Month: February 2012

FRANCE’S SARKOZY SHOULD NOT ATTEMPT TO LEGISLATE TURKEY’S HISTORY: VIEW

Bloomberg

Jan 30 2012

The president of France is getting ready to sign a bill making it a
crime in his country to deny that a century ago, the Ottoman Empire
committed genocide against Armenians. As President Nicolas Sarkozy’s
own party proposed the legislation, we suspect that he will sign it.

But it’s never too late to drop a bad idea.

Let’s start with the genocide — it happened. Beginning in 1915,
as many as 1.5 million ethnic Armenians living in what today is
modern Turkey were killed or deported. The Ottoman Empire was falling
apart, or more accurately was being dismembered by Britain, France
and Russia. The authorities in Istanbul saw Christian Armenians as
a potential fifth column and drove them out through executions and
deportations. Greeks and Christian Assyrians soon followed.

This is a painful piece of Armenian history that continues to
traumatize the families of its victims, now dispersed around the globe
in California, France and elsewhere. Every April, there are battles
in Washington as legislators with Armenian constituents lobby for
the U.S. to formally recognize the genocide.

Turkey, the Ottoman Empire’s successor state, has barely started to
deal with the essential process of facing the truth and bringing some
kind of closure to the victims’ families. While it has recently become
possible for Turkish historians to discuss the events of 1915 without
facing jail, it was only in 2007 that Turkish-Armenian journalist
Hrant Dink was shot dead in broad daylight for daring to write about
the genocide.

Instead, Turkish officials like to emphasize that 1915 was in the
midst of World War I; that Armenian units fought with the Russians
in a grab for territory; and that many ethnic Turks were killed too,
some of them by Armenian revenge squads. That’s all true. It’s also
irrelevant. The 1948 United Nations convention on genocide defines it
as crimes carried out with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part,
a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” It’s what the
Ottoman leaders intended and carried through that counts.

But if Turkey is having trouble defending free speech, that’s no reason
for France to follow suit. The new French law would make denying
the Armenian genocide punishable by a year in jail or a 45,000-euro
fine. Just as problematic, if governments are going to make a habit
of legislating the history of other nations, where should they stop?

The bill on President Sarkozy’s desk covers only the two genocides
that France has formally recognized — the Jewish Holocaust and the
Armenian Great Catastrophe. Yet UN courts have ruled that genocide was
committed in Rwanda in 1994, as well as at Srebrenica in Bosnia, a year
later. Why not send people to jail for denying these genocides, too?

French legislators didn’t need a UN court ruling to act on the Armenian
issue. So how about Sudan’s Darfur, or Pol Pot’s killing fields in
Cambodia? Or Stalin’s engineered famine in Ukraine in the 1930s,
or Oliver Cromwell’s scorched earth campaign against the Catholics
of Ireland? Or, indeed, the decimation of Native Americans during
the European settlement of North America?

No surprise then that Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
not a man to mince his words, is now claiming that France committed
genocide in Algeria, a former African colony, in the 1950s and ’60s.

None of this helps solve the real problems that this troubled part
of the world faces today. The question for Sarkozy isn’t who is right
in this dispute, but why should France be legislating an issue of two
other nations’ history, let alone adding it to the French penal code?

Turkey eventually will have to reconcile with Armenia over the
genocide, on its own.

The law could also harm economic relations. Turkey, an emerging market
with a young and growing population, is spending tens of billions
of dollars on new capital investment. That means passenger aircraft,
water purification plants, high-speed trains, nuclear power stations
and military hardware — all areas in which French companies are
among the world leaders. Turkish officials have said publicly they
would extract a commercial price for the genocide law.

Some of the 86 French senators who voted against the genocide bill are
now trying to round up the votes they need to challenge it in France’s
constitutional court. We hope they succeed. Turkey and France are NATO
allies that need to be working together to stabilize the Middle East,
not bickering over each other’s history.

TURKISH GAME LETS YOU SLAP SARKOZY

MINA – Macedonian News Agency

Jan 30 2012

A Turkish gaming website unveiled today an Internet-based game that
lets you slap French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The video game was uploaded to the website hours after
a piece of legislation criminalizing the denial of Armenian genocide
claims was approved by the French Senate.

The game, titled “Slap Sarkozy,” lets you control an on-screen hand
with your mouse and slap an unsuspecting Sarkozy standing in front
of a backdrop of Paris scenery as hard as possible.

In the definition section of the game, the developers ask players,
“Don’t you think Sarkozy deserves a good slap in the face?” and gives
a brief account of the recent political developments that led to the
approval of the “genocide denial” law.

The game comes in seven different languages; unsurprisingly, French
is not one of them.

The game calculates how fast you hit Sarkozy and gives the result
in kilometers per hour. Any slap that falls below 200 km/h is deemed
“unsuccessful” by the game.

LEFORT: EU HAS ALWAYS REGARDED MILITARY SOLUTION OF NAGRNO-KARABAKH CONFLICT AS UNACCEPTABLE

Vestnik Kavkaza
Jan 30 2012
Russia

The special representative of the EU to the South Caucasus and Georgia,
Philippe Lefort, said that Europe has always supported a peaceful
settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict during the meeting with
the secretary of the Armenian Security Forces, 1news.az reports,
referring to Armenian media.

Participants in the meeting exchanged opinions on regional and
international problems, especially on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

THE PERILS OF PLAYING POLITICS WITH HISTORY
By ALAN COWELL

The New York Times

Jan 30 2012

PARIS – At a time when Europe’s future seems so murkily ill-defined,
when people fret about paychecks and their abrupt disappearance, a
jittery currency and suffocating debt, the past might seem the last
place to look for salvation.

Yet, in recent days, history has tugged at national debates from
Istanbul to Edinburgh like some gravitational force, and with it
has come a question: what risks do politicians court by evoking the
chimera of the past to score points in the present?

That question intruded most brazenly, perhaps, in the acrimonious
exchanges over a vote in the French Senate to outlaw denial of genocide
in the mass killings of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey a century ago.

The vote was portrayed by many analysts here as an act of expediency
to win support among hundreds of thousands of French citizens of
Armenian descent ahead of the presidential elections this spring.

“One by one, to prepare the ground for his campaign, Nicolas Sarkozy
seems to have decided to win over the ‘communities”‘ of voters,
the editor Pascal Riche wrote on the Rue89 news Web site.

Foreign policy, of course, is rarely decoupled from its effect at home.

As an article in Le Monde said of the lingering effect of French
political maneuvering in the tangled events that led 18 years ago
to genocide in Rwanda, only the bloody Algerian war of independence
could inspire “accusations of a similar gravity, such a gulf between
two camps that could be characterized as the ‘anti-France’ and the
‘eternal France.”‘

In Scotland, history’s totems arose anew as Alex Salmond, the first
minister, fired opening salvos toward a referendum on independence,
which he wants to hold in 2014 – the 700th anniversary of England’s
defeat at the Battle of Bannockburn.

And in Berlin, where the past seems undying, a new legal battle
prevented the publication, once again, of excerpts of Adolf Hitler’s
“Mein Kampf,” even as the land began an unusual commemoration of the
300th anniversary of the birth of Frederick the Great.

Those separate episodes pointed to a common conclusion: the way the
past is depicted helps mold the founding myths and taboos of national
identity, enabling successor generations to live with their past;
history, in other words, is a time bomb, and its fuse burns brightest
in the half-light of competing versions where truth has different
meanings for victor and vanquished.

That was most evident in the harsh exchanges between Ankara and Paris
over the bloody events as modern Turkey struggled to emerge from
the Ottoman ruins almost a century ago, a new republic built on such
unbending pillars of Turkishness that the hankering for a different
notion of identity became synonymous with treachery (a conflation
that also drove long years of repression of Turkey’s large Kurdish
minority). Hundreds of thousands of Armenians died in what is now
eastern Turkey. An Ottoman document made public in 2009 said 972,000
Armenians had disappeared from the population records between 1915
and 1916. But the tally is disputed – modern Turkey says the figure
of 1.5 million claimed by Armenians is an exaggeration. Armenians
call the bloodshed, forced marches and executions a result of a
genocidal Ottoman design; Turks call it an outcome of war and of
Armenian collaboration with the Russian foe.

By criminalizing the denial of genocide in Armenia, France followed
the examples of Switzerland and Slovenia and helped sharpen a
parallel debate in Israel. But in alienating Turkey – an increasingly
sharp-elbowed NATO ally and regional player – the French authorities
seemed to place political considerations at home ahead of perils
abroad, risking criticism of their own cherished identity as a bastion
of liberte.

“This bill, if implemented, would have a chilling effect on public
debate and contravene France’s international obligation to uphold
freedom of expression,” said Nicola Duckworth of Amnesty International.

The legislation, providing for penalties of as much as a year in
jail and a fine of ~@45,000, or about $59,000, opened a sluice-gate
of Turkish reprisals, threats, rage and recrimination.

Why, Turkish leaders said, did France not scrutinize its own colonial
history, as Mr. Sarkozy was finally reported to have done in a leaked
letter to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Why, some Armenians
asked, did Turkish leaders not examine their own parlous record on
free speech, well illustrated by provisions in its penal code to outlaw
affirmation of the Armenian genocide as an insult to Turkishness?

“Everybody should look at themselves in the mirror,” said Orhan Dink,
the brother of a Turkish-Armenian journalist, Hrant Dink, murdered
by a far right teenager in 2007.

Indeed, said Francois Bayrou, a candidate in the French presidential
elections, “it is not for the law to write history, still less the
history of another country,” drawing a distinction between the newest
vote and an older French law criminalizing denial of the Holocaust.

“Those, alas, were things that happened on our own soil,” he said,
apparently referring to the deportation of French Jews during World
War II, a topic that was long taboo.

The debate is not simply academic.

Turkey sometimes seems to resemble a house whose front door faces
a prosperous, tranquil West, while its back door looks out onto
a rougher, unstable neighborhood bordering Iran, Iraq and Syria,
among others.

The more Turkey is isolated, some Turkish analysts say, the more its
national center of gravity will shift to the east. Ankara’s dream
of becoming the first Muslim nation to join the European Union –
an embrace opposed implacably by France and Germany – will recede
yet further, with unknowable consequences.

An old adage says that those who ignore the past are condemned to
repeat it. As France has discovered, reopening history’s unhealed
wounds has its perils, too.

STAIBDANCE’S NAME DAY TAKES MODERN LOOK AT ARMENIAN TRADITION

Creative Loafing Atlanta

Jan 30 2012

Choreographer George Staib’s personal heritage comes to life in dance
by Andrew Alexander

When choreographer George Staib was growing up, he’d ask the adults
around him how old his grandfather was. “Nobody would know,” he says.

“That’s because in the Armenian tradition, children are named after
a saint, and the saint’s day is celebrated. It obscures the birthday
and even the birth year. The Name Day is just a much bigger deal.”

Staib will explore Name Day and other aspects of his mixed heritage in
the new show Name Day, premiering this weekend at Emory’s Schwartz
Center for the Performing Arts. Staib’s American father met his
Armenian mother when he was stationed in Iran with the military. Staib
lived in Iran until he was 10, when his family returned to the States.

“Wherever we lived, there was always this blending of American culture
and Armenian tradition,” he says. “We tried to cling to both.”

The Armenian way of celebrating, of mourning, of rearing children, and
of dancing were all part of the Staib household. “When we had parties,
my sister and I were just thrown into the middle of a circle and we’d
have to dance together. If you went to someone’s house for dinner
and music was played, you’d have to get up and dance. It’s very much
a part of life,” says Staib, who has been a member of Emory’s dance
faculty since 2001.

A visit to Israel last year inspired Staib to create a show on
his family history. There, he was immersed in traditional Armenian
communities in Jerusalem and witnessed innovative modern choreography
in Tel Aviv that incorporated elements of traditional folk dance. “I
dropped into a really old version of Armenian culture in Jerusalem,”
says Staib. “I felt it was an interesting challenge for me to work
with something really old in a contemporary way.”

Name Day is comprised of lively folk-driven group dances interspersed
by more contemplative and introspective solos. The costumes capture
the look of the clothing Staib remembers from his childhood, Western
clothes of the ’60s and ’70s, and the music represents a diverse
soundscape: traditional Armenian music, electronica, Israeli folk,
choral music, and Bach.

The work also prominently features dancer Helen Hale, who has become
a central figure on Atlanta’s independent dance scene. Her recent work
ANTI-MANNERS also blended elements of folk and contemporary movement.

“She really gets this piece,” says Staib. “If I want to do something
that’s a little strange or obscure or highly theatrical, she is the
one to give those moments to because she indulges so fully in that.”

And Staib is determined to dig in: “There’s so much of my family
history that no one would ever talk about,” he says. “You’re expected
to know the traditions, but they’re never explained. You do it ‘just
because’ without knowing why.” With Name Day, Staib may finally
uncover some of the why.

NEWS ANALYSIS: TURKEY NOT IN RUSH ON ANTI-FRANCE SANCTIONS OVER ARMENIAN GENOCIDE BILL

Xinhua General News Service
January 29, 2012 Sunday 7:25 AM EST
China

Turkey delayed the releasing of sanction measures towards France over
its approval of a “Armenian genocide” bill, arousing soaring debates
of Turkey’s dilemma among experts.

The French Senate voted last Monday 127 to 86 in favor of the draft
bill after hours of debate, making it illegal to deny as ” genocide”
the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915. The bill, waiting
to be signed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, has been passed
by the French National Assembly, the lower house of the parliament,
on Dec. 22 last year.

“This bill is part of a larger wave of rising extreme-right opinion in
Europe, including in France, against non-Europeans, including Turkey,”
Cinar Ozen, an academic at Ankara University, was quoted by local
media as saying on Sunday.

Turkey vowed to slap Paris with harsh sanctions after its approval
of the bill. While claiming the bill was “null and void” to Turkey,
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday that
Turkish leaders are “waiting with patience to see how the process
will go on” before presenting action plan against France, adding that
“if We decide to implement those measures, there will be no step back.”

However, possible sanctions on France will be a double-edged sword,
Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman quoted experts as saying on Sunday.

Although there are little room left for Turkey to impose sanctions
economically as both Turkey and France are WTO members, experts
believe it is not uncommon in Turkish society for citizens to mobilize
through the use of emails or social networks and have their say in
politics through the use of their only means of intervention, which
is disrupting business.

When the French Senate passed into law in 2001 the recognition of the
incidents of 1915 as genocide, French exports to Turkey saw almost a
40 percent decline, said Zeynep Necipoglu, head of the Turkish-French
Chamber of Commerce.

“Economic measures would eventually return as damage to Turkey, ”
Necipoglu warned as she elaborated that the French firms operating in
Turkey are employing around 100,000 Turks, who would be the sufferer
of any severe blow to French firms.

Turkish officials said that they are waiting for the last signature to
come in, still cherishing hope that the bill will go down the drain
once 60 French lawmakers brave a possible backlash and appeal it at
the French constitutional court.

In France, even if a bill has been approved by the Senate, it can
still be appealed to the constitutional court if a large number of
parliamentarians file for it. The decision lies with the court to
decide whether the bill is compatible with French law or not. Turkey
believes the chances in striking down the bill in the constitutional
court are high.

“The number of French politicians gathering to take the bill to the
constitutional court increases every day,” Necipoglu said, adding
that the number of opponents to the bill has exceeded 30 on Thursday
and could reach the required 60 soon.

A French Senate Commission of Laws has already announced its opinion
that the bill violates freedom of expression, but its non- binding
advice was disregarded by the French Senate at the vote.

Sarkozy’s signature, however, is largely considered a formality, and
a refusal from Sarkozy to sign the bill into effect is negligible,
as he was the driving force behind the bill in the first place in
order to win the support of the country’s 500,000 ethnic Armenians
in the upcoming presidential election in May, Turkish observers said.

Sarkozy’s signature needs to come within a 15-day period after the
bill’s passage in the Senate, and experts believe Turkey is buying
time to reassess the situation by saying they will wait until the
last moment to come up with their “new and permanent” measures.

In December last year, when the lower house of the French Parliament
approved the bill and presented it to the Senate, Turkey withdrew
its ambassador to France for consultations and froze all military
and economic ties with France, suspending bilateral meetings, while
stopping short of asking the French ambassador to leave Turkey.

Turkey says the effects of sanctions this time, if enacted, would be
permanent, and the country is serious about responding to Sarkozy,
who is treated by Turkish officials as an obstacle on Turkey’s path
to the European Union membership, experts say.

Turkey’s big progress in recent years have been bothering big powers
like France, said Umut Deniz Oncel, a Turkish scholar, in a recent
analysis article written for the Wise Men Center for Strategic Studies.

“What Turkey can do is take rational steps,” Oncel said, suggesting
Ankara to create grounds for dialogues with Turkey’s Armenians and win
their hearts. Once Turkey is free of its internal prejudices and has
made peace within itself, it will then be able to fend off external
accusations and move on, he added.

TURKISH COUNCIL OF MINISTERS TO DECIDE ON SANCTIONS AGAINST FRANCE

Vestnik Kavkaza
Jan 30 2012
Russia

The Turkish Council of Ministers, chaired by Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, will hold a session at 2 pm (local time), TRT reports.

Experts expect ministers to discuss sanctions against France for
criminalization of the Armenian Genocide. Ankara announced escalating
sanctions for passing of the French bill.

The session will also hold talks on the processes at the World Economic
Forum in Davos, which was attended by three Turkish ministers.

INTERNAL SELECTION FOR ARMENIA

EuroVision.TV

Jan 30 2012

Armenia in Eurovision 2012. Source: ARMTV 30

Yerevan, Armenia – The Armenian representative for the 2012
Eurovision Song Contest in Baku will be determined internally,
as Gohar Gasparyan, representative of the public broadcaster ARMTV
and head of the Armenian delegation, confirmed recently. The result
of the internal selection will be announced close to the official
deadline, no later than March 18th. The decision who will represent
the Caucasian country in neighbouring Azerbaijan will be taken by a
expert jury, consisting of musicians, producers and TV professionals
of The Public Television and Radio Council of the Republic of Armenia.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

TURKISH MINISTER MAKES HARSH STATEMENT ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE IN SWITZERLAND

Vestnik Kavkaza
Jan 30 2012
Russia

Egemen Bagys, Turkish Minister for EU Affairs, made a harsh statement
in Switzerland, a state that had approved the bill on criminalization
of denial of the Armenian Genocide by the French Senate, TRT reports.

Bagys said that there was no genocide of Armenians in 1915 and said
that he was ready to be arrested for saying that.

The Turkish minister attended the World Economic Forum in Davos. He
later went to Zurich and watched a performance of Turkish singer
Sezen Aksu. He made the statement after the concert.

SOURCE: ARMENIA’S ROUGH DIAMOND BUYS FROM ALROSA 70% HIGHER IN 2011

Tacy

Jan 30 2012
Israel

Nine Armenian diamond manufacturers purchased US$43 million worth
of rough diamonds from Russian mining conglomerate Alrosa in 2011,
compared to US$25 million in 2010, reports Interfax, citing Armenia’s
First Deputy Economic Minister, Karine Minasyan.

According to Minasyan, there is potential for additional diamond
manufacturers to purchase even more rough from Alrosa in 2012,
possibly increasing purchases to US$50 million. However, she added,
local demand for Alrosa’s diamonds remains below what the Russian
company can supply. “Our enterprises might be able to purchase a lot
more [diamonds from Alrosa] but they aren’t buying based on current
demand and market prices,” she said, as quoted by the news source.