many Israelis up at night. You’d think there’d be other names to keep Israelis up at night, but no. It’s Charlie Yankos. Israel and Australia used to tangle in the 1980s in the World Cup qualifiers. So, in soccer – it’s a game, it’s a sport, right – say there is a semblance of contact in the penalty box, a possibility of a foul, i.e., an event: do you think both sets of fans are going to characterize the event in the same way? No! They’ll see the same thing, but characterize it differently.

    But that is what historiography does, it characterizes events according to the needs of collective memory, to strengthen group solidarity. The characterization of the event informs us on whose fan you are, than it does on what happened. So whose fan are YOU? Are you a fan in this political game in which only Armenians and Turks are on the field? Who runs this game? Do you want to be the referee? As the referee you’d have the players of both teams begging that you characterize events in a certain way. You don’t see players asking the referee “hey, why are we even playing this game?” They are so caught up in the game. Being the referee in that particular situation is a position of power, as the players of the two teams hold their breaths, waiting for the referee to decide how to characterize what happened. Referees would like to freeze this moment of getting attention, before actually making a decision that will disappoint one of the two sides. Such is the issue between the Armenians and the Turks. For some reason – which is not that big of a mystery if you come to think of it – the referee, or referees are suspending the decision. It might be clear that there was contact but no foul, but the important aspect of this event and its characterization has become this frozen moment in which Turks are shown as having to plead with the referee that there was no foul. It is a humiliating position to be in, if you are the Turks. It is frustrating for the Armenians, who for a long time think that they are about to get a penalty-kick. They’re not going to get it. And let me tell you something important: there are no real referees in the international political system. But a great power, or an aspiring power, would like to be thought of as a referee. Referees are the most powerful when there is a situation in the penalty box. Imagine a referee that was able to delay the decision, and just bask in the moment. Isn’t that a referee’s fantasy, the best of both worlds: to have both teams beg for a favorable decision, and yet not have to make a decision on the characterization of the event. In the game between Armenia and Turkey there are no real referees, there are people who pretend to be referees, but they are actually extensions of whoever is running the game – and they want to freeze this moment, to keep this question of foul contact in the penalty box as long as possible – the most dramatic state of the game on pause – so that the Turkish team will constantly appear as running to the referee in “denial” of having committed a foul. This image of denying that something happened is the whole point, and it has a life of its own, regardless of whether there was a foul in the penalty box. The Turks are constantly shown as saying “no” to something, like the players who run at the referee to say, “no, no penalty.” A century after the contact in the box. The Turks are constantly shown as if they are denying that something happened.

    DENYING A FACT OR REFUTING A CHARACTERIZATION?

    Let’s talk about real denial. Holocaust denial – denial – is something completely different. To say, for instance, that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz is to deny a fact. To say that Jews were not executed by gas chambers, is to say that an event did not happen. In our soccer analogy, to say that the players weren’t even in the box would be a denial of fact, while to say that the contact in the box does not qualify as a foul is to refute a characterization of an event. One denies facts. If something is not a fact, then it is not denied, it’s refuted or rejected. People might call you a denier to make it seem as if they have ownership of facts. It is a tactic. It is my understanding that the Turkish government recognizes the contact in the penalty box; it recognizes every aspect of the Armenian suffering in 1915-16, but it rejects the biased characterization of the event. The fact that those who accuse Turkey of genocide and denial are ignoring Turkey’s clear position, and ignore the distinction made between fact and its characterization, should serve as a strong indication that there is a political commitment at play to press this issue against the Turks regardless of facts. A genuine study is that of facts. To study the actual contact first, before deciding how to characterize the events.

    Those who study the facts full-time, are the very opposite of deniers of facts. Justin McCarthy was here in Australia and he was accused of terrible things. This Dr. McCarthy, whom I have had the pleasure to meet once at a conference in Sarajevo, is not a denier of facts. He is dedicated, as a scholar, to knowing more about what happened. This impressive man, a walking encyclopedia of a man, has spent a lifetime of studying the facts of the events and surrounding the events. I sit and study facts all day. This is what I do. I am not a big-time barrister in London, I am not even a recording artist. This is not a gig for me. I am committed to studying facts. I am finding them. Give me time, and these facts will become known. Give me a platform, and these facts will become known. Would you publish my work here? Do you want to know what happened, or have you already decided to take part in running this political game?

    THE LETTER BY FM JULIE BISHOP

    Even a well-articulated letter such as that drafted by the Honourable Julie Bishop in June – stating that the tragic events are not characterized by the Australian government as genocide – even such a letter only extends the game if it is accompanied by efforts of other branches of the Australian government to utilize the media and education to indirectly promote the belief that the event should be characterized as genocide. It is clear to me that by making the public believe that it was genocide, great pressure is placed on the Turkish government, and then the Western governments reap the benefits of this pressure, and letters such as the one by the Australian Minister of Foreign Affairs are considered a favor to Turkey, to which a price is attached. It is like a coupon that Turkey is expected to accept. However, the jig is up on this type of double play.

    POLITICAL POWER

    Why is it so easy for scholars who are not Ottomanists to publish work that is readily accessible to a wide audience in the US, in the UK, and here in Australia? Why is it so easy to publish a book in which truly skilled scholars such as Dr. McCarthy are disrespected? Why is it so easy to call Turks genocidal? To accuse an entire nation of something so abominable without the expertise, without the knowledge of Ottoman history and language?

    Samantha Power, now representing the United States as its ambassador to New York, she did this. There was power behind this book of hers. Infrastructure. Typically, books that are filled with inaccuracies – the work of shoddy research – are not expected to win prizes. This book won the Pulitzer Prize. No joke. It presented “Turks” as perpetrators of a terrible crime in a matter-of-fact way, used imprecise descriptions, citing fiction as fact, advocating a distinctly anti-Turkish view of history.

    Samantha Power is a political actor. Look at what she said about Russia in the book and what she has to say about Russia now. Her opinion changes according to the political needs of the United States government. Period. So yeah, she did it, she freely tarnished the image of an entire nation without being able to cite Ottoman sources, by simply and unabashedly relying on English writings of Anglo-American political actors. Also, Michael Ignatieff, a famous friend of hers, almost the Canadian prime-minister, did it. Michael Oren, another famous friend of hers, the former American-turned-Israeli ambassador to the United States, he did it. These people are not Ottomanists, and, judging by who they cite, they did not spend any time studying first hand facts on Ottoman history and language. They are famous Harvard scholars and political actors, who have access to readers, and influence public opinion. They do not seem to want to access facts. They have access to readers, to the public. Power. And they use this power to make terrible accusations against Turks in general, that they are genocidal and deniers. Have these scholars no shame? Do we know why people who do not know what happened – and do not want to know what happened – are pretending to know what happened and are clearly popularizing a phrase that combines “Armenian” with “genocide” as if a name? It makes you want to ask “What’s going on?”

    POLITICAL PURPOSE

    Here’s what’s going on. The accusation of genocide serves political purpose. Three main purposes, one that is great-power specific, one that is Turkish-specific, and one that is Armenian-specific.

    The first one, it allows great powers, usually the United States, to replace disfavored regimes in an indirect manner. Instead of just using sheer force to dominate a region, which also happens, it is more advantageous for a great power to do so by setting up a revolt that would lead to a reaction by the sovereign, that would lead to international acceptance of an intervention led by the very same great power that concocted this mess. This way, the sovereign gets the blame for killing its own people, and the great power, typically America, typically if you have oil or other important resources, gets to show up and save the day, as Samantha Power would have it do. Interestingly, the definition of genocide as it was drawn up does not consider political groups to be victims of genocide. Meaning, if a great power wants to stage a genocide in order to topple a regime, then it will have to make it seem as if the group of people is persecuted for religious or ethnic reasons. Other times, the great power just doesn’t care. This happens when the popular perception is all that the great power cares to affect, without having to admit that it is misusing the term in the legal sense. For instance, in oil-filled Libya, those were clearly political rebels who were facing annihilation by [Muammar] Gaddafi, and yet that did not stop President Barack Obama from using the phrase genocide in justifying the planned intervention. By the way, at the time, Power was a member of Obama’s National Security Council. Another point of interest regarding how great powers use the genocide concept is that the Genocide Convention gives no heed to the fact that many massacres are the result of the intent to instigate by a third party to the conflict. It has been common to point a finger at third parties who did not stop massacres, suggesting that they were complicit. However, there is not much discussion in academia on how the Genocide Convention sets free third-party instigators for whom it serves a political interest to encourage a rebellion, even when the terrible consequences are anticipated. In this instance, the great power mobilizes a group within a state to rebel and attempt to replace the sovereign; then, either the rebellion succeeds and the great power achieves a moment of success in its foreign policy, or the rebellion fails and then the sovereign state that quelled the rebellion is blamed for the atrocities of war. This is not genocide, this is sophisticated imperialism.

    The second purpose, the Turkish-specific aspect of the accusation is that it provides the United States and the West with a political tool, a “stick” to raise against Turkey, to press it to make policy decisions according to their wishes, to deny Turkey its place in the European Union, to weaken its image and influence. The lack of a perfect cultural affinity between the US and Turkey has meant that there is no such brotherhood as that which exists among the English speaking countries. Applying for a visa to come here, it was interesting to learn that the information collected as part of my application is to be shared with government agencies in the US, the UK and Canada, the English-speaking gang. Turkey was not one of them. There is no complete trust in Turkey. Turkey’s different. However, if you are the United States, you are thinking that there has to be a way to make sure Turkey always picks up the phone when America calls. Sure, there have been carrots in this relationship. Turkey has done very well since the 1950s thanks to cooperation with the United States. But it’s doing much better now, some might say that things have been going too well for Turkey. Its government has reached a level of stability to the point where measures have finally been taken to reduce the influence of outside entities in Turkey. This is a problem for those who thrive on having outside influence around the world. It means that the Turkish government is vilified on Western TV whenever it has to take bold steps to maintain its democracy through fighting outside interference. It is not necessarily that there are better and lesser democracies, but rather sometimes some democracies face more challenges than others. As Turkey is strong enough to face new challenges it has not faced before, this also means that from the West’s perspective there is a need for means to influence Turkey’s decisions. Hence, the Armenian issue.

    Three, the Armenian-specific purpose of the genocide accusation is that it distracts from a real ongoing grievance, and that is the Armenian occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh. As long as the headlines on the Armenians in the West show them as victims, there is not enough oxygen in the public’s brain to think of them as aggressive occupiers. The Armenian-Azeri conflict is an explosive conflict that has ignited the popularization of the genocide accusation as a proxy-polemic, almost like a replacement-conflict. As long as Nagorno-Karabakh is occupied, Armenian memory will be politicized, and the Armenian people will continue to suffer from this ill-advised politicization of Armenian memory. Instead of better understanding their own past, instead of enjoying greater international relations in their present, the Armenians are locked out of acting toward a more prosperous future for Armenia. It is a simple formula: settle the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh, and the proxy-polemic would fade away, the misuse of genocide will stop. Granted, the genocide accusation began before the occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh, but the two other purposes have already began to lose their momentum.

    STUDYING “THE STUDY OF GENOCIDE”

    There is so much material to be studied – on the British political actors in the late nineteenth century, on the Anglo-American imperialist cooperation leading up to the twentieth century, and on the emergence of genocide as a field of study in the last two-three decades – that over time this information will be revealed and undoubtedly expose the political designs of this genocide accusation against Turkey. There is so much interesting material that there ought to be an association of scholars that are studying the study of genocide, studying the people behind the organization of genocide study: how did this field of genocide study, this genocide study, come into being and why. Study all of these people who made ungrounded accusations against Turkey, name by name, one by one. It is an utter disgrace to accuse an entire people of genocide without caring to study the facts. Why has it been so easy to issue such accusations against the Turkish people? What aspects of prejudice are related to this? Racism? Islamophobia? Racism and Islamophobia not necessarily as the reasons why this accusation is made – the reasons for that are political, as I stated – but racism and Islamophobia may explain why it is so easy in the West to make the accusation and have it be so effective in convincing the public of Turkish wrong-doing.

    “CREDIBLE INDEPENDENT EXPERTS”

    To me, it is an academic priority to understand what such people have done in the name of academia. How political interest has disguised itself as academia. It is already a fact that Cass Sunstein, who happens to be Samantha Power’s husband, and a friend of the US president, pushed for the US government to use scholars for its own interests. On the same year of being appointed the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs – a lofty US government position of information control – he co-authored an article in support of government involvement in academic affairs if it helps the government: “The government can partially circumvent these problems [referring to accusations of conspiracy against the US government] if it enlists credible independent experts… There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that the government cannot be seen to control the independent experts.” This is in the Journal of Political Philosophy, volume 17, issue number 2, 2009, page 223.

    This begs an immediate question that should be asked more and more: How much of this genocide accusation is done by the US government? How much of this academic discussion is really a manifestation of political power? It is important to remember that the term genocide became international law because of power, not morality. Morality is owned by power. The US itself was the driving force behind the convention but it did not sign the ratification of the Genocide Convention until the 1980s. Why? Because it feared that there would be accusations made against what happened to the Native Americans and the African slaves. The American enterprise that is known as the International Association of Genocide Scholars took care of that problem. Out of 20 issues of Genocide Studies International by the IAGS, upon its thousands of pages, only 9 pages of one pathetic article discuss the Native Americans. The verdict, surprise surprise, is that it was not a genocide per se. And that was that. When you have power, you control the conversation, and then you control the content, you control the language, you control what people think, and then you can talk about freedom. Freedom is not a problem for the government that has enough power to control thought. Do you know who thought the Native Americans suffered a genocide plain and simple? Raphael Lemkin.

    RAFAEL LEMKIN

    Let’s talk a bit about Raphael Lemkin. When the term genocide first became published in a 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, under Lemkin’s name, he was employed by the United States government.

    The book has the marking of having more than one author, and it is questionable, in my view, that Lemkin even wrote it, considering the quality of the English and the fact that he had only made it to the US in 1941 for the first time. There was no American TV to influence foreigners’ English at the time. There was no Bonanza or MacGyver on Eastern European TV in the 1930s. He could not have written that book on his own, and yet he does not credit anyone for either translating it or editing it, not even proofreading it. It’s odd. It is even odder considering that in the late 1950s when he was no longer employed by the US government, his autobiography was dismissed by publishers in the US partly because of his poor grammar. This was a problem 15 plus years after he immigrated, but it was not a problem just two-three years after he immigrated to the US? That is really odd. The only way for this to make sense is if he didn’t really write the 1944 book, and, guess what, he was working for the US government at the time, when a whole bunch of ivy-league graduates could do it for him.

    Regardless of who actually wrote the book, it coins genocide without regard to the Armenians. It does not mention Armenians, not even once. And yet, Yair Auron, an Israeli scholar who is affiliated with the Zoryan Institute – that’s an institute that promotes Armenian affairs in academia – is quoted all over the internet as saying “When Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1944 he cited the annihilation of Armenians as a seminal example of genocide.” That is not even a half-truth, but an entirely false statement. Why is this scholar saying such a thing if it is not true? Auron only began to write profusely about the Armenian issue in the 1990s, 15 years after completing a doctoral dissertation on a completely different topic, on Jewish youths in France… he might as well be a barrister. And he still goes on TV shows in Israel, writes for Haaretz from time to time, unopposed, without anybody questioning the veracity of his statements. Notice that I am not calling him names, like is done by such people who call Dr. McCarthy a denier; notice that I am not degrading Auron just because he doesn’t agree with my opinion. I am pointing out an actual statement made by him that is completely false.

    This Dr. Auron has been active in facilitating the teaching of the Armenian case as genocide in Israel, holding a position of influence in the main college in Israel that educates the teachers of tomorrow. There are organizations that frame people’s understanding of history in anti-Turkish ways. An “international educational” organization such as Facing History and Ourselves is said to reach over 1.5 million school kids, through close to 20,000 educators in the US and Switzerland. No wonder, then, that in Switzerland they believe these stories about World War One and Lemkin. A false narrative has made it seem as if Lemkin was inspired by the Armenian suffering to coin genocide. Is it any wonder, then, that when the honourable judges of the European Court of Human Rights corrected the wrong done by the Swiss government and courts that convicted a Turk, Doğu Perinçek, for sticking to his understanding of what happened, even these honourable judges who made this correction, still said, and this is a quote “We know that when Raphael Lemkin (Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, 1944) coined the term genocide, he had in mind the 1915 massacres and deportations” (that’s on page 53 of the English version of their decision)? No, we do not know that. In fact, Lemkin did not express any thought on the Armenians at that time. This falsehood is easily acceptable for reasons that must be examined.

    The truth is that while he was employed by the US government, the Armenian issue did not seem to be on Lemkin’s mind. Why would it be? It was not a US political agenda at the time. After Lemkin was dropped by the government, he wanted to promote the term in every way he could, and promote himself in the process, and he became involved with the activities of American Christian organizations, who already had a long history of involvement in the tensions between Armenians and Muslims. Under their influence he said in an interview to CBS in 1949 – one of these organizations may have arranged for that interview, by the way – that he became interested in genocide because of what happened to the Armenians. However, at a different time, while campaigning for genocide ratification in Italy, and being asked “When did you first become interested in Genocide?” his answer was Armenian-free, made to fit to his audience in Italy. Time and place, audience and purpose, determined his answers. His written autobiography was just as flexible. And yet it is his autobiography, the one that could not get published while he was alive, that Samantha Power cites in her book like it was a mathematical truth.

    At the twilight of his life, while his push for greater discussion on genocide and for Noble Peace Prize nominations was ongoing, Lemkin referred to a total of 62 cases in history – in Antiquity, the Middle-Ages, and Modernity – as genocide. Among them the genocide of Native Americans, he called it the “Genocide against the American Indians,” the genocide by the Greeks against the Turks, the genocide in Belgian Congo. Of the 41 cases in modern times, number 39 states “Armenians.” Number 41 was added in handwriting and says “Natives of Australia.” This does not mean that they were all genocides. These were all researched hurriedly and superficially to gather as many cases for the promotion of the term’s popularity. Not only was the historical research insufficient, over time Lemkin distanced his definition from that of the Genocide Convention and began to follow a home-made definition of genocide. But, what’s interesting is that out of all of these, for some reason – and what is that reason? – the Armenian case, or should I say the anti-Turkish case, is the one that is kept alive, and made into an ongoing and going and going – without being gone – issue. Certainly not forgotten, but falsely advertised as such.

    JAMES BRYCE AT THE CENTER OF THE FALSEHOODS

    This accusation of genocide may still be turned around from falsehoods to greater truths that have yet to be brought out. But first we must expose the falsehoods for what they are. What are the genocide claims based on? Wartime articles in the New York Times? Missionary accounts? Armenian memories written down in Massachusetts? The report by Ambassador Henry Morgenthau whose embassy functioned as a hub for Entente agenda during the war’s first couple of years? The British government-based, government-issued, Blue Book?

    Go to the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Special Collections, seek the help of a nice gentleman by the name of Colin Harris, and you will find there the catalogue of papers of one James Bryce.

    Going by my own growing familiarity with the facts, what happened may be characterized as a tragedy because the Armenians were set up for a big painful fall by the British, and by presumptive Armenian leaders, the so-called Armenian representatives who met with British officials – headed by Bryce – in London hotels, and acted irresponsibly toward the many innocent Armenians who were – as a result – fated to suffer the consequences of the actions of these so-called Armenian representatives.

    These representatives were fed by British hubris as they strove to advance the political quest for an Armenian independent state on Ottoman land, their personal ambition to be leaders of this state, but mainly on behalf of British imperialist agenda. There is no question that these actions, namely colluding with the British and agreeing to lead an intensified rebellion, meant selling out the safety of the Armenian people in eastern Anatolia who were not the majority in any of the provinces there, and would be subject to an escalation in violence similar to what followed Bryce’s previous campaigns to excite Armenian rebellion in the 1890s.

    James Bryce is not just the man behind the Blue Book during World War One. In 1967, Arnold J. Toynbee, who during World War One was a young historian fully employed by the British government to work under Bryce in editing the Blue Book and manufacture other propaganda, admitted that the Blue Book was designed to affect the American public during the war. By World War One, Bryce had already established strong connections with people who were in the loftiest political positions in the US. To quote the Washington Post from January 28, 1917, “No man in Europe commands a more sympathetic audience in America than Bryce.” What Toynbee did not share with his readers, even in his old age when he wrote Acquaintances, was that decades prior to World War One, Bryce had made a name for himself as a Liberal politician and an expert in foreign affairs thanks to raising the Armenian Question in 1876 as part of the larger Eastern Question raised by Gladstone and other anti-Muslim politicians, historians and journalists during the Bulgarian Agitation. It was imperialism, disguised as morality. Already in 1878, Bryce announced Turkey’s death, and presented the plan to cultivate “the growth of a native Christian race” – the Armenians – to the point of establishing “the nucleus of an independent state” – Armenia – whose territories would comprise of Ottoman land in the size of “about three hundred and fifty miles in length by two hundred and fifty in breadth.” Between then and World War One, Bryce engaged in many activities to organize the Armenians as a political entity within the Ottoman state that would replace the Ottoman sovereign. This was accompanied by the promotion of a conviction according to which the Turks as a race and as followers of Islam were inferior, uncivilized and an obstruction of progress. While giving the Romans Lecture in 1902 at Oxford, Bryce said that there are “cases in which the exclusion of the Backward race seems justified, in the interests of humanity at large,” and he invited his audience to “ Conceive what a difference it might make if Islam were within two centuries to disappear from the earth!” That’s a quote from 1902. Before World War One, before 9-11, before post-9/11ism supplanted postcolonialism. Before this idea of radical Islam became popularized. Bryce wanted Islam gone. It got in the way of his imperialist vision of the world.

    If you were to study Bryce’s papers, you would find that all of the sources of falsehoods, cited by biased scholars or “credible independent experts,” whatever you want to call them, they are associated with Bryce, all of these sources are associated with Bryce. Go read his correspondence with the editors of the New York Times – see how much influence he had with them, with US government officials, with American church-organizers, with overseers of missionary activities in eastern Anatolia, with Armenian leaders in the US, Britain and eastern Anatolia. Go read his published articles in liberal periodicals, feel the hatred for the Turkish race and its Muslim religion, understand how the pretense of morality and values served an imperialist agenda, and become aware of the plotting that was going on. Then you will begin to wonder what facts are being denied here? How much is currently known on what led the British Liberals to promote Christian nationalism within the Ottoman Empire while they were in the opposition and Benjamin Disraeli was the premier? How does it relate to the rise of Darwinism at the time? How does it relate to anti-Semitism? How does it relate – on conceptual and interpersonal levels – to the rise of German anti-Semitism?

    THE RISE OF RACISM, ISLAMOPHOBIA AND ANTI-SEMITISM IN BRITAIN

    Bryce’s mentor in academia, the Oxford historian Edward A. Freeman was considered a spokesperson of sorts for Liberal Party ideology during Disraeli’s premiership, when the Liberal Party was in need of political pretext to win back the British public. He was described by historian Richard Shannon as “the natural leader of the Gladstonian historians.” Freeman wrote in 1877 that “the people of Aryan and Christian Europe” – the Christian minorities in the European territories of Ottoman Empire – were suffering from “ The union of the Jew and the Turk against the Christian.” To him, the Turk, much like the Jew, “did not belong to the Aryan branch of mankind” and did not belong in Europe. He elaborated on how the Jew and the Turk are the enemies of Europe. Upon visiting the US in the 1880s, in promotion of Anglo-Americanism, this was one of his impressions: “Very many approved when I suggested that the best remedy for whatever was amiss would be if every Irishman should kill a negro and be hanged for it.” Another observation: “The eternal laws of nature, the eternal distinction of colour, forbid the assimilation of the negroe.” And another one: “ The negro… is not a man and a brother in the same full sense in which every Western Aryan is a man and a brother. He cannot be assimilated; the laws of nature forbid it.” Or how about this: “…I must say that every nation has a right to get rid of strangers who prove a nuisance, whether they are Chinese in America, or Jews in Russia, Servia, Hungary, and Roumania.” This man was a racist, and he coached Bryce to develop the political potential of the Armenian people in Ottoman land, by highlighting their supposed superior race and religion. I am not bringing forth these quotes to judge a man according to our postmodern-postcolonialist standards. I am bringing these quotes before you to show that this is the frame of mind that propelled the British imperialist idea to pin the Armenian people against the Turks. There was a racial intensity that had proven effective then, and has been overlooked in academia to this day.

    The anti-Semitism shown against Disraeli, by these same people, was a new Darwinian-inspired anti-Semitism. It was a blood based, race based, anti-Semitism. It did not aim against Disraeli for being a practicing Jew, for “killing Jesus,” for working on Sundays, for not believing, because Disraeli was Anglican, he was baptized as a boy. This was not the anti-Semitism of the Middle-Ages, but the anti-Semitism that was later promoted in Germany by the likes of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a Briton in Germany, who grew up supporting Gladstone against Disraeli. The spiritual leader of Nazi racism was influenced by the anti-Semitism that developed in Britain during the time of the Bulgarian Agitation and the raising of the Armenian question. In the Holocaust, Jews were persecuted by the Nazis systematically, not because of religious differences but because of racial beliefs; certainly not because of a rebellion. The Jews were loyal Germans who participated in German culture and were proud of their German national home. The argument that feeds on comparisons between the Holocaust and a tragedy that followed Armenian, British sponsored, rebellion, is unacceptable. To suggest that Hitler was right when he equated – if he did – the Jews or the Poles to the rebellious, British-sponsored, Armenians, is unacceptable. It is important to internalize that the same people in Britain who wanted an Armenian independent state on Ottoman land were the ones who claimed that the Jews were never to be accepted in their European national homes. They were the racists who invented modern racism. Bryce wrote about Disraeli that he was not an Englishman. Disraeli was his prime-minister, English born and Anglican, and yet Bryce wrote about him that he was not really an Englishman. Why? Because Disraeli had Jewish blood.

    THE HISTORIOGRAPHICAL PROBLEM

    This is a big problem to this day – can the Jews be considered Englishmen or Englishwomen in Britain? Can the Muslims? Can the Turks? And how about in Australia? Are the Turks here Australians? We might receive an illuminating understanding of it if we were to address British historiography on the Armenian issue, on anti-Turkish, anti-Muslim, anti-Ottoman, anti-Semitic aspects of it, openly and sincerely. Instead of letting part-time scholars keep this fascinating and important period of history as part of a political game, let’s open up the books. Let’s read what was said at that time in Britain, and try to understand how this might be connected to the current national identity crisis in Britain and in Western states. How is an African Muslim to become aligned with British national identity? This is the basic problem. More basic than the tension due to the fighting of Western militaries in Muslim countries. The basic problem is that British historiography has not owned up to its hateful prejudice. Statements such as that made by William Gladstone, the much revered four-time prime-minister of Britain – elected more times than anybody in British history to be the premier – who ran policies against Muslims in Turkey and Egypt. He said: “It is not a question of Mahometanism simply, but of Mahometanism compounded with the peculiar character of a race… They [the Turks] were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity.” How can one expect Muslims to feel like they are a part of national identity, when such words are unaccounted for, and the man who said them is enshrined, literally, a figure that is a source of pride in Britain’s modern history? How has this tension between British pride in its anti-Muslim history and the pretense of bogus morality for imperialist gains been reconciled with its current social makeup?

    We can ask even further, what about British history of slave ownership? Has that been addressed? How many of you know that William Gladstone’s father, John, was one of the wealthiest slave owners in Liverpool? How many of you know that in his plantations Africans were hanged or shot down when they wanted to set themselves free? How many of you know that he was one of the most passionate voices in Britain against abolition, and that he called William Wilberforce – who was the leader of the anti-slavery campaign – he called him a “mistaken man,” and that he only gave up the fight once the government paid him a huge sum of money as compensation? How many of you knew that? There is no attempt of owning up to this history, of addressing the fact that William Gladstone was not so moral or that his father was not a philanthropist (a philanthropist they still call him!); there is no attempt to recognize that the anti-Turkish use of Armenians as colonialist pawns against the so-called “antihuman” Turks, is mentally related to the use of African slaves, just as the Gladstones – father and son – are related. There are churches in the Liverpool area that were built with slave money, and yet the name Liverpool does not make the common person think first of slavery; instead, people think of the Beatles and Ian Rush.

    IS AUSTRALIA A FAIR PLACE FOR ALL ITS CITIZENS?

    David Cameron, in his first speech as Britain’s prime-minister blamed state multiculturalism for the national identity crisis of Muslims in Britain. They have been allowed to live their separate lives for too long, he said. Why wouldn’t he say that? It is politically popular to take action against Muslims in Western societies in our post-9/11 world, and it means that Britain does not have to change its national identity, that it does not have to recognize a deep disrespect to the formerly colonized people who are now among its citizens. And here in Australia, a relatively new settler state, has it not been shown that when there isn’t a historiography that is filled with anti-Muslim moments, multiculturalism actually works? So what if Muslims or Turks prefer to maintain their traditional customs and live in their own neighborhoods? They still might watch Neighbours and Home and Away, if they are comfortable. If their historical background is truly respected by Australia, they will be proud Australians. It is not advisable to create a national identity crisis for Turks or Muslims in Australia by following a political ordinance from the US or the UK to twist history. Historiographical cleanliness is crucial for keeping national identity intact. How would Muslims or Turks feel about having to send their children to Australian schools if lies are taught about their people’s heritage?

    This is my message to you. Historiographical cleanliness goes a long way. The study of historical facts must be on full display. The approach taken by you on the characterization of the events in 1915-16 defines your national identity. Is Australia a fair place for all its citizens? May all of Australia’s citizens be proud of their government’s fairness in choosing historical study over prejudice, or is Australia a country that receives political dictations on history?

    Thank you!

    24. November 2014
    NEW SOUTH WALES PARLIAMENT
    AUSTRALIA

  • FOI release: the Armenian massacres and UK policy

    FOI release: the Armenian massacres and UK policy

    GOV.UK From: Foreign & Commonwealth Office First published: 30 September 2014

    Documents relating to the Armenian massacres and UK government policy.

    Documents

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    Detail

    FOI ref 0298-14 gives links to information already in the public domain on the Armenian massacres and UK policy in respect of the massacres. It releases 54 documents that have been redacted under section 27 (international relations), section 28 (relations within the UK) , section 35 (formulation of government policy) and, section 41 (information provided in confidence) Published: 30 September 2014 From: Foreign & Commonwealth Office

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  • Thomas de Waal’s Futile Attempt at Trivializing the Armenian Genocide

    Thomas de Waal’s Futile Attempt at Trivializing the Armenian Genocide

    khoghe-mtnes

     

    BY SETO BOYADJIAN, ESQ.

    “A half-truth is a whole lie” – Yiddish proverb

    Thomas de Waal is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has penned an article, “The G-Word – The Armenian Massacre and the Politics of Genocide,” that will appear in the upcoming January-February 2015 issue of Foreign Affairs. This article is the precursor of his forthcoming book, “Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide.” Given the timing of the publication of this article and the book, it is obvious that Mr. de Waal opens the first salvo of Turkish denialism against the centennial of the Armenian Genocide.

    Mr. de Waal is an analyst who has repeatedly focused on Armenian-Azerbaijani relations over the issue of the independent Republic of Nagorno Karabakh and on Armenian-Turkish relations over the issue of the Armenian Genocide. But he has a peculiar way of showing integrity in his approach to these two fundamental issues.

    It is peculiar because, as an “expert” in conflict resolution, Mr. de Waal utilizes the old gimmick of double standard. On the issue of Nagorno Karabakh, he is an ardent proponent of changing the status quo – in favor of Azerbaijan and against Armenia. On the issue of the Armenian Genocide, he is an avid defender of maintaining the status quo – in favor of Turkey and against Armenia. As it is obvious, for Mr. de Waal the concept of justice is a variable in his approach to conflict resolution, depending on the identity of the party to the conflict.

    Given his biased reputation on issues involving Armenia and Armenians, Mr. de Waal’s article did not strike any intellectual surprises on the side of justice and truth in conflict resolutions. Through this article, his entire endeavor amounts to a futile attempt at trivializing the Armenian Genocide in order to reach his proposed conclusion that it is time for Armenians to “bury their grandparents and receive an acknowledgment from the Turkish state of the terrible fate they suffered.”

    We should look beyond this insulting “advice” and, instead, focus on the facts Mr. de Waal advances in support of his conclusion. We must bear in mind that his attempt is to transform the Armenian Genocide into a non-existing issue.

    First, he claims that Armenians “discovered” Genocide in 1960s. According to Mr. De Waal, for decades the “event of the Great Catastrophe” were “more a matter of private grief than public record;” that they spent more effort “fighting the Soviet Union rather than Turkey;” and that only in the 1960s did they “seriously revive” the massacres “as a public political issue” by being inspired from the “Holocaust consciousness.”

    In making these blatant statements Mr. de Waal conveniently overlooks the facts that as of the beginning of 1920s Armenians expressed their collective consciousness of the Catastrophe and voiced their claims for reparations. It is true that they did not refer to it as Genocide, as they could not, because that term came into existence in 1944, when Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin coined it based on the Ottoman massacres of Armenians. Until that time, Armenians presented themselves to the world and to Turkey as claimants of their national heritage destroyed by Ottoman Turkey and of their national homeland occupied by Turkey. As the world turned a blind eye on Armenian demands for justice, in the 1920s they organized their own “Nuremberg trials” by punishing the chief organizers and perpetrators of the Armenian massacres – namely, Talaat pasha, Enver pasha, Jemal Azmi, Behaeddin Shakir, Jivanshi Bey, and so on… At the same time, Armenians established the Delegation of the Republic of Armenia to officially pursue their claims for territorial and economic reparations from Turkey.

    Contrary to Mr. de Waal’s claims, Armenians actively pursued their claims for justice since the 1920s; at the same time they remembered their grandparents and they will do so forever.

    Second, Mr. de Waal displays his irritation over the use of the word “Genocide” in reference to the Armenian massacres. He credits Raphael Lemkin for inventing that terminology and lobbying the United Nations for the adoption of the 1948 Genocide Convention. However, he attempts to discredit Lemkin as a “problematic personality;” he criticizes the ambiguity of the Genocide Convention; and he deplores the exploitation of the word Genocide. With that he arrives at the notion that “The Armenian Diaspora saw the word as a perfect fit to describe what happened” to them, thereby helping “activate a new political movement…”

    Mr. de Waal ignores the fact that even back in 1944, when Raphael Lemkin coined the term Genocide he invoked the Armenian case as a definitive example of Genocide in the 20th century. Lemkin described the crime of Genocide as the “systematic destruction of a whole national, racial or religious groups. The sort of thing that Hitler did to the Jews and the Turks did to the Armenians.”

    Mr. de Waal also ignores the records that the United Nations enacted on December 11, 1946, its first resolution on Genocide, known as UN General Assembly Resolution 95(1). Thereafter, on December 9, 1948, it adopted the UN Genocide Convention. Both the resolution and the convention recognized the Armenian Genocide as the type of crime the United Nations intended to prevent by codifying the existing customary international rules and standards. Again, in 1948, the UN War Crimes Commission invoked the Armenian Genocide as being “precisely . . . one of the types of acts which the modern term ‘crimes against humanity’ is intended to cover as a precedent for the Nuremberg tribunals.” Thereafter, in 1985, the UN Commission on Human Rights report, entitled ‘Study of the Question of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,’ invoked the Armenian massacres as an example of genocide. In the report, the UN commission stated, “The Nazi aberration has unfortunately not been the only case of genocide in the twentieth century. Among other examples, which can be cited as qualifying, are . . . the Ottoman massacre of Armenians in 1915-1916.”

    As the official records stand, the Armenians did not see the word Genocide “as a perfect fit,” it was the United Nations who, on behalf of the world governments, established and declared through its resolutions and the Genocide Convention that genocidal acts of Ottoman Turkey against Armenians and of Nazi Germany against Jews are Genocide.

    Third, according to Mr. de Waal, even if the word Genocide is granted to the Armenian massacres, the U.N. Genocide Convention does not have retroactive applicability. He claims, without identifying them that “Most international legal opinions are clear that the UN Genocide Convention carries no retroactive force and therefore could not be invoked to bring claims on dispossessed property.”

    Again, Mr. de Waal makes blanket statements without any substantiation in fact or in law. And once again, he conveniently ignores the record, the law and the facts. The provisions of the Genocide Convention carry ex post facto applicability. They are indeed enforceable retroactively based on the following points:

    1. The dual vocation of the Genocide Convention in preventing and punishing the perpetrator of the crime of Genocide provides the necessary basis for its retroactivity;

    2. The retribution mandated by the Genocide Convention makes it retroactive, because, besides being condemned and punished for the crime of Genocide, the perpetrator of the crime is also not to be allowed to keep the fruits of the crime;

    3. The Genocide Convention is declaratory of a pre-existing internationally recognized wrongful act, thereby giving rise to both state responsibility and individual penal liability. As such, the convention is not creating a new criminal law.

    4. To provide solid legal grounds to the foregoing points, on November 26, 1968 the UN adopted the Convention on the Non-Applicability of the Statutory Limitation on War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity. This convention eliminated any time bar on the crime of genocide. Thus, the provisions of the Genocide Convention are applicable to any crime of genocide, irrespective of the time of its commission.

    Mr. de Waal makes many other unsubstantiated statements in his attempt at trivializing the Armenian Genocide. He twists facts, to serve his purpose, as if to confirm Mark Twain’s observation to “get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”

    In the final analysis, Mr. de Waal’s entire attempt is based on uttering half-truths. And as the wise Yiddish proverb asserts, “A half-truth is a whole lie.”

  • ERDOGAN: Oil deal in Iraq should be example for Cyprus

    ERDOGAN: Oil deal in Iraq should be example for Cyprus

    REUTERS Photo

    The recent internal agreement between Baghdad and Erbil should set an example for sharing potential energy resources off Cyprus, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said, vowing that Turkey will never abandon the rights of Turkish Cypriots in the Eastern Mediterranean.

    “We played a leading role in the mechanism that made the deal between Baghdad and Erbil possible. In the end, we came to a point where everyone is satisfied. We hold the same understanding for Cyprus. I believe the success of our energy diplomacy in Iraq will be repeated in Cyprus as well,” Erdoğan said in an address late Dec. 10, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO).

    A recent deal between the central and regional governments of Iraq removed legal obstacles in front of the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) marketing of its oil via Turkey. It also cleared the way for intensified energy cooperation between Ankara and Baghdad.

    However, the situation in the Eastern Mediterranean is more complicated than in Iraq, as Greek Cyprus is recognized as the sole sovereign state by the international community. When Greek Cyprus recently issued licenses to foreign companies to launch oil exploration off the island, Turkey sent its seismic vessel Barbaros to do its own drilling. It also deployed a warship to the region to monitor Greek Cypriot moves.

    Erdoğan reiterated that Turkey will not remain above the fray on developments off Cyprus.

    “We will continue our work in the region unless Greece and the Greek Cypriot Administration take our warnings seriously. As with all work that takes place in Cypriot exclusive economic zones, Turkish Cypriots have equal rights by law. I want to express that we will defend their rights until the end,” he said, stressing that Turkey’s position on the issue is to find a resolution based in international law.

    Fresh drilling in Western Black Sea

    Erdoğan also said Turkey plans to carry out its own oil explorations by domestic-made seismic vessels and oil platforms, and said the first vessel will be launched into the sea in one month.

    “In January, we will launch new drilling operations in the Western Black Sea region. There may be a need for a local drilling platform; we are capable of building this platform in our shipyards. I want to herald this. If need be, we can build a $1 billion-worth platform using 100 percent national resources,” he said.

    Speaking on the recent deal between Russia and Turkey on the construction of a new pipeline to carry Russian gas to Europe via Turkey through a gas terminal to be stationed on the Greek border, Erdoğan said building energy cooperation with Russia is a “win-win” situation. He also underlined that the project can be begin only after the finalization of the agreement.
    December/11/2014

      Küfi Seydali