Author: Andres-Papazian

Twin Cities Daily Planet
June 29 2014

The Great War and modern amnesia: Imperialism still coming home to roost

By Rich Broderick, Ground Zero

Exactly 100 years ago, on the morning of June 28, 1914, the Archduke
Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his wife Sophie
were assassinated when two bullets were fired at them at close range.
At the moment, the couple were riding through the streets of Sarajevo
in an open car when the vehicle stalled while the driver attempted to
turn around.

The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, was one of a team of killers on the
trail of the Archduke that day. All were Serb nationalists who laid
claim to all regions of the Balkans inhabited by ethnic Serbs,
including places that were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Princip and the others were also members of a terrorist organization
called the Black Hand founded by the head of Serbia’s military
intelligence.

At the time, little was made of the killings. Virtually no one in the
public sphere thought the event would lead to anything more
cataclysmic than another round of fighting between Austria and Serbia.
As we now know, of course, the assassinations precipitated a chain of
events that, within six weeks, plunged Europe – and eventually the
rest of the world – into the bloodiest conflict in history up to that
time.

The leading politicians, journalists and public intellectuals who did
not foresee the outbreak of war were equally shortsighted about the
course that war would take once it erupted. It was going to be short.
A few weeks, a few months at most. Everyone home by Christmas.
Everyone in the know was familiar with the deadliness of mechanized
weaponry, from machine guns to aerial bombardment to heavy artillery.
But until then, such armaments had mostly been used against poorly
armed tribes or native insurrectionists in “uncivilized” lands
colonized by a European state. In 1914, the best and brightest of the
day fully expected that enemy troops would be routed by “our side” as
easily as villagers in North Africa or tribal warriors in Southeast
Asia.

Once again, we now know different. But who could blame the European
powers for their undue optimism? In current parlance, the leaders of
those nations lived in a bubble. They were only told what those around
them thought they wanted to hear, and they only listened – like elites
everywhere, including Washington, D.C. – to those willing to tell them
what they wanted to hear.

In the run-up to the Great War’s centenary, the already capacious
library of books published about the conflict, like Paul Fussell’s
early masterpiece The Great War and Modern Memory, has swelled
considerably, including Christopher Clark’s magisterial 700 page The
Sleepwalkers.

Among the newer books – it was published in 2011 – The Russian Origins
of World War I by Sean McMeekin should have special value for us in
the United States. Not only does it offer an alternative, and
convincing, take on who the most villainous player was in the lead up
to hostilities in 1914, its examination of Russian policies before and
during the war offers critical lessons for America, especially in the
Middle East. There our current leaders seem doomed to keep making the
same kinds of mistakes Tsarist Russia made in pursuing policies that
were simultaneously fickle, feckless, and brutal, based upon premises
that were little more than self-delusion. Epistemic cloture is a term
currently in vogue for describing the echo chamber in which, for
example, the GOP leadership seems to be operating. Epistemic cloture
is also a good term for describing the milieu in which Russian leaders
operated in the early 20th century. It is an equally apt term for the
milieu in which American leaders operate, not just when it comes to
the Middle East and Central Asia but, indeed, throughout all of the
developing, non-Western world.

The Russian Origins of World War I is a study of the unintended
calamitous consequences that inevitably follow misguided decisions in
the fields of foreign policy and war. Not only did the Tsar’s secret
service collude with Serbian intelligence in helping fund and train
the Black Hand, but Russia’s military leaders urged the Serbs to
resist Austria’s demands that it be allowed to participate in the
investigation of the Archduke’s murder, promising the Serbs in return
slices of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Balkans domain – territory
that Russia was also promising to other nations. Most critical of all,
it was news of Russia’s secret general mobilization of its military
nearly a week before Germany or Austria that enabled the German staff
to overcome Kaiser Wilhelm’s reluctance to rush to war.

Russia’s aim in all this was for France and England, its partners in
the Triple Entente, to pin down Germany and Austria long enough for
Russia to achieve its real strategic goals – dismemberment of the
Ottoman Empire and seizure of Constantinople, which Russia planned to
rename Tsargrad.

In a shameful episode that bears a striking similarity to what
happened to Iraq’s Kurds and southern Shia when we abandoned them to
Saddam Hussein’s revenge following the 1991 Gulf War, McMeekin
describes Russia’s key role in triggering the course of events that
resulted in the forced relocation and subsequent death of 600,000
Armenians living under Turkish rule. This humanitarian disaster was
set in motion by Russia’s decision to arm and train Armenian militia
in 1914. When Turkey responded, Russia walked away from its pledge of
military support for the Armenians. The Turks, facing an internal
uprising along the border with its traditional enemy, reacted, as we
know, with unrestrained brutality.

Whatever its proximate cause, however, and whichever nation bears the
greatest responsibility for setting it off, WWI was ultimately
European Imperialism come home to roost: a homecoming that in 1939
would see the “scientific racism” concocted in the 19th century to
justify the conquest of “lesser peoples” reach its apogee with
Hitler’s attempt to exterminate Europe’s Jews, Gypsies and Slavs.

As McMeekin’s book shows, the war was also the coming home to roost of
the Great Game Europe had played throughout the 19th and early 20th
centuries with the lives and territories of people living in the
Middle East, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. The ISIS horror show
currently on display in Syria and Iraq is yet another consequence of
Europe casually divvying up the Middle East without regard to the
region’s ethnic or sectarian realities – a Pandora’s Box the U.S.
obligingly pried open with its ill-fated decision to invade Iraq in
2003.

Over the course of the century since the assassination of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand, Europe would – at the cost of more than 100 million
European lives – come to see the error of its ways, turning away from
armed conflict as the primary means of advancing national interests.

But if the decades following the Second World War have demonstrated
anything, it is that the United States still hasn’t learned the
lessons so painfully absorbed on the battlefields of Flanders and the
killing fields of Auschwitz and Dachau. We continue to blunder along
trying to impose our “civilizing” mission — now termed “nation
building” and “democratization” — on lesser peoples, especially in
the Middle East and Central Asia (think Afghanistan).

Tsarist Russia, to its ultimate cost, found out how self-destructive
its fantasies of hegemony in this part of the world proved to be.
Would that we took note of Russia’s fate in 1917 and acted
accordingly.

Not that I’m holding my breath. Even now, there is an assassin waiting
for us to come into range. Only this time the name of the assassin
isn’t Gavrilo Princip. It’s us.

And the gun we hold is aimed at our own heads.

From: A. Papazian

`Should Tigran Sargsyan be a general, he cannot raise Armenia’s rating
in the United States.’ Yervand Bozoyan

June 28 2014

Aravot.am asked the political scientist, Yervand Bozoyan, about what
we will achieve by pro-western views possessing former Prime Minister
Tigran Sargsyan’s appointment as an Ambassador of Armenia to the
United States, and whether it is possible to take new steps towards
signing of the EU Association Agreement. Yervand Bozoyan responded
that Tigran Sargsyan’s appointment an Ambassador was unusual in
several components. `First of all, I do not think that Tigran Sargsyan
was a pro-western figure, because there is no single sign of why he
was a pro-western figure. It’s answer is not clear to me, I do not
know what the Armenian society may think of this issue. Secondly, what
EU Association Agreements we are talking about, when Armenian a few
times has officially announced that it is joining the CU and the
Eurasian Economic Union. Being a pro-western, to put it mildly, is not
an axiom for me. I think that the vast majority of public politicians
in Armenia have a very weak perception of the values system and world
outlook, and these people can be conventionally considered pro-Western
or pro-Russian. They are rather pro-selfish and they proceed by their
interests. Basically, they do not have the philosophical basis which,
let’ say, have in Ukraine or Georgia. In this sense, Armenia’s
pro-Western or pro-Russian politicians can be accepted strictly
conditional. Specifically, Tigran Sargsyan Minister has not been
displayed in any form even in the public and officially, at least in
words that he is a pro-Western. During his activities, he has a lot of
times made contradictory statements towards Russia and in pro-Western
direction. And why he is a pro-Western, I cannot imagine.’ Pertaining
to the EU integration steps, Yervand Bozoyan said, `Armenia has
already officially announced about its integration to the Eurasian
Economic Union. In this sense, Armenian proceeds in the European
direction as, let’s say, Kazakhstan or Belarus.’ According to Yervand
Bozoyan, the `and-and’ policy existed in the 90²s and 2000²s, when
Armenia was trying to maneuver, and lead a balanced policy as much as
it is could succeed. `Given the objective geopolitical situation,
Armenia had key security relationships with Russia. At the same time,
it was trying to complement the relations with Russia by the western
vector to be able to ensure financial flows on preferential terms. At
some point, Armenia was successful in it the then. From the very
beginning of this president’s administration, his moves were extremely
instable, at least at the level of the visibility. It ended in the
fact that since 2008-2009, he started to be active in close relations
with the Europeans. Even, in some sense, we were not considering
Russians, which were followed by tough steps by Russians towards
Armenia, the core of which was the fact that on his visit to Baku last
year on August, the President of the Russian Federation signed an
agreement of more than 4 billion dollar on selling of arms and
ammunition, as well as establishment of a military-industrial complex
in Azerbaijan. Russia signed an agreement of about 700 million dollars
on selling of ammunition. All of this was a clear message to Serzh
Sargsyan that if he tries to ignore the Russian direction, then very
sad days are expected to Karabakh and Armenia. In fact, the words that
said by Shavarsh Kocharyan that as it is a business for Russia to sell
weapons to Azerbaijan, so as it is a business for Armenia to be in
relationship with the Europeans, this `audacity’ ended on September 3,
when Armenia’s policy officially became unilateral.’ To our question
of given that Tigran Sargsyan’s name is touched upon in offshore
scandal and corruption transactions, how he will be successful to keep
the rating of Armenia high in the international arena, Yervand Bozoyan
responded, `Armenia’s rating is already so low that no one can raise
it. Everyone understands it. As long as these authorities exist, no
one trusts Armenia anymore, because these people already confirmed
that their words do not turn into an action. Now, neither Russians
respect Armenia, because they have received from Armenia what they
already have, nor the Europeans because they have understood that
these authorities have cheated them. The No. 1 and the most
influential person in Armenia is the president as long as he rules,
whoever is appointed to a position, he will have a conditional
confidence anywhere, be in Russia or in the West. In this sense,
whether Tigran Sargsyan will be a hero of the offshore scandal, or a
general, there will be no significant difference.’

Hripsime JEBEJYAN

Read more at:

From: A. Papazian

ARMENIE
L’Arménie a exporté 49 tonnes d’abricots

L’Arménie a exporté 49 tonnes d’abricots vers la Fédération de Russie
et la Suisse a annoncé le service de presse du ministère de
l’agriculture. L’Arménie a également exporté 330 tonnes de cerises
douces vers la Russie et la Géorgie.

Le ministère de l’agriculture prévoit que les exportations d’abricot
cette année vont baisser à environ 8000 tonnes contre 86 000 tonnes en
2013.

dimanche 29 juin 2014,
Stéphane (c)armenews.com

From: A. Papazian

REPORT: DUROY JIHADISTS ARRIVED FROM ISTANBUL, AL-HASAN GETS $50K FOR EACH SUICIDE BOMBER

NaharNet, Lebanon
June 27 2014

The suicide bomber who blew up an explosive vest at the Duroy Hotel
and his accomplice had arrived in Lebanon from the Turkish city of
Istanbul, a media report said on Friday.

“Abdul Rahman Nasser al-Shenifi, the would-be suicide bomber who
survived (Wednesday’s blast), told interrogators that he wanted to
stage a suicide attack because he believes in ‘the Sunni state’,”
LBCI reported.

Shenifi revealed he and his Saudi compatriot Ali Ibrahim al-Thwaini
were supposed to blow themselves up at al-Saha Restaurant in Dahieh,
a Hizbullah bastion, “within days,” before their plot was foiled by
the General Security raid.

“Investigations revealed that al-Monzer al-Hasan, the man who provided
the Duroy bombers with explosives, had visited them around four
days prior to the hotel incident, accompanying them to an unknown
destination for several hours,” LBCI said.

A number of employees at the hotel recognized al-Hasan from his
circulated picture, according to the TV network.

“The two Saudi suicide bombers had been at the Duroy Hotel since June
15, after having arrived in Beirut from Riyadh via Istanbul’s airport,”
LBCI said.

“Investigators believe that Monzer al-Hasan has an assistant
in Istanbul, who also helped the would-be suicide bombers,” the TV
network reported, adding that the Saudi duo had spent around five days
in Istanbul and that al-Hasan himself had traveled several times to
the Turkish city.

The TV network said investigations have highlighted a “key role”
for al-Hasan in several suicide bombings.

“It turned out that Monzer al-Hasan has links to several suicide
bombers and bomb attacks and he acted as an intermediary between
extremist groups and terrorists sent by them,” LBCI added.

According to investigators, al-Hasan receives $50,000 for facilitating
the mission of every suicide bomber.

“He provides them with explosives, locates the target and takes care
of their accommodation at hotels or other places,” LBCI said.

“He books their rooms through touristic agencies or firms and when
the would-be suicide bomber arrives in Lebanon he would have Monzer
al-Hasan’s phone number and nickname and the latter would then guide
him to hotel or specific place of residency,” it added.

“Two days before the operation, he would give him the suicide vest
or bomb-laden car and tell him how to get to the target,” LBCI said.

On Wednesday, a Saudi suicide bomber detonated his explosives at his
room in the Duroy Hotel in Raouche during a raid by General Security
officers.

Wednesday’s suicide attack was the third in Lebanon in less than a
week and sparked fears of renewed violence in a country that has been
deeply affected by the civil war in neighboring Syria.

Al-Hasan’s picture was circulated by the General Security agency
on Thursday.

From: A. Papazian

ARMENIAN PM ABRAHAMYAN STOPS IN NAGORNO-KARABAKH FOR WORKING VISIT

CISTran Finance
June 27 2014

June 27, 2014 7:00 AM
By Lisa Barron

Armenian Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan met with the Ara Harutyunyan,
the prime minister of Nagorno-Karabakh, on Tuesday as part of a
working visit to the republic.

“This is my first visit to Nagorno-Karabakh as Prime Minister,”
Abrahamyan said. “I am sure that we will maintain warm and fruitful
working relationship with the Prime Minister and the government
of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. My approach is as follows: all
discussions ought to be objective and targeted as we are bound to
meet the deadlines set for the implementation of our decisions. We
prioritize our second homeland’s economic development and security and,
as the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia, I will do everything
to achieve this goal.”

Harutyunyan agreed the two sides will continue to develop relations,
and, in addition to the meeting between the two heads of state,
delegations from both governments held talks on a wide range of issues.

From: A. Papazian

HOW AN ASSASSIN IN 1914 SPAWNED TODAY’S ULTRANATIONALISTS

The Globe and Mail, Canada
June 27 2014

Doug Saunders

Earlier this month, a swarm of fighters bearing the black flags of
the jihadi militia known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant,
busy invading a large chunk of northern Iraq, decided to pause and
link their cause to the First World War.

On that Tuesday, the Sunni fighters seized a bulldozer and some
military vehicles and plowed a rough roadway through the earthen
berm that divides Syria and Iraq. After dancing on the newly erased
border and firing automatic weapons into the air, the ISIL fighters
took to Twitter and YouTube to make a historic boast: By moving aside
this pile of sand and earth, they said, they “are demolishing the
Sykes-Picot borders. All thanks due to Allah.”

Our world, those Sunni insurgents reminded us, is still very much
governed by the ideas that were blasted into global prominence with
Gavrilo Princip’s pistol.

They saw themselves reversing a decision made only a few months after
Princip’s bullet killed the future leader of Austria-Hungary, one of
the huge empires that controlled much of the developed world in 1914.

Soon after the Great War’s battles began in earnest that August,
leaders of the Allied powers realized that those empires –
Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian Czarist and German Hohenzollern –
were likely to collapse. They set about inventing something new to
replace them.

Seeing that Constantinople was on the verge of losing hold of the
huge expanse of the Ottoman Empire and worried that this territory
(and the petroleum beneath it) would fall into the wrong hands,
the Allies dispatched two diplomats, Mark Sykes of Britain and
Francois Georges-Picot of France, to figure out how to divide the
remains between the future victors. Two years later, their governments
accepted a line those diplomats had drawn across the Middle East. In
the years after the war, that line would define the borders of the
newly created post-Ottoman countries: Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon,
Turkey, Jordan and, later, Israel.

You might think that, by trying to create a Sunni Muslim theocracy
stretching across a wide swath of the Arab world, those ISIL fighters
saw themselves as undoing one of the great consequences of the Great
War: the replacement of empires with scores of newly formed and largely
arbitrary nations; that they were putting an end to the postwar world.

>From another perspective, though, groups such as ISIL are the true
heirs to the ideas of June 28, 1914. Their beliefs, and their way
of organizing those beliefs into terrifying action, are very direct
copies of those that launched the Great War – and which had really
not existed, to any significant extent, before Princip brought them
to life.

Are we living through the long tail of 1914, or experiencing its even
longer antithesis? The difference depends on how you weigh the two
forces unleashed a century ago – one a new form of nation, the other
a new form of nationalism.

The new nations

The modern idea of the nation – that is, a political entity claiming to
represent people united by language or ethnicity – had existed only for
a few decades before 1914, and at the time was regarded as something
of an anomaly. Europe had been nothing more than 200-odd kingdoms and
a handful of empires a century earlier; in June, 1914, it contained
just three republics (Switzerland, France and Portugal). And it had
only recently witnessed the birth of Germany (which is four years
younger than Canada) and Italy (seven years older), both cobbled
together from diverse collections of somewhat-similar kingdoms.

At the same time, 1914 Europe was teeming with nationalist movements,
most of them without nations: Armenian, Georgian, Lithuanian,
Jewish, Macedonian, Albanian, Ruthenian, Croatian, Basque, Catalan,
Flemish, Sardinian and Irish. Few had widespread popular support:
The nationalist idea was an elite one.

It was also almost entirely fictional. European states in 1914 were
far more multicultural and multilingual than they are today; the idea
of finding a common language, culture or ethnicity within any of them
was implausible, and could be accomplished only by using extreme force.

On the eve of the Great War, barely more than half the citizens of
France spoke the French language or considered themselves ethnically
French, as historian Eugen Weber famously illustrated; it was the war
itself that replaced France’s regional languages and identities with
a national one.

And France was one of the more unified nations. In 1914, less
than half the population of Romanov Russia was ethnic Russian. In
post-unification Italy, only 2.5 per cent of citizens spoke Italian
on a daily basis.

Multiculturalism was the prewar norm: For every 100 soldiers in the
Hapsburg army in 1914, historian David Reynolds observes, “there were
on average 25 Germans, 18 Magyars, 13 Czechs, 11 Serbs and Croats,
9 Poles, 9 Ruthenes, 6 Romanians, 4 Slovaks, 2 Slovenes and 2 Italians.

… Many units operated with two languages, some as many as five.”

It wasn’t the war that changed all that, but the peace. In the postwar
wreckage of Europe’s empires and economies, the Treaty of Versailles
attempted to create a new peace by granting independent statehood to
virtually anyone who sought it and asked loudly or forcefully enough.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, the man most responsible for shaping the
postwar world, famously declared, in early 1918, that “all well-defined
national aspirations shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction.” He
took the phrase “self-determination” – a Bolshevik idea popular with
Lenin – and gave it a much wider meaning.

This was not at all an inevitable development – in fact, both countries
best poised to determine the peace, the United States and Britain,
were opposed to (and sometimes threatened by) ethnic and linguistic
nationalism. But, as historian Eric Hobsbawm once observed, the
postwar explosion of new countries “was the result of two unintended
developments: the collapse of the great multinational empires of
Europe, and the Russian Revolution – which made it desirable for the
Allies to play the Wilsonian card against the Bolshevik card.” Ethnic
nationalism was ugly, but it trumped communist internationalism.

These new postwar nations were of a very different flavour from those
created in the nationalist fervour of the 19th century. “Whereas
Italy and Germany had been created through the unification of various
local polities with similar language and culture,” David Reynolds
writes in his superb history, The Long Shadow: The Great War and
the Twentieth Century, these nations were created “through secession
from dynastic empires that had hitherto controlled a volatile mix of
ethnic groups in various stages of national self-consciousness and
political mobilization.”

Even before the war was over, more cautious people warned that this
thrust to create ethno-states was a ticking bomb. Wilson’s secretary of
state, Robert Lansing, expressed alarm: “When the President talks of
‘self-determination,’ what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race,
a territorial area, or a community?” The phrase, in Lansing’s view, was
“simply loaded with dynamite,” and would “raise hopes which can never
be realized” and “cost thousands of lives.” He was certainly correct.

These newborn nations were destined for further violence:
None was actually uni-ethnic or uni-linguistic, despite their
claims; most contained competing nationalities and faiths seeking
self-determination. Some, such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and
Iraq, were purely artificial hodgepodges of groups that had ancient
rivalries. Arab states such as Jordan and Syria were essentially
gifts to tribal families that had favoured the old empire. The
Israel-Palestine conflict was the most inevitable conflict arising
from the borders of this post-1914 world, but there have been hundreds
of others – including, most recently, ISIL’s Sunni-imperial challenge
to the Sykes-Picot line.

“Although nationalist frenzy was more consequence than cause of the
Great War,” Mr. Reynolds writes, “the war-makers had let the genie
out of the bottle and the peace-makers could not put it back.”

The new nationalism

That nationalist frenzy was not merely the product of top-down peace
treaties and diplomatic deals, though. What Wilson and his allies
unleashed was a new form of thinking, and a new form of politics and
violence, that had filled the air in 1914.

It is important to distinguish these nationalist movements from the
liberal states that were created in their name. They were different
things, with different consequences.

The term “nationalism” was not coined until the final decades of the
19th century; prior to that, the notion that people should form an
independent political entity strictly on the basis of their language
or ethnicity was confined to a few radical philosophers, especially
in Germany. Unleashed, it spread like a disease.

The decade before 1914 was pocked with scores of assassinations,
bombings, kidnappings and violent riots on every continent as the
new nationalism took hold. Princip’s bullets were the first acts of
nationalist violence of the war, but the first to succeed in creating
a new country was Ireland’s, which erupted in the middle of the war,
overwhelmed Britain with exceedingly bloody conflict, and created
the first of dozens of new nations to be born as a result of the war.

The new nationalism, unlike the new nations, did not pretend to be
orderly or rational. Whether applied by Serbians, Arabs, Basques,
Jews or Sunni Muslims, it was a self-sacrificing, totalizing ideology
that placed the imaginary nation above all else. Today’s ISIL fighters
would recognize, in every detail, the beliefs and motives of Princip,
and the nature of the Serbian ultra-nationalist organization to
which he belonged. Historian Christopher Clark, in his new work The
Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, makes this vividly clear:

“What must strike any twenty-first-century reader who follows
the course of the summer crisis of 1914,” he writes, “is its raw
modernity. It began with a squad of suicide bombers and a cavalcade
of automobiles.

“Behind the outrage at Sarajevo was an avowedly terrorist organization
with a cult of sacrifice, death and revenge; but this organization
was extraterritorial, without a clear geographical or political
location; it was scattered in cells across political borders, it was
unaccountable, its links to any sovereign government were oblique,
hidden and certainly very difficult to discern from outside the
organization.”

Princip and his co-collaborators were far from being rogue extremists:
They were selected by organizations that received funding and support
from within the Serbian state. But they were a type of nationalist we
would recognize today: harsh ascetics, they rejected alcohol and sexual
relations with women, “they read nationalist poetry and irredentist
newspapers and pamphlets … sacrifice was a central preoccupation,
almost an obsession,” Mr. Clark writes.

Indeed, their act of June 28, 1914, was meant to be a suicide bombing.

It isn’t remembered that way – because the bomb exploded beneath
the wrong car and a handgun was used instead, and because Princip’s
suicide capsule failed to kill him – but the language of martyrdom
used by these young men would be entirely recognizable to the foreign
fighters of ISIL and al-Qaeda.

This new ideology had dire consequences. The previously polyglot
countries of Europe discovered the new language of uni-ethnic
nationalism: supremacy, xenophobia, ethnic cleansing. In the years
before 1914, anti-Semitism, previously a Christian hatred of spiritual
rivals that had peaked in the pogroms of the Middle Ages and gradually
faded (though certainly not vanished) after the Enlightenment, burst
back onto the scene in a new form: the Jew as disloyal, unpatriotic
outsider, as civilizational invader.

The war gave new licence to this ideology. In 1915, as the Ottoman
Empire began to collapse, the Turks expelled and slaughtered Armenians
in a mass atrocity widely considered genocidal (they would later also
expel millions of ethnic Greeks). Then, starting in 1916, the Irish
rose en masse against their British occupier. As the decades of war
and extremism unfolded, the ethnic cleansings and expulsions became
more intense: While the Great War and the Versailles Treaty did not
authorize the hateful movements of the 1930s and 40s, they provided a
welcoming climate for their gestation. In the years after the Second
World War, the movements would spread with equal vehemence across
Asia and Africa.

We are left, a century after those bullets in Sarajevo, with two
lasting consequences: a set of lines in the sand, damningly difficult
to erase, and a set of ideas etched into countless minds, even harder
to obliterate. Ours is a much more peaceful, well-ordered world,
but its last remaining threats and menaces are almost all traceable
to the dark origins of 1914.

From: A. Papazian

Manure in front of Gaspary’s house

15:03 | June 28,2014 | Social

It’s already four days, civil activist Vardges Gaspary and his family
members have to pass over manure while leaving the house. This was
informed A1+ by the activist.

According to his words, the manure appeared in front of their house
after he had held an action in front of Serzh Sargsyan’s house with
“More insidious, undignified than the last pimps” poster in his hand.
With this protest Gaspary responded to the harsh actions of the
policemen against the protesters of electricity price increase action.

According to Gaspary’s words, he phoned Serzh Sargsyan’s staff head
Vigen Sargsyan for removing the manure, but in vein.

“They want to make me silent with such actions. The government, who
made my fellow citizens silent with Cheryomukha bullets, tries to make
me silent with manure,”- noted Vardges Gaspary.

He is not going to clean that manure.

From: A. Papazian

Trend, Azerbaijan
June 28 2014

Despite no results on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, OSCE Minsk Group is active

Baku, Azerbaijan, June 28
By Elchin Mehdiyev – Trend:

The OSCE PA is the source of parliamentary democracy, president of the
Standing Committee of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (OSCE PA),
chairman of the Parliament of Montenegro, Ranko Krivokapic said.

He made the remarks at the OSCE PA Standing Committee meeting that is
being held in Baku today.

“The political processes in the OSCE PA must be created correctly,”
Krivokapic said, adding that OSCE PA expands its cooperation with
NGOs.

While answering the question about the cooperation with the Council of
Europe, the European Parliament and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly,
Krivokapic said that the cooperation was observed with the Council of
Europe and the European Parliament during the observation missions.

He went on to add that several identical resolutions were passed, and
said that meetings at the top level are held.

Krivokapic also stressed that it is important to implement the
resolutions within the activity of the OSCE PA.

Speaking of the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict,
Krivokapic noted that Special Representative for the South Caucasus
Joao Soares is well familiar with the problems of the region.

“Despite the lack of results in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
settlement, the OSCE Minsk Group is more active than the OSCE PA,” he
underscored. “OSCE PA’s role must be enhanced.”

Head of the Azerbaijani delegation to the OSCE PA Bahar Muradova
stressed that the relations normalized with the OSCE institutions
within Krivokapic’s activity, and important work was conducted to
expand the activity of the organization in the region.

From: A. Papazian

Trend, Azerbaijan
June 28 2014

Azerbaijani Defense Minister orders tenfold response to fire from Armenian side

Baku, Azerbaijan, June 28
By Ilkin Izzet – Trend:

Azerbaijani Defence Minister, Colonel General Zakir Hasanov ordered
Azerbaijani forces to respond tenfold to fire from the Armenian side.

Ceasefire on the contact line of Azerbaijani and Armenian Armed Forces
has been constantly violated.

Armenian troops open fire at Azerbaijani soldiers and civilians.

According to reliable sources, Azerbaijani Defense Minister ordered to
respond tenfold to attacks from the Armenian side and destroy enemy
positions from which the fire was made.

From: A. Papazian

Trend, Azerbaijan
June 28 2014

For status quo to change Armenia should start withdrawing troops from
Azerbaijani lands

Baku, Azerbaijan, June 28

By Seymur Aliyev, Elchin Mehdiyev – Trend:

For over 20 years Azerbaijan has been suffering from Armenian
aggression and occupation, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said on
June 28, at the opening ceremony of the 23rd Annual Session of the
OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in Baku.

“Nagorno-Karabakh is a historic part of Azerbaijan, it is an ancient
land of Azerbaijan that has been occupied by Armenia for more than 20
years,” President Aliyev said.

He added that 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized
land is under occupation, one million of Azerbaijanis became refugees
and displaced persons on their own land.

“We became the subject of ethnic cleansing. Armenians committed
genocide against Azerbaijani city of Khojaly – the genocide that is
already recognized by 10 countries of the world,” Azerbaijani
president stressed. “International law norms are violated. The UN
Security Council adopted 4 resolutions demanding immediate and
unconditional withdrawal of Armenian forces from the occupied
territories. These resolutions remain on paper, and are not
implemented.”

President Aliyev went on to add that the OSCE decisions, in
particular, the decision of the Lisbon summit, which clearly identify
what steps should be taken in order to resolve the conflict, also
remain on paper.

“European Parliament, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of
Europe, Islamic Cooperation Organization and others, including the
Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), have adopted decisions and resolutions but
Armenia simply ignores it,” Ilham Aliyev underscored.

He added that Armenians do not want to liberate the territory that
does not belong to them.

“Armenia wants to keep everything unchanged. It ignores even the OSCE
Minsk Group co-chair countries presidents’ statements. Presidents of
U.S., France, and Russia made it very clear that the status-quo is not
acceptable, and it means that the status quo must be changed. In order
for it to change, Armenia has to start the withdrawal of its troops
from our land, but Armenia ignores it,” President Aliyev said.

Azerbaijani president said the implementation of the resolutions of
the international organizations, restoration of territorial integrity
of Azerbaijan and the resolution of the conflict, based on the
principle of territorial integrity of the countries is the main
prerequisite for successful resolution of the conflict.

“As far as the principle of self-determination is concerned, if we
look carefully at the Helsinki Final Act, we will see that
self-determination should not undermine the territorial integrity of
countries. Armenians already have their independent state. There are
no reasons why they should have another Armenian state on historic
Azerbaijani territories, taking into account that the first Armenian
existing state was created on Azerbaijani lands,” President Aliyev
stressed.

He went on to add that the OSCE sent two missions to the occupied
territories, a fact-finding mission and a field-assessment mission.

“Both of these missions reported total devastation of the occupied
territories. It is a dead zone. Our cities are levelled to the ground,
our historic buildings, mosques and cemeteries are destroyed. This is
the evidence of the missions,” Azerbaijani president said.

“We are grateful to OSCE for these initiatives, but these reports play
no role in the resolution of the conflict. We need resolution of the
conflict that is what our refugees, our people and country need. Our
region needs that, because Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict is a major
source of threat to the region,” Azerbaijani president said.

Ilham Aliyev underscored that the best way to reduce tensions and to
establish confidence-building mechanisms will begin with withdrawal of
Armenian troops from Azerbaijani lands.

From: A. Papazian