Author: Baghdasarian Karlen

‘TREASON OR PLOT?’
By Hakob Chakrian
AZG Armenian Daily
16/03/2006
Halil Berktay Allegedly Requested Financial Aid from Diasporan
Armenians.
This was the title of an article in Turkish Vatan newspaper on
March 13 that dealt with an email allegedly sent by professor of
Sabanci University, Halil Berktay, to history professor at Minnesota
University, Stephan Weinstein.
In March 10 and 11 issues of Vatan, columnist Ruhat Mengi without
checking authenticity of the email commented on it meanwhile demanding
that Berktay reveal other Turkish scientists who receive money form
the Armenians. By doing so he arose uproar and allowed to suspect
Berktay in treason.
Why? Because Berktay, according to Mengi, defined deportation
of Armenians in 1915 as genocide, called the Armenian Genocide an
undisputed fact, called a renowned scientists as Bernard Luis Justin
McCarty a hired scholar of Turkey, dubbed Turkish scholars backing
official thesis “fascists concealing the truth” as well as established
close ties with the Armenian Diaspora.
As to the email, Prof. Berktay urged Weinstein to ban the participation
of Yusuf Halacoglu, head of Turkish History Foundation, and Gyunduz
Aktan in the panel of PBS TV and added that “scientists backing our
views on Genocide should be invited. We should discover them and give
chance to voice their opinion. We need to secure necessary financial
means for that.”
Berktay refuted the allegations calling them clear slander and then
he said: “First of all Stephen Weinstein is an American Jew and
does not accept the fact of the Armenian genocide. He criticized in
an article those opposing the participation of Halacoglu and Aktan
in the TV show. I turned to Weinstein via the Internet to back his
approach. I do not know him personally and I have never been to the
University of Minnesota nor have I made a speech there. I believe
this issue goes deeper than just questioning ‘was the deportation
of 1915 a genocide or not?’ I opposed to those blocking discussions
on the matter. As to financial support, it is an incredible lie that
has hurt my self-esteem and I am going to sue.”
The American historian confirmed Berktay’s words. He said the email
is a fiction and that he knows neither Aktan nor Halacoglu and has
never met Berktay.
Stephen Weinstein’s words well answer the question posed in the title
of the article underscoring that Berktay is a victim of a plot.
Prof. Halil Berktay is one of those Turkish scholars who recognize
the Armenian Genocide. In the created situation when the freedom
of speech is gaining momentum in Turkey, some circles strive not to
limit the freedom of thought of scientists but rather to force them
give up their views by various means.
It’s over doubt that any scientist facing an accusation of treason
will prefer to keep his mouth shut on Genocide issues than playing
with fire.
From: Baghdasarian

RA OMBUDSMAN AGAINST GOVERNMENT AND PRESIDENT
By Marietta Khachatrian
AZG Armenian Daily
16/03/2006
Armen Harutyunian, RA ombudsman, is getting prepared to the March 21
sitting of RA Constitutional Court where, according to his appeal,
the August 1 2002, government decision #1151-N on alienation of the
lands for the state needs. RA Government and RA President will be
defendants at the court hearing.
“We will operate with laws, the international treaties and article
#31 of RA Constitution and struggle. The acts I pointed out are
anti-constitutional, thus the alienation of the property right in
the Northern Avenue was implemented according to these acts,” Armen
Harutyunian said. He didn’t want to go into details, adding that he
is quite determined to take victory on March 21.
From: Baghdasarian

IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Laurel Lambert, KCET
(323) 953-5246
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tomikka Anderson
Publicity Associate
KCET
323-953-5308 phone
323-953-5678 fax
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
KCET TO PREMIERE ‘LE GENOCIDE ARMENIEN’ (‘THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE’) AT
9 PM ON MONDAY, APRIL 17 – ‘MY SON SHALL BE ARMENIAN’ TO AIR MONDAY,
APRIL 24 AT 9 PM
KCET has scheduled its premiere of “Le Genocide Armenien” (“The
Armenian Genocide”) the 2005 documentary by French filmmaker Laurence
Jourdan, for 9 pm on Monday, April 17. (The film had originally
been slated to air at 10 pm). The English-narrated documentary will
be premiering for the first time on American television. Also in
April, KCET has scheduled an encore of “My Son Shall Be Armenian” by
Armenian-Canadian filmmaker Hagop Goudsouzian to air Monday, April 24
(9 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.)
“We have received very positive feedback regarding our airing of
‘Le Genocide Armenien’ and we are choosing to air it earlier in the
evening to create the opportunity for a larger audience to view this
important production,” said Mary Mazur, KCET executive vice president
or programming and production. “We feel the comprehensive storytelling
of the documentary and its educational content will be appreciated
by a broad range of KCET viewers.”
“My Son Shall Be Armenian” follows the journey of filmmaker Hagop
Goudsouzian, who, accompanied by five Montreal men and women of
Armenian origin, returned to the land of his ancestors in search
of survivors of the genocide of 1915. Through the moving testimony
of those centenarians and the funny and touching accounts of his
fellow travelers from the New World, Hagop Goudsouzian has crafted a
dignified and poignant film on the need to make peace with the past
in order to turn toward the future.
Additional information about the films and filmmakers is available
on KCET.org.
# # #
From: Baghdasarian

GEORGIAN AUTHORITIES RESPONSIBLE FOR INCIDENTS AGAINST ARMENIANS IN JAVAKHETI
PanARMENIAN.Net
14.03.2006 23:17 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The Council of Javakhk NGO many times urged Armenian
authorities to pay proper attention to problems of Armenians in
Javakheti, to recognize the political element in those problems.
These calls were not answered, says a statement of the Council. The
message notes, “Encouraged by Armenian party’s indifference, the
Georgian party became more unruly. Three incidents against Armenians
happened within the past month, including the Georgian Orthodox Church
establishing a Diocese in the territory of Armenia and murder of an
Armenian in Tsalka.”
Statement authors keep the Georgian authorities and the Georgian
Orthodox Church responsible for all incidents. “Armenian authorities
also have their share of responsibility – they did nothing to solve
Javakheti problems. By their neutral stance they allow the Georgian
chauvinists acting that is fraught with dangerous consequences,”
the Council believes.
The statement calls to censure planned actions against Armenians,
discrimination and bind the Armenian authorities to demand
that Georgian authorities punish instigators of actions against
Armenians. “We demand that Armenian authorities along with those of
Georgia plan measures to solve all issues in Javakheti in a fair
manner. Javakhk Council will do its best to protect Armenians in
Javakheti and not to admit forcing out Armenians from Georgia. In
case it is necessary, it will counteract anti-Armenian provocation,”
the statement says.
From: Baghdasarian

AN ARTISTIC TREK ACROSS A SURREAL LAND OF SAND AND SELF-DISCOVERY
By Kathryn Shattuck
The New York Times
March 9, 2006 Thursday
Late Edition – Final
As snow fell lightly on Broome Street in SoHo one evening last month,
three women in their 40’s sipped tea inside an artist’s studio and
charted a journey through unfamiliar territory. The landscape, viewed
on an iMac monitor, was at once barren and lush, its undulating sands
and craggy outcroppings morphing into gently rhythmic waves. It could
have been anywhere.
But to the cellist Maya Beiser, the composer Eve Beglarian and the
visual artist Shirin Neshat — each laying claim to a different
piece of the broader Middle East — this curious terrain born of an
18-month odyssey of music, art and, not least, self-awareness was
specific and unique.
The fruit of their travels, “I Am Writing to You From a Far-Off
Country,” will be presented by Ms. Beiser at Zankel Hall tonight
as part of “Almost Human,” a program in which she draws comparisons
between the sound of the cello and the human voice. After new works
by Brett Dean, Joby Talbot and Michael Gordon, the second half will
be devoted to “Far-Off Country,” Ms. Beglarian’s 40-minute setting
of a poem of the same name by the Belgian Surrealist Henri Michaux,
with video by Ms. Neshat.
Though “Far-Off Country” was written by a man, the voice is
a woman’s. In 12 letters to an unspecified listener — a lover,
perhaps, or a god — she describes a place of wind and water and
“inexorable weather,” where leaves are separated from their trees and
“dwarfs are born constantly.”
“I am writing to you from the end of the world,” she says. “You must
realize this.”
Ms. Beiser first came to “Far-Off Country” as a teenager in her own
distant land, on a kibbutz in northern Israel between Nazareth and
the Sea of Galilee.
The poem haunted her, she said, after her move to the United States,
where she studied at Yale, and later, as she traveled the world
performing.
More recently, she found an English translation of the poem and
decided to produce a setting of the work for “Almost Human,” to make
the words her own.
“I had wanted to work with Eve for a long time, and this gave me
an excuse,” she said of Ms. Beglarian, an experimentalist whose
work often interweaves electronics, spoken word and even dance and
theater. “I think she has a phenomenal way of working with text and
incorporating that with music.”
Ms. Beglarian said: “That was really meaningful to me. I know what
it’s like to love a text and not yet know what form it should take.”
That form slowly revealed itself as the women dissected the poem line
by line to find a common starting point.
“It’s a really bizarre country that this woman finds herself in,”
Ms. Beglarian said, “and yet as you travel through the poem you realize
that the far-off country she is describing is the country we’re
in. I was looking for a combination of strangeness and otherness,
and I found this in Armenian music because of how Armenian culture
lies at the intersection of the East and the West.”
Drawing from Christian liturgical music and chants, Ms. Beglarian
created a deeply layered composition that requires Ms. Beiser to recite
the poem while playing, accompanied by a recorded instrumental track. A
mezzo-soprano, Alexandra Montano, adds recorded and live vocalises.
The connection to Ms. Beglarian’s heritage, so obvious in retrospect,
did not come to her immediately. Though her father was Armenian and
lived in Tehran for part of his childhood, he did not immerse his
children in the culture of his youth. “Only toward end of his life did
it become clear to me how important his Armenian-ness was to him,”
she said. “This is the first time I’ve incorporated what was his
music into my work.”
But how to convey the poem’s otherworldliness visually? The women
turned to the Iranian-born Ms. Neshat. Ms. Beglarian felt she had the
fierceness and sensitivity to respond in a powerful way to the text,
and Ms. Beiser proposed that she join their collaboration.
“For me, it was a chance to expand my own vocabulary and my own
themes,” Ms. Neshat said. “I felt that this collaboration from three
women from three different cultures could be very poignant in a way.”
Still, “I have to be very honest that I had not been to Israel, I had
never collaborated with anyone from Israel, and when Maya approached
me, I was wary,” she said. “We have in Iran in many ways been
brainwashed since childhood about certain cultures and religions. But
I thought, if I don’t do something about the way I’m programmed and I
don’t take that responsibility to negotiate and collaborate and open
up about those people I feel are strangers to me, it’s never going
to happen. These days more than ever, I feel that culture can be a
tool of peace and mediation and negotiation and understanding.”
Ms. Neshat began to imagine the place the poem’s narrator was
describing.
“It was clear to me this was a world unlike any other world,”
she said. “I was really after this sort of landscape not common to
the eye.”
She considered the Moroccan desert, but when one of her
cinematographers announced he was traveling to Israel, she asked him
to film the landscape of Ms. Beiser’s home.
“Of course, I come from the desert too,” Ms. Neshat said. “But I was so
shocked when he came back. I thought, ‘My God, is this what all these
people are fighting for, this barren land? This is so ironic.’ The
space was so abandoned, and yet there was this energy about it,
in emotional and political ways, that charged me.”
How “Far-Off Country” is interpreted — as a specific destination or
a spiritual excursion or even as a woman’s secret and often painful
existence inside herself — is ultimately in the eye of the beholder,
Ms. Beiser said. But to these three artists, the lessons are far
larger than that.
“That’s the message for me in all of this, that yes, we are connected
to where we come from and that’s important, but in the end we all
transcend that if we let ourselves go into a deeper kind of place,”
Ms. Beiser said. “I think women need to say much more in this
way. Because if we make our voices heard, maybe then there will be
less of that horrible stuff in the world.”
From: Baghdasarian

LEVON ARONIAN FOR THE FIRST TIME TO TAKE PART IN “AMBER” TOURNAMENT
YEREVAN, MARCH 9, NOYAN TAPAN. The traditional chess tournament
“Amber” will be held in Monte Carlo on March 18-30. The peculiarity of
it is that 12 strongest grand masters hold small competitions among
one another. One of the games will be held by “blind”, the second one
by fast chess rules. Levon Aronian, the strongest chess-player of
Armenia for the first time received an invitation of taking part in
the competitions. The competitors of the World cup holder in the Monte
Carlo will be world champion Veselin Topalov (Bulgary), Vishvanatan
Anand (India), Peter Leko (Hungary), Vasili Ivanchuk (Ukraine), Pyotr
Svidler, Alexander Grishchuk, Alexander Morozevich (three from
Russia), Boris Gelfand (Israel), Luk Van Velin (Holland), Fransisko
Valejo (Spain) and Peter-Hans Nilsen (Denmark).
From: Baghdasarian

NATIONAL CHOREOGRAPHY DEGRADES TODAY, SPECIALISTS EMPHASIZE

YEREVAN, MARCH 10, NOYAN TAPAN. The March 10 discussion at the
“Hayeli” (Mirror) club was dedicated to the current problems and
further fate of the Armenian choreography. The discussion was held
with participation of Zemfira Yeritsian, professor of Choreography
Chair of Yerevan State Institute of Theater and Cinema, and Albert
Kizirian, Head of Choreography Chair of Yereven Pedagogical University
Culture Faculty.
The discussion participants touched upon the current condition of
national choreography stating that it is gradually degrading giving up
its place to the choreography of oriental peoples. They are convinced
that the Ministry of Culture has no exact state policy for the
regulation of this issue, as a result of which “we have the current
situation”.
Albert Kizirian said that the folklore of each people is the basis of
its choreography. Meanwhile, he is convinced that having folklore in
the basis of choreography, nevertheless, today we should also take
into consideration the requirements and dictates of time in this
sphere of art.
According to Zemfira Yeritsian, the current choreography figures,
performers and producers have lost not only the Armenian traditional
dancing elements but also a very important thing – the fire of the
soul. “They dance without any fire, without feelings, without a
dialogue with the spectators, which has made the national dance simple
and non-attractive,” the former solo dancer considers.
From: Baghdasarian

Armenian Assembly of America
1140 19th Street, NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202-393-3434
Fax: 202-638-4904
Email: [email protected]
Web:
PRESS RELEASE
March 7, 2006
CONTACT: Christine Kojoian
E-mail: [email protected]
ARMENIAN ASSEMBLY FILES AMICUS BRIEF IN GENOCIDE DENIAL CASE
Washington, DC – On March 8, the Armenian Assembly filed an amicus
curiae (“friend of the court”) brief in the matter of Driscoll
v. Griswold (“The Genocide Denial Case”) arguing that the Assembly of
Turkish American Associations (ATAA) and its co-plaintiffs must be
prevented from injecting genocide denial materials into the
Massachusetts school curriculum.
The brief supports the right of the Massachusetts Department of
Education to teach the facts of the Armenian Genocide to public school
students without including denialist materials.
The brief states in part:
“This lawsuit is an unprecedented attempt by the plaintiffs to utilize
the federal courts as a vehicle for their unconstitutional intrusion
into educational policy in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts….It is
not for this Court to decide the appropriate curriculum in
Massachusetts public schools.”
The Massachusetts school curriculum ensures that the lessons of the
Holocaust, Armenian Genocide, Irish Famine and other crimes against
humanity are not forgotten and are thus taught in the classrooms.
Additionally, the Assembly argues that the case should be dismissed
because the plaintiffs have not established a basis for challenging
curricular choices based on the First Amendment.
“No court in the country ever has recognized a First Amendment injury
from having curriculum or a curriculum guide advance a particular
viewpoint,” the Assembly brief states.
“The Assembly’s amicus brief forcefully supports the Commonwealth’s
unassailable legal position regarding the Curriculum Guide on the
Armenian Genocide, of which the plaintiffs have no legal case to
object,” said Assembly Board of Trustees Vice President and Counselor
Robert A. Kaloosdian. “The brief reaffirms the incontrovertible fact
of the Armenian Genocide and thus exposes the revisionism and
denialist tactics employed by those who seek to deny the historical
truth.”
To read the amicus curiae brief or other pleadings filed in this case,
visit the “Genocide Denial Case” section on the Assembly’s home page
at
The Armenian Assembly is the largest Washington-based nationwide
organization promoting public understanding and awareness of Armenian
issue. It is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt membership organization.
###

NR#2006-021
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

The World’s Billionaires
Billionaire Bacchanalia
Edited by Luisa Kroll and Allison Fass 03.27.06
Nearly two-thirds of the planet’s very richest people are self-made.
Canadian playboy Calvin Ayre went down to Costa Rica a decade ago and began
taking illegal bets over the Internet. Now he’s worth $1 billion. Making a
billion just isn’t what it used to be. In its inaugural ranking ofthe world’s
richest people 20 years ago FORBES uncovered some 140 billionaires. Just
three years ago we found 476. This year the list is a record 793, up 102 from
last year. They’re worth a combined $2.6 trillion, up 18% since last March.
Their average net worth: $3.3 billion.
Strong stock markets around the world (the U.S. being the notable exception)
contributed to this surge in wealth. India, whose BSE SENSEX market was up
54% in the past 12 months, is home to 10 new billionaires, more than any other
country besides the U.S.
Notable newcomers include Tulsi Tanti, a former textile trader whose
alternative energy company owns Asia’s largest windfarm; Vijay Mallya, the liquor
tycoon behind Kingfisher beer; Kushal Pal Singh, India’s biggest real estate
developer; and Anurag Dikshit (pronounced `dix-sit’), another online gaming
mogul, who made his fortune when he and two Americans took their PartyGaming
poker company public in London last June.
Russia, whose RTS stock exchange was up 108%, benefited from strong gains in
commodities prices. The surge swelled the fortunes of its 33 billionaires,
including 7 newcomers who join the list. China now has 8 billionaires, four
times as many as last year. The U.S. is home to 44 new billionaires and
commands nearly half of the fortunes on the roster.
Bill Gates retains his title as the world’s richest person for the
twelfth
straight year, proving that while it’s getting easier to make a billion, the
same can’t be said for making $50 billion.
Twelve people return to the list. Thirty-nine people depart from it. Seven
fortunes were broken up among family members, usually siblings, adding 15
individuals to the ranks. Seventy-eight women make the list, 10 more than last
year, though only 6 are self-made. Hind Hariri, daughter of slain Lebanese
prime minister Rafik Hariri, who is eight months younger than Germany=80=99s Prince
Albert von Thurn und Taxis, is, at 22, the list’s youngest member.
#53 Kirk Kerkorian
Age: 88
Fortune: self made
Source: Investments, casinos
Net Worth: 8.7
Country Of Citizenship: United States
Residence: Los Angeles, California, United States, North America
Industry: Investments
Marital Status: divorced, 2 children
High School, Diploma
Low-key investor with eighth-grade education scored big with $7.9 billion
takeover of Mandalay Bay Resorts in 2004. MGM Mirage now owns more than half
the hotel rooms on the Las Vegas Strip, but stock down 14% since July. Born in
Fresno to Armenian immigrants, flew planes across Atlantic during World War
II. First fortune: selling Trans International Airlines for $104 million
profit in the 1960s. Invested proceeds in Sin City: acquired Flamingo hotel 1967,
built International hotel 1969. Sold both properties to Hilton Hotels in
1970. Built first MGM Grand (now Bally’s), opened second incarnation 1993.
Took over Steve Wynn’s (see) Mirage Resorts in $6.4 billion buyout 2000.
Longtime romance with MGM movie studio now over: 3-time studio owner closed$5
billion deal with Sony, 3 private-equity firms and cable giant Comcast last
April; netted $1.8 billion. Former DaimlerChrysler shareholder now buying up
General Motors stock; owns 10% stake, value down $650 million since September.
Tennis junkie, said to play every day.
REPORTED BY Cristina von Zeppelin, Tatiana Serafin, Suzanne Hoppough, Kiyoe
Minami, Helen Coster, Kerry A. Dolan, Russell Flannery, Evan Hessel, Megan
Johnston, Matthew Miller, Matthew Swibel.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY Kiri Blakeley, Justin Doebele, Chandrani Ghosh, Lea
Goldman, Naazneen Karmali, Maxim Kashulinsky,
Josephine Lee, Forbes Russia, Nathan Vardi, Kirill Vishnepolsky, Chaniga
Vorasarun.
RESEARCH BY Phyllis Berman, Heidi Brown, Tomas Kellner, Ritu Kalra, Susan
Kitchens, Deborah Orr, Forbes Poland, Forbes Turkey.
PHOTO EDITOR Gail Toivanen.
DATABASE Mitchel Rand.
Forbes.com Inc.=84¢
From: Baghdasarian

3/10/06
What Really Happed to the Shah of Iran
By _Ernst Schroeder_ (mailto:[email protected])
My name is Ernst Schroeder, and since I have some Iranian friends from
school and review your online magazine occasionally, I thought I’d
pass onthe following three page quote from a book I read a few months
ago entitled, “_A Century Of War : Anglo-American Oil Politics and the
New World Order_
( 532309X/netnative) “, which
was written by William Engdahl, a German historianm . This is a book
about how oil and politics have been intertwined for the past 100
years.
I submit the below passage for direct publishing on your website, as I
think the quote will prove to be significant for anyone of Persian
descent.
“In November 1978, President Carter named the Bilderberg group’s
George Ball, another member of the Trilateral Commission, to head a
special WhiteHouse Iran task force under the National Security
Council’s Brzezinski. Ball recommended that Washington drop support
for the Shah of Iran and support the fundamentalistic Islamic
opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. Robert Bowie from the CIA was one
of the lead ‘case officers’ in the new CIA-led coup against the man
their covert actions had placed into power 25 years earlier.
Their scheme was based on a detailed study of the phenomenon of
Islamic fundamentalism, as presented by British Islamic expert,
Dr. Bernard Lewis,then on assignment at Princeton University in the
United States. Lewis’s scheme, which was unveiled at the May 1979
Bilderberg meeting in Austria, endorsed the radical Muslim Brotherhood
movement behind Khomeini, in order to promote balkanization of the
entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines.
Lewis argued that the West should encourage autonomous groups such as
the Kurds, Armenians, Lebanese Maronites, Ethiopian Copts, Azerbaijani
Turks, and so forth. The chaos would spread in what he termed an ‘Arc
of Crisis,’ which would spill over into Muslim regions of the Soviet
Union.
The coup against the Shah, like that against Mossadegh in 1953, was
run by British and American intelligence, with the bombastic American,
Brzezinski, taking public ‘credit’ for getting rid of the ‘corrupt’
Shah, while the British characteristically remained safely in the
background.
During 1978, negotiations were under way between the Shah’s government
and British Petroleum for renewal of the 25-year old extraction
agreement. By October 1978, the talks had collapsed over a British
‘offer’ which demanded exclusive rights to Iran’s future oil output,
while refusing to guarantee purchase of the oil. With their
dependence on British-controlled export apparently at an end, Iran
appeared on the verge of independence in its oil sales policy for the
first time since 1953, with eager prospective buyers in Germany,
France, Japan and elsewhere. In its lead editorial that September,
Iran’s Kayhan International stated:
In retrospect, the 25-year partnership with the [British Petroleum]
consortium and the 50-year relationship with British Petroleum which
preceded it, have not been satisfactory ones for Iran =80¦ Looking to
the future, NIOC [National Iranian Oil Company] should plan to handle
all operations by itself.
London was blackmailing and putting enormous economic pressure on the
Shah’s regime by refusing to buy Iranian oil production, taking only 3
million or so barrels daily of an agreed minimum of 5 million barrels
per day. This imposed dramatic revenue pressures on Iran, which
provided the context inwhich religious discontent against the Shah
could be fanned by trained agitators deployed by British and
U.S. intelligence. In addition, strikes among oil workers at this
critical juncture crippled Iranian oil production.
As Iran’s domestic economic troubles grew, American ‘security’
advisers to the Shah’s Savak secret police implemented a policy of
ever more brutal repression, in a manner calculated to maximize
popular antipathy to the Shah. At the same time, the Carter
administration cynically began protesting abusesof ‘human rights’
under the Shah.
British Petroleum reportedly began to organize capital flight out of
Iran, through its strong influence in Iran’s financial and banking
community. The British Broadcasting Corporation’s Persian-language
broadcasts, with dozens of Persian-speaking BBC ‘correspondents’ sent
into even the smallest village, drummed up hysteria against the Shah.
The BBC gave Ayatollah Khomeini a full propaganda platform inside Iran
during this time. The British government-owned broadcasting
organization refused to give the Shah’s government an equal chance to
reply. Repeated personal appeals from the Shah to the BBC yielded no
result. Anglo-American intelligence was committed to toppling the
Shah.
The Shah fled in January, and by February 1979, Khomeini had been
flown into Tehran to proclaim the establishment of his repressive
theocratic state to replace the Shah’s government.
Reflecting on his downfall months later, shortly before his death, the
Shah noted from exile,
I did not know it then – perhaps I did not want to know – but it is
clear to me now that the Americans wanted me out. Clearly this is
what the human rights advocates in the State Department wanted =80¦
What was I to make of the Administration’s sudden decision to call
former Under Secretary of State George Ball to the White House as an
adviser on Iran? =80¦ Ball was among those Americans who wanted to
abandon me and ultimately my country._[1]_
( 1090.html#_ftn1) [1]
With the fall of the Shah and the coming to power of the fanatical
Khomeini adherents in Iran, chaos was unleashed. By May 1979, the new
Khomeini regime had singled out the country’s nuclear power
development plans and announced cancellation of the entire program for
French and German nuclear reactor construction.
Iran’s oil exports to the world were suddenly cut off, some 3 million
barrels per day. Curiously, Saudi Arabian production in the critical
daysof January 1979 was also cut by some 2 million barrels per day.
To add to the pressures on world oil supply, British Petroleum
declared force majeure and cancelled major contracts for oil supply.
Prices on the Rotterdam spot market, heavily influenced by BP and
Royal Cutch Shell as the largest oil traders, soared in early 1979 as
a result. The second oil shock of the 1970s was fully under way.
Indications are that the actual planners of the Iranian Khomeini coup
in London and within the senior ranks of the U.S. liberal
establishment decided to keep President Carter largely ignorant of the
policy and its ultimate objectives. The ensuing energy crisis in the
United States was a major factor in bringing about Carter’s defeat a
year later.
There was never a real shortage in the world supply of petroleum.
Existing Saudi and Kuwaiti production capacities could at any time
have met the 5-6 million barrels per day temporary shortfall, as a
U.S. congressional investigation by the General Accounting Office
months later confirmed.
Unusually low reserve stocks of oil held by the Seven Sisters oil
multinationals contributed to creating a devastating world oil price
shock, with prices for crude oil soaring from a level of some $14 per
barrel in 1978 towards the astronomical heights of $40 per barrel for
some grades of crude on the spot market. Long gasoline lines across
America contributed to a general sense of panic, and Carter energy
secretary and former CIA director, James R.
Schlesinger, did not help calm matters when he told Congress and the
mediain February 1979 that the Iranian oil shortfall was
‘prospectively more serious’ than the 1973 Arab oil embargo._[2]_
( 1090.html#_ftn2) [2]
The Carter administration’s Trilateral Commission foreign policy
further ensured that any European effort from Germany and France to
develop more cooperative trade, economic and diplomatic relations with
their Soviet neighbor, under the umbrella of détente and various
Soviet-west European energy agreements, was also thrown into disarray.
Carter’s security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and secretary of
state, Cyrus Vance, implemented their ‘Arc of Crisis’ policy,
spreading the instability of the Iranian revolution throughout the
perimeter around the Soviet Union.
Throughout the Islamic perimeter from Pakistan to Iran,
U.S. initiatives created instability or worse.”
— William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and
the New World Order, © 1992, 2004. Pluto Press Ltd. Pages 171-174.
_[1]_ ( ref1) [1] In
1978, the Iranian Ettelaat published an article accusing Khomeini of
being a British agent. The clerics organized violent demonstrations
in response, which led to the flight of the Shah months later. See
U.S. Library of Congress Country Studies, Iran. The Coming of the
Revolution. December 1987. The role of BBC Persian broadcasts in the
ousting of the Shah is detailed in Hossein Shahidi. ‘BBC Persian
Service 60 years on.’ The Iranian. September 24, 2001.
The BBC was so much identified with Khomeini that it won the name
‘Ayatollah BBC.’
_[2]_ ( ref2) [2]
Comptroller General of the United States. ‘Iranian Oil Cutoff:
Reduced Petroleum Supplies and Inadequate U.S. Government Response.’
Report to Congress by General Accounting Office. 1979.
From: Baghdasarian