Month: February 2015

Tax audits of Tsarukyan businesses ordered; embattled tycoon dismissed
from posts

POLITICS | 15.02.15 | 11:51
RELATED NEWS

“War”: Tsarukyan vows Sargsyan’s words will turn to action in the streets

Armenian Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan has ordered a probe to
“verify reports” claiming that embattled opposition leader Gagik
Tsarukyan has hidden huge amounts of money in taxes under the guise of
charitable activities.

Upon the instruction of the premier, chief of government staff,
minister David Harutyunyan reportedly sent a letter to Finance
Minister Gagik Khachatryan requesting that a relevant examination be
conducted.

Addressing senior members of his ruling Republican Party of Armenia on
February 12, President Serzh Sargsyan called Tsarukyan, as a
politician, an evil for the country. He also spoke about “unverified”
reports about tax evasion by the tycoon, who leads the second largest
parliamentary party, Prosperous Armenia (PAP).

Sargsyan immediately dismissed Tsarukyan from the National Security
Council and recommended that the National Assembly leadership consider
grounds for stripping Tsarukyan of his parliamentary seat due to his
chronic absenteeism.

On Saturday, Tsarukyan was also dismissed from the post of Chairman of
the Board of the Armenian State Institute of Physical Training.

Tsarukyan and the PAP have brushed aside the accusations from Sargsyan
as groundless and unconstitutional. PAP members have claimed that
political persecution has been launched against Tsarukyan, who has
revealed his presidential ambitions recently. The leader of the PAP
himself called for a “total regime change” as he addressed senior
members of his party on Friday.

The PAP’s opposition allies, including the Armenian National Congress
and Heritage, also condemned the crackdown against Tsarukyan and his
party. The leaders of the troika have been in consultations since
Friday regarding further possible actions of the opposition that is
seeking early presidential and parliamentary elections.

The next presidential election in Armenia is scheduled for 2018. But
the PAP and other opposition groups believe President Sargsyan plans
to retain his power even after his second and last term in office ends
in three years. They claim the constitutional reform initiated by the
current administration will serve as a means for the ruling party to
achieve this goal. President Sargsyan himself has repeatedly assured
his opponents that he will not seek a top government post after
leaving office in 2018. The head of state says the reform is primarily
needed to promote further democratization of Armenia.

Armenian National Congress: Serzh Sargsyan’s speech was a bad attempt
to remove a political opponent

by Nana Martirosyan
Friday, February 13, 22:56

Serzh Sargsyan’s speech at the session of the Council of the
Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) was a bad attempt to remove his
political opponent, Armenian National Congress (ANC) says in a
statement.

The ANC says that the only target of Sargsyan’s speech was the
Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) leader Gagik Tsarukyan, on whom
Sargsyan was trying to exert pressure to make him leave the politics
and do business only. “This is a serious violation of the Armenian
Constitution, because any person can launch political activities and
no one has the right to hinder these activities. So, Tsarukyan has the
same rights to be engaged in politics as Sargsyan”, says the
statement.

The statement also says that in his speech Sargsyan stressed the need
to check the rumors about Tsarukyan’s tax evasion and privity to
crimes. “One can suppose that the incumbent regime has been aware of
it but has been “sponsoring and cultivating” all that for many years
and now the regime has decided that it cannot stand it any more. If
the rumors have been circulating for many years, why hasn’t the regime
checked them so far? So, Sargsyan has been abusing his office and has
become privy to Tsarukyan’s “crimes”, the statement says. The ANC also
expresses indignation at the fact that earlier Serzh Sargsyan offered
the prime minister’s post to Tsarukyan, whom he accused of a number of
crimes yesterday. Sargsyan also offered him the president’s post
after the constitutional reforms are conducted.

The ANC harshly condemns Sargsyan’s speech and qualifies it as a bad
attempt to draw the public attention away from his own sins. “People
know who is responsible for the extremely hard situation in the
country and who must be brought to account”, the statement says.

Ethnic leaders demand sacking of Multicultural NSW boss Hakan Harman
over ‘airbrushing’ of war atrocities

By Rick Feneley
February 15, 2015 – 11:00PM

Ethnic community leaders are demanding the resignation or sacking of
their most senior representative in the NSW government, claiming he
pushed the agenda of his Turkish homeland to resist public memorials
for genocides by the former Ottoman Empire as well as Japan’s war
crimes and other atrocities.

Hakan Harman is under intense pressure to quit as chief executive of
Multicultural NSW, just seven months after his predecessor, Vic
Alhadeff, resigned over a perceived conflict of interest when he
defended Israel’s right to strike Gaza as a defence against
Palestinian militants.

Armenian, Greek, Cypriot, Korean and Assyrian leaders have united to
sign a statement saying Mr Harman’s position is untenable after he
issued guidelines to local governments ` without first telling his
minister, Victor Dominello ` that they should be careful not “assign
blame” when considering memorials or public monuments to “contentious”
historical events.

Mr Dominello forced Mr Harman to withdraw the guidelines when he was
alerted by the aggrieved community leaders. And Mr Harman told Fairfax
Media on Sunday: “In hindsight, I made an error of judgement by not
consulting more widely,” but he said his door was open to his critics
so they could work together on “what unites people as Australians”.

The signatories say Mr Harman’s unilateral action makes him unsuitable
to lead an agency with a charter “to promote and advance community
harmony”.

In 1997, the NSW Legislative Assembly unanimously acknowledged the
genocide of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1922 and it erected
its own garden memorial the next year. The monument includes the
parliament’s resolution that it “condemns and rejects all attempts to
deny or distort the historical truth” about this and other genocides
of the 20th century.

But the Foreign Affairs Minister, Julie Bishop, assured her Turkish
counterpart last year that the federal government does not recognise
the “tragic events” as genocide.

Armenian Australians plan to erect another memorial in Willoughby when
they mark the centenary of the genocide on April 24 this year ` the
day before Anzac Day, when Australia will also commemorate 100 years
since the bloody landing at Gallipoli in Turkey.

Korean and Chinese Australians also have plans for a statue called
Three Sisters in Strathfield to pay respect to 200,000 so-called
“comfort women” ` sex slaves abused by Japanese soldiers during World
War II.

“This made us very angry,” said Luke Song, president of the Korean
Society of Sydney, adding that any attempt to block the memorial would
deprive future generations of the truth about the abuse, especially
while Japan refused to admit blame or apologise to the surviving
women.

Turkey vehemently denies there was genocide of Armenians, or of
Assyrians and Greeks, who say they lost 750,000 and 500,000 people
respectively.

While Mr Harman’s guidelines did not mention Turkey or Japan, he had
received a letter last October from the Japan Community Network and
the Australian Turkish Advocacy Alliance, lobbying him to introduce
guidelines that would restrict public money or space being devoted to
“specific ethnic groups” and their “own interpretations of historical
events”.

“We do not believe that it is appropriate for government, at any level
in Australia, to ‘weigh in’ on those historical matters,” the letter
said, arguing it could jeopardise community harmony.

On February 3 this year, the Turkish alliance issued a press release
applauding Multicultural NSW for its guidelines and pointedly
criticising Mr Dominello and Prime Minister Tony Abbott for having
attended the unveiling of memorials such as the “so-called” Assyrian
Genocide Memorial at Bonnyrigg. (That memorial was vandalised with
graffiti ` “f— Assyrian dogs” ` soon after its opening in 2010.)

In a newsletter last year, the Turkish alliance admitted that donors’
pledges had not been forthcoming, so: “We are currently running on $0
and are entirely reliant on campaign specific assistance from the
consulate.”

The signatories against Mr Harman said Multicultural NSW could not be
“led by an individual who engages in unilateral action ` in this case,
by adopting divisive guidelines that were drafted by a body backed by
a foreign government”.

Some of the leaders told Fairfax Media they regarded Mr Harman’s
“conflict of interest” to be worse than that of Mr Alhadeff, who had
continued to act as chief executive of the NSW Jewish Board of
Deputies while he headed the Community Relations Commission, recently
renamed Multicultural NSW. His dual roles, they said, had at least
been transparent.

They feared stopping the construction of monuments was an attempt to
“airbrush” war atrocities.

While the board of deputies was not a signatory to their protest, its
president, Jeremy Spinak, thanked Mr Dominello “for his swift action
in quashing these guidelines which, if implemented, would have caused
significant division and disharmony. It is concerning that policy in
such an important and sensitive area could have been shaped in this
manner”.

Stepan Kerkyasharian, a long-serving head of the CRC, and an Armenian
Australian, did not sign the document either but said he was saddened
that “the processes followed by the commission have created
disharmony, reflecting on its reputation”.

“The apparent selective consultation by the commission raises serious
ethical questions which need to be addressed by the government,” he
said. “The commission is duty-bound not only to be impartial,
inclusive and transparent but also be seen to be so.”

A spokesman for Mr Dominello said he had “asked Mr Harman to work with
the relevant organisations to address their concerns”. Mr Harman said
he welcomed that opportunity and “we exist to build peace and harmony
in the community”.

The signatories to the protest letter were the Korean Society of
Sydney, the Assyrian Universal Alliance, the Australian Hellenic
Council of NSW, the Greek Orthodox Community of NSW, the Cyprus
Community of NSW and the Armenian National Committee of Australia.

PA Newswire: Northern Ireland
February 15, 2015 Sunday 2:45 AM BST

GRANDFATHER WAS ‘GENOCIDE’ VICTIM

By Michael McHugh, Press Association

A Northern Ireland man who believes his grandfather was killed and
buried in an Armenian mass grave has called on the British and Irish
governments to recognise the deaths as genocide.

Paul Manook said his grandfather was lined up alongside other men in a
village in modern-day eastern Turkey by Ottoman Turkish soldiers a
century ago. He was never seen again.

Turkey denies Armenian claims that up to 1.5 million people died in an
act of genocide during the First World War when troops targeted the
Christian minority.

Dr Manook said: “Because of the geopolitics of the region the UK does
not want to touch this. Ireland is a small country, probably they will
follow the UK because they are a small country and there are quite a
lot of links together.”

Turkey has resisted widespread calls for it to recognise as genocide
the 1915-16 killings, which followed mass deportations, but apologised
for the deaths.

According to the UN, genocide involves acts intended “to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”.

The dispute about whether deaths caused by the Ottomans represented
genocide centres on the degree to which the killings were
orchestrated.

The most notorious example of genocide is the Nazis’ attempted
extermination of the Jews. This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day was
marked across Britain and Ireland.

Mr Manook, 64, from Millisle in Co Down, said his grandfather Manook
Dishchekenian was removed from his village along with many other men.
“They lined them up and took them.”

He said his father was then aged six.

“My grandmother realised immediately, she just took my dad and four
aunts and they escaped the village. My father was a survivor of the
genocide.”

He said the fate for men left behind was grim.

“I have a strong feeling that they must have killed them and buried
them in mass graves.”

Armenians mark the date April 24 1915 as the start of what they regard
as genocide.

In Turkey public debate on the issue has been stifled, using the law
to prosecute writers who highlight the mass killings.

However last month Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu, said:
“Having already underscored the inhumane consequences of the
relocation policies essentially enforced under wartime circumstances,
including that of 1915, Turkey shares the suffering of Armenians and,
with patience and resolve, is endeavouring to re-establish empathy
between the two peoples.

“Our 23 April 2014 message of condolence, which included elements of
how, primarily through dialogue, we may together bring an end to the
enmity that has kept our relations captive, was a testament to this
determination.

“Only by breaking taboos can we hope to begin addressing the great
trauma that froze time in 1915. For its part, Turkey has transcended
this critical threshold and relinquished the generalisations and
stereotypical assertions of the past.”

Edward Horgan, a former UN soldier from Ireland and peace activist,
said a group of politicians from the Dail in Dublin was being created
to lobby on the issue.

“Clearly it is an issue of language but the fact is that the Turkish
government, who were not involved in the genocide, has consistently
denied and prosecuted people in Turkey for highlighting and
proclaiming it was a genocide, that does need to be addressed.”

Last year previous Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
speaking on the eve of the 99th anniversary, offered condolences for
the first time for the mass killings of Armenians under Ottoman rule.

Turkey has said the number of deaths was much smaller than Armenian estimates.

A spokesman for the London embassy said: “Turkey is legitimately
challenging the Armenian views of history. This is based on documents
in archives, many scholarly studies as well as the memory of millions
of people in Turkey.

“I would like to highlight that genocide is a clearly defined crime
with specific conditions of proof. There is no verdict given by a
competent court or whatsoever, labelling the events of 1915 as
genocide.”

Argentina, Belgium, Canada, France, Italy, Russia and Uruguay
recognise the conflict as genocide. The UK, US, Israel and others use
different names.

Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) said: “While the
terrible suffering cannot be forgotten and we must continue to
remember and honour the victims of the past, we believe the UK’s
priority today should be to promote reconciliation between the peoples
and governments of Turkey and Armenia and to find a way for these two
countries to face their joint history together.”

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Interfax, Russia
Feb 14 2015

Yerevan objects to tying normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations
to Karabakh settlement process

YEREVAN. Feb 14

The normalization of relations between Armenia and Turkey cannot be
tied to the process of settling the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a
high-ranking source with the Armenian Foreign Ministry told Interfax.

“Armenia adheres to a principled position that the normalization of
the Armenian-Turkish relationship cannot be tied to the settlement of
the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. It is with this very conviction that we
started the process of normalization of our relations with Turkey, and
it is with this conviction and mutual understanding that we conducted
the negotiations and signed protocols,” the source said.

“As for the Turkish prime minister’s absurd proposal, this is obvious
progress for him, as earlier his request concerned two districts.
Perhaps it won’t take him long to realize that the Karabakh settlement
process cannot be tied to the normalization of Armenian-Turkish
relations,” he said.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu had said at an earlier meeting
with leaders of non-Muslim religious and secular organizations in
Ankara that Turkey could open its border with Armenia if the latter
returned at least one district to Azerbaijan.

From: A. Papazian

US Official News
February 14, 2015 Saturday

European MPs Demand Fair Trial for Men Jailed in Armenian-Occupied
Nagorno-Karabakh

New York

New York County Lawyers’ Association has issued the following news release:

Members of Parliament from 24 European nations have signed a motion
calling for two men jailed by an internationally unrecognised court in
Armenian-occupied Nagorno-Karabakh to be given a fair trial under
Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The two, Russian citizen Dilgam Asgarov and Azerbaijani citizen
Shahbaz Guliyev, were apprehended by the Armenian Army in the
Armenian-occupied Kalbajar region of Azerbaijan in June last year and
then convicted of murder by a “court of first instance of the
Nagorno-Karabakh Republic”.

The motion, before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of
Europe, was signed by 46 MPs and calls for their fair trial, given
they were convicted in a “Republic” that is an “unrecognised
separatist regime”, which is not a signatory to any international
treaties that “guarantee either human rights or the rule of law”.

The 46 signatories include MPs from Ireland, Spain, Italy, Finland,
Ukraine and Croatia.

The motion was tabled on February 5th by Azerbaijani PACE delegate
Elkhan Suleymanov, who said the two men could only be legally tried by
an Azerbaijani court, given the alleged offence took place in
internationally-recognised Azerbaijani territory. He said the
additional charge of illegally entering Nagorno-Karabakh is void for
the same reason.

Asgarov was sentenced to life imprisonment and Guliyev to 22 years. A
third man, Hasan Hasanov, was shot dead at the scene.

Suleymanov has questioned the actions of the Armenian Army who,
despite answering to Yerevan, chose to hand the men over to the
so-called “Nagorno-Karabakh Republic”, which has not been recognised
by any United Nations member state, including Armenia.

“This is a deliberate action, not a coincidence. The Armenian side
wants to insure itself from being involved in any international
responsibility by distancing itself from this issue,” he said.

Had the men been able to access the Azerbaijani legal system, there
would have been no “first instance” court and they would have had the
protection of the European Convention on Human Rights, which was
signed by Azerbaijan in 2001. At the time Baku warned that “it is
unable to guarantee the application of the provisions of the
Convention in the territories occupied by the Republic of Armenia
until these territories are liberated from that occupation.”

That occupation continues to this day, despite numerous resolutions
calling for Armenia’s immediate withdrawal by the United Nations,
European Parliament, the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in
Europe (OSCE) and other international bodies.

Vestnik Kavkaza, Russia
Feb 15 2015

Armenian Church celebrates original Shrovetide day

15 February 2015 – 3:52pm

Armenians call Shrovetide Barekendan, which literally means “good
behavior”, “joy for life”. In ancient times on Shrovetide much food
and fun was prepared, and the poor became the subject of public
attention and used public tables.On Sunday night after eating dinner
at Shrovetide, people ate matsun (yogurt) and Katni – milk rice
pudding.

On Shrovetide day people can eat any fruit except the fruit of the
tree of knowledge, which symbolizes fasting.

Shrovetide is an expression of the virtues. On this day, people come
out of mourning and begin to enjoy, forget suffering and find comfort.
“Every Christian begins the Lenten fast with humility in their soul,
repentance, fasting, and with hope for the mercy of God,” the website
of the Ararat Patriarchal Diocese says

Open Democracy
Feb 15 2015

Karabakh truce shaken by gunshots and tough talk

Armen Karapetyan 15 February 2015

OSCE mediators urge an end to attacks after a month in which the
20-year-old ceasefire was broken in thousands of incidents.

IWPR: As an upsurge in fighting between Azerbaijani and Armenian
troops is accompanied by increasingly tough rhetoric, the ceasefire
that has held for two decades is under more strain than ever. The
competing accounts of what is going on along the border and the `line
of contact’ around Nagorno-Karabakh are hard to reconcile, but adding
up all the reports of ceasefire violations gives around 5,000 for
January’the biggest monthly figure since active hostilities ended in a
truce in 1994.

`From a military perspective, this escalation per se is not new,’ said
Richard Giragosian, director of the Regional Studies Centre in the
Armenian capital, Yerevan. `What is new, however, is an expanded
battle space’the geography of attacks is much broader and includes
parts of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border’and an expansion in intensity
of the attacks.’

Giragosian was speaking at a discussion meeting held by the Institute
for War and Peace Reporting and the Media Centre in Yerevan late last
month to examine the implications of the upsurge in fighting over the
former predominantly-Armenian enclave of Azerbaijan. Worryingly,
officials on both sides are using the word `war’ to describe what is
happening. In remarks quoted by the Armenian service of RFE/RL on 6
February, an Armenian Defence Ministry representative referred to `a
slow war on the border’, while his Azerbaijani equivalent responded by
saying that `in actual fact, the war has not halted in the last 20
years’. War would end when Armenian forces withdrew from Azerbaijani
territory, he said.

Expressions of concern

The Minsk Group’the mediating body of the Organisation for Security
and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) on the Karabakh conflict, chaired by
the United States, Russia and France’has issued several expressions of
concern. In a statement on 7 February, the group’s co-chairs and the
current OSCE chair, Ivica DaÄ?iÄ?, said: `We all agree that the military
situation along the line of contact and Armenia-Azerbaijan border is
deteriorating, posing a threat to regional stability and endangering
the lives of civilians … After 2014, in which approximately 60
people lost their lives, we are alarmed that this disturbing violent
trend has continued.’ The statement called on all sides to `end
incursions, cease targeting villages and civilians, stop the threat of
reprisals and the use of asymmetric force, and take additional steps
to reduce tensions and strengthen the ceasefire’.

Defence officials in Yerevan and the Karabkh capital, Stepanakert,
recorded ten deaths of Armenian military personnel in January.
Azerbaijan said it had lost four men, although the number is likely to
be higher. Again, these fatalities are out of the ordinary’in recent
times comparable only with a burst of violence in July and August last
year, when more than 20 Azerbaijani and Armenian soldiers were killed.

Worryingly, officials on both sides are using the word `war’ to
describe what is happening.

The summer skirmishing receded when the presidents of Armenia and
Azerbaijan were brought together by the Russian leader, Vladimir
Putin, in August. Serzh Sargsyan and Ilham Aliyev met again in
September and October, in what seemed to be first steps towards
resuming the long-dormant peace process. One confidence-building
measure they undertook was to withdraw heavy weapons from the front
lines. But that optimism faded, with the downing of an Armenian
helicopter in November and January’s death toll.

At the start of the month, Armenia’s Defence Ministry issued new
orders to officers along the frontier, authorising them to use their
own initiative in retaliating against attacks and to take pre-emptive
action when they saw fit. Sargsyan confirmed this apparent switch in
tactics when he addressed ministry staff on 26 January, telling them
that `if there are more substantial build-ups along our borders and on
the front line [the Karabakh line of contact], we reserve the right to
deliver pre-emptive strikes’.

Azerbaijan’s Defence Ministry came out with its own statement on 12
January, insisting it would exercise its right to fly manned and
unmanned aircraft over the line of contact, and to deploy `all
available military equipment’ without reference to the other side. On
29 January, it announced that its forces had shot down an Armenian
drone plane near Karabakh. Armenian officials said this was `absurd’
and suggested instead that the Azerbaijanis might have downed one of
their own aircraft.

Arms race

Speaking a day after Sargsyan’s announcement, Aliyev dismissed Armenia
as a mere `colony’ which `cannot exist as an independent state’. He
was referring to the large economic imbalance between his oil-rich
state and Armenia, which affects the arms race between them.

The Global Militarisation Index 2014, produced by the Bonn
International Centre for Conversion, ranks Armenia and Azerbaijan
among the world’s ten most heavily militarised states, measured by
defence spending against gross domestic product and the number of
armed-forces personnel per capita. The Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute reports that defence spending has risen
exponentially in both countries.

Between 1995 and 2013, Armenia’s annual expenditure rose from $52m to
$427m. But that pales in comparison with Azerbaijan, which spent $3.4
billion in 2013, as against just $66m back in 1995. Much to Armenia’s
annoyance, its security and economic ally Russia has been happy to
take Azerbaijan’s cash for high-tech weapons, including modern tanks
and missiles.

These figures do not include defence expenditure in Nagorno-Karabakh,
governed by a separate Armenian administration since the war stopped
in 1994, although no one has recognised its claim to independence from
Azerbaijan.

Giragosian sees this disparity in spending power as a risk factor,
since it could result in `a shift in the balance of military power in
Azerbaijan’s favour over the longer term’. Right now though, he said,
it was not enough to change a situation where `Armenia’s defensive
position is still stronger than Azerbaijan’s potential offensive
capacity’.

In the shorter term, Girogasian said, the real risk was that war could
break out `by accident, based on miscalculation’.

This article was originally published by the Institute for War and
Peace Reporting. It is reproduced with appreciation.

The Sunday Times (London)
February 15, 2015 Sunday

Fighting over the bones: Every country wanted to feast on the failing
Ottoman Empire, and we’re still dealing with the mess today

by Max Hastings

THE FALL OF THE OTTOMANS The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920
by EUGENE ROGAN Allen Lane £25/ebook £19.99 pp485

It is an impossible task, either to identify a nation’s rightful
frontiers, or to arbitrate beyond controversy where virtue lies in
international disputes. The Ottoman Empire, the 19th century’s Sick
Man, was a focus of greed for all the European powers, licking their
lips for a share of its carcass. The Germans and Russians wanted
control of the Dardanelles, and in the wars of the 1870s Russia helped
itself to the Caucasus and gained sway in several of the newly
independent Balkan states.

The British took Cyprus, controlled Egypt and developed a keen
appetite for Iraqi oil. France grabbed Morocco, and coveted Syria and
Lebanon. Italy gobbled Libya. But was the moral claim of the Ottomans
to rule any of these societies, not to mention Arabia, any stronger
than that of the British to hold India? Few in those days believed in
the rights of relatively “primitive” peoples to self-determination:
the Americans had only just finished exterminating their own
indigenous population. The Ottomans were scarcely enlightened despots.
They drove many ethnic Greeks out of Turkey.

One of the final deeds of the Empire was the 1915-16 Armenian
genocide, vividly described in this book, and probably responsible for
1m deaths. This was the first occasion in modern history when the word
“cleansing” was used, to describe the systematic slaughter of an
unwanted minority, in this case Christians.

To say all this is not to offer a verdict, but merely to reflect on
what a muddle history is, with the Ottoman Empire a bigger muddle than
most. Eugene Rogan is an Oxford history lecturer and author of an
exemplary work called The Arabs, who now addresses the events of the
First World War in the Middle East, after the Young Turks who had
seized control in Constantinople in 1908 threw in their lot with the
Central Powers, entering the conflict in November 1914.

In August, Winston Churchill, first lord of the admiralty, had
summarily requisitioned in their British shipyards two new
dreadnoughts, bought by Turkish public subscription. It remains a moot
point whether this was a necessary act, or a blunder which did much to
drive the Turks into Berlin’s arms. Probably fear of Russia and hopes
of using German support to regain their Balkan provinces would have
caused them to fight anyway.

Rogan is an excellent historian, who does a fine job of recounting the
littleknown Russo-Turkish campaign in the Caucasus. The British
operation in Mesopotamia – modern Iraq – was a masterpiece of folly.
Having effortlessly seized the oil port of Basra at the outset, they
should have sat on their winnings.

Instead, they launched the fatally hubristic 1915 drive for Baghdad,
which ended in humiliation when the British garrison of Kut was
obliged to surrender after a siege of 145 days. Lord Kitchener,
secretary of state for war, made a memorable contribution to the Kut
story: assuming that all Turks were infinitely corruptible, he
suggested that, rather than try to fight its way into Kut, the relief
force should offer the local enemy commander an enormous bribe to
retreat. Instead, the British commander, Major General Sir Charles
Townshend, was forced to capitulate. Shamefully, British officer
prisoners, headed by the general himself, accepted comfortable terms
of confinement, while their 13,000 men suffered unspeakable
privations, and many died. Not until 1917-18 was a British army strong
enough to venture a snail’s pace advance on Baghdad. Further west,
having repulsed a shambling Turkish advance on the Suez Canal, British
forces launched a drive across Sinai which was also mightily bungled,
and achieved success only when Field Marshal Allenby entered Jerusalem
on Christmas Day 1917.

Rogan’s account of the Gallipoli saga is unexceptionable, but,
inevitably, there is little fresh to be said. Lord Curzon, a member of
the War Cabinet, wrote of Britain’s 1914-16 operations against the
Turks: “A more shocking exposure of official blundering and
incompetence official blunder-has not in my opinion been made, at any
rate since the Crimean War.”

Part of the trouble thereafter was that Britain, having entered the
war in principled support of Belgium, became ever more greedy to
reclaim some of the appalling cost in lives and treasure by acquiring
useful booty from the enemy. Iraq’s oil was the most conspicuous
prize, but duplicitous promises were also made for Bedouin services in
the Arab Revolt.

In 1917 the British began to use poison gas against the Turks in
Palestine in 1917. The other side behaved equally badly. Berlin had
been striving to promote a Muslim jihad against the British even
before war came, and the Turks hanged Arab nationalists by the score.
Prisoners of the Ottomans suffered terribly.

Allenby finished his war by capturing Damascus, and only the
Bolsheviks’ triumph spared Turkey from Russian predation. At the
Versailles conference, the Ottoman Empire was broken up. The Arabs
lost their Turkish masters, only to substitute British and French
ones. The surge of Jewish immigration to Palestine that followed the
1917 Balfour Declaration provoked rioting in Jerusalem in 1920-21.

Rogan has written an impressively sound and fair-minded account of the
fall of the Ottoman Empire, rather than a ground-breaking one. A
reader is left struggling to decide which nation or faction comes
worst out of the story.

The author concludes by noting that Islamic State tweeted in 2014 that
it was committed to “smashing Sykes-Picot”, the notorious 1916
Franco-British treaty that determined the shape of the region. “One
century on,” writes Rogan, “the borders of the Middle East remain
controversial – and volatile.” Who can say how, in our lifetimes, they
may change? And who dares to decree how they ought? ? Available at the
Bookshop price of £20 (inc p&p) and £19.99 (ebook) on 0845 271 2135

The British campaign in Mesopotamia was a masterpiece of folly

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Vestnik Kavkaza, Russia
Feb 15 2015

Forward Yura Movsisyan extends his contract with Spartak Moscow FC

15 February 2015 – 8:08pm

The forward Yura Movsisyan has extended his contract with Spartak Moscow FC.

There is no information on the terms of the agreement with the
27-year-old forward of the Armenian national team. The previous
contract was due to end in 2017.

This season, Movsisyan played eight matches and scored one goal for
the the reds-and-whites. He missed the start of the Championship of
Russia due to injury.

“We are very pleased that a player of the level of Yura, so
significant for the football team, has signed a new contract with the
club,” the CEO of Spartak Roman Askhabadze said.

Movsisyan also confirmed that he wants his immediate future to be
linked only with Spartak Moscow FC.

“It is obvious that there was much gossip about a possible transition,
lots of suggestions, but none of them was true,” TASS quoted the
forward.