Category: Southern Caucasus

  • Canadian MP calls on colleagues to commemorate the victims of Khojaly tragedy in Parliament

    Canadian MP calls on colleagues to commemorate the victims of Khojaly tragedy in Parliament

    40th PARLIAMENT, 3rd SESSION

    Thursday, March 11, 2010

    HedyFry
    Hon. Hedy Fry Member of House of Common Canadian Parliament

    Member of Canadian Parliament Hedy Fry at the meeting of the House of Commons called on colleagues to commemorate the victims of the Khojaly tragedy jointly with members of country’s Azerbaijani community.

    Fry also called to recognize the tragedies that occurred in the life of peoples, which representatives live in Canada.

    (Non-official translation from French to English)

    L’hon. Hedy Fry (Vancouver-Centre, Lib.):

    “Mr. Speaker, I rise today to ask this House to join me and the Azeri community in Canada to commemorate the tragedy of Khojaly, which took place 18 years ago, on 25 and 26 February. I know that this date has passed.

    However, I think it is important for Canada, as a global nation, home to people from different countries who came here to find new beginnings, to recognize the tragedies that once marred their lives and mourn with them, however briefly. The tragedy of lost human life is still too common in a world plagued by civil strife. Canada, through democracy and rule of law, has found peaceful resolution to our own civil disagreements. By remembering tragedies such as Khojaly, we can hopefully help our new citizens to remember the past while beginning anew to embrace values of peaceful coexistence here in Canada”.

    Link: 

  • CATALONIAN PRESIDENT APOLOGIZES FOR “BASELESS” ARMENIAN RESOLUTION

    CATALONIAN PRESIDENT APOLOGIZES FOR “BASELESS” ARMENIAN RESOLUTION

    Good news! Apparently, an unassuming event in a place tucked away in picturesque Spain may elucidate the ugliness and shamelessness behind the persistent Armenian deception surrounding the alleged genocide.

    It is not uncommon to wake up to news that the parliament of so and so place passed a resolution recognizing the alleged” Armenian genocide. Names like Wales, Catalonia, Patagonia, Uruguay, and others make you think: “What? Do these voters even know where Armenia is today, let alone the complexities of the Armenian revolts, treason, and terrorism of 1877-1921 period and the Ottoman Empire’s security measures taken in response to them some 100 years ago half a world away?”

    Then you read the resolution and go : “Hmmm. Where did I read that before?”

    Finally it downs on you: it is the same worthless and baseless propaganda piece you have seen in all the perennial resolutions in the US Congress and elsewhere, penned by the Armenian extremists, and shoved down the throats of unsuspecting public through equally devious and selfish politicians who could not give a damn about history and even less about human rights. Because if they did, they would not violate the human rights of Turks by ignoring article 11 which says every human being is entitled to defend him/herself in the face of accusations. Turks’ right to defend themselves against the accusation of a high crime are stripped with the ill-informed and malicious votes. American (and universal) value of assumption of innocence until the guilt is proven, at a court of law, after due process, is abandoned.

    This happens all too often, no thanks to the deceitful Armenian lobby, victimizing Turks. In the meantime, no word of condemnation of Armenian terrorism since 1973 causing 70+ fatalities among Turkish diplomats or Armenian ethnic cleansing and aggression in Azerbaijan since 1992 causing one million Azeris to suffer in leaky tents while their homes are populated by Armenian soldiers conducting target practice on places of Azeri cultural heritage, schools, and mosques. I guess current human suffering of enormous dimensions is not as important to these righteous, virtuous, honorable politicians as the falsified history of a scheming Armenian radicals.

    Back to the story. You then dig a bit deeper to find out about the Patagonia-Armenia connection and that’s when you notice the dishonest and corrupt Armenian lobby rearing its ugly head. You check it in Wales… Catalonia… You see them everywhere… And the mystery is resolved: the politicians are duped by the Armenian lobby.

    Here is how the Armenian lobby does it: the contacts of the Armenian community are used to impress upon unsuspecting people that Armenian are persecuted by Turks, never showing them the photos of Armenian thugs armed-to-the-teeth (www.ethocide.com) murdering Turkish women and children. The Armenian lobby only talks about how bloody the Turkish retaliation were, but never about Armenian rebellions, treason, bombings, assassinations, hostage takings, bank raids, murders, and terrorism, at a time of war, when the motherland was under brutal foreign occupations, that finally drove the Turks to TERESET (temporarily resettle) the Armenians suspected of fifth column activities.

    An intensely emotional atmosphere is created before the vote is taken. That’s when the tricky Armenian lobby, for good measure, wheels in a few 80-year-olds in wheel chairs and pass them as “genocide survivors”. The theatrical stage is set for a bogus Armenian genocide. Resolution passes.

    Then you read in the media that so and so place has accepted the genocide resolution, never mentioning all the fanfare and drama staged by the fraudulent Armenian lobby. The impression is created that, somehow, these people in some part of the world, all of a sudden, came to their senses on a raging moment of righteousness attack, decide to call a spade a spade. Really? Where did that come from? You wonder.

    These shenanigans, at least in one case, in the case of Catalonia, was exposed today when an irate president “apologized” to Turkey for the abuse of his parliamentarian system by the wily Armenian lobby.

    First we read that “…the decision of Catalonian Parliament on recognition of Armenian genocide allegations does not reflect the opinion of Spain regarding to the issue…” Turkey’s Foreign Minister Davutoglu discusses the issue with his Spanish counterpart and expresses Turkey’s concerns . He stresses that “… Turkey condemns recognition of baseless (genocide) claims and that it is not the job of local or national parliaments to write history.” Davutoglu is pleased to hear from his Spanish counterpart that the “…Spanish government announced that recognition of so called Armenian genocide does not reflect the views of the Spanish government related to the issue”. Then comes the clincher. Catalonian Autonomous Government’s President Jose Montilla apologizes on behalf of his administration and stresses “…that the decision was baseless…” (source: .)

    So, here you are, dear fair-minded truth-seeker, another Armenian falsification is exposed. If you go after each and every recognition masquerade in all forty states and the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the United States and some twenty countries, mostly in Europe, you will see the common thread of deception and distortion by Armenians running through all of them, repeat, all of them. No self-respecting parliament would reduce itself to the level of approving a fallacy and legislating a racist and dishonest version of history. It is only a matter of time before the entire Armenian hullabaloo bites the dirt as spotlights of scrutiny and critical thinking are shone on the Armenian propaganda.

    So, what did just happen here?

    First came the vote, then the apology for the vote.

    Hmmm. I say chalk this one off to the start of enlightenment and awakening. Turkish perseverance in sticking with the truth, in a sea of bias and bigotry, may be paying some dividends after all.

    One word of advice to the Armenians who shamelessly promote a bogus genocide: GET A LIFE!

  • Clinton Invites Sarkisian To Washington

    Clinton Invites Sarkisian To Washington

    A162A1DA B37C 4308 9830 3ADBAB059009 w527 sU.S. — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks during a briefing on the State Department’s 2009 Country Report on Human Rights Practices, Washington, DC, 11Mar2010

    12.03.2010
    Emil Danielyan, Ruben Meloyan

    U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday invited President Serzh Sarkisian to visit Washington next month, in a telephone conversation that appears to have centered on Armenia’s stalled rapprochement with Turkey.

    Sarkisian’s office said Clinton phoned the Armenian leader to invite him to an international summit on nuclear energy security that will take place in Washington in mid-April. It said she expressed hope that the two sides will use the occasion to “continue discussing issues on the bilateral, regional and international agenda.” It gave no further details.

    The phone call came the day after Sarkisian suggested that Turkey will not unconditionally normalize relations with Armenia anytime soon and again threatened to annul the U.S.-brokered protocols signed by the two nations in October. Clinton similarly phoned Sarkisian in December just hours after he publicly voiced such a threat for the first time.

    The Washington conference, which Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan plans to attend, will come ahead of the April 24 remembrance of more than one million Armenians massacred in Ottoman Empire in 1915-1918. The remembrance day is now seen by some observers as Yerevan’s new unofficial deadline for Turkish ratification of the two protocols.

    A deputy chairman of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party on Friday rejected this and other “artificial deadlines” set by Armenian officials and reiterated that the Turkish parliament will not ratify the protocols without further progress in the Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiations on Nagorno-Karabakh.

    “By April, unless there is progress on Karabakh, [the protocols] will not passed the Turkish parliament,” Suat Kiniklioglu told an international seminar held in Yerevan by the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. “The [Turkish-Armenian] border has been closed for 17 years. I think we can wait for another year, if that is going to lead to a solution to the problem.”

    Kiniklioglu also said Ankara does not insist on a comprehensive resolution of the Karabakh dispute. “We are not talking about the withdrawal of Armenian troops from the seven [Azerbaijani] raions or anything else,” he said. “ We are talking about a roadmap that puts a clear timeline with international guarantees of how the process should work.”

    Armenian leaders have repeatedly rejected any linkage between Turkish-Armenian relations and Karabakh peace.

    https://www.azatutyun.am/a/1982261.html
  • Armenia Thanks Sweden For “Genocide” Recognition

    Armenia Thanks Sweden For “Genocide” Recognition

    0C897BB8 209C 43CE B36D CD988DA2CA6B w527 sArmenia — President Serzh Sarkisian greets Goran Lennmarker (L), chairman of the Swedish parliament committee on foreign affairs, in Yerevan, 12 March 2010.

    12.03.2010
    Ruben Meloyan

    Armenia’s leaders thanked Sweden’s parliament on Friday for adopting a resolution that recognizes the World War One-era mass killings and deportations of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide.

    President Serzh Sarkisian hailed the development at a meeting with Goran Lennmarker, the visiting chairman of the Swedish parliament’s foreign affairs committee. He said “recognition of and condemnation of crimes against humanity is the best way to avert such crimes.”

    Speaking to RFE/RL earlier in the day, Lennmarker endorsed the resolution which was opposed by the Swedish parliament but passed by a 131-130 vote. He said he would have voted for the measure had he not been absent from Stockholm during Thursday’s vote.

    Lennmarker, who is better known in Armenia as the Nagorno-Karabakh rapporteur of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, visited on Thursday the Yerevan memorial to up to 1.5 million Armenians killed in what many historians consider a genocide.

    Parliament speaker Hovik Abrahamian also welcomed the resolution strongly condemned by Ankara. “I think that with its historic decision Sweden’s parliament … will also contribute to peace and stability in the South Caucasus,” Abrahamian said in a letter to his Swedish counterpart, Per Westerberg.

    Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned, meanwhile, that the Swedish vote “can hurt relations between Turkey and Armenia.” He appeared to refer to the fence-mending agreements signed by the two estranged nations last fall.

    The Turks were already fuming over a similar resolution that was approved last week by a key committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Reuters news agency reported that Turkish parliamentary speaker Mehmet Ali Sahin said on Friday Western countries whose assemblies have passed such resolutions should “look in the mirror, if they want to find criminals.” He mentioned no specific country.

    “Our ‘friend’ Sweden has stabbed us in the back with one vote!” read a front-page headline in “Sabah,” a leading Turkish daily.

    Fatih Altayli, editor-in-chief of “Haberturk” daily cited by Reuters, was more sarcastic: “Soon, there will be no Turkish ambassadors left abroad and no foreign country our officials can visit.”

    https://www.azatutyun.am/a/1982309.html
  • Turkey Recalls Envoy After Sweden Recognizes Armenian ‘Genocide’

    Turkey Recalls Envoy After Sweden Recognizes Armenian ‘Genocide’

    EB80A776 9E9D 4B88 8BB9 2A822D681CD4 mw270 sTurkish Ambassador to Sweden Zergun Koruturk said Swedish lawmakers ”acted thinking that they were historians rather than parliamentarians, and it’s very, very unfortunate.”

    March 12, 2010
    (RFE/RL) — Turkey has reacted angrily to a decision by Sweden’s parliament to recognize as genocide the World War I-era mass killings of Armenians by Turkish forces.

    The parliament narrowly approved the resolution on March 11 despite opposition from the government in Stockholm.

    Ankara immediately recalled its ambassador to Sweden over what it condemned as a resolution made for “political calculations.” And it said its Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was canceling a visit to the Scandinavian country planned for next week.

    Sweden’s move comes just a week after Ankara recalled its ambassador from Washington following a U.S. congressional panel’s decision to approve a similar “genocide” resolution.

    “I’m very disappointed,” said Turkey’s ambassador to Sweden, Zergun Koruturk. “Unfortunately the parliamentarians — I think they acted thinking that they were historians rather than parliamentarians, and it’s very, very unfortunate. This is going to have drastic effects on our bilateral relations and I don’t think it will be compensated in a short time.”

    Genocide Issue

    Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin were killed by their Ottoman Turk rulers in 1915 in a planned campaign of extermination.

    Turkey accepts that many Armenians were killed, but it rejects the term “genocide,” saying the death toll has been inflated and that many Turks were also killed during a period of civil war and unrest.

    Sweden now joins a growing list of countries recognizing the massacres as genocide, alongside Russia, France, and Switzerland among others.

    But the March 12 vote was razor-thin. It passed by a one-vote margin thanks to several lawmakers from the ruling center-right coalition who broke ranks to back the measure.

    Conservative legislator Gustav Blix and Hans Linde of the Swedish Left Party argued each side of the debate, with Blix saying: “This is not something that should be decided by parliament. It is a question for historians and not for politicians to decide on.”

    Linde responded that “If the victims are not acknowledged and get their sufferings proved true, this trauma may go on for generations.”

    Complicating Normalization?

    Some worry that the vote could complicate not just bilateral relations between Turkey and Sweden — which has been a firm backer of Ankara’s long-standing bid to join the European Union.

    Sweden’s foreign minister, Carl Bildt, said it would have a knock-on effect on the halting process now under way to normalize ties between Turkey and Armenia.

    “I’m very concerned, I am worried about the consequences,” Bildt said. “I got a report from Turkey that the opposition now wants the normalization of the contacts between Armenia and Turkey to stop. I think this politicizing of history risks making reconciliation more difficult.”

    Ankara has also made similar warnings. In the latest, an official in Turkey’s ruling party said before Sweden’s vote that Ankara was extremely unlikely at this point to ratify its fence-mending protocols with Armenia.

    Suat Kiniklioglu, deputy chairman of the Justice and Development Party, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that Turkish ratification had been made “more difficult” by the U.S. resolution.

    But Swedish lawmaker Goran Lennmarker, told RFE/RL that he believed the reconciliation process would not be jeopardized, “irrespective of what happened” in Sweden or the United States.

    Lennmarker is chairman of the Swedish parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee and the special representative of the OSCE’s Parliamentary Assembly for Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory disputed by Armenia and Azerbaijan and site of a war in the 1990s.

    “There should be ratification in the [parliament] of Turkey of the agreement as soon as possible, they don’t’ have to wait for anything else, not least a solution on Nagorno-Karabakh,” Lennmarker said.

    RFE/RL’s Armenian Service contributed to this report. With agency reports

     
    https://www.rferl.org/a/Turkey_Recalls_Envoy_After_Sweden_Recognizes_Armenian_Genocide/1981705.html
  • US CONGRESS & SWEDISH PARLIAMENT VOTES: HOW POLITICIANS DEMOLISHED A PEACE PROCESS

    US CONGRESS & SWEDISH PARLIAMENT VOTES: HOW POLITICIANS DEMOLISHED A PEACE PROCESS

    March 12, 2010

    Hon. Ambassador Jonas Hafström
    Embassy of Sweden
    2900 K Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20007, USA
    Phone: 202-467 2600
    Fax: 202-467 2699
    Email: [email protected]

    Dear Ambassador Hafström,

    According to the report of International Radio of Sweden, Sweden’s former Consulate General to Istanbul and Middle East expert Ingmar Karlsson said that the decision of Swedish Parliament will have negative effects especially on Armenia. Stressing that Armenia is isolated from the rest of the world, Karlsson said, “The ones who consider that they are struggling for Armenia should know that their efforts will affect Armenia negatively.” Karlsson stressed that voting in the Swedish parliament may undermine the achievements that are made till now and said, “The risk for Armenia to fall under the influence of Russia is more than any other time now.” (Source: .)
    I agree with Ingmar Karlsson and wish to record it here for the use of future generations, in no uncertain terms, that those politicians who voted for the bogus genocide in Washington DC and Stockholm are responsible for destroying a peace process.

    Readers of my columns at www.turkla.com, www.historyoftruth, www.turkishny.com , www.turkishjournal.com , www.turkishforum.com , and elsewhere know well that I have repeatedly written that if Armenian does not wish to become a distant, irrelevant, isolated province of Russia, then Armenia must do three things:

    1) stop the military occupation of Azerbaijan soil in Karabagh and the seven surrounding provinces (thus honoring the U.N. Security Council resolutions for same,)

    2) allow a million Azeri refugees made refugees on their own soil at gunpoint by Armenian regulars and irregulars armed with Russian weapons and advisors,

    3) and stop political pressure by its diaspora on foreign parliaments designed to defame and demonize Turkey with falsified history promoted as genocide in meaningless resolutions.

    Armenia, and its diaspora, delivered on none of those expectations. Now that The U.S. Congress Foreign Affairs Committee and the Swedish Parliament, both voted by a single vote majority, to take Armenian propaganda at face value with total disregard for the truth, as summarized in the six T’s of the Turkish-Armenian conflict (www.turkla.com) , the Turkey is in no mood to feel charitable towards its land-locked, poverty-stricken, starving, aggressive, violent, corrupt, and tiny neighbor, Armenia. The protocols signed between the two last October, signaling a rapprochement of sorts, are pretty much dead-on-arrival now, thanks in no small part to those irresponsible politicians whose narrow personal interests outweighed the considerations of peace between two nations, and indeed an entire region of Caucasus involving Azerbaijan and Georgia.

    I protest, therefore, the incredibly selfish actions of a few politicians who chose their own selfish interests over peace in a difficult region involving millions of people.

    Sincerely,