Month: November 2006

AMD 450.3MLN, $50,000 STATE PROPERTY PRIVATIZED IN ARMENIA IN JAN-SEPT 2006
ARKA News Agency, Armenia
Nov 3 2006
YEREVAN, November 3. /ARKA/. State property worth a total of AMD
450.3mln and $50,000 was privatized in Armenia in January-September
2006.
The RA Statistical Service reports that receipts from the privatization
of companies totaled AMD 376.3mln and $50,000, from incomplete
construction projects AMD 11.2mln, from “small” facilities AMD
62.8mln. During the period under review, the governmental shares in
ten companies were privatized, six by means of direct sale, two on a
competitive basis, and two by auctions. Six incomplete construction
projects and three “small” projects were privatized.
Over AMD 3.7bln and $931.2ths are expected to be received. AMD 1.2bln
and $931.2ths of them are receipts from the privatization of companies,
AMD 2.5bln from incomplete construction projects, and AMD 2.5bln from
“small” facilities.

WHEN SILENCE IS BETRAYAL: BEING SILENT AGAINST INJUSTICE IS A CRIME ITSELF
By Aland Mizell
Kurdish Media, UK
Nov 3 2006
The collapse of the Soviet Union opened the door of opportunity
for Turkey. Private companies and the Turkish government quickly
implemented special policies to develop their presence in Central
Asia. Because many Turks believed that their ancestors come from
Central Asia, many Turkish people called Central Asians “Ata yurd,”
meaning fatherland. In their view, the Soviet Union was a divided
Turkic nation for more than seventy years. After the fall of the
Communist regime in this area, Turks were happy to go back to their
ancestral land. Turkish nationalists like the Grey Wolves and religious
sects like the Gulen community seized this opportunity, especially
the Gulen movement’s leader with his businessmen, teachers, students,
and supporters to go to Ata yurd. Gulen and the Turkish government,
with ex-president Ozal leading the charge, undertook a twelve-day
trip to Central Asia to establish economic and cultural networks
between the Gulen movement and other social networks.
Gulen opened schools all over Central Asian countries. Turkish
delegates visited these countries getting emotional, saying that
after such a long time Turks were able once again to visit their
fatherland. They invited Uzbek, Kazakh, Turkmen and Kyrgyz officials
to Turkey to rebuild the broken bridge. It was a huge economic
opportunity for Turkish markets to explore Central Asian countries,
and for Turkey to take advantage of its history, culture, religion,
and background to use the Central Asian rich resources and to invest
heavily there. Turkish nationalists even wrote a song about how
they missed their fatherland. The Gulen movement took advantage
of this same historical, cultural, and religious background and
helped their brothers and sisters in Central Asia. When the people
of Central Asia asked them why they helped with schools and free
education, they replied that they did so because brothers should
help brothers. Not only that, but also they explained that Central
Asia is their fatherland, so they should help one another. This was
a very valid point because, yes, Turkey should help their brothers
and sisters in Central Asia; and, yes, they should take advantage
of the rich economic resources and eliminate the poverty to end the
suffering of poor. Since that time, Turkish businessmen have invested
multi-million dollars in Central Asian countries.
Shared resources among brothers would be mutually beneficial. Why
can the Kurdish people in Iraq not share the rich oil resources with
their other Kurdish brothers in the north? Why can the Kurds not
reestablish their economic, social, educational, and political bonds?
Kurds who live in the south of their region have much more Kurdish
educational experience than the Kurdish people who live in the north,
because the Turkish regime forbids Kurdish education in public;
the regional government in northern Iraq does provide Kurdish schools.
Therefore, it makes sense for the Kurdish people who want to learn
the true history of their ancestors to study in southern Kurdish
universities. When Turkish religion groups and nationalist groups
opened universities in Central Asia, and the Turkish government spent
so much money opening universities in Turkistan just to teach Turkish
history and to rebuild brotherhood, why can the Kurds not do it?
Political barriers prevent such policies. When the mayor of the
Diyarbakir wanted to invite Kurdish leaders from Iraq to participate in
the Kurdish Nevroz holiday, the Turkish government radically opposed
the invitation and accused the Kurds of racism and separatism.
Powerful Muslim leaders like Gulen always talk about peace, justice,
and equality. Many people believe in his word. But if Gulen is so
sincere in what he is saying, why then is he so silent about Kurdish
injustice? Why did he never publicly denounce the Turkish government’s
prejudiced policy toward the Kurdish people? Today Gulen and others
accuse America of being oil thirsty and claim that this is the reason
that America is in the Middle East. Well, then Mr. Gulen, why did you
open schools in the southern Kurdish region? Why did you open schools
in Central Asia, Russia, China, Cambodia, the Philippines, Colombia,
Japan, America, Australia, and Germany as well as in many other
countries? When you open schools in all those country, you teach the
Turkish language and Turkish culture, and you open Turkish businesses
as well. You criticize America for being in the Middle East because
of national interests, which is true, but you also have national
interests. At least America does not have a plan to conquer the whole
world as you do in setting up a pan-Islamic global state. At least
America saved the Muslims from the Serbs while other Muslims could not
do anything. In front of your eyes, Saddam gassed thousands of Kurds.
Why were you so silent? Saddam’s helicopter chased Kurds, Kurds running
to find a safe place to hide from his slaughter, and Turkish soldiers
sent them back. Why were you silent? Isn’t silence against injustice
a crime?
It is acceptance of injustice. Now that the Americans and the British
have taken power from Saddam, you are bothered because the Kurds
will have a decent life. Without justice peace is nothing but a nice
sounding word.
Courage has no value unless joined by justice. Thirty minutes of
justice is worth your years of prayers.
After Gulf War I, the world was shocked by the status of the
Kurds, especially Saddam’s ‘genocide against the Kurds and Turkey’s
oppression policy toward the Kurds. Kurds do not have a friend but
their destiny. The world was silent, when Saddam gassed thousands
of Kurds and when Turkish soldiers and especially its police forces
kidnapped, murdered, tortured, raped, and denied their basic God-given
rights. God supposedly created every human being equal, and none can
take and individual’s rights way.
Also God created every creature in His image, so the human tragedy is
awful in itself, but the silence of those who should be concerned by
virtue of their ties with humanity is worse. The spiritual leaders who
preach human values such as morality, God’s love, equality, those in
the Christian and as well as Muslim communities, make the silence more
terrible. While the world was silent, the devil was murdering Kurdish
men, women, and children. Genocide against the Kurds happened in 1988,
but nobody knew until the Gulf War. Or did the people know but just
were silent? Where were the principles of God’s love for humanity,
equality, and moral values? Why was God’s love suddenly turned to
God’s hatred if judged by these spiritual leaders’ response? Does
God not like the Kurds?
Where is God’s justice that many Muslim leaders talk about? Why were
fellow Muslims so silent while many Kurdish mothers cried for their
love ones? Why were they forgotten? After the second Gulf War, the
Turkish government officially expressed their concern over the fate
of 300 thousand Turkmen living in Iraq, but we have not heard the
same concern from the Muslim leaders about millions of Kurds living
in the same region.
The Turkish government and religion leaders for all their concern made
sure that the Turkmen were safe and sound and that harm did not come to
any of them. Was this concern because the blood of Turkmen has a high
value compared to that of other ethnicities? Was it because God created
Turks superior to the Kurds? For more than thirty million Kurds, their
dignity is daily taken away; their rights have been denied to them
before the eyes of the corrupt religion leaders, elite politicians,
media, and even society itself. Every day we see houses of Kurds being
burned by the military, we see the Kurdish people being humiliated,
we see the Kurdish people suffering, and we see Kurds disappearing. We
even learn that the Turkish government put a bomb in a bookstore,
trying to terrorize the region. On our television screen everyday
international news bulletins document that the military is trying to
make a veritable hell of their lives.
Not only has that Gulen been silent against injustice, but also he is
denying that anything happened in Turkey, “Therefore in our country
there is no deprivation due to discrimination in general terms, so
some current events cannot be considered the last drop overflowing
the glass. Everybody can become soldiers in Turkey. Every group can
have one of their people be generals or even president. Look for
example, our second president from Malatya was Kurdish, and so was
Turgut Ozal, the eighth president.” Does his statement declare that
nobody in Turkey is being deprived of the benefaction of democracy?
He further argues, “Sometimes the state’s protection has been
perceived as oppression by some. Whether the state did actually
oppress anyone, I can’t say. That would be lack of respect for
my state. But the impression was created by the propaganda that
provoked the people.” Denial may be the stepsister of silence. How
many journalists working on articles related to Kurdish issues has
the government killed?
How many Kurdish intellectuals have been kidnapped or assassinated,
or how many newspapers offices and magazines have been raided.
Interestingly, none of those who have committed crimes against Kurds
have been caught.
Why were Muslims absent in such a bewildering manner when many
Kurds suffered from genocide? Why does Gulen remain silent about
the tragedies of millions of Kurds while he is concerned about the
fate of the three hundred thousand Turkmen in Iraq? Is the blood of
the Kurdish people cheaper than Turcoman blood? Why do Muslims and
other religious leaders still keep silent in the face of injustice;
being silent in the face of injustice is in itself is injustice. If
Kurds are not now being angry, when will they be angry? Why was not
their voice heard or action seen in angry protest? When Israel bombed
Lebanon, millions of Muslims went to streets to protest against the
U.S. in Lebanon. Who bombed the bookstore in Semdinli province? Was
the government creating terror by first burning houses and villages,
and then by forcing them to leave their home, by making them homeless,
and now by bombing public spaces? Are these actions for protection of
the people or destruction of the people? It is true that there is no
problem in Turkey about being a beneficiary of democracy or getting
moved up to a good position unless you have to be Turk to do so.
However, when you say, “I am a Kurd,” those observations do not
apply; instead, you are automatically labeled a terrorist. In other
word, there is not a problem as long as you say, “I am a Turk in
Turkey.” Also Gulen says Ozal was a Kurd as well, but how many times
did Ozal go on television and say, “I am a Kurd”? Is it very sad for
Kurds that many Kurds who are successful businessmen, intellectuals,
or young intelligent students believe what Gulen is saying and are
being indoctrinated.
Why then should Kurds trust the Turkish government? When Tayyip Erdogan
gave a historical speech in the main Kurdish city of Diyarbakir,
for the first time he pointed out that “the great states are those
who learn from their mistakes.” He hinted that the long policy of
suppression against the Kurdish minority had been the greatest error,
but did Erdogan keep his promise? Did Erdogan compensate the Kurds
for the houses that had been destroyed by the military? Did Erdogan
build new schools, roads, and clinics? Did Erdogan create jobs and
opportunities to eliminate unemployment? What he did was increase
the size of the military in southeastern Turkey and based the biggest
battalion around Diyarbakir.
When Diyarbakir’s mayor Baydemir explained that southeastern resources
should not be going to the west for processing, he explained that
Batman’s oil is going to western Turkey for processing. Why should
it not be processed in eastern Turkey, so that it will create the
jobs for the Kurdish people? Again many Turks accuse Mayor Baydemir
of being racist and charge him with wanting to divide Turkey and to
establish an independent Kurdistan. Why do Turkish government officials
create such paranoia? What Baydemir was saying is that the petroleum
belongs to the east, the east is suffering high unemployment, and,
consequently, why can the oil not be processed in eastern Turkey;
in that way the policy will create some jobs for the Kurds.
Who bombed the bookstore in Semdinli province? Was the government
creating terror by first burning houses and villages, and then by
forcing them to leave their home, by making them homeless, and now by
bombing public spaces? Are these actions for protection of the people
or destruction of the people? It is true that there is no problem
in Turkey about being a beneficiary of democracy or getting moved
up to a good position unless you have to be Turk to do so. However,
when you say, “I am a Kurd,” those observations do not apply; instead,
you are automatically labeled a terrorist. In other word, there is not
a problem as long as you say, “I am a Turk in Turkey.” Also Gulen says
Ozal was a Kurd as well, but how many times did Ozal go on television
and say, “I am a Kurd”? Is it very sad for Kurds that many Kurds
who are successful businessmen, intellectuals, or young intelligent
students believe what Gulen is saying and are being indoctrinated.
In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, in his letter from a prison cell
wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” When the
writer Orhan Pamuk stood against injustice and broke the silence saying
that “one million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in those lands
and nobody but me will talk about it,” he was charged with denigrating
the Turkish national identity and insulting Turkishness. Thanks
to the European Union Turkey could not put him in prison. Now many
Turkish religious groups, newspapers, and nationalists are attacking
Mr. Pamuk and questioning his intellectual capability. What Mr. Pamuk
did show was that a human being cannot sit in his home and not be
concerned about what is happening in southeastern Turkey, because for
Mr. Pamuk and us, we are inescapably and mutually tied in a single
destiny, and whatever happens to one directly affects all, at least
indirectly. Injustice anywhere in Turkey is a threat to all people
living in Turkey. It is the business of God fearing, peace loving
people to speak up against injustice.
Like sociologist Ismail Besikci wrote that one of the most tragic
events in the history of the Middles East and in the world in our
time was the implementation of an interstate system of colonialism
in Kurdistan. Even though Besikci himself was a Turk speaking against
injustice, he served years in prison for not being silent. The colonial
system in Kurdistan can be easily described as a human tragedy because
of the suffering of millions of Kurds. History has been determined;
millions are dead and their family property has been divided. Silence
reaps grave consequences. Religious leaders in other countries remained
silent in the face of racism. When Hitler operated the vast factory
of death where the Nazis tortured, shot, gassed, starved, raped, six
million innocent human beings — Jews, the handicapped, and dissidents,
the world failed to confront it. Now Germany is speaking out, but the
victims are dead. Seemingly then as now even God was silent, perhaps
waiting for one of his creations to speak out against injustice.
Aland Mizell, a Kurdish legal expert, is with the University of Texas
at Dallas school of Social Science and a regular KurdishMedia.com
writer.
/news.asp?id=13522

OSCE-ORGANIZED CONFERENCE GATHERS SCIENTISTS TO DISCUSS ARMENIA’S CAPACITY TO CONFRONT NEW SECURITY THREATS
Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE)

Nov 3 2006
YEREVAN, 2 November 2006 – Scientists and researchers from Armenia,
Russia and the United States met in Yerevan for a two-day conference,
organized by the OSCE Office in Yerevan, to talk about Armenia’s
capacity to deal with new threats and challenges to security.
“This event, which is a follow-up to a similar conference held in
November 2004, is meant to bring together Armenia’s academia and
beyond and to give them an opportunity to exchange their views on
human security challenges in Armenia and the wider Southern Caucasus,”
said Ambassador Vladimir Pryakhin, Head of the OSCE Office.
“Functioning democratic institutions and the rule of law play an
important role in preventing threats to human security worldwide.
This is where the OSCE comes in: respect for human rights and
fundamental freedoms, democracy and the rule of law are at the core
of the OSCE’s comprehensive concept of security,” he said.
One of the key recommendations emanating from the event was to
connect with the so-called Byurakan Symposia on Global Challenges,
which served in the 1960s and 70s to promote international contacts
of Armenia’s scientific community and civil society. It is hoped that
the event will be held on an annual basis.

THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND THE POLITICS OF SILENCE
By Elizabeth Kolbert
The New Yorket
Nov 2 2006
On September 14, 2000, Representatives George Radanovich, Republican
of California, and David Bonior, Democrat of Michigan, introduced a
House resolution-later to be known as H.R. 596-on the slaughter of
the Armenians. The measure urged the President, in dealing with the
matter, to demonstrate “appropriate understanding and sensitivity.”
It further instructed him on how to phrase his annual message on
the Armenian Day of Remembrance: the President should refer to the
atrocities as “genocide.” The bill was sent to the International
Relations Committee and immediately came under attack. State Department
officials reminded the committee that it was U.S. policy to “respect
the Turkish government’s assertions that, although many ethnic
Armenians died during World War I, no genocide took place.”
Expanding on this theme, Secretary of Defense William Cohen, in a
letter to Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the House, wrote that while
he in no way wanted to “downplay the Armenian tragedy . . . passing
judgment on this history through legislation could have a negative
impact on Turkish-Armenian relations and on our security interests in
the region.” After committee members voted, on October 3rd, to send
H.R. 596 to the floor, Turkish officials warned that negotiations
with an American defense contractor, Bell Textron, over four and a
half billion dollars’ worth of attack helicopters were in jeopardy.
On October 5th, the leaders of all five parties in the Turkish
parliament issued a joint statement threatening to deny the U.S.
access to an airbase in Incirlik, which it was using to patrol
northern Iraq. Finally, on October 19th, just a few hours before H.R.
596 was scheduled to be debated in the House, Hastert pulled it from
the agenda. He had, he said, been informed by President Clinton that
passage of the resolution could “risk the lives of Americans.”
The defeat of H.R. 596 is a small but fairly typical episode in a
great campaign of forgetting. Like President Clinton, President Bush
continues to “respect the Turkish government’s assertions” and to issue
Armenian Remembrance Day proclamations each year without ever quite
acknowledging what it is that’s being remembered. If in Washington
it’s politically awkward to refer to the genocide, it is positively
dangerous to do so in Istanbul. Last year, Turkey’s leading author,
Orhan Pamuk, was prosecuted merely for having brought up the subject
in a press interview. “A million Armenians were killed and nobody but
me dares to talk about it, ” he told the Sunday magazine of the Swiss
newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. Pamuk, now a recipient of the Nobel Prize in
Literature, was accused of having violated Section 301 of the Turkish
penal code, which outlaws “insulting Turkishness.” (The charge was
eventually dropped, on a technicality.) A few months later, another
prominent Turkish novelist, Elif Shafak, was charged with the same
offense, for having a character in her most recent novel, “The Bastard
of Istanbul,” declare, “I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who
lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915,
but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide.” The charges
were dropped after Shafak argued that the statement of a fictional
person could not be used to prosecute a real one, then reinstated by
a higher court, and then dropped again.
It is in this context that Taner Akcam’s new history, “A Shameful Act:
The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility”
(Metropolitan; $30), must be considered. The book is dryly written
and awkwardly translated, but nevertheless moving.
Akcam grew up in far northeastern Turkey and was educated at Ankara’s
Middle East Technical University, where he became the editor of a
leftist journal. In 1976, he was arrested and sentenced to ten years
in prison for spreading propaganda. Using a stove leg to dig a tunnel,
he managed to escape after a year, and fled to Germany. Akcam is one
of the first Turkish historians to treat the Armenian genocide as
genocide-he now lives in exile in Minnesota-and in “A Shameful Act”
he tries to grapple both with the enormity of the crime and with the
logic of its repression.
Any writer who takes on genocide as his topic accepts obligations
that, if not exactly contradictory, are clearly in tension. The
first is to describe the event in a way that is adequate to its
exceptionality. (The original U.N. resolution on the subject, approved
in 1946, describes genocide as an act that “shocks the conscience
of mankind.”) The second is to make sense of it, which is to say,
to produce an account of the unspeakable that anyone can understand.
Akcam begins his history in the nineteenth century, when roughly
two million Armenians were living in the Ottoman Empire, some in
major cities like Istanbul and Izmir, and the rest in the provinces
of central and eastern Anatolia. Already, the Armenians were in
a peculiarly vulnerable position: Christians living in the heart
of a Muslim empire, they were subject by law to special taxes and
restrictions, and by tradition to extortion and harassment. As the
century wore on, the so-called Sick Man of Europe kept shedding
territory: first Greece, in the Greek War of Independence; and then,
following the Russo-Turkish War, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, and
Bosnia and Herzegovina. These humiliating defeats eroded the Ottomans’
confidence, which, in turn, Akcam argues, “resulted in the loss of
their tolerance.” Muslim assaults on Christians increased throughout
the empire, and the ancient prejudices against the Armenians hardened
into something uglier.
In 1876, Sultan Abdulhamid II came to power. Abdulhamid, who ruled
the empire for thirty-three of its last forty-six years, was a deeply
anxious man, perhaps paranoid. He maintained a vast network of spies;
turned Yildiz Palace, overlooking the Bosporus, into a ramshackle fort;
and demanded that each dish be tasted by his chief chamberlain before
being served. Abdulhamid soon took anti-Armenianism to new heights. (It
was rumored that the Sultan’s own mother, a former dancing girl, was
Armenian, but he always denied this.) He shut down Armenian schools,
threw Armenian teachers in jail, prohibited the use of the word
“Armenia” in newspapers and textbooks, and formed special Kurdish
regiments, known as the Hamidiye, whose raison d’etre appears to
have been to harass Armenian farmers. Encouraged by American and
European missionaries, the Armenians turned to the outside world for
help. The English, the French, and the Russians repeatedly demanded
that Istanbul institute “reforms” on the Armenians’ behalf.
Officially, the Sultan acceded to these demands, only to turn around
and repress the Armenians that much more vigorously. “By taking away
Greece and Romania, Europe has cut off the feet of the Turkish state,”
Abdulhamid complained. “Now, by means of this Armenian agitation, they
want to get at our most vital places and tear out our very guts. This
would be the beginning of totally annihilating us, and we must fight
against it with all the strength we possess.”
In the mid-eighteen-nineties, tens of thousands of Armenians were
murdered. The slaughter began in Sasun, in eastern Anatolia, where
Armenians had refused to pay taxes on the ground that the government
had failed to protect them from Kurdish extortion. The killings in
Sasun provoked an international outcry, which was answered with the
Sultan’s usual promises of reform, and then with a string of even
bloodier massacres in the provinces of Erzurum, Ankara, Sivas, Trabzon,
and Harput. In the wake of the killings, William Gladstone, the former
British Prime Minister, labelled Abdulhamid “the great assassin.”
Finally, in 1909, Abdulhamid was pushed aside. The coup was engineered
by a group composed, for the most part, of discontented Army
officers-the original Young Turks. The Young Turks spoke loftily of
progress and brotherhood-on the eve of the revolt, one of their leaders
is said to have declared, “Under the blue sky we are all equal”-and
the empire’s remaining Christians celebrated their ascendancy. But
the logic of slaughtering the Armenians had by this point been too
well established.
When the First World War broke out, the Young Turks rushed to join the
conflict. “That day of revenge, which has been awaited for centuries
by the nation’s young and old, by its martyrs and by its living,
has finally arrived,” the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies asserted in
a letter to the armed forces. By 1914, the empire was being led
by a troika-nicknamed the Three Pashas-composed of the Minister of
the Interior, the Minister of the Navy, and the Minister of War. In
December, the War Minister, Ismail Enver, decided to lead the Third
Army in an attack against the Russians on the Caucasian front. Enver
planned to press all the way east to Baku, in present-day Azerbaijan,
where he hoped to incite the local Muslims to join the Ottomans’ cause,
and, as a first step, he ordered his forces to divide up and follow
different routes to Sarikamish, a Russian military outpost. The idea
was for all the troops to arrive at the same time and surprise the
enemy with their strength; instead, they straggled in over a period
of several days, with devastating results.
The Ottomans lost about seventy-five thousand men at Sarikamish, out
of a total force of ninety thousand. A German officer attached to the
Third Army described the defeat as “a disaster which for rapidity and
completeness is without parallel in military history.” The Russians
had encouraged the Armenians to form volunteer regiments to fight
against the Ottomans, and some (though not many) had heeded this
call. The Armenians’ role in the disaster became one of the pretexts
for the genocide.
On April 24, 1915, some two hundred and fifty prominent
Armenians-poets, doctors, bankers, and even a member of the Ottoman
parliament-were arrested in Istanbul. They were split up into groups,
loaded onto trains, shipped off to remote prisons, and eventually
killed. (The Armenian Day of Remembrance is marked each year on the
anniversary of these arrests.) Around the same time, orders were
issued to begin rounding up Armenians wholesale and deporting them.
“Some regional variations notwithstanding,” Akcam reports, the
deportations “proceeded in the same manner everywhere.” Armenians
would be given a few days or, in some cases, just a few hours to
leave their homes. The men were separated from the women and children,
led beyond the town, and either tortured or murdered outright. Their
families were then herded to concentration camps in the Syrian desert,
often bound by ropes or chains. Along the way, they were frequently
set upon by Kurdish tribesmen, who had been given license to loot
and rape, or by the very gendarmes who were supposed to be guarding
them. A Greek witness wrote of watching a column of deportees being
led through the Kemakh Gorge, on the upper Euphrates. The guards
“withdrew to the mountainside” and “began a hail of rifle fire,”
he wrote. “A few days later there was a mopping-up operation: since
many little children were still alive and wandering about beside
their dead parents.” In areas where ammunition was in short supply,
the killing squads relied on whatever weapons were at hand-axes,
cleavers, even shovels. Adults were hacked to pieces, and infants
dashed against the rocks. In the Black Sea region, Armenians were
loaded onto boats and thrown overboard. In the area around Lake Hazar,
they were tossed over cliffs.
At the time of the deportations, the U.S. had not yet entered the
war. It maintained an extensive network of diplomats in the region,
and many of these provided detailed chronicles of what they had seen,
which Henry Morgenthau, the United States Ambassador in Istanbul,
urgently forwarded to Washington. (Other eyewitness accounts came from
German Army officers, Danish missionaries, and Armenian survivors.) In
a dispatch sent to the State Department on November 1, 1915, the
U.S. consul in Aleppo wrote:
It is extremely rare to find a family intact that has come any
considerable distance, invariably all having lost members from disease
and fatigue, young girls and boys carried off by hostile tribesmen,
and about all the men having been separated from the families and
suffered fates that had best be left unmentioned, many being done
away with in atrocious manners before the eyes of their relatives
and friends. So severe has been the treatment that careful estimates
place the number of survivors at only 15 percent of those originally
deported. On this basis the number surviving even this far being less
than 150,000 . . . there seems to have been about 1,000,000 persons
lost up to this date.
An American businessman who made a tour of the lower Euphrates the
next year reported having encountered “all along the road from Meskene
to Der-i-Zor graves containing the remains of unfortunate Armenians
abandoned and dead in atrocious suffering. It is by the hundreds
that these mounds are numbered where sleep anonymously in their last
sleep these outcasts of existence, these victims of barbary without
qualification.” Morgenthau repeatedly confronted the Ottoman Interior
Minister, Mehmed Talât, with the contents of these dispatches, telling
him that the Americans would “never forget these massacres.” But the
warnings made no impression. During one session, Morgenthau later
recalled in a memoir, Talât turned to him and asked if he could
obtain a list of Armenians who had purchased life-insurance policies
with American firms. “They are practically all dead now, and have no
heirs left to collect the money,” the Interior Minister reasoned, and
therefore the unclaimed benefits rightfully belonged to the government.
The official explanation for the Armenian deportations was that
they were necessary for security reasons, and this is still the
account provided by state-sanctioned histories today. “Facts on
the Relocation of Armenians (1914-1918),” a volume produced by the
Turkish Historical Society, was published in English in 2002. It
begins with an epigram from John F. Kennedy (“For the great enemy
of the truth is very often not the lie-deliberate, contrived, and
dishonest-but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic”)
and the reassurance that it is “not a propaganda document.” The book
argues that Russia and its allies had “sown the seeds of intrigue and
mischief among the Armenians, who in turn had been doing everything in
their power to make life difficult for Ottoman armies.” Deciding that
“fundamental precautions” were needed, the Ottoman authorities took
steps to “relocate” the Armenians away from the front. They worked to
insure that the transfer would be effected “as humanely as possible”;
if this goal was not always realized, it was because of disease-so
difficult to control during wartime-or rogue bands of “tribal people”
who sometimes attacked Armenian convoys. “Whenever the government
realized that some untoward incidents had taken place . . . the
government acted very promptly and warned the local authorities.” In
support of this “Arbeit Macht Frei” version of events, “Facts on the
Relocation of Armenians” cites the very Ottoman officials who oversaw
the slaughter. Turkish officials, in turn, now cite works like “Facts”
to support their claim that the period’s history remains contested. In
March, 2005, just before the commemoration of the ninetieth anniversary
of the Day of Remembrance, the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, called for an “impartial study” to look into what had really
happened to the Armenians. The International Association of Genocide
Scholars responded that such a call could only be regarded as still
more propaganda. “The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented
by thousands of official records . . . by eyewitness accounts of
missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by
decades of historical scholarship,” the association’s directors wrote
in a letter explaining their refusal to participate. An academic
conference on the massacres planned for later that spring in Istanbul
was banned by a court order. (After much maneuvering, it was held at
a private university amid raucous protests.)
The Ottomans formally surrendered to the Allies on October 30, 1918.
The Paris Peace Conference opened the following year, and it took
another year for the Allies to agree on how to dispose of the empire.
The pact that finally emerged-the Treaty of Sèvres-awarded Palestine,
Transjordan, and Mesopotamia to the English, Syria and Lebanon to
the French, Rhodes and a chunk of southern Anatolia to the Italians,
and Izmir and western Anatolia to the Greeks. Eastern Anatolia, with
a prize stretch of Black Sea coast, was to go to the Armenians. The
Bosporus and the Dardanelles were to be demilitarized and placed under
international control. From an imperial power the Turks were thus
transformed into something very close to a subject people. This was
the final disgrace and, as it turned out, also the start of a revival.
As the rulers of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks had been fighting
against history; they had spent more than a century trying-often
unsuccessfully-to fend off nationalist movements in the regions
they controlled. Now, in defeat, they adopted the cause as their
own. In the spring of 1920, the Turkish Nationalists, led by Mustafa
Kemal-later to be known as Ataturk-established a new government in
Ankara. (The government’s founding is celebrated every April 23rd,
one day before the Armenian Day of Remembrance.) During the next
three years, the Nationalists fought a series of brutal battles,
which eventually forced the Allies to abandon Sèvres. A new treaty
was drawn up, the Treaty of Lausanne, and the Republic of Turkey
was created. The big losers in this process were, once again, the
Armenians: Lausanne returned all of Anatolia to Turkish control.
In Akcam’s view, what happened between 1920 and 1923 is the key to
understanding the Turks’ refusal to discuss what happened in 1915.
The Armenian genocide was what today would be called a campaign of
ethnic cleansing, and as such it was highly effective. It changed
the demographics of eastern Anatolia; then, on the basis of these
changed demographics, the Turks used the logic of self-determination
to deprive of a home the very people they had decimated. Although
the genocide was not committed by the Nationalists, without it the
nationalist project wouldn’t have made much sense. Meanwhile, the
Nationalists made sure that the perpetrators were never punished.
Immediately after the end of the war, the Three Pashas fled the
country. (The Interior Minister, Talât, was assassinated in Berlin
by an Armenian who had been left for dead in a pile of corpses.) In
an attempt to mollify the Allies, the Ottomans arrested scores of
lower-ranking officials and put some of them on trial, but, when the
Nationalists came to power, they suspended these proceedings and freed
the suspects. A separate prosecution effort by the British, who were
keeping dozens of Ottoman officers locked up in Malta, similarly came
to nothing, and eventually the officers were sent home as part of
a prisoner-of-war exchange. Several went on to become high-ranking
members of Mustafa Kemal’s government. 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 Akcam’s words, “would call into question the state’s very
identity.” And so the Turks prefer to insist, as “Facts on the
Relocation of Armenians” puts it, that the genocide is a “legend.”
It is, of course, possible to question Akcam’s highly psychologized
account. Turkey has long sought to join the European Union, and,
while a history of genocide is clearly no barrier to membership,
denying it may be; several European governments have indicated that
they will oppose the country’s bid unless it acknowledges the crimes
committed against the Armenians. Are the Turks really willing to risk
their country’s economic future merely in order to hide-or pretend
to hide-an ugly fact about its origins? To believe this seems to
require a view of Turkish ethnic pride that gets dangerously close to
a national stereotype. In fact, many Turkish nationalists oppose E.U.
membership; from their perspective, denying the Armenian genocide
serves an eminently practical political purpose.
That being said, Akcam clearly has a point, and one that Americans, in
particular, ought to be able to appreciate. Before the arrival of the
first Europeans, there were, it is estimated, at least forty million
indigenous people living in the Americas; by 1650, fewer than ten
million were left. The decline was the result of casual cruelty on the
one hand-diseases unwittingly spread-and systematic slaughter on the
other. Every November, when American schoolchildren are taught about
Thanksgiving, they are insistently told the story of how the Pilgrims,
in their gratitude, entertained the kindly Wampanoag. We now know
that the comity of that original Thanksgiving was entirely atypical,
and that, by 1621, the Wampanoag were already a dying nation. While it
was cowardly of Congress to pull H.R. 596, passing it would, in its own
way, also have been problematic. We may side with the Armenians, but,
historically speaking, we probably have more in common with the Turks.
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IRAN, RUSSIA DISCUSS RESTORING RAILWAY LINKS
Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran
Nov 2 2006
Moscow, Nov — A high ranking Russian delegation headed by Vladimir
Yakunin will be in Tehran within 4-6 November to discuss restoring
linkage between the two countries’ railways, said a Russian railway
spokesman on Thursday.
The source underscored the importance of construction of a north-south
international transport railway and said the Russian delegation would
put forth the issue of re-linking the two railway systems which has
been cut following Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict over Karabakh region.
The source added that in this respect the construction of a new
Ghazvin-Rasht-Astara railway would be necessary and Russia is intent
on contributing to constructing and modernizing Iran’s railway
infrastructure.
Iranians and Russians are also to exchange views on ways and means
of providing security measures for Russian made locomotives and wagon.
Russia has also expressed readiness to teach Iranian specialists in
its expert railway school.

GEORGIA ACCUSED OF OVERCHARGING ARMENIA FOR NATURAL GAS
By M. Alkhazashvili
Translated by Diana Dundua
The Messenger, Georgia
Nov 3 2006
There is an additional reason to make Georgian-Russian relations
tenser. Russian giant Gazprom accuses Georgia of using the natural
gas considered for Armenia. Though Georgia categorically denies this
fact and states that recently Armenia has not expressed any problems
with Georgian side in transporting the natural gas. (The newspaper
Rezonansi.)
According to the General Director of Armrosgazprom Karen Karapetyan,
Armenia paid for Russian natural gas based on the metre on the
Georgian-Armenian border and not based on the metre in Armenia. “The
counter on the Georgian-Armenian border registered a higher amount of
gas use compared to the amount on the metre in Armenian territory,”
Karapetyan stated at a news conference on October 31.
According to her, in order to investigate the difference on the two
meters they suspended gas delivery for two days into Armenia. “The
counter on Georgian territory registered more gas than was sent to
Armenia but in order to avoid a cut-off we paid the whole amount,”
Karapetyan noted, adding that this registered gas couldn’t just
“disappear” between the two metres. Karapetyan said the metre on the
Georgia border was out-dated while the metre in Armenia is more modern.
Russia used the incident to call Georgia an untrustworthy transit
country. Russian owned Gazprom is in talks to get a stake in the
Iran-Armenia natural gas pipeline. It is stated in Gazprom that
after finishing the construction of the natural gas pipeline there
would not be any problems in transporting natural gas to Armenia. The
Iran-Armenia natural gas pipeline will supply 36 billion cubic metres
(bcm) of natural gas to Armenia for the next 20 years.
Georgian Ministry of Energy refuses to comment on the Russian
accusations. Head of the Natural Gas Transportation Company Rezo
Urushadze states that all accusations are wrong but if there has been
a mistake, Georgia will provide Armenia with an additional amount of
natural gas to make up the difference.

FRANCE’S ARMENIAN GHOSTS
Middle East Online, UK
Nov 3 2006
Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler question the French legislation
of punishment of the expression of denial. That is, why France
would address Turkey on Armenians when they have delayed addressing
themselves about Algerians, or European complicity in the holocaust.
What pushes this legislation as Turkey hopes to join Europe’s Union?
Moral ghosts of the Holocaust still haunt Europe. Now in new guise,
moral ghosts are playing havoc with France’s capacity for moral
discernment. Draped under the absolutist mantle of virtue, France’s
legislators have lost their moral compass. The nation which charted
the first Human Rights Act has done a perplexing turn-about in order
to confront these other ghosts, others’ ghosts.
Is the French National Assembly’s sweeping law which would punish
any expression of denial that Turkey committed ‘genocide’ against
Armenians evidence of France’s own malaise, a reluctance to grapple
morally with admission of its own ghosts, and politically with the
admission of Turkey into Europe?
Over recent years Europe has expanded its boundaries so that Auschwitz
is now fully integrated into its midst. Europe is defining a new
moral identity for itself. Does France see itself part of that new
moral self-definition, or is France seeking to expand Europe’s moral
boundaries while contracting those boundaries in geo-political terms?
Europe is remembering too much, and too little. Too little, since
all Europeans have yet fully to confront their Holocaust ghosts;
too much, in that when they grapple with those ghosts they often
embrace collective expiation of guilt, re-defined by the late French
philosopher Jacques Derrida as “dissolution of guilt…If one starts
to accuse oneself by begging forgiveness of all crimes of the past
against humanity, there would not be a single innocent left on earth.”
After attempting to bury memories by long choosing not to remember
60 years on, Europe does commemorate the Holocaust, acknowledges
a shared guilt. But commemoration has not stilled the ghosts. They
creep further on — crossing historical and geographical boundaries
to tackle national memories of colonialism and slavery. The moral
pressure of the ghosts also induced Europeans to confront contemporary
moral challenges in Bosnia and Kosovo, while 9/11 compelled them to
relate to ‘the other’ in their midst.
What then drove this French insistence on a purist cross-border law
with regard to Turkey’s ghosts — an attempt perhaps to gain comfort
by turning away from confronting their own sins?
This imperative of grappling with ‘the other’ within their midst
complicates European attitudes on how to relate to ‘the other’ beyond
their realm, the other who would like to become part of their realm.
This is especially true of relations between some Europeans and Turks
— as Turkey negotiates to become a full part of Europe, negotiates
to stop being “the other’.
Could the enacting of a genocide-denial law committed by a country
which is not yet included in their midst be intended to help Europeans
avoid an historical grappling with ‘a European crime’ — if Europe be
enlarged to Turkey? Let rather Turkey remain beyond Europe, let its
‘genocide’ remain beyond Europe.
But if the French purpose was both to keep Turkey out of Europe
politically and Turkey’s tainted past out of Europe historically, it is
backfiring. Turkey’s ghost is doubling up as France’s Armenian ghosts.
Europe is at a crossroads between its past and its future orientation
— both political and moral. The French law seeks to put an indelible
stamp on the choices which define Europe, the basis on which Europe
ought to constitute itself.
With respect to Holocaust guilt, Derrida wrote: “If everyone is
considered guilty there will be no-one left to judge what then cannot
be adequately judged; if there is no-one to judge, then there is no
need for soul-search.” France’s insistence on a legalistic measure
to tackle the “Armenian genocide” takes the Derrida stricture to an
illogical conclusion.
The law is patently not the same as legislation against Holocaust
denial — as many European nations have done. Holocaust deniers still
try to ply their wares, their anti-Semitism meant to thrive on that
denial. Denial of the Armenian genocide is, however, a non-issue
in this respect: No-one in France, nor in Europe, nor indeed within
Turkey, uses denial to foment hatred.
Morally, it’s perfectly acceptable for France to prod Turkey to
confront its ghosts, as many Turks themselves demand of their
country. But beyond suspect political motives, is this legal rush
merely an attempt by some in France to cover-up refusal to confront
their national ghosts — from France’s colonial past?
Hardly surprisingly, aghast Turkish critics of the French action now
pursue a counter-challenge: What about your Algerian ghosts? France
is coming to terms with those ghosts, but “slowly” and “belatedly”
are the operative words. It took the film Indigenes by French-born
filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb about the role of Algerian conscripts in
World War II to gain those French veterans belated recognition.
As France attempts to impose a soul-search on others there is another
unexpected result: France, already under demand that it address its
own ghosts, is under pressure at home to reflect on the demand it
has made of Turkey. The ultimate injunction would seem to be “Judge
not the moral ghosts of ‘the other’!”‘
Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler are Jerusalem-based reporters
and documentary filmmakers.
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ARMENIANS BREACH CEASEFIRE IN FRONTLINE
Author: S.Jaliloglu
TREND Information, Azerbaijan
Nov 3 2006
On 2 November the Armenian Armed Forces dislocated in Horadiz
Village of the occupied Azerbaijani region, Fizuli, fired guns and
machines guns at the Azerbaijan National Army from 18:00 to 18:30,
the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry informed Trend.
The Azerbaijan National Army was also fired at from 20:10 to 21:10
from the villages Meftili and Daratepe of Jebrayil District by the
Armenian forces located there.
The Azerbaijan National Army retaliated and no causalities were
reported

CANADIAN FOREIGN MINISTRY WITHDRAWS ITS SPONSORSHIP OF TURKISH CONFERENCE
Asbarez
11/3/2006
OTTAWA–The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT)
has withdrawn its sponsorship of “Turkey in the World: Implications
for Canada” one-day conference organized by the Turkish Canadian
Advocacy Group and sponsored by DFAIT and the Turkish Embassy. The
conference will take place on November 3 in Ottawa.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the conference is a “special
lecture” titled “History as a Present Day Problem: the Ottoman Armenian
Question” to be delivered by Prof. Guenter Lewy, a well-known Armenian
Genocide denier engaged in Turkish propaganda rather than in scholarly
research.
Prof. Lewy’s participation in a DFAIT sponsored conference is in
conflict with the policies of the Canadian government and public
pronouncements of the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign
Affairs.”
Moreover, the conference included discussions on Middle Eastern,
Mediterranean and Caucuses issues without representation from those
regions. Rather than make the conference an open and pluralistic
forum conducted by academic, diplomatic and expert participation,
organizers had handpicked panelists who are guaranteed to deliver
the message the organizers wanted to hear.
The withdrawal of DFAIT from the conference followed an October 23
letter by the Armenian National Committee of Canada to Minister MacKay
and a presentation to DFAIT of the concerns of the Canadian-Armenian
community.
The ANCC considers such a sponsorship morally and ethically
unacceptable and at odds with Canadian values and what Canada stands
for. “The conference and Prof. Lewy’s “headline” participation is
an insult to the Canadian government, to the House of Commons and to
Senate Members, to Quebec, Ontario and to British Columbia–the three
provinces which recognize the Armenian Genocide as a historic fact,”
said Aris Babikian, executive director of ANCC.
“The ANCC would like to take this opportunity to thank DFAIT and other
political authorities for their understanding and valuable input in
upholding the government’s principled stand on such important human
rights issues as the Armenian Genocide,” said Babikian.

TURKISH MILITARY COVERS UP MASS GRAVE OF POSSIBLE GENOCIDE VICTIMS
Asbarez
11/3/2006
MARDIN, Turkey–Turkish gendarmerie has instructed local villagers
of a southeastern region to keep silence about a recently discovered
a mass grave, discovered on October 17, that might contain remains
of Armenian Genocide victims in mass burial site that might contain
skeletons of massacred Armenians.
According to Ulkede Ozgur Gundem, a Kurdish newspaper published in
Turkish, villagers from Xirabebaba (Kuru) were digging a grave for
one of their relatives when they came across to a cave full of skulls
and bones of reportedly 40 people.
The Xirabebaba residents assumed they had uncovered a mass grave of
300 Armenian villagers massacred during the Genocide of 1915. They
informed Akarsu Gendarmerie headquarters, the local military unit,
about the discovered remains. Turkish army officers, according
to Ulkede Ozgur Gundem, instructed the villagers to block the cave
entrance and make no mention of the remains buried in it. The officers
said an investigation would take place.
The newspaper reported on the developments and the Turkish military’s
attempt to hide the news. In an October 22 article, titled Found
by Villagers: Covered up by the Military, the newspaper wrote that
soldiers from Akarsu gendarmerie headquarters came to the site,
covered the cave entrance and took photographs. Journalists, who had
arrived to obtain more information, were denied access to the cave.
Although there had been prior instances of finding mass burial sites
believed to be from the Armenian Genocide, this was the first incident
when a Turkish daily newspaper reported the discovery.
As the mass burial made news, local gendarmerie made another visit
to the villagers. The latter were pressed to report the name of
the person who leaked the mass burial discovery to the press. The
officers told the villagers that the news reported by Roj TV, an
international Kurdish satellite television, and Ulkede ozgur Gundem
were all lies. The villagers were warned not to show anyone directions
to the cave.
The victims of the mass grave, according to Sodertorn University
History Professor David Gaunt, are most likely the 150 Armenian and
120 Syrian males, heads of their families, from the nearby town of Dara
(now Oguz) killed on June 14, 1915.
The Armenian and Syrian residents were marched out of the town,
and only one person was known to have escaped to tell of what had
happened, Prof. Gaunt said. According to the Syrian survivor, his
marching neighbors were murdered and their bodies were placed in a
well. The mass burial in this cave suggests that the two groups could
have been killed in separate places, and that the Armenians were put
into this cave, while the Syrians were put in a well, concluded Prof.
Gaunt, whose book, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian
Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I, is due out this
month.