Tag: Gulen

A Nation of Conspiracies
The article which states ” In the first, the AKP is a party of religious deception that seeks to bring all elements of the government under its control. Its hidden goal is the eradication of the secular state, the wrenching of Turkey from the West, and, ultimately, the imposition of Islamic law.”.

Regards
AHMET SUER [klmaf@hotmail.com]

President, TASAA (Turkish Society of Augusta and Aiken):
- WALL St JOURNAL
- MARCH 13, 2010
Coup plots and growing extremism. Why the West can’t ignore Turkey’s paranoia
- By CLAIRE BERLINSKI
Last fall, having observed that few women in Istanbul took martial-arts classes, I conceived the idea to work with local instructors on creating a women’s self-defense initiative. My project met with initial enthusiasm, particularly among women concerned with the high rate of domestic violence in Turkey. But other martial arts instructors in the city grew uneasy, sensing a plot to swindle them out of their small pieces of the martial-arts pie. Istanbul quickened with lunatic rumors that the initiative was a conspiracy to disparage the other instructors’ martial prowess and steal their students. Martial-arts cliques consumed themselves with plotting and counter-plotting. Secret tribunals were held, covert alliances formed, poison-pen letters sent, friends betrayed. I gave up in disgust.
No one familiar with the prominent role of conspiracies and paranoia in Turkish social and political life will be surprised. Last month, more than five dozen military officers were arrested and charged with plotting a coup. The detained stand accused of planning to bomb mosques and down Greek fighter jets as a pretext for toppling the government. Whether it is true, I don’t know. But either way, the country is drowning in persecutory theories.

Turkey’s strategic and economic significance to the West is massive—and American-Turkish relations took a turn for the worse earlier this month when a U.S. congressional committee recommended the full House of Representatives take up a vote on a resolution condemning the slaughter of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide.

Turkey is a rarity in the Middle East, a democracy with a secular constitution. It has the second-largest army in NATO; it provides a crucial energy route to Europe. The Incirlik air base is a crucial staging point for the US military. Turkey has made a sizable contribution to the coalition forces in Afghanistan. It has a seat on the U.N. Security Council, and could be a vital diplomatic partner—or a vexed antagonist—to America throughout the Middle East and Islamic world.

The West, understandably, is concerned about the trouble in Turkey. Particularly disturbing is the growing anti-Israel animus of Turkey’s foreign policy and its growing intimacy with the most extremist regimes and parties of the Islamic world. Turkey’s trade with Iran is galloping. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was the first international figure to host Hamas. He has called for the expulsion of Israel from the U.N. while offering diplomatic support for the denial of genocide in Darfur.

Turkey has seen three military coups in the past half century—by definition, you can’t have a coup without a conspiracy. The military, which conceives itself as the guardian of Turkish democracy and secularism, has intervened, most recently in 1997, to unseat prime ministers who have veered too far off the secular rails.

The ruling Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP, came to power in 2002. Its senior figures rose from the ranks of virulent—and banned—Islamist parties, but the AKP claims to be moderate.

Almost everyone in Turkey subscribes to one of two conspiracy narratives about this party or its antagonists. In the first, the AKP is a party of religious deception that seeks to bring all elements of the government under its control. Its hidden goal is the eradication of the secular state, the wrenching of Turkey from the West, and, ultimately, the imposition of Islamic law. In this narrative, the specter of the sect leader Fethullah Gülen, who has undefined ties to the party and has taken exile in Utah, arouses particular dread. His critics fear he is the Turkish Ayatollah Khomenei; they say that his acolytes have seeped into the organs of the Turkish body politic, where they lie poised, like a zombie army, to be awakened by his signal.
The second version holds that the AKP is exactly what it purports to be: a modern and democratic party with which the West can and should do business. Mr. Gülen’s followers say the real conspirators are instead members of the so-called Deep State—what they call a demented, multitentacled secret alliance of high-level figures in the military, the intelligence services, the judiciary and organized crime.

Neither theory has irrefragable proof behind it. Both are worryingly plausible and supported by some evidence. But most significantly, one or the other story is believed by virtually everyone here. It is the paranoid style of Turkish politics itself that should alarm the West. Turkey’s underlying disease is not so much Islamism or a military gone rogue, but corruption and authoritarianism over which a veneer of voter participation has been painted.

The system does not look too undemocratic on paper. Turkish political parties are structured, in principle, around district and provincial organizations. There is universal suffrage, but a party must receive 10% of the vote to be represented in Parliament. Party members elect district delegates, district presidents and board members. Yet Turkish prime ministers have near-dictatorial powers over their political parties and are not embarrassed to use them.
It is theparty members, not voters, who pick the party leader. Members of Parliament enjoy unlimited political immunity, as do the bureaucrats they appoint. The resulting license to steal money and votes is accepted with alacrity and used with impunity. Corruption and influence peddling are the inevitable consequence. Business leaders are afraid to object for fear of being shut out.

Conspiracies flourish when citizens fear punishment for open political expression, when power is seen as illegitimate, and when people have no access to healthy channels of influence. They give rise inevitably to counterconspiracies that fuel the paranoia and enmity, a self-reinforcing cycle. Throughout Turkey is the pervasive feeling that no one beyond family can be trusted.
The common charge that the AKP is progressively weakening the judiciary and the military is objectively correct, as is the claim that this concentrates an unhealthy amount of power in the hands of the executive branch. Yet the prime minister and his intimates insist that their actions are defensive. “For 40 years, they have kept files on us. Now, it is our turn to keep files on them,” AKP deputy Avni Doğan has said.

Their enemies voice the same worldview. “When you look at Turkey today, it is as if the country has … fallen under foreign occupation,” the leader of the opposition CHP party Deniz Baykal has said.
Paranoia is inevitably also grandiose. When the House Committee on Foreign Affairs passed up the recent resolution to describe the massacre of Armenians in the First World War era as a genocide, Suat Kiniklioglu, the spokesman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Turkish Parliament, explained Turkey’s outrage thus: “I think the Americans would feel that same if we were to pass a resolution in our parliament talking about the treatment of [native] Indians in this country.”
Mr. Kiniklioglu speaks fluent English; he has spent years in the West. Yet he is blind to the most obvious of facts about American culture: No one in America would give a damn.
Meanwhile, discussion of Turkey’s most serious social and economic problems—corruption, poverty, unemployment, and a legal system held in contempt even by its attorneys—has been eclipsed. Reports of economic miracles under the AKP have, as everyone now understands, been exaggerated by statistical legerdemain. This is all too easy to do, because Turkey has one of the largest underground economies in the world, worth somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the country’s GDP. Every major economic sector in Turkey is largely off-the-record. No one can say confidently whether these sectors are growing or shrinking, and even officially, Turkey now has the second-highest rate of unemployment in Europe. This is hardly the mark of an expanding middle class.
Among the most serious of Turkey’s problems, ignored in the constant din of mutual accusations, is the grave seismic risk to Istanbul. The city’s position on a highly active fault line and the prevalence of shoddy construction make it not only possible but probable that it will be the world’s next Port-au-Prince. The death and displacement of half a million Turks in an earthquake would clearly be the end of any hope of stability and peace in this region.
The failure to prepare for this predictable event is a betrayal of trust, like so many the Turkish people have suffered. Each deepens the paranoia. Each citizen believes that to survive, he must lie and conspire. Everyone assumes everyone else is lying and conspiring against him because he himself is lying and conspiring.
Turkish Ambassador Namik Tan recently said that the West “must understand that in this region, two plus two doesn’t always equal four. Sometimes it equals six, sometimes 10. You cannot hope to understand this region unless you grasp this.”
Psychiatrists are typically advised to attempt to form a “working alliance” with the paranoid patient, avoid becoming the object of projection, and provide a model of non-paranoid behavior. This is also sound advice in diplomacy.
But paranoia is known to be a particularly intractable disorder. Those who experience it do not trust those trying to help them. The West should keep this, too, in mind, for the paranoid spiral here could easily do what spirals are known to do: spin out of control.
March 14, 2010

THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A CASE OF SELECTIVE MEMORY

Dmitry Babich

RIA Novosti
15:44 09/03/2010
Moscow

A resolution on the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, passed
by the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Relations, has raised a real
storm in international diplomacy.

Feverish diplomatic activity and apparent hesitations of the
U.S. administration are a clear sign that Turkey’s foreign policy
influence has grown.

The committee’s resolution is non-binding and it is not clear if it
will be placed before the whole house, but Turkey has already recalled
its ambassador to Ankara for consultations, while U.S. Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton, according to The New York Times, has asked
the Congress not to take up this delicate matter now.

When, in 1915, 1.5 million Armenians “disappeared” as a result of the
action undertaken by the Young Turks’ government, Turkey and Armenia
froze all contacts with each other. It was only last year that signs
of thawing first became manifest, and in the fall of 2009 the sides
agreed to establish diplomatic relations. This was viewed as a success
for the Turkish leadership, both the prime minister and the president.

Will now a final “thaw” be postponed again?

That is not likely, although Turkish politicians are certain to take
advantage of the situation to improve their standing.

It is very likely that the current scandal will only boost the prestige
of Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Not so long ago,
he was the first politician in Turkish history to challenge the
military, saying he uncovered a military plot initially scheduled
for 2003. Before that, Erdogan made out a successful case for the
Palestinians as Muslim brothers, harshly criticizing Israel for
its Gaza Strip operation. During the U.S. Iraqi campaign, Turkey
never allowed American troops to pass through its territory, forcing
Washington to invade Iraq only from the south.

Now the ambiguous position the U.S. has maintained for years on the
Armenian genocide, which helped Washington to draw Turkey into NATO,
is beginning to backfire against U.S. interests. This is a good
lesson for all, and it is not limited to the events of 1915. There
are other examples. The Western mass media are still keeping silent
about anti-Armenian violence in Baku in 1989-1990. Most reports
mention only that Soviet troops were introduced into the city.

The reason for such selective memory in American and West European
media is understandable: it is simple to place the blame on Moscow,
forgetting all about previous events. At that moment, the troops
sent by Moscow saved the lives of thousands of Armenians and other
“Russian speakers” in Baku. Even many Russian media find the subject
of the violence in Baku unpopular and almost forbidden. Some say this
could lose Russia advertising contracts and lead to conflicts with
influential people.

“I do not know what has to be done to get the mass media throughout
the world to highlight those events,” says political analyst Andronik
Migranyan, a member of Russia’s Public Chamber. “Will Armenia itself
have to carry out PR campaigns to make things change?”

The point is that the events of 1915 and those of the 1980s in Armenia
and Azerbaijan do not concern only Armenians; they concern everyone.

The anti-Armenian violence in Baku came after an inhumane expulsion
of Azerbaijanians from Nagorny Karabakh, followed by the Khodzhala
tragedy that shocked the world. People must remember everything,
because destruction of human life cannot be forgotten or remembered
selectively. Otherwise, diplomatic embarrassments like the present
U.S.-Turkish spat may become regular.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not
necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.

=======================================\

Dmitry Babich




Dmitry Babich graduated from the Journalism Department of Moscow State University. From 1990-1996, he worked as a correspondent and senior parliament correspondent in Komsomolskaya Pravda, which was at the time a respected Russian daily newspaper with a circulation of up to 20 million. He the covered politics for the TV-6 television channel for three years before becoming head of the international department of the weekly newspaper Moscow News. While he was working at Moscow News, Dima won a prize from ITAR-TASS for developing Russian-Ukrainian information exchange following a series of reports from Ukraine. He joined Russia Profile as a staff writer at the beginning of 2004. ======REPONCE FROM ERGUN KIRLIKOVALI =============================== Re: “ The Armenian Genocide: A Case Of Selective Memory”, By Dmitry Babich, RIA Novosti, Moscow, 9 March 2010, (produced below for your convenience – the undersigned thanks www.TurkishForum.com.tr for bringing this anti-Turkish, anti-Azeri, andti-Muslim artcile to my atention, giving me a chance to respond.) THE BOGUS ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A CASE OF SELECTIVE MEMORY Dear Editor, So this is what Journalism Department of Moscow State University produces: cockeyed look at world events to promote Russian interests at all costs. Here is a writer who will shamelessly complain about selective memory while “practicing” it. Did you read any lines about Azeris killed by Armenians above? Did you see any remorse about Khodjaly exterminations of Azeris (genocide?) by Armenian thugs using Russian advisors and weapons? Any word about the mass killings of Azeris in Karabagh by Armenian soldiers and paramilitaries under the command of Russian “advisors” using Russian tanks? Azeris were killed by Armenians toting Russian Mosins in 1893 and Russian Kalashnikovs in 1993? Both under the leadership of Russian “advisors”. What has changed in the hundred years, other than the model of the murder weapon? How about Armenian aggression in the seven rayons (provinces) surrounding Karabagh? Why is he silent about that? Isn’t that pure aggression and persecution? Most dramatic of all, perhaps, is the embarrassing silence of the Russian writer (and I use the term loosely) about the million or so Azeri refugees bracing, made homeless by the Armenian thugs toting Russian rifles, bracing for the 18th scorching summer after 17th freezing winter endured in leaky tents with little food or medicine. Is this how a Russian “journalist” sees events? Through the prism of selective memory? Just like those biased promoters of a bogus genocide who will… a) remember Morgenthau’s falsified reports but not Bristol’s or Hubbard’s eyewitness reports; b) remember the long-discredited lie of 1.5 million dead Armenians, but not the Paris Peace Conference report dated 29 March 1919 declaring the number “…more than 200,000…” from which the current lie had originated; c) remember the Armenian dead (about 200,00 according to Paris Peace Conference of 1919) but not more than 524,000 Muslim, mostly Turkish dead; d) remember 24 April as the start of a fake genocide, but not the fact that 24 April was nothing more than the Ottoman Guantanamo when the known Armenian terrorists, insurgents, and spies and their suspected accomplices, were arrested for questioning, some of whom were later released; e) remember Turkish retaliations but not the Armenian revolts that started them, the biggest one of all being the Van rebellion of April 1915 which was the 9/11 of the Ottoman Empire when Armenian killed more than 40,000 of thei Muslim neighbors and turned the city over to the invading Russian armies; f) remember Dink, but not Arikan, and 70 other the Armenians killed since 1973; g) remember Armenia Tereset (temporary resettlement of 1915) but not the facts that Armenians backstabbed their own country at a time when the motherland was under brutal foreign invasion in the West (Dardanelles by the French, and Anzacs, in the East (by Russians and Armenians), in the South (by the British in Sinai, Palestine, and Mesopotamia); h) remember Armenians who were resettled because of their treasonous activities and revolts but not the Crimean Tatars (Turks) who were deported in cattle wagons to Kazakhstan, or Meshketian Turks to Uzbekiastan, or Koreans or Ukranians or Chechens or tens of millions of others to distant deserts and barren plains of Central Asia and icy regios of Siberia, who met worse tragic end, if such a thing is possible, at the hands of their brutal Russian handlers… and many more (too long to list here) i) remember to quote the Armenian commentator Andronik today but not the Armenian terrorist Andranik of last century who ruthlessly murdered many non-combatant, unarmed Muslims, mostly Turks, after torturing them in unspeakable manners; or those other Armenian terrorists like Dro, Aram, and thousands of others who were trained and supported by the Russians all along the way; Russians are the last people on earth to talk about selective memory or persecution of defenseless ethnic people. Sincerely, Ergün KIRLIKOVALI President-Elect, ATAA ergun@cox.net 9741 Irvine Center Drive Irvine, CA 92618-4324 , USA Cell: (949) 878-1186

March 11, 2010

The Meds Yeghern and Turkish Intellectuals

PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo No. 86
Breaking the Nation’s Taboo

The Meds Yeghern and Turkish Intellectuals

PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo No. 86

Nona Shahnazarian
Center for Pontic and Caucasian Studies, Kuban Social and Economic Institute (Krasnodar) September 2009 (Dr Nona Shahnazarian is an anthropologist at Kuban University and a researcher at the Center for Pontic and Caucasus Studies, Krasnodar, Russian Federation (shahnon @ mail.ru).)

An Apology Action
On December 12, 2008, a group of Turkish intellectuals launched an internet campaign to apologize for the World War I-era slaughter of Armenians in Turkey. Significantly, the “apology campaign” did not employ the highly disputed term “genocide” (soykırım), opting instead for a Turkish translation of the term commonly used in the Armenian language, the “Great Catastrophe” (Meds Yeghern or, in Turkish, Büyük Felaket). Signatories to the apology declared:

My conscience does not accept the insensitivity [shown in] the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them.

By July 26, 2009, more than 30,000 members of the Turkish public had signed the online apology. As journalist Suzan Fraser noted, the apology campaign appeared to be “a sign that many in Turkey are ready to break a long-held taboo against acknowledging Turkish culpability for the deaths.” At the same time, many in Turkey criticized the campaign; a group of nearly 60 retired diplomats called it “unfair, wrong, and unfavorable to [Turkey’s] national interests.”

In Turkish intellectual circles and society as a whole, a fierce intellectual struggle has begun, and a schism is now developing with regard to the treatment of the Armenian genocide. The predominant group, which corresponds to the political right wing, uses the Turkish term “deportation” (tehcir), a publicly acceptable concept, for the
1915 events.

Representing this view, the Turkish Historical Society insists on a particular account of the events. First, there were ethnic cleansings during World War I, in which 450,000 Armenians perished, largely as a result of illness contracted during the deportation. Second, these victims were not shot in an organized manner, nor did they all die at once. Third, the persecution was not centrally coordinated, refuting allegations that it was a policy organized and executed by the Turkish government. Finally, killings took place on both the Turkish and Armenian sides, and, therefore, cannot be considered genocide. By comparing Turkish social realities in 1915-23 with the practices of the Third Reich, Turkish historians have concluded that the two tragedies simply do not represent the same phenomenon.

Perhaps as a sign that a post-national narrative of Turkey’s history is developing, a group of Turkish scholars have come to represent another branch of critically thinking Turkish intellectuals–the so-called “critical left wing.” One of the pioneers of critical discourse is Taner Akçam, the first Turkish historian to openly study the Armenian genocide. In Akçam’s view, according to Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker, “the key to understanding the Turks’ refusal to discuss [the events] of 1915” is the linkage between those events and Turkey’s formative nation-building process from 1920 to 1923. Kolbert explains that the Armenian genocide was:

a campaign of ethnic cleansing [that] changed the demographics of eastern Anatolia….For the Turks to acknowledge the genocide would thus mean admitting that their country was founded by war criminals and that its existence depended on their crimes. This, in Akçam’s words, ‘would call into question the state’s very identity.’

“What the World Knows and Turkey Does Not”
In 2005, three Turkish universities cosponsored a conference entitled “Ottoman Armenians during the Decline of the Empire: Issues of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy.” The conference, which was open only to Turkish scholars, was the first in Turkey to address the issue of the Armenian genocide. Ninety years after the tragic events of 1915, the participants, Turkey’s own academics and intellectuals, were ready “to collectively raise their voices [which] differ from…the official [state version of history], and put forth their own contributions.”

The conference, however, was postponed due to government pressure. As Suzan Fraser noted, the postponement may have been an indication that Turkey was not yet “ready to tolerate dissenting voices on sensitive subjects.” It might also have been considered a blow “to Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union, which is pressuring the country to adopt greater freedoms.” The conference was criticized by Turkish officials such as then-Justice Minister Cemil Cicek, who said it “went against government efforts to counter [the] Armenian campaign to have the killings recognized as genocide.” He went as far as to call the organizers of the conference “traitors” and the conference itself a “stab in the back to the Turkish nation” in a session of the Turkish parliament.

Though the conference was ultimately held at a private university amid rowdy protests, it prompted the creation of Article 301, which made it illegal to denigrate Turkey, “Turkishness,” or Turkish state institutions. Author Orhan Pamuk was charged under this new law after a February 2005 interview with a Swiss newspaper in which he said, “30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” The target of a hate campaign, Pamuk temporarily left Turkey, although the charges were subsequently dropped. Many Turks believe Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006 for political reasons.

Pamuk was only one of some 60 writers and publishers to face such charges in 2005. Another Turkish author, Elif Safak, ran into trouble after a character in her novel The Bastard of Istanbul, declared that her grandparents had “lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915, but she herself had been brainwashed to deny the genocide.” As Kolbert writes, the charges were eventually dropped after Safak successfully argued that a “statement by a fictional person could not be used to prosecute a real one.”

Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union have increased the attention of external observers to problems of ethnic minorities’
rights, cultural diversity, political Islam, and freedom of expression in Turkey. The charges against Pamuk elicited an international reaction and led many to question Turkey’s readiness to join the EU.
Camiel Eurlings, one of five members of the European Parliament who observed Pamuk’s trial, remarked:

Freedom of expression is one of the fundamental rights Turkey has to respect. This is essential for Turkey’s accession to the EU. The cases as filed against Orhan Pamuk, Hrant Dink, [and] Ragip Zarakolu [among others] are not in line with the European Convention on Human Rights and could have a negative effect on Turkey’s accession process.

That said, EU membership no longer holds the same appeal in Turkish society as it once did. According to the Journal of Turkish Weekly, just 52 percent of Turks support EU membership. For many Turks that oppose membership, especially among nationalist, conservative/traditionalist, and political Islamist circles, denying the Armenian genocide serves an eminently practical political purpose
– helping prevent Turkey from ever becoming a serious candidate for EU membership.

The January 2007 assassination by an ultranationalist Turkish youth of Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink, a vocal advocate of Turkish-Armenian dialogue, proved a turning point in the freedom of expression in Turkey. At his funeral, tens of thousands of mourners marched through Istanbul to condemn the assassination, chanting, “We are all Armenians” and “We are all Hrant Dink.” A series of workshops were launched by Sabanci University in 2008 and 2009 in memory of Dink. After his murder, criticism of Article 301 increased substantially, leading to parliamentary proposals for its repeal.

The end of the taboo against discussion of the Armenian tragedy has led to unprecedented turbulence in Turkish society and an avalanche of admissions that many contemporary Turks are actually closely related to Armenians. Many more have admitted that their great-grandmothers were Armenians who secretly married Turkish or Kurdish men and converted to Islam after 1915. This subject has lent extreme gender sensitivity to the discourse about the genocide. Confessions have poured out in autobiographical novels recounting the lives and confessions of grandmothers and great-grandmothers.

An Armenian Response
Marginalization and isolation, largely products of the post-Soviet transition, have contributed to a continuously growing identity of victimization in Armenia. Among Armenians, a fierce debate rages about the legitimacy of Turkey’s preconditions for reconciliation. After a year of pronouncements anticipating an improvement in Armenian-Turkish relations, some Armenian analysts believed that the two countries’
efforts at so-called “soccer diplomacy” had “stalled.” This seemed especially true, according to an analyst for the EurasiaNet website, after Ankara “expressed its intent to link the reopening of its border with Armenia [to] a comprehensive solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.” Yerevan, for its part, has asserted, as a reporter for ArmeniaNow put it, that “Armenian-Turkish rapprochement must take place without preconditions and should not be linked [to] either the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict” or the campaign for genocide recognition.

In this context, the reaction to the Turkish “apology” initiative in Armenia, Nagorno-Karabagh, and the diaspora has been ambivalent. On the one hand, Armenians of all classes and social strata have recognized and are grateful for what they have been waiting 90 years to receive; on the other hand, Armenians continue to feel vulnerable thanks to the “preconditions” Turkish politicians have established for opening the Armenian-Turkish border.

The Armenian intellectual critique of the apology campaign has been articulated the best by Laurent Leylekian, executive director of the European Armenian Federation (Armenian National Committee of Europe), in a May 2009 speech published in the Armenian Reporter. Critiquing both Turkish intellectuals and Kemalism as a social phenomenon, Leylekian notes a wide range of anti-Kemalist intellectuals in Turkey, some of whom “oppose the Turkish state system” while others “simply want to improve its image.” Regardless of where they stand, Leylekian says that most of these Turkish intellectuals share the political priorities of the ruling AK Party: support for Turkey’s European Union membership; support for institutional reforms (democracy and the rule of law); and respect for human rights and minorities.

At the same time, Leylekian observes that even Turkish intellectuals critical of Kemalism still share “the national goal of getting rid of unwelcome questions or at least their political significance.” They approach the Armenian genocide less as a “political crime in need of an international legal response” than as something that should be dealt with “solely within the Turkish nation and in a way that will be painless for [it].”

Leylekian outlines five methods Turkish intellectuals employ for this purpose. He calls these methods a discourse of humiliation and strategies of containment, formal empathy, rejecting of extremes, and deprivation. A discourse of humiliation “plays upon the Europeans’
guilty conscience toward the Muslim world” and implies that the focus on genocide recognition is a convenient cover for the West’s shabby treatment of Turkey. The strategy of containment seeks to frame the issue of genocide solely within the confines of academic discourse.
Strategies of formal empathy and the rejection of extremes seek to establish that Armenians and Turks all suffered together and that all manifestations of extremism should be rejected equally. Finally, the strategy of deprivation seeks to keep Armenians themselves out of the Turkish debate about genocide. Leylekian concludes by saying that he really sees only two preconditions to dialogue: recognition of the genocide, “not only as a historical fact but also as a political problem today,” and the “acceptance of the political, legal, and moral responsibility of the present Turkish state” as the successor to the one responsible for the genocide.

In the end, unfortunately, the discourse among nationalist circles in Turkey and Armenia is essentialist and one-dimensional. For Turks and Armenians both, the Armenian genocide ( “catastrophe” or “tragedy”) is directly connected to fundamental questions of collective identity. In Turkey, this fact combines with complex processes involving a desperate battle between the ruling Islamists, who are eager to join Europe and attempting to overcome their problems with neighboring countries, and the military-patriotic establishment. For Armenians, the Karabagh war and its consequences of isolation and dependence represent a kind of continuation to genocide, a perception which is reaffirmed by Turkey’s biased defense of Azerbaijani interests in the reconciliation process. Whatever victory Armenians have obtained in Karabagh represents a resolution to this victimization complex, making Turkish preconditions to normalization appear nonsensical and pushing Armenians to be suspicious of the apology movement altogether. In the end, symbolic values and traumatic memories continue to exert a pull on both state policy and social relations.

PONARS Eurasia publications are funded through the International Program of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

(c) PONARS Eurasia 2009

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

Nona Shahnazaryan

Nona Shahnazaryan is Associate Researcher at Center for Pontic and Caucasian Studies (Krasnodar, Russia, from 1999 to present) and Lecturer, Kuban State University (from 2002 – 2005), Kuban Socio-Economic Institute in Krasnodar (from 2006 to present). She received her Candidate s Degree in Social Anthropology from the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, (17 May 2005) and has conducted fieldwork in Russia, USA, Armenia, Georgia, and Nagorno-Karabagh through grants from Memorial (Historical and Human Right organization, Moscow; 2003, 2004), the Soros Foundation (1999), and The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (2004), The Carnegie Fund (2006), Fulbright (2006-2007).

Her recent articles on the Caucasus include, “The Virtual Widows of Migrant Husbands in War-Torn Mountainous Karabagh,” in: Generations, Kinship and Care. Gendered Provisions of Social Security in Central Eastern Europe. Ed: H. Haukanes and F. Pine, Volume No.17. University of Bergen. Center for Women?s and Gender Research. 2005; with Artyom Kosmarski, “Krasnodar, Karabakh, Moscow: Reflections on a Post-Soviet Anthropologist at Home/ in the Field”. Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 16 (2007), pp. 161-169. Los Angeles; “Gender Scenarios of Ethnic Conflicts: Narratives of the Karabakh War”. Ab Imperio. Studies of New Imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space. 1/2007. Moscow; “Femina Sovietica: Survival in Caucasian Way”. Vestnik Evrazii, 4, ed. S. Panarin. Moscow, 2006; and La situation linguistique des Arméniens du Haut-Karabagh : l’emprunt lexical comme création intralinguistique // Revue du Monde Armenien Moderne et Contemporain, 6/2001, Paris, Societe des Etudes Armeniennes. P. 51-73.

March 10, 2010
The Armenian Genocide Resolution is a Farce all Around”

Ermeni Tasarisi Elestirisi

ABD Temsilciler Meclisi Dis Iliskiler komitesinde Ermeni iddialarini iceren karar tasarisinin 04 Mart 2010 persembe gunu yapilan oylamada bir oy farkla kabul edilmesi ile baglantili olarak, yabanci medyada cok sayida yorum ve kose yazisi yayinlandi. Asagida, Henry Barkey’in Washington Post’ta yer alan makalesine yanit olarak bir fransiz arastirmaci Maxime Gauin’in okuyucu mektubunu aktariyorum. Gauin, bu yazisinda, jenosid iddiasinin neden temelsiz bir suclama oldugunu ozlu bicimde acikliyor.
Pulat Tacar [tacarps@gmail.com]

Turkish Forum danisma kurulu Uyesi,

Buyukelci (e),

UNESCO Türkiye Milli Komisyonu Başkan Vekili

MAXIME GAUIN’IN HENRY BARKEY’IN

WASHINGTON POST’TA CIKAN MAKALESINE

GONDERDIGI OKUYUCU MEKTUBU

“Mister Barkey,

Your article “The Armenian Genocide Resolution is a Farce all Around” https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/02/AR2010030202375.html?waporef=obinsite) is an interesting and iconoclast analysis; unfortunately, among the pertinent remarks, there is this big error:

“To be clear, the overwhelming historical evidence demonstrates that what took place in 1915 was genocide.”

1. Many respectable historians criticize the “genocide” label, including Roderic H. Davison, Gwynne Dyer, Edward J. Erickson, Michael M. Gunter, Paul B. Henze, J. C. Hurewitz, Yitzchak Kerem, Bernard Lewis, Guenter Lewy, Heath Lowry, Justin McCarthy, Andrew Mango, Robert Mantran, Jeremy Salt, Stanford J. Shaw, Norman Stone, Gilles Veinstein and Robert F. Zeidner.

2. There is simply no evidence of a genocide intent.

— Gwynne Dyer demonstrated as early as 1973 that Mevlanzade Rifat’s book is a crude falsification, and even Yves Ternon, strongly favorable to Armenian nationalists, considers this work as more than dubtious.

— The “Andonian documents” were proved to be forgeries, more than twenty-five years ago: Christopher Walker, who believed in 1980 to the authenticity of “Andonian documents” suppressed almost all references to this material in the second edition of his book (Armenia. The Survival of a Nation, London, Routledge, 1990), then wrote in an article that “doubt must remain until and unless the documents or similar ones themselves resurface and are published in a critical edition” (“World War I and the Armenian Genocide”, in Richard G. Hovannisian, [ed.], The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Time, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1997, p. 247). Absolutely no effort in this sense was made since 1997: it is perhaps the best evidence that Andonian material is nothing but a forgery.

— The “Ten Commandments” are a another forgery. As early as 1973 Gwynne Dyer demonstrated that the authenticity is highly questionable. More recently, even the strongly pro-Armenian historian Donald Bloxham noticed (“Donald Bloxham replies”, History Today, July 2005, Vol. 55, Issue 7) : “Most serious historians accept that this document is dubious at best, and probably a fake. It was the subject of controversy some twenty years before Dadrian rediscovered it for publication in 1993. The document’s donor originally offered it for sale to the British authorities in February 1919, a time when numerous fraudulent documents were in circulation.”

The late Stanford J. Shaw, former professor of Turkish history at Harvard, University of California-Los Angeles and Bilkent noticed: “The British and French authorities to who they had been handed pointed out that they were at complete variance with Ottoman style and vocabulary and were obvious forgeries, as a result never using them in courts of law” (From Empire to Republic. The Turkish War of National Liberation. 1918-1923, Ankara, 2000, tome I, p. 316). Similarly, British historian Jeremy Salt, considers that the text is “certainly a fake” ).

— Ambassador Morgenthau’s story, which was not considered as a reliable source by actual American specialists like George Abel Schreiner and Horace C. Peterson, is refuted even by the personal archives of Morgenthau himself. See Ralph Elliot Cook, The United States and the Armenian Question, 1894-1924, Ph.D. dissertation, Flertcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 1957, p. 129; Heath Lowry, The Story Behind “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story”, Istanbul, The Isis Press, 1990 (available online: http://www.eraren.org/index.php?Lisan=en&Page=YayinIcerik&SayiNo=19) and Guenter Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey, Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 2005, pp. 140-142.

— The Special Organization was accused by Arthur Beylerian, V. Dadrian and Taner Akçam to be a key of “racial extermination”, but only in using falsified quotations and in neglecting the archival material of this organization, as demonstrated by Guenter Lewy and Edward J. Erickson: https://www.meforum.org/748/revisiting-the-armenian-genocide https://www.meforum.org/991/armenian-massacres-new-records-undercut-old-blame

— The Turkish martial-courts of 1919-1920 violated all the basic rights of defense, and all their original material is lost, as explained by Guenter Lewy in his article and his mentioned before. See also Ferudun Ata, İşgal İstanbul’unda Tehcir Yargılamaları (“The Istanbul Trials of Relocation”), Ankara, TTK, 2005.

3. It is not true that Western sources support mostly the “genocide” allegations.

US journalist George Abel Schreiner, who traveled extensively in Anatolia, wrote that “Turkish ineptness, more than intentional brutality, was responsible for the hardships the Armenian subjected to” (The Craft Sinister: A Diplomatic History of the Great War and Its Causes, New York, G. Albert, 1920, pp. 124-125).

Swedish journalist G. H. Pravitz published an account of his trip in Eastern Anatolia then in Arab provinces, in his newspaper Nya Dagligt Allehanda, April 23, 1917. He concluded that there was no campaign of extermination and that all the allegations of massacres which he checked were false (http://www.tallarmeniantale.com/swedish-eyewitness.htm).

Heinrich Bergfeld, German consul in Trebizond, who served eight years in Turkey and spoke Turkish, checked rumors of “massacre” in his region, together with the US consul Oscar Heizer, on July 17, 1915: they concluded that the rumors were baseless; in other occasions, Bergfeld denounced crimes against other convoys of displaced Armenian, who indeed occurred this time (Guenter Lewy, op. cit., pp. 145-146).

William Peet, the American head of international Armenian relief effort in Istanbul, recalled that Talat Pasha “gave prompt attention to my requests, frequently greeting me as I called upon him in his office with the introductory remark: ‘We are partners, what can I do for you today?’” (Louise Jenison Peet, No Less Honor: The Biography of William Wheelock Peet, Chattanooga, E. A. Andrews, 1939, p. 170).

H. Philips, diplomat serving in US embassy of Istanbul, sent on September 1^st, 1916, a report concluding that atrocities were committed by local officials, without orders from central government (Guenter Lewy, op. cit., p. 231).

Otto Liman von Sanders, chief of German military mission in Ottoman Empire, and not exactly a Turkophile, explained that “In the execution of expulsions many of the terrible and damnable cases of ruthlessness may unquestionably be ascribed to the minor official whose personal hatred and rapacity gave the measures ordered from above enhancement of harshness that was not intended [by Ottoman government]” (Five Years in Turkey, Annapolis, U.S. Naval Institute, 1927, p. 157; translated from German by Carl Reichmann).

The report of General Harbord, approved by US Senate in 1920, does not mention any “extermination campaign” but war crimes from both sides (see the full text online: . The report of Emory Niles and Arthur Sutherland supports the same conclusion, with more details ).

Moreover, the compilation of German documents published by Johannes Lepsius in 1919 was proved to be not only selective, but also full of dishonest ellipses and even containing pure and simple manipulations of texts, as a systematic comparison between the originals of German archives and the published version demonstrates (Cem Özgönül, Der Mythos Eines Völkermordes, Cologne, Önel Verlag, 2005).

4. The “genocide recognitions” forget the crimes committed by Armenian nationalists.

— The crimes committed against the Armenian population herself.

Armenian Revolutionary Federation and Hunchakian Party killed many decent Armenians, who were loyal to Ottoman Empire, or at least, denounced the methods of gangsters used by revolutionary committees, including the Armenian chief of Ottoman police in Bitlis, assassinated in 1898, and the mayor of Van Bedros Kapamajian, assassinated in 1912 (see, among others: Kapriel S. Papazian, Patriotism Perverted, Boston, Baikar Press, 1934, pp. 13-18 and pp. 68-73; Justin McCarthy, “The Armenian Uprising and the Ottomans”, Review of Armenian Studies, 7-8, 2005).

The Armenian revolutionary committees claimed their responsibility in the massacres of Armenians of WWI, explaining that they organized insurrections and recruitment of volunteers for Russian an French army in guessing perfectly the tragic consequence (Gareguine Pasdermadjian, Why Armenia Should Be Free, Boston, Hairenik Press, 1918, p. 43; Aram Turabian, Les Volontaires arméniens sous les drapeaux français, Marseille, Imprimerie nouvelle, 1917, pp. 41-42).

— Then, the great massacres of Muslim and Jewish civilians.

Haig Shiroyan, an Ottoman Armenian who became an US citizens, wrote in his Memories: “The Russian victorious armies, reinforced by Armenian volunteers, had slaughtered every Turk they could find, destroyed every house they penetrated” (Smiling Through the Tears, New York, 1954, p. 186). Niles and Sutherland, in their report mentioned before, noticed: “Armenians massacred Musulmans on a large scale with many refinements of cruelties” and that “Armenians are responsible for most of the destruction done to towns and villages”.

Ottoman archives are full of first-hand accounts about atrocities committed by Armenian volunteers, including burning of babies, cutting of women’s breast, etc.; many documents were translated into Western languages: https://louisville.edu/a-s/history/turks/Documents2.pdf https://louisville.edu/a-s/history/turks/turcs_et_armeniens.pdf Archeological excavations, carried out in Eastern Anatolia thanks to documents and very old survivors, discovered several thousands of skeletons, from 1986 to 2003, identified thanks to specific clothes, small Korans, bullets, and, for the last mass graves, thanks to DNA tests.

— Finally, the Armenian terrorism which supported the “recognition movement” — and was supported by ARF, Hunchak and some personalities of Ramkavar/AGBU. Armenian terrorists killed at least 70 persons, wounded more than 500, and perpetrating 160 attacks by explosives.

One of the Armenian terrorist groups was simply a branch of ARF (Francis P. Hyland, Armenian Terrorism: the Past, the Present, the Prospects, Boulder-San Francisco-Oxford, Westview Press, 1991, pp. 61-62; Gaïdz Minassian, Guerre et terrorisme arméniens, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2002, pp. 28-37 and 106-109; Yves Ternon, La Cause arménienne, Paris, Le Seuil, 1983, pp. 218-224). ARF of Californian and elsewhere celebrates the racist murderer Hampig Sassounian, sentenced to life by Californian justice, currently in a Californian jail (among many other examples: www.asbarez.com/45716/sassounian-thanks-community-for-continued-support/ www.asbarez.com/46446/more-than-70-000-raised-for-hampig-sassounian-defense-effort/ www.fra-france.com/print_article.php?id=56).

Mourad Topalian, one of the most active Armenian American lobbyists, former president of Armenian National Committee of America, was sentenced in 2001 to 37 months of jail for illegal storing of war weapons and explosives, linked to a terrorist organization. Vicken Hovsepian, principal leader of ARF in USA, was sentenced in 1984 to six years of jail for participation to an attempt of bombing.

Who recalled the terrorist past activities of these peoples during the debate about “genocide” resolution?

In hoping to read more balanced accounts of WWI and Armenian terrorism in your articles,

Regards,

Maxime Gauin,

Paris”

March 10, 2010
Armenian-Americans Should not Allow Obama and Clinton to Bury Genocide Bill

It was bad enough that Pres. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had failed to keep their campaign pledge to reaffirm the facts of the Armenian Genocide. They sunk to a new low last week, when Mrs. Clinton announced that she and the President opposed adoption of the Armenian Genocide resolution by the full House, following its passage by the Foreign Affairs Committee.

When asked by journalists why she and the President have reversed course on this issue, Mrs. Clinton unabashedly replied: “Well, I think circumstances have changed in a very significant way…. We do not believe that any action by the Congress is appropriate and we oppose it.” She added that the administration does not believe the full House “will or should” vote on the resolution. How can the facts of a genocide that took place 95 years ago change overnight? In reality, nothing has changed except Secretary Clinton’s moral compass, assuming she had one to begin with!

It is shameful that the Obama administration is caving in to threats from a third world country that needs the U.S. more than the U.S. needs it. As Aram Hamparian, the Executive Director of the Armenian National Committee of America said last week: “Turkey does not get a vote or a veto in the US Congress!” Neither does the U.S. President nor the Secretary of State, on a non-binding congressional resolution.

A White House spokesman announced last week that the presidents of Turkey and United States had spoken by phone on the eve of the Committee vote. Soon after, Mrs. Clinton warned Committee Chairman Howard Berman that “further congressional action could impede progress on normalization of relations” between Turkey and Armenia. Strangely, Mrs. Clinton seems to have appointed herself as supreme arbiter of what’s in Armenia’s best interest, while Armenian-Americans and Armenia’s leaders have repeatedly declared that they support the adoption of the genocide resolution. Indeed, Mrs. Clinton has put herself in the ridiculous position of knowing better than Armenians what’s good for them!

After claiming for months that the Armenia-Turkey Protocols have no preconditions and not linked to any other issue, Mrs. Clinton now asserts that the Protocols pave the way for a commission that is supposed to study the facts of the Armenian Genocide. “I do not think it is for any other country to determine how two countries resolve matters between them,” she stated. This confirms the worst fears of Armenian opponents of the Protocols. Clearly, the Secretary believes that ratification of the Protocols would prevent consideration of the Armenian Genocide issue by third parties. This is precisely what the Turkish side had been stating, to the dismay of most Armenians. Interestingly, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu made a similar announcement last week, expressing his surprise that the Armenian Genocide resolution is once again on the agenda of the U.S. Congress. All along, the intent of Turkish leaders has been to stop third parties from raising the Armenian Genocide issue, as they drag out the Armenia-Turkey reconciliation process.

It was no accident that almost all Congressmen, who spoke against the genocide resolution in the Foreign Affairs Committee, used the lame excuse that their opposition to this bill was prompted by a desire not to undermine the Protocols which ostensibly would bring Armenian-Turkish reconciliation. Despite their sugar-coated rhetoric, those who opposed the resolution and supported the Protocols were in fact acting against Armenia’s best interests on both counts. The Protocols are now dead and buried anyway, thanks to Turkey’s refusal to ratify them, unless Armenia accepted extraneous preconditions.

While Armenian-American voters cannot settle their score with Pres. Obama this year, since he is not on the ballot in November, 18 of 22 opponents of the resolution are! Armenian-Americans should do everything in their power to prevent the re-election of all those who voted against the genocide resolution on March 4: Russ Carnahan (D-MO), Gerald Connolly (D-VA), Michael McMahon (D-NY), Mike Ross (D-AR), Brad Miller (D-NC), David Scott (D-GA), Gregory Meeks (D-NY), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Ron Paul (R-TX), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Mike Pence (R-IN), Joe Wilson (R-SC), Connie Mack (R-FL), Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE), Michael McCaul (R-TX), Ted Poe (R-TX), Bob Inglis (R-SC), and Dan Burton (R-IN). Bill Delahunt (D-MA) and John Tanner (D-TN) are retiring from Congress. Gresham Barrett (R-SC) is running for Governor, while John Boozman (R-AR) is a candidate for the U.S. Senate. The latter two should be opposed in their new campaigns.

In addition, Armenian-Americans should campaign against the re-election of Steve Cohen (D-TN), Ed Whitfield (R-KY) and Kay Granger (R-TX), for sending a joint letter to Foreign Affairs Committee members urging them to vote against the genocide resolution. All three are members of the congressional Turkish Caucus.

The next culprits are CEO’s of five major American aerospace and defense companies: Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co., Raytheon Co., United Technologies Corp., and Northrop Grumman Corp. They sent a joint letter to the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee urging him to reject the Armenian Genocide resolution, in order not to jeopardize their sales to Turkey. These CEO’s have committed not only an immoral act by placing a higher premium on profits — blood money — over human rights, but also ignored the fact that Turkey cannot forego its purchases from their firms, because by doing so it would only weaken itself. Armenian-Americans should counter these firms by staging demonstrations in front of their headquarters and factories. Those employed by these firms should communicate their anger to the CEO’s of these firms. Stockholders should go to the next annual meeting of these companies to make their concerns known and seek removal of the CEO’s. Similar protest actions should be taken against the Aerospace Industries Association, which represents more than 270 member companies. The AIA sent a separate letter to Congress against the Armenian Genocide resolution.

The Congressmen and companies who opposed the resolution on March 4 should pay a heavy price for their immoral act. Ignoring their negative votes and letters would encourage them to oppose the resolution again, when it reaches the House floor. If Armenian-Americans could cause the defeat of just one of these scoundrels in November, the rest of them will get the message that voting against genocide recognition can cost them their political careers. They will then think twice before casting such a vote.

As far as Pres. Obama and Secretary Clinton are concerned, Armenian-Americans should not allow them to dictate to the U.S. Congress. Given the fact that most Americans are disillusioned with the failed policies and unfulfilled promises of the Obama administration, all elected officials nationwide are seriously worried about their re-election. This is the perfect time to demand action from politicians and punish those who do not cooperate. Armenian-Americans should contact their representatives in every congressional district throughout the country, even in remote areas, and tell them that unless they support the genocide resolution, they will not get their vote in November. Politicians would rather listen to the voices of their constituents than to Pres. Obama who is the main cause for their seats being in jeopardy. Therefore, the fate of the resolution is ultimately in the hands of Armenian-Americans. If they work hard and get enough congressional supporters, Speaker Pelosi would have no choice but to bring the resolution to the House floor, regardless of what the administration tells her to do. Otherwise, voters who are angry on many other issues could toss out of office the incumbents, jeopardizing her own speakership!

Armenian-Americans should not forget to express their profound gratitude to Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) and 22 other Congressmen who voted for the resolution on March 4. They are: Gary Ackerman (D-NY), Eni Faleomavaega (D-American Samoa), Donald Payne (D-NJ), Brad Sherman (D-CA), Eliot Engel (D-NY), Diane Watson (D-CA), Albio Sires (D-NJ), Gene Green (D-TX), Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Shelley Berkley (D-NV), Joseph Crowley (D-NY), Jim Costa (D-CA), Keith Ellison (D-MN), Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), Christopher Smith (R-NJ), Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), Donald Manzullo (R-IL), and Edward Royce (R-CA), Elton Gallegly (R-CA), and Ron Klein (D-FL). The Armenian community should enthusiastically support their re-election.

Finally, some Turkish circles are consoling themselves simply because the resolution was adopted by a difference of one vote. Since House Committee members who opposed the resolution for unrelated reasons explicitly stated that they did not dispute the facts of the Armenian Genocide, the vote could have been 45 to 0, not 23-22, in terms of genocide acknowledgment — a great victory for the truth and a major defeat for Turkish denialists and their backers. No one should be surprised therefore, if in the coming days Turkish leaders cancel the multi-million dollar contracts of their failed lobbying firms!

March 9, 2010
Deputy Chief of Staff to the President of Armenia, Vigen Sargsyan Undermines Armenia’s National Security

By Appo Jabarian

Executive Publisher / Managing Editor
USA Armenian Life Magazine

In February, Deputy Chief of Staff to the President of Armenia Vigen Sargsyan visited the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC, to discuss the prospects and “potential benefits of normalization of relations between Turkey and Armenia,” according to the CSIS website.

During the question-and-answer session, in response to a question from Mr. Kazari of the Embassy of the Republic of Azerbaijan in Washington, DC, Mr. Sargsyan astonishingly said the following regarding the current Armenian-Azeri border: “All those important parts of the borders can be de-blocked. Our immediate borders between Armenia and Azerbaijan have nothing to do with the territories around Nagorno Karabagh.”

He continued: “Now as far as the occupation, our concerns are very much in favor [of] … what is important [is that] the president of Armenia [Serzh Sargsyan], who was the Minister of Defense of these territories, has always stated that he does not think of these territories as historic Armenian lands. He always stated that these territories have to return to Azerbaijan when the settlement of Nagorno-Karabagh is found.”

In reference to the controversial former Foreign Minister of Armenia, Mr. V. Sargsyan added: “Vardan Oskanyan’s reference to the word of ‘occupied territories’ [ignited] big internal discussions on what he has to do” to mitigate the negative outcome in the mass media.

As many readers recall, in September 2007, I had called for Mr. Oskanyan’s resignation or dismissal as Foreign Minister of Armenia. The article was disseminated through several news outlets around the globe.

In that article, I wrote: “Oskanyan has been Foreign Minister for too long, without having achieved any substantial gains for Armenia. Furthermore, Armenia squandered away many valuable opportunities for diplomatic gains in the international arena and even sustained self-inflicted damages thanks to Mr. Oskanyan’s mishandling of several cases at the United Nations and elsewhere. It is absurd that the foreign minister … mislabels the liberated Armenian lands as ‘occupied’ territories. … Isn’t it time for a change? The political landscape is shifting. We need more proactive leaders in Armenia.”

Is Mr. V. Sargsyan aware that the territories surrounding mountainous Artsakh have always been part of Armenia?

The now-liberated territories around Artsakh are part of the entire Region of Artsakh that extends to the Kura River, just east of the border between the Republic of Artsakh and the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan.

As Mr. V. Sargsyan should know, the Artsakh Region along with Nakhitchevan was arbitrarily carved out of the 1918-1920 independent Republic of Armenia. These regions were part of Armenia up until its takeover by the Soviet occupation forces in November 1920.

In 1921, soon after Sovietization, Armenia was subjected to the process of “Stalinization” when the infamous Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin “gifted” the entire Region of Artsakh with its lowlands and highlands; and Nakhitchevan to the then newly created Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan.

Presently, the Republic of Azerbaijan continues to illegally occupy 1) The northern Artsakh district of Shahumian; and Gandzak (Kirovabad); 2) the outlying lowlands that extend to Kura River; and 3) Nakhitchevan.

One wonders if Pres. Serzh Sargsyan is aware of his Deputy Chief of Staff V. Sargsyan’s latest serious international blunder (to say the least), undermining Armenia’s national security interests during a lecture in Washington, DC.

By using the misleading term “occupation,” Mr. V. Sargsyan should feel ashamed for having committed an act of blasphemy against the memory of thousands of innocent Armenian victims of the 1988 Azeri pogroms in Baku, Sumgait and Gandzak/Kirovabad and their deportation staged by Azerbaijan.

Mr. V. Sargsyan also disrespected the memory of countless freedom fighters that liberated Artsakh from the Azeri yoke during the Artsakh Liberation War (1991-1994) which was in response to the 1988 Azeri crimes against defenseless Armenians.

While still on the job, Mr. Sargsyan should steer away from or remain unswayed by the influence of neo-con enablers in various academic/diplomatic circles, such as the one inside the Fletcher School of Diplomacy which he graduated from.

Interestingly, during recent years, the Fletcher School of Diplomacy has been serving as the farming grounds for spineless Armenian diplomats, among them former Foreign Minister Oskanyan.

To President Serzh Sargsyan’s credit, as soon as he took the helm of Armenia’s leadership in 2008, he decommissioned Foreign Minister Oskanyan because of his dismal performance.

It would only be logical, if Pres. Sargsyan were to deal with Mr. V. Sargsyan, the way he dealt with Mr. Oskanyan. May be, Mr. V. Sargsyan should not even wait – he should present his letter of resignation sooner rather than later.

To listen to Mr. V. Sargsyan’s comments at CSIS, please fast-forward to the last 5 minutes of his remarks, by using the following link: ).
Audio file icon is located under the heading: “Audio: The Prospects for Armenia-Turkey Normalization: The View from Yerevan”

March 8, 2010