ARMENIAN PRESIDENT TO PAY OFFICIAL VISIT TO EGYPT
Arka News Agency, Armenia
April 10 2007
YEREVAN, APRIL 9. /ARKA/. Armenian President Robert Kocharyan intends
to pay an official visit to Egypt.
RA Presidential Press Secretary Victor Soghomonyan reported that the
date has not yet been specified.
In Cairo the RA President is to hold a meeting with the Egyptian
leaders and discuss a wide range of issues of bilateral cooperation,
Soghomonyan said.
CONFERENCE "COMPETITIVENESS OF TURISM IN ARMENIA" SCHEDULED FOR APRIL 11-12, 2007 IN ARMENIA
Arka News Agency, Armenia
April 10 2007
YEREVAN, April 9. /ARKA/. The conference "Competitiveness of Tourism in
Armenia" will be held in Yerevan on April 11-12, 2007, lead specialist
of CAPS (Competitive Armenian Private Sector) for tourism Alan Saffery
told reporters in Yerevan on Monday.
According to him, results of surveys conducted by CAPS employees will
be presented at the conference. The surveys demonstrate concrete
indicators of this sector and contain practical approaches to
objectives of its development.
"Besides this, representatives of state-owned and non-governmental
organizations of Armenia will make presentations on a wide range of
issues of competitiveness of the Armenian tourism on the home and
foreign markets," he said.
Saffery reported that the conference is organized by the Ministry of
Trade and Economic Development, Tourism Development Agency, and CAPS.
Participating in the conference will be leaders and representatives
of many interested organizations, including travel agencies, NGOs,
and restaurants," he said.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
POWER, FAITH AND FANTASY
By Jamie Glazov
Front Page Magazine
April 10 2007
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Michael B. Oren, a Senior Fellow
at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem research and educational institute.
He is the author of the best-selling Six Days of War: June 1967 and
the Making of the Modern Middle East (Oxford, 2002), which won the
Los Angeles Times Book Award; a history of the 1956 Sinai Campaign
(Cass, 1993); as well as dozens of scholarly and popular articles on
history and the politics of the Middle East. His writing has appeared
in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post,
The New Republic, Commentary, and The Wall Street Journal. He is
the author of the new book Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the
Middle East, 1776-Present. It is the first book to tell the history
of America in the Middle East from the Founding Fathers to the present
day in one volume.
FP: Michael Oren, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Oren: It’s a great pleasure and an honor to be here.
FP: What inspired you to write this book?
Oren: The idea first occurred to me when I was a graduate student
in Middle East history at Princeton about twenty years ago. I was
listening to a lecture on the emergence of modern Egypt and my
professor happened to mention that, in the late 1860s, a group of
Civil War veterans-former Union and Confederate officers-went to
Egypt to help modernize its army. But when they got to Cairo, the
officers discovered that most of the Egyptian army was illiterate,
so they began to build a system of literacy schools. The Egyptian
soldiers, though, showed up to class with their children, and so these
veterans of Vicksburg and Gettysburg got into the business of teaching
Egyptian children to read and write. And while they were at it, they
also taught American values: patriotism, civic duties, and democracy.
I was fascinated by this story-like many Americans, I believe my
country’s involvement in the Middle East began just after World
War II-and I rushed to the library to read more about it. Yet, to
my disappointment, I found that while there were many books on the
history of British and French involvement in the Middle East, there
was not one volume on America’s experience in the region. There was
certainly no comprehensive history that would place these officers’
extraordinary story in any kind of meaningful, historical, context.
Flash forward some years to the aftermath of 9/11. Suddenly, it seemed
to me, Americans were being asked to make some profound decisions in
the Middle East-decisions that would impact not only their security
but that of much of the world-but they lacked an historical framework
for making them. And so, when my editor asked me "what’s the one
book about the Middle East that must be written but that hasn’t?" I
did not hesitate a moment. I told him: America in the Middle East,
1776 to the Present.
FP: What are the origins of America’s support for Israel?
Oren: The roots of American support for Israel go back hundreds of
years-indeed to the day that the first buckled shoe alighted on a
rock along the Massachusetts shore. The owner of that shoe, William
Bradford, proclaimed "Come let us declare in Zion the word of God."
Bradford was a leader of the Puritans, a dissenting Protestant movement
that suffered greatly at the hands of the Church of England, and which
sought strength in the books of the Old Testament. There the Puritans
found a God who spoke directly to His people, in their language,
and who promised them to rescue them from exile and restore them to
their Holy Land.
The Puritans appropriated this narrative-they became the New Israel
and the New World became the new Zion. Consequently, the Puritans
and their descendents developed a strong sense of kinship with the
Old Israel-the Jews-and an attachment to the Old Promised Land,
then known as Palestine, part of the Ottoman Empire. Many of them
concluded that, in order to be good Christians and Americans, they
were obliged to assist God in fulfilling his Biblical promises to
restore the Jews to their ancestral homeland. So was born the notion of
restorations, which became an immensely popular movement in eighteenth
and nineteenth-century America. John Adams declared that his fondest
wish was that "100,000 Jewish soldiers…would march into Palestine
and reclaim it as a Judean kingdom," and Abraham Lincoln acknowledged
that the dream of restoring the Jews was dear to a great many Americans
and pledged to help realize that dream after the Civil War.
Perhaps the greatest expression of restorationism occurred in 1891,
when real estate mogul William Blackstone submitted a petition to
President Benjamin Harrison urging the United States to spearhead an
international effort to take Palestine from the Turks and return it
to the Jews. The Blackstone Memorial, as it was called, was signed by
400 prominent Americans, including John D. Rockefeller, J. Pierpont
Morgan, and William McKinley. Restorationism proved instrumental in
moving Woodrow Wilson to endorse the Balfour Declaration, recognizing
the Jewish people’s right to a national home in Palestine, and in
convincing Harry Truman, a strict Baptist who had nearly memorized
the Bible, to be the first world leader to recognize Israel in 1948.
Of course, the fact that Israel is a democracy struggling for survival
in a profoundly undemocratic environment plays a role in America’s
support of the Jewish state. So, too, does the extensive cooperation
between the United States and Israel on military development,
intelligence sharing, and training. But the core of the U.S.-Israel
alliance lies in the faith of the American people, which remains-in
contrast to Europe-intense.
FP: Human rights and social equality appear to be alien notions and
un-existent realities in the Islamic Middle East. How come?
Oren: Concepts of human rights and social equality do exist in the
Middle East but they are interpreted much differently then they are
in the West. Under Islam, men are accorded rights that are denied
women-in divorce proceedings, for example-and those strictures are
stringently applied in many Arab societies, such as in Saudi Arabia.
Similarly, there are no provisions for children’s rights virtually
anywhere in the Middle East, no affirmative action, no bill of
rights. Homosexuality is considered a capital offense by many Middle
Eastern governments, including Iran and the Palestinian Authority.
And yet, in response to charges of sexual repression and systematic
rights denial, Middle Eastern Muslims often point out the exploitation
of women in the West, the breakdown of family values, and widespread
use of alcohol and drugs. Where we see progress and modernity, they
see decadence and the trampling of age-old traditions. This is the
fundamental source of friction between the West and the Middle East. It
is a clash not merely of civilizations but of entire worldviews,
of incompatible universes.
FP: What were the most fateful decisions made by U.S. Presidents
vis-a-vis the Middle East?
Oren: Many historians would probably list Harry Truman’s recognition
of Israel in May 1948 as one of America’s most fateful decisions in
the Middle East. While Truman undoubtedly provided a major boost
to the morale of Israeli forces fighting for their lives against
invading Arab armies, in fact he provided no concrete assistance to
the nascent Jewish state, and even imposed an arms embargo on it. The
United States would have eventually recognized Israel, as did virtually
all Western states, over the course of the following year.
The Arab-Israel conflict, meanwhile, became a reality.
A far more influential event was, to my mind, Woodrow Wilson’s decision
not to declare war against Turkey in 1917-1918. Remember that the
United States entered World War I in April 1917, opening hostilities
against Germany and Austria-Hungary, the two major members of the
Central Powers. Wilson then had to decide whether to go to war against
Ottoman Turkey, the third member of the coalition.
Both houses of Congress staunchly supported the move, as did Teddy
Roosevelt, the popular ex-president, who claimed that the slogan
"making the world safe for democracy" would become nonsense if America
ignored the tyrranical Turks.
But Wilson was also lobbied by Protestant missionaries and their
supporters. If the United States went to war in the Middle East,
they argued, the Turks would destroy nearly a century of American
good works, hospitals, and schools. Moreover, they would massacre
the missionaries much as they had the Armenians.
Wilson ultimately supported the missionaries. The grandson, son,
and nephew of Presbyterian ministers, the president was closely
associated with the missionary movements and greatly admired its
success. And so the United States never went to war against Turkey
and the ramifications of that decision were immense.
By the time of the armistice, in November 1918, Great Britain had
nearly a million troops deployed between Cairo and Istanbul. French
forces also occupied strategic positions in the area. The United
States, by contrast, had not a single soldier stationed anywhere in
the Middle East. The results of that vacuum soon became apparent at
Paris, where the Allies gathered to draw the map of the new Middle
East. Though his ideas for the region’s future differed substantively
from that of Britain and France, lacking military leverage, Wilson
was powerless to prevent the British and the French from dividing the
Middle East between them. Among their creations were Jordan, Lebanon,
Iraq, and the Palestine Mandate – later to morph into Israel.
Another decision of massive ramifications was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s
support for Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser in the 1956 Suez
Crisis. Though Nasser had plotted against Arab moderates and had
violated international agreements by nationalizing the Suez Canal,
Eisenhower sided with the Soviet Union – this while Soviet tanks
were crushing freedom-fighters in Hungary – to rescue Nasser from
certain defeat at the hands of Britain, France, and Israel. A
vastly strengthened Nasser proceeded to turn his Soviet-supplied
arms against Arab moderates and ultimately aimed them at Israel. But
imagine if Eisenhower had just stepped back and let Nasser fall. The
Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 might have been averted. There
would be no occupied territories, no intifadas or Hamas. Minus Nasser,
the Middle East might look radically different today.
FP: Shed some light for our readers on why the word "Fantasy" is in
the title of your book.
Oren: Fantasy relates to the highly romantic, and often erotic, image
of the Middle East in the American imagination. The roots of that
myth are quite deep, many of them stemming back to A Thousand and
One Arabian Nights, that collection of ribald Persian tales which,
after the Bible, was the second-most popular book on the American
colonial bookshelf. The myriad Americans who read this book, and had
no other reliable information on the Middle East, took it as truth:
there really were flying carpets, genie-haunted lamps, and veiled
but available harem girls. Such myths lured many Americans to see
the Middle East for themselves.
Starting with John Ledyard, a close friend of Thomas Jefferson
who became the first American explorer in Egypt in 1788, Americans
flocked to the Middle East. By the mid-nineteenth century, Americans
had surpassed the British as the largest group of tourists in the
area. Among them were Elizabeth Cabot Kirkland, the wife of Harvard’s
president, an African-American former slave named David Dorr, and the
Civil War heroes William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant. And
while many of these travelers wrote devastating portraits of the Middle
East, debunking the myths of A Thousand and One Nights, Americans
remained enchanted. By the early twentieth century, Hollywood had
seized on the Middle Eastern myth, producing such blockbusters as
the Sheikh of Araby (1921), which rocketed Rudolph Valentino to
stardom. There followed an almost endless series of Thousand and One
Nights knock-off movies, followed by smash hits such as Indiana Jones
and Sahara-all Middle Eastern fantasies.
Fantasy also had a profound impact on policy. Back in 1788, John
Ledyard looked at the Bedouin of the desert and likened them to
the pioneers of the American frontier. These were lovers of liberty
who, unfortunately, were languishing under Ottoman tyranny. Remove
that tyranny, Ledyard speculated, and the Arabs would rise up and
naturally embrace democracy. Such myths played an influential role in
America’s policy-making toward the Middle East-many Americans might
have wondered why, on 9/11, these picturesque nomads would leave their
oases to hijack civilian airliners-and in the decision to invade Iraq.
FP: Who were some of the more memorable characters and figures in
America’s history in the region?
Oren: Among my favorite characters are George Bethune English,
Harvard Class of 1807, who traveled to the Middle East as a Marine,
jumped ship in Cairo, and converted to Islam. Later, as a general
in the army of Egypt’s ruler, he led an expedition against Sudanese
bandits in Darfur. He ended his career-and indeed his life-acting as
President John Quincy Adam’s special agent in the Middle East, secretly
mediating a treaty between the United States and the Ottoman Empire.
Another outstanding character was Philip Dickson, a crusty old
Yankee from Groton, MA., who moved with his wife and twin daughters
to Palestine in 1855. On a barren hilltop, optimistically christened
Mount Hope, the Dicksons established a colony dedicated to teaching
the Jews how to farm and so preparing them for eventual statehood.
The Dickson daughters married two German Lutheran brothers, Frederick
and Johann Grossteinbeck, and together the family struggled to overcome
disease and hunger in order fulfill its mission.
In December 1856, the Dickson farm hosted an usual visitor-the
author Herman Melville. He had come to the Middle East in search of
an inspiration for his next novel; his last one, Moby-Dick, had sold
a disappointing 3,000 copies. Melville lunched with the Dicksons and
the Grossteinbecks, and later wrote rather disparagingly of them in
his diary. The following month, the farm was attacked by Bedouins.
Philip Dickson was struck mortally on the head while his wife and
daughters were brutally raped. Frederick Grossteinbeck was shot in the
groin and died an agonizing death. The only member of the colony to
escape unscathed was Johann Grossteinbeck who, according to consular
records, left Palestine and relocated to California.
Melville would allude to the attack on the Dickson colony in
his 24,000-line epic poem, Clarel, but so, too, would Johann
Grossteinbeck’s grandson, in his biblically-toned novel, East of
Eden. John Steinbeck’s grandfather had met Herman Melville in the
Middle East, in a colony created by Philip Dickson.
No favorite list of characters in American-Middle Eastern relations
would be complete without mentioning Mark Twain. Still going by his
real name, Samuel Clemens, Twain was a relatively unknown humorist
in 1867 when two American papers commissioned him to report on his
travels aboard the steamship Quaker City, bound for the Middle East.
The steamship and its lackluster passengers visited Istanbul,
Tangiers, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Alexandria. Twain’s observations
of these lands and their inhabitants were ruthless. The Syrian women,
he sneered, were so ugly that they "couldn’t smile after ten o’clock
Saturday night without breaking the Sabbath." Shocked by the cost of
a boat ride across the Sea of Galilee, he snorted, "no wonder Jesus
walked." Yet Twain was no less brutal in lambasting his countrymen,
especially those who took sledgehammers to ancient monuments and
knocked off fist-sized souvenirs. "American vandals," he called them.
The Middle East made Mark Twain. Using his new penname, he published
his collected dispatches as Innocents Abroad, which became the
largest-selling book of late nineteenth-century America. "It sold
more books than the Bible," Twain characteristically quipped.
FP: So what role should the U.S. be playing in the Middle East today
and in the near-future? What must it do in Iraq and how can it best
fight the terror war in general?
Oren: Americans must understand that they cannot disengage from the
Middle East. Iraq is not Vietnam. Americans withdrew from Vietnam
in 1975 confident that the North Vietnamese would not pursue them
to American cities. By contrast, the United States can evacuate it
soldiers from Iraq–and it will, eventually–but the Middle East
will pursue. Americans cannot detach themselves from the Middle
East because the Middle East will remain for the foreseeable future
attached to the United States. Elements in the region will continue
to seek to harm American citizens and vital American interests.
Leaders in Washington will still be called up to try to resolve Middle
Eastern disputes. And the U.S. economy will remain intertwined with
that of the oil-producing Gulf.
The question is, then: how can the United States interact with the
Middle East in a more prudent and effective manner?
And the answer, I believe, can be found in America’s centuries-old
history in the region–the legacy of power, faith, and fantasy.
To defend themselves against persistent Middle Eastern threats,
Americans will still have to employ power in the area. But at the
same time, they must realize that power has its limits in the Middle
East. Following Thomas Jefferson’s example of first fighting and then
concluding a peace treaty with the Barbary pirates, American leaders
must learn when to strike back and when to negotiate. They must realize
that military power, alone, cannot remake and sustain Middle Eastern
states riven by tribal and ethnic hostilities. They must develop new
forms of power to meet the rapid-changing dangers from the Middle
East–familiarizing a generation of American servicemen and women in
the languages and cultures of the region and strengthening economic
strictures against the financiers of terror.
Americans must maintain their faith in the Middle East, especially
their civic, secular faith in democracy, equality, and human rights.
The United States should enhance its support–flagging of late–for
Middle Eastern democratic movements and distance itself from the
region’s autocratic regimes. It must act according to its own
principles and ethic codes and so avoid atrocities such as those
committed at Abu Ghraib. At the same time, though, Americans must
realize that their concepts of liberty may not be appropriate or
transplantable to the Middle East, where ideas such as sexual freedom
and unbridled free speech are alien if not abhorrent.
Finally, and perhaps most crucially, Americans must learn to
distinguish fantasy from reality in the Middle East. They can offer
to assist the region to democratize, but without the illusion that
its inhabitants are desperate to rise up and embrace American-style
freedoms. They can open channels of communication to the enemies, such
as Iran, but without believing that those enemies share America’s
interests in stability and peace or that they care about their
citizens’ safety in the same way America does. They can invest heavily
in efforts to resolve conflicts between Arabs and Israelis or Shiites
and Sunnis but all the while understanding that the United States,
alone, cannot effect rapprochement among the region’s adversaries and
that some of these disputes will continue to roil indefinitely. The
United States should and must reduce its dependence on Middle Eastern
oil, and seek to develop alternative forms of energy, yet it must
realize that oil will remain the determinant commodity for many
years to come, and that the Middle East will still rank among its
principal suppliers.
In short, the United States will continue to be involved in the Middle
East–extensively and perhaps also existentially–but will hopefully
be so in a more resilient, flexible, and sober manner.
FP: Michael Oren, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
Oren: Thank you for this compelling and stimulating opportunity.
OBJECTIONS LEAD U.N. TO DELAY GENOCIDE EXHIBIT
By Warren Hoge
New York Times, NY
April 10 2007
UNITED NATIONS, April 9 – The United Nations dismantled an exhibit on
the Rwandan genocide and postponed its scheduled opening by Secretary
General Ban Ki-moon on Monday after the Turkish mission objected to
references to the Armenian genocide in Turkey at the time of World
War I.
The panels of graphics, photos and statements had been installed in
the visitors lobby on Thursday by the British-based Aegis Trust. The
trust campaigns for the prevention of genocide and runs a center in
Kigali, the Rwandan capital, memorializing the 500,000 victims of
the massacres there 13 years ago.
Hours after the show was assembled, however, a Turkish diplomat
spotted offending words in a section entitled "What is genocide?" and
raised objections.
The passage said that "following World War I, during which one million
Armenians were murdered in Turkey," Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer
credited with coining the word genocide, "urged the League of Nations
to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes."
James Smith, the chief executive of Aegis, said he was told by the
United Nations on Saturday night that the sentence would have to be
eliminated or the exhibition would be struck.
Armen Martirosyan, the Armenian ambassador, said he sought out
Kiyotaka Akasaka, the United Nations under secretary general for
public information, and thought he had reached an agreement to let
the show go forward by omitting the words "in Turkey."
But Mr. Akasaka said, "That was his suggestion, and I agreed only to
take it into account in finding the final wording."
Baki Ilkin, the ambassador of Turkey, said, "We just expressed our
discomfort over the text’s making references to the Armenian issue
and drawing parallels with the genocide in Rwanda."
There were widespread killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during
several years beginning in 1915 in which an estimated 1.5 million died,
but Turkey has always vehemently denied claims of genocide.
Mr. Smith said he was "very disappointed because this was supposed
to talk about the lessons drawn from Rwanda and point up that what
is happening in Darfur is the cost of inaction."
NATIONALISTIC FERVOR HIJACKS GOVERNMENT
By Lale Sariibrahimoglu
Today’s Zaman, Turkey
April 10 2007
Increased nationalistic fervor in Turkey, which sometimes takes the
form of violence as witnessed in the slaying of Armenian Turkish
journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul in January this year, has been
hijacking the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party)
government, too.
Some scholars, for example, link the AK Party government’s decreased
appetite for furthering democratic oversight of the Turkish security
sector in the past two years — primarily the Turkish Armed Forces
(TSK) — to the increased nationalistic tendency of the government
that has surfaced with the national elections due in a few months,
hot on the heels of the controversial presidential elections in May.
"The government and the TSK share the same threat perception which
consists of two legs; one is the PKK and its activities and the second
is the establishment of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq.
Despite the rhetoric that Turkey has come to terms with the existence
of a Kurdish entity in Iraq, I still think that this is not something
easy for both the government and the TSK to accept. If the government
and the TSK did not share the same threat perception on northern
Iraq, the ruling party could have taken more steps for the democratic
oversight of the TSK," Professor Umit Cizre from Ankara-based Bilkent
University argues.
Ironically, both the PKK and the Kurdish state issues are perhaps the
only two areas that bring the AK Party and the TSK closer while both
depart significantly on all internal and external policy issues,
seriously affecting the normalization of the country. It is then
not surprising, however unfortunate, that almost two years ago
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoðan stepped back from his attempts
to address the Kurdish problem in the country’s southeast through
democratic reforms that would have discouraged the taking up of arms
to solve this chronic problem.
As the US war in Iraq to topple deposed and executed Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein entered its fourth year yesterday, it is hard to say
that Ankara has learned its lessons from self-inflicted mistakes
such as, for example, neglecting the socio-economic problems of its
own Kurds while underestimating the growing power of the neighboring
Kurds of Iraq. We all know that Iraqi Kurds have already been enjoying
a de facto Kurdish state as the late former Turkish Prime Minister
Bulent Ecevit had said on several occasions. With the US invasion of
Iraq supported by Britain in March 2003, Kurds have also officially
inaugurated their autonomous Kurdish region’s Parliament as envisaged
in the new Iraqi Constitution.
Jalal Talabani, leader of one of the two main Kurdish groups, became
Iraqi president while Hoshyar Zebari, an Iraqi Kurd has been serving as
the foreign minister of Iraq. Iraqi Kurds play a significant role as a
power broker in Iraq where the rest of the population consists of Sunni
and Shiite Muslims as well as some minority groups such as Turkomans.
Again Iraqi Kurds are the closest allies of the US in Iraq, and are
apparently convinced that the US administration will not allow any
Turkish cross-border operation, even in cooperation with US forces.
Iraqi Kurds have become more vocal than ever in their warning signals
sent to neighboring countries, mainly Turkey.
A recent statement made by a senior Iraqi Kurdish leader warning
Ankara over meddling in its affairs proves once again the ongoing
Iraqi Kurdish anger with Turkey which has until recently been bullying
the Kurds.
Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP)
and the head of the Iraqi autonomous Kurdish region, said during a
weekend TV broadcast that Turkey must not interfere in Iraqi Kurdish
attempts to attach the oil-rich city of Kirkuk to the Kurdish region.
He went to say if they were deterred by Turkey, Iraq’s Kurds would
retaliate by intervening in Turkey’s Kurdish dominated southeast.
Barzani also set a deadline of 10 to 15 years for the establishment
of a Kurdish state while saying that Turkey’s problem was not the
PKK but the existence of the Kurds.
I do not know how long this war of words will last between Turkey
and the Iraqi Kurds but one thing for sure is that Ankara should
behave like a big state and first solve its own internal problems
before looking for scapegoats for its self-inflicted mistakes. We
also have to bear in mind that acting on nationalistic sentiments
inflicts serious damage on the country in the long term.
–Boundary_(ID_0/1IbgR4Zgx+dFi8UsI8YQ)–
GENOCIDE OR NOT
By Tulin Daloglu
Washington Times, DC
April 10 2007
One would assume that the question of whether what happened between
Turks and Armenians during World War I constitutes "genocide" is not an
important issue in American politics or the American consciousness. Yet
for Turkish Americans, it remains a constant source of anxiety and fear
of discrimination or reprisals if they express a different point of
view. Generations later, even in this country that celebrates freedom
of speech and debate, they feel that publicly discussing the issue
will engender more hate.
"I can still remember my friends’ parents saying, ‘What are we going
to do if our daughter marries a Turk?’ " said Angelina Kara.
Born in Istanbul to a French father and a Turkish mother, Angelina,
30, was raised as a Christian, married a Muslim Turk, and lives in
California. "These parents never thought while raising their children
in Istanbul that [the children] might eventually one day at least date
a Muslim Turk. They threatened to cut their children off if they did."
"Non-Muslim communities live within their own circles in Turkey,"
Angelina said. "They marry within their own religion. Frankly, they
feel superior to the Muslim Turks … I remember visiting my Armenian
friends. They were not encouraged to make friends with the Turks.
They made friends with other Armenian kids going to the Sunday school
at church. During the summer, they were usually sent abroad to their
relatives or worked with their fathers."
Angelina’s is a unique perspective on Turkish social norms. Not all
non-Muslim Turkish families distance themselves from Muslim Turks,
but she notes that a significant number prefers to live in a separate
world. Angelina and her husband, Tolga, seem to deal with their worlds
by celebrating their ethnic and religious differences.
Yet she worries that in Turkey, the distance between the two will
ultimately jeopardize the country.
In California, this young Turkish American couple sees firsthand
the hard work of the Armenian American lobby for a non-binding
congressional resolution that would declare the mass killings of
Armenians on Turkish soil "genocide." But there is another side.
Tolga remembers his grandmother: "Until she died five years ago,
she wept for her father. She used to tell stories about World War I,
and how the Armenians raided their home in Erzincan late at night
and took her father and uncle. Days later, they found her uncle’s
body dismembered on the side of a small stream. They never found
her father."
Tolga says that until he moved to California, he’d accepted the past as
a tragedy of war. But his experience in the United States has opened
his eyes to how deeply Armenians hate Turks: "One day I saw a young
man staring at me in a bad way. I did not understand it, and thought I
was being too sensitive. A few days later, I ran into him again, and
he stared at me in the same way — this time pointing his finger. I
asked him what his problem was, and he kept pointing — so I called
the police. He was an Armenian, but [because there was no physical
altercation] what he was doing was merely an exercise of free speech."
Turkey does not have a great record on free speech — but that has
been changing. Over the last several years, academic conferences and
television programs have publicly debated the Armenian accusations. The
United States, however, has been less favorable toward such public
conversations. Last year, the University of Southern California
cancelled a conference titled "Turkish-Armenian Relations: The Turkish
Perspective." A press release from the Armenian National Committee of
America (ANCA) read, "The ANCA-WR, working with USC Armenian student
groups, Alumni and school supporters, was able to demonstrate to USC
officials the misguided and sinister nature of this panel which led
to its cancellation."
A few years ago, Armenian students at USC protested the annual Turkish
Night organized by the USC Turkish Student Association. The USC Daily
Trojan reported that "the dance was shut down for safety," and that
a party-goer who requested anonymity out of concern for his safety
called the protesters "hostile-looking and intimidating."
Recently, a concert at Brown University titled "The Armenian Composers
of the Ottoman Period," in which two Armenian and two Turkish musicians
were to perform, was cancelled. Its aim was to bring together Turks and
Armenians through music, but the Armenians who agreed to participate
faced tremendous pressure to keep their distance from the Turks.
Many Turkish Americans fear the Armenian American community’s power
in the United States. They don’t understand why no doubt exists about
what happened between Armenians and Turks. They wonder why no one
remembers the murdered Turkish diplomats by Armenian terrorists or
numerous silenced academicians. They feel that the "genocide" claims
feed an industry — influential Armenian committees, non-governmental
organizations and academics promoting their "truth" — attached to
politics. They understand that politicians need to get elected and
must satisfy their constituents’ needs. But they also demand an
environment free of intimidation and fear.
Tulin Daloglu is a free-lance writer.
TURKEY PROTEST TO UN GENOCIDE EXHIBIT
PRESS TV, Iran
April 10 2007
A UN exhibit on 1990’s genocide in Rwanda was postponed after an
objections was made by Turkey to the mention of Armenian genocide in
World War One.
The exhibit was originally planned to be opened on Monday with the
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon scheduled to give an inauguration
lecture.
Turkey has objected to a sentence in the text which mentions that the
alleged massacre of over one million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire
during the early twentieth century acted as an instigation to form
an international alliance against genocide, Reuters reported.
A UN staff member told reporters that the event organizers were
informed of the delay through international body’s Department of Public
Information, adding that other UN divisions were not consulted with
for writing of the text which needed some more fact-checking.
Armenians insist that during the First World War over one million
Armenians died in Turkey after the Turkish Ottoman Empire launched
a massive crackdown on them which also forced many of the Armenian
population to leave their home.
Turkey denies any systematic massacre of Armenians but says large
numbers of both Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died during a
raging partisan conflict at that time.
FT: FRENCH AND TURKISH ELECTIONS STALL NABUCCO PIPELINE PLANS
The New Anatolian, Turkey
April 10 2007
The Financial Times reported yesterday that plans to build the
$6.2bn Nabucco pipeline to transport Caspian gas to western Europe
have almost ground to a halt after becoming embroiled in electoral
politics in France and Turkey.
The Nabucco pipeline will transport gas from Central Asia, through
Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary to Austria. Start of the pipeline
construction is scheduled for 2008. The first gas shipments have to
be made by 2012. The planned pipeline would reduce Europe’s dependency
on Russian gas.
The Times recalled that Turkey has refused to approve extending the
construction project to include Gaz de France, the French utility.
"The move, which officials said might be revised after the French
presidential elections in May, reflects simmering anger in Ankara
over France’s support for Armenia’s claim of genocide by Ottoman
Turks during the first world war," the daily said.
Turkey strongly opposes the claims that its predecessor state, the
Ottoman government, caused the Armenian deaths in a planned genocide.
The Turkish government has said the toll is wildly inflated and that
Armenians were killed or displaced in civil unrest during the empire’s
collapse and conditions of World War I. Ankara’s proposal to Yerevan to
set up a joint commission of historians to study the disputed events
is still awaiting a positive response from the Armenian side. After
French lawmakers voted last October to make it a crime to deny that the
claims were genocide, Turkey said it would suspend military relations
with France.
"A threatened boycott of French goods in Turkey after the French
parliament voted last year to make denial of the genocide claim a
crime has not had much success. But the Turkish government warned at
the time that it might exclude French companies from contracts. The
face-off with GdF may be a result of that, some diplomats in Ankara
said yesterday," the daily said
"The dispute over the participation of GdF, the favourite to join
the consortium building Nabucco, could complicate matters further",
the daily said. "Industry observers said the negotiations with a
new investor had taken longer than expected, with some blaming the
strained relations between Ankara and Paris."
Recalling that Turkey is holding a general election later this year,
the daily added the Armenian issue has exploded onto the political
agenda. But, the daily quoted some analysts saying "the stand-off
between Turkey and GdF could have as much to do with negotiating
tactics as with politics."
"The Nabucco project is an opportunity for Turkey to unload its excess
supply," the daily quoted Bulgarian analyses. "But if talks with a
French buyer aren’t going well, it doesn’t cost anything to bring up
the Armenian issue."
ARMENIA: HAYKO’S PROMO TOUR BEGINS
esctoday.com, Netherlands
April 10 2007
Hayko, the second Armenian ambassador to the Eurovision Song Contest,
will be touring Europe to promote this year’s entry Anytime you need.
Three destinations have been announced so far but eurovision.am
promises that there will be more.
Hayko’s first stop will be the the Netherlands where he will be
visiting Almelo on 11th April, next day he will be travelling
to Brussels and then on the 13th and 14th he will be stopping at
Frankfurt and Hanau in Germany.
Stay tuned for more information on Hayko’s promo tour!
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
NOBEL LAUREATES CALL FOR TURKISH-ARMENIAN RECONCILIATION
Today’s Zaman, Turkey
April 10 2007
The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Huma-nity (EWF) released an appeal
signed by 53 Nobel Laurates endorsing Turkish-Armenian reconciliation.
The appeal stressed on that the Genocide Conven-tion has never been
applied retroactively and, therefore can not be used as the basis
for reparations or territorial claims.
The appeal called on the Turkish government to end discrimination
against ethnic and religious minorities and abolish Article 301 of
the penal Code, which makes it a criminal offense to denigrate
Turkishness. Laurates also called on Armenia to reverse its
authoritarian course, allow free and fair elections, and respect human
rights. Fifty-three Nobel Laureates, not including Turkish novelist
Orhan Pamuk, who won the last Nobel prize for literature, call peoples
of Turkey and Armenian for tolerance, contact and cooperation. The
appeal urged civil society to advocate steps by the governments of
Turkey and Armenia to overcome distrust and divisions that affect
relations between the two peoples.
Laurates also urged the Turkish Govern-ment and Armenia to open the
Turkish-Armenian border thereby improving economic conditions on
both sides of the border and enabling human interaction, which is
essential for human understanding. They called on the governments to
accelerate bilateral contacts and the establishment of full diplomatic
relations. They also supported practical projects between civil
society representatives that address shared problems. In addition,
the appeal suggested a legal approach to address the gap in national
perceptions over the "Armenian genocide". It also noted that the
Genocide Convention has never been applied retroactively and, therefore
can not be used as the basis for reparations or territorial claims.
[EXCERPTS]
Organized by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which was
established after Professor Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Peace in 1986, the appeal of Nobel Laureates calls on Turks and
Armenians to:
* Open the Turkish-Armenian border. An open border would greatly
improve the economic conditions for communities on both sides of the
border and enable human interaction, which is essential for mutual
understanding. Treaties between the two countries recognize existing
borders, call for unhampered travel, trade.
* Generate confidence through civil society cooperation. Turks and
Armeni-ans have been working since 2001 on practical projects that
offer great promise in creatively and constructively dealing with
shared problems. The governments should support such efforts by,
for example, sponsoring academic links between Turkish and Armenian
faculty, as well as student exchanges.
* Improve official contacts. Civil society initiatives would be
enhanced by the governments’ decision to accelerate their bilateral
contacts, devise new frameworks for consultation, and consolidate
relations through additional treaty arrangements and diplomatic
relations.
* Allow basic freedoms. Turkey should end discrimination against ethnic
and religious minorities and abolish Article 301 of the Penal Code,
which makes it a criminal offense to "denigrate Turkishness."
Armenia also should reverse its own authoritarian course, allow free
and fair elections, and respect human rights.
Today’s Zaman Ýstanbul
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress