Author: Emil Lazarian

IN 2007 ARMENIAN GOVERNMENT PLANS TO COLLECT 48.4 BILLION DRAMS THANKS TO IMPROVEMENT OF TAX ADMINISTRATION
Noyan Tapan
Nov 02 2006
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 2, NOYAN TAPAN. According to the 2007 draft state
budget, the programmed revenues make 489.5 billion drams, which
exceeds by 12.2% the approved revenues of 2006 and by 8.5% the
revenues expected. In the indicated amount, revenues of 458.9 bln
drams are expected from tax and state duties collection, including
48.4 bln drams (about 127.3 mln USD) thanks to improvement of tax
administration and 4.5 bln drams as a result of possible amendments
to the legislation. The RA Minister of Finance and Economy Vardan
Khachatrian stated this when presenting the 2007 draft state budget
during the November 1 joint sitting of the RA National Assembly
standing committees. According to the minister, the government is now
developing a program of tax administration reforms in 2007 and the next
two years. The program is aimed at achieving a high level of budget
revenues collection. The consistent fight against economic crimes will
help create equal conditions for the economic competition among various
economic entities, which will allow to reduce the impact of economic
entities, which operate in the shadow sector or evade paying taxes,
on the market. In 2007, the clarification and simplification of the
laws related to the customs sphere, and the provision of customs
bodies with technical equipment will continue. In response to NT
correspondent’s question, V. Khachatrian said that he does not see yet
any new risks to the 2007 state budget compared with the previous two
years. In his opinion, the only one is the ratio of taxes/GDP. By the
draft, tax and state duty revenues will make up 15.7% of GDP against
the 2006 programmed index of 14.7%.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

MINISTER OF TRADE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF RA: ALTHOUGH DRAM APPRECIATES, NO ARMENIAN EXPORTING COMPANY HAS BEEN CLOSED
Noyan Tapan
Nov 02 2006
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 2, NOYAN TAPAN. “Although the exchange rate of the
Armenian dram against the US dollar has grown from 580 to 380 drams in
the last three years, no Armenian exporting company has been closed,”
the RA Minister of Trade and Economic Development Karen Chshmaritian
said during the November 1 round table “Foreign Currency Depreciation
Impact on Economic Development, Particularly Export” organized by the
Union of Manufacturers and Businessmen of Armenia (UMBA). Repsonding
to questions of the round table participants, K. Chshmaritian assured
them that the appreciation of the dram will not result in closure
of any local company, if exporting comanies have a stable management
system. In his opinion, the improvement of their management systems
and the correct application of laws are more important for Armeian
enterprises than the impact of the dram’s appreciation. Speaking about
the factors contributing to the appreciation of the Armenian dram,
the minister subscribed to the Central Bank of Armenia (CBA) Chairman
Tigran Sargsian’s opinion that they are connected with objective
factors of the increased foreign currency inflow. In particular, in
the last 5 years, exports have increased almost fourfold, while the
number of tourists to Armenia has grown tenfold in the last 7 years.
Besides, in recent years import replacement has grown by 12-15%
annually. At the present time, technological equipment accounts for
25-30% of imports, while goods temporarily imported into Armenia (to
be processed and later exported) – for 20-22% of imports. According
to K. Chshmaritian, it is due to the impact of these factors
that Armenia’s payment balance is positive by 400 million dollars
under conditions of a trade deficit of 800 million dollars. The
minister said that issues of mitigating the consequences of the
dram’s appreciation were discussed at 5 meetings of the RA Economic
Council (composed of the RA prime minister, the chief advisor to
the RA president on economic issues, the minister of finance and
economy, the minister of trade and economic development, and the CBA
chairman), and legislative proposals will be developed based on the
results of these discussions. T. Sargsian in his turn noted that the
CBA prevents sharp fluctuations of the exchange rate by purchasing
currency with profits received from bonds. He expressed an opinion
that the amounts of currency purchase are sufficient, while in case of
greater amounts, credit interest rates and tax rates would rise and
the economic growth would slow down. According to him, superprofits
of the monopoly sectors should be allocated for the technological
re-equipment of Armenian enterprises. Besides, by issuing securities,
companies may attract resources from the population after proving
their financial transparency through a CBA rating: so far only 30
Armenian enterprises have applied to the CBA for such rating. Chairman
of the RA State Commission on Protection of Economic Competition
Ashot Shahnazarian said that one of the reasons for nonregistered
dollar inflow is that economic entities communicate with each other
without signing any contract and making payments in dollars, that
is in the shadow sector. A monitoring implemented by the commission
showed that shadow circulation makes up 50-80% in various sectors of
the Armenian economy. Chairman of UMBA Arsen Ghazarian expressed his
concern that the domestic production will be endangered if taxes on
the superprofits of importers are not raised in the future too. He
also expressed concern that the economic entities with superprofits
may use their money to redistribute their property by acquiring shares
of transparently operating companies.
In his words, the necessity to control the process of the dram’s
appreciation is also conditioned by the fact that previously the
agreement prices of power-bearing substances imported into Armenia
have been calculated based on a higher dollar-dram exchange rate,
which now also affects the prices of transportation services. Chief
Advisor to the RA President on Economic Issues Vahram Nersisiants
said that Armenia with its tax liberalization regime cannot choose
the way of raising the limits of superprofit taxation. He saw the
solution of the problem in improvement of tax administration and the
tax and budgetary policy, since “it is just impossible to curb the
annual inflow of 2.5 billion dollars only by monetary and credit
instruments.” According to him, cumulative infrastructures should
be created for “sterlilization” of these resources. It is noteworthy
that in addition to state officials and businessmen, deputies of the
National Assembly, scientits and experts took part in the round table.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

RA GOVERNMENT PROPOSES CONVENING NA SPECIAL SITTING ON NOVEMBER 9
Noyan Tapan
Nov 01 2006
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 1, NOYAN TAPAN. Being guided by Article 70, RA
Constitution, at the November 2 sitting, RA government decided to
apply to RA National Assembly Speaker with a proposal to convene a
National Assembly special sitting on 2006 November 9, at 12:00. As
NT was informed from RA government Information and Public Relations
Department, at the sitting, it is planned to discuss and adopt a
number of bills approved by RA government.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

ACCORDING TO “HAYOTS ASHKHARH”, RUSSIA MAY CARRY OUT “GAS RE-ARRANGEMENT” WITH IRAN
Noyan Tapan
Nov 02 2006
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 2, NOYAN TAPAN. Under conditions of newly strained
relations between Russia and Georgia, Armenia can insure itself
against a gas blockade and at the same time to counterbalance its
transport-related dependence on Georgia by the prospect of increasing
the energy dependence of that country.
This is said in the November 2 issue of the daily “Hayots Ashkharh”
when summarizing the RA President Robert Kocharian’s working visit
to Moscow.
According to the newspaper, given the speedy operation of the
Iran-Armenia gas pipleline and prospect of passing ArmRusgazprom’s
control package of shares (from 45 to 58%) to Gazprom, it is not
difficult to conclude that the Russian side is trying to use the
version “re-arrangement of the functions” of the gas pipelines running
into the South Caucasus. “That is, Armenia will receive gas from Iran,
while in all likelihood Russians will offer Georgia to pay a twice
as high price,” the daily writes. According to “Hayots Ashkharh”,
in the coming months Armenia may “be more frank” in the issue of
suspending the construction of Kars-Akhalkalak railway scheduled
to start in January 2007, i.e. it will get an extra leverage of
pressure on Georgia. Noting that despite the serious signals regularly
received from Russia, Armenia managed to move the Javakhk factor
out of the Russian-Georgian confrontation field, “Hayots Ashkharh”
concludes that now by starting the Kars-Akhalkalak construction, it
is Georgia rather than Armenia will face the temptation to “arouse”
the Javakhk factor and play it against itself.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

PRICES OF GASOLINE AND DIESEL FUEL DECLINE BY 5.8% AND 0.8% RESPECTIVELY IN ARMENIA IN OCTOBER 2006
Noyan Tapan
Nov 02 2006
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 2, NOYAN TAPAN. A 5.8% and 0.8% decline in the
prices of gasoline and diesel fuel respectively was registered in
Armenia in October on September 2006. According to the RA National
Statistical Service, the price of gasoline declined by 3.3%, while
that of diesel fuel grew by 0.7% in Armenia in October 2006 on October
2005. The growth in the prices of gasoline and diesel fuel made 9.1%
and 11.7% respectively in October 2006 on 2005.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

‘FRENCH DIPLOMATIC OFFICE TO KURDISTAN’ TO OPEN IN NORTHERN IRAQ IN JANUARY
By Hakob Chakrian
AZG Armenian Daily
03/11/2006
Jalal Talabani, President of Iraq, is going to lave for Paris for two
days’ official visit. It is envisaged that he will meet with French
President Jacques Chirac, French Foreign Minister Fillippe Douste
Blazy and Speaker of the French Parliament within the framework of the
official visit. Dwelling on the visit of Talabani, Hurriyet wrote in
its November 1 issue that after the adoption of the bill criminalizing
denial of the Armenian Genocide, France is going to take the second
step that may cause Turkey concern.
The question is that France is ready to open a diplomatic office of
Kurdistan in Erbil city, Northern Iraq. The French Foreign Ministry
stated in its official web site that “in the beginning of the coming
year, in Erbil (Kurdistan), the opening ceremony of the embassy’s
office will take place.”
We wonder why does Turkey feel insecure? Is it because the “embassy
office” becomes the diplomatic office of France to Kurdistan? In other
words, by opening the above office, France recognizes “Kurdistan”
that has been shaped in the North of Iraq.
Probably, that’s why it wasn’t accidental when Hurriyet turned
to the speaker of the French Foreign Ministry with the request to
explain the situation. In response, the French FM Speaker stated
that “France, just like Turkey, supports the territorial integrity
of Iraq. We have an embassy in Baghdad. Anyway, we are going to open
“the embassy office” in Erbil city, Northern Iraq, that is going to
function under the control of the French Embassy to Iraq.”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

GOVERNMENT BANS ADVERTISEMENT OF NON-LICENSED MEDICAL SERVICES
Panorama.am
17:43 02/11/06
The government issued a decision, which bans promotional ads of
people who have no medical education or medical services which are
not licensed by the state. Up to today, all medical services had the
right to advertise themselves. The new government decision ensures
new requirements for medical service promotion.
Suren Krmoyan, adviser to the minister of health on legal issues,
told a briefing today saying, “Non registered medicine is prohibited
to be advertised similar to drugs and special prescription medicine,”
he said.
The government imposes lighter requirements for the advertisement of
medical equipment.
Krmoyan said the ministry of health has the right to grant the
permission for advertisement within 20 days.
After 20 days the applicant has the right to post his/her advertisement
in any mass media outlet.
Krmoyan said the ministry will collect no money for giving the
permission.

THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND THE POLITICS OF SILENCE
By Elizabeth Kolbert
The New Yorket
Nov 2 2006
On September 14, 2000, Representatives George Radanovich, Republican
of California, and David Bonior, Democrat of Michigan, introduced a
House resolution-later to be known as H.R. 596-on the slaughter of
the Armenians. The measure urged the President, in dealing with the
matter, to demonstrate “appropriate understanding and sensitivity.”
It further instructed him on how to phrase his annual message on
the Armenian Day of Remembrance: the President should refer to the
atrocities as “genocide.” The bill was sent to the International
Relations Committee and immediately came under attack. State Department
officials reminded the committee that it was U.S. policy to “respect
the Turkish government’s assertions that, although many ethnic
Armenians died during World War I, no genocide took place.”
Expanding on this theme, Secretary of Defense William Cohen, in a
letter to Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the House, wrote that while
he in no way wanted to “downplay the Armenian tragedy . . . passing
judgment on this history through legislation could have a negative
impact on Turkish-Armenian relations and on our security interests in
the region.” After committee members voted, on October 3rd, to send
H.R. 596 to the floor, Turkish officials warned that negotiations
with an American defense contractor, Bell Textron, over four and a
half billion dollars’ worth of attack helicopters were in jeopardy.
On October 5th, the leaders of all five parties in the Turkish
parliament issued a joint statement threatening to deny the U.S.
access to an airbase in Incirlik, which it was using to patrol
northern Iraq. Finally, on October 19th, just a few hours before H.R.
596 was scheduled to be debated in the House, Hastert pulled it from
the agenda. He had, he said, been informed by President Clinton that
passage of the resolution could “risk the lives of Americans.”
The defeat of H.R. 596 is a small but fairly typical episode in a
great campaign of forgetting. Like President Clinton, President Bush
continues to “respect the Turkish government’s assertions” and to issue
Armenian Remembrance Day proclamations each year without ever quite
acknowledging what it is that’s being remembered. If in Washington
it’s politically awkward to refer to the genocide, it is positively
dangerous to do so in Istanbul. Last year, Turkey’s leading author,
Orhan Pamuk, was prosecuted merely for having brought up the subject
in a press interview. “A million Armenians were killed and nobody but
me dares to talk about it, ” he told the Sunday magazine of the Swiss
newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. Pamuk, now a recipient of the Nobel Prize in
Literature, was accused of having violated Section 301 of the Turkish
penal code, which outlaws “insulting Turkishness.” (The charge was
eventually dropped, on a technicality.) A few months later, another
prominent Turkish novelist, Elif Shafak, was charged with the same
offense, for having a character in her most recent novel, “The Bastard
of Istanbul,” declare, “I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who
lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915,
but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide.” The charges
were dropped after Shafak argued that the statement of a fictional
person could not be used to prosecute a real one, then reinstated by
a higher court, and then dropped again.
It is in this context that Taner Akcam’s new history, “A Shameful Act:
The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility”
(Metropolitan; $30), must be considered. The book is dryly written
and awkwardly translated, but nevertheless moving.
Akcam grew up in far northeastern Turkey and was educated at Ankara’s
Middle East Technical University, where he became the editor of a
leftist journal. In 1976, he was arrested and sentenced to ten years
in prison for spreading propaganda. Using a stove leg to dig a tunnel,
he managed to escape after a year, and fled to Germany. Akcam is one
of the first Turkish historians to treat the Armenian genocide as
genocide-he now lives in exile in Minnesota-and in “A Shameful Act”
he tries to grapple both with the enormity of the crime and with the
logic of its repression.
Any writer who takes on genocide as his topic accepts obligations
that, if not exactly contradictory, are clearly in tension. The
first is to describe the event in a way that is adequate to its
exceptionality. (The original U.N. resolution on the subject, approved
in 1946, describes genocide as an act that “shocks the conscience
of mankind.”) The second is to make sense of it, which is to say,
to produce an account of the unspeakable that anyone can understand.
Akcam begins his history in the nineteenth century, when roughly
two million Armenians were living in the Ottoman Empire, some in
major cities like Istanbul and Izmir, and the rest in the provinces
of central and eastern Anatolia. Already, the Armenians were in
a peculiarly vulnerable position: Christians living in the heart
of a Muslim empire, they were subject by law to special taxes and
restrictions, and by tradition to extortion and harassment. As the
century wore on, the so-called Sick Man of Europe kept shedding
territory: first Greece, in the Greek War of Independence; and then,
following the Russo-Turkish War, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, and
Bosnia and Herzegovina. These humiliating defeats eroded the Ottomans’
confidence, which, in turn, Akcam argues, “resulted in the loss of
their tolerance.” Muslim assaults on Christians increased throughout
the empire, and the ancient prejudices against the Armenians hardened
into something uglier.
In 1876, Sultan Abdulhamid II came to power. Abdulhamid, who ruled
the empire for thirty-three of its last forty-six years, was a deeply
anxious man, perhaps paranoid. He maintained a vast network of spies;
turned Yildiz Palace, overlooking the Bosporus, into a ramshackle fort;
and demanded that each dish be tasted by his chief chamberlain before
being served. Abdulhamid soon took anti-Armenianism to new heights. (It
was rumored that the Sultan’s own mother, a former dancing girl, was
Armenian, but he always denied this.) He shut down Armenian schools,
threw Armenian teachers in jail, prohibited the use of the word
“Armenia” in newspapers and textbooks, and formed special Kurdish
regiments, known as the Hamidiye, whose raison d’etre appears to
have been to harass Armenian farmers. Encouraged by American and
European missionaries, the Armenians turned to the outside world for
help. The English, the French, and the Russians repeatedly demanded
that Istanbul institute “reforms” on the Armenians’ behalf.
Officially, the Sultan acceded to these demands, only to turn around
and repress the Armenians that much more vigorously. “By taking away
Greece and Romania, Europe has cut off the feet of the Turkish state,”
Abdulhamid complained. “Now, by means of this Armenian agitation, they
want to get at our most vital places and tear out our very guts. This
would be the beginning of totally annihilating us, and we must fight
against it with all the strength we possess.”
In the mid-eighteen-nineties, tens of thousands of Armenians were
murdered. The slaughter began in Sasun, in eastern Anatolia, where
Armenians had refused to pay taxes on the ground that the government
had failed to protect them from Kurdish extortion. The killings in
Sasun provoked an international outcry, which was answered with the
Sultan’s usual promises of reform, and then with a string of even
bloodier massacres in the provinces of Erzurum, Ankara, Sivas, Trabzon,
and Harput. In the wake of the killings, William Gladstone, the former
British Prime Minister, labelled Abdulhamid “the great assassin.”
Finally, in 1909, Abdulhamid was pushed aside. The coup was engineered
by a group composed, for the most part, of discontented Army
officers-the original Young Turks. The Young Turks spoke loftily of
progress and brotherhood-on the eve of the revolt, one of their leaders
is said to have declared, “Under the blue sky we are all equal”-and
the empire’s remaining Christians celebrated their ascendancy. But
the logic of slaughtering the Armenians had by this point been too
well established.
When the First World War broke out, the Young Turks rushed to join the
conflict. “That day of revenge, which has been awaited for centuries
by the nation’s young and old, by its martyrs and by its living,
has finally arrived,” the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies asserted in
a letter to the armed forces. By 1914, the empire was being led
by a troika-nicknamed the Three Pashas-composed of the Minister of
the Interior, the Minister of the Navy, and the Minister of War. In
December, the War Minister, Ismail Enver, decided to lead the Third
Army in an attack against the Russians on the Caucasian front. Enver
planned to press all the way east to Baku, in present-day Azerbaijan,
where he hoped to incite the local Muslims to join the Ottomans’ cause,
and, as a first step, he ordered his forces to divide up and follow
different routes to Sarikamish, a Russian military outpost. The idea
was for all the troops to arrive at the same time and surprise the
enemy with their strength; instead, they straggled in over a period
of several days, with devastating results.
The Ottomans lost about seventy-five thousand men at Sarikamish, out
of a total force of ninety thousand. A German officer attached to the
Third Army described the defeat as “a disaster which for rapidity and
completeness is without parallel in military history.” The Russians
had encouraged the Armenians to form volunteer regiments to fight
against the Ottomans, and some (though not many) had heeded this
call. The Armenians’ role in the disaster became one of the pretexts
for the genocide.
On April 24, 1915, some two hundred and fifty prominent
Armenians-poets, doctors, bankers, and even a member of the Ottoman
parliament-were arrested in Istanbul. They were split up into groups,
loaded onto trains, shipped off to remote prisons, and eventually
killed. (The Armenian Day of Remembrance is marked each year on the
anniversary of these arrests.) Around the same time, orders were
issued to begin rounding up Armenians wholesale and deporting them.
“Some regional variations notwithstanding,” Akcam reports, the
deportations “proceeded in the same manner everywhere.” Armenians
would be given a few days or, in some cases, just a few hours to
leave their homes. The men were separated from the women and children,
led beyond the town, and either tortured or murdered outright. Their
families were then herded to concentration camps in the Syrian desert,
often bound by ropes or chains. Along the way, they were frequently
set upon by Kurdish tribesmen, who had been given license to loot
and rape, or by the very gendarmes who were supposed to be guarding
them. A Greek witness wrote of watching a column of deportees being
led through the Kemakh Gorge, on the upper Euphrates. The guards
“withdrew to the mountainside” and “began a hail of rifle fire,”
he wrote. “A few days later there was a mopping-up operation: since
many little children were still alive and wandering about beside
their dead parents.” In areas where ammunition was in short supply,
the killing squads relied on whatever weapons were at hand-axes,
cleavers, even shovels. Adults were hacked to pieces, and infants
dashed against the rocks. In the Black Sea region, Armenians were
loaded onto boats and thrown overboard. In the area around Lake Hazar,
they were tossed over cliffs.
At the time of the deportations, the U.S. had not yet entered the
war. It maintained an extensive network of diplomats in the region,
and many of these provided detailed chronicles of what they had seen,
which Henry Morgenthau, the United States Ambassador in Istanbul,
urgently forwarded to Washington. (Other eyewitness accounts came from
German Army officers, Danish missionaries, and Armenian survivors.) In
a dispatch sent to the State Department on November 1, 1915, the
U.S. consul in Aleppo wrote:
It is extremely rare to find a family intact that has come any
considerable distance, invariably all having lost members from disease
and fatigue, young girls and boys carried off by hostile tribesmen,
and about all the men having been separated from the families and
suffered fates that had best be left unmentioned, many being done
away with in atrocious manners before the eyes of their relatives
and friends. So severe has been the treatment that careful estimates
place the number of survivors at only 15 percent of those originally
deported. On this basis the number surviving even this far being less
than 150,000 . . . there seems to have been about 1,000,000 persons
lost up to this date.
An American businessman who made a tour of the lower Euphrates the
next year reported having encountered “all along the road from Meskene
to Der-i-Zor graves containing the remains of unfortunate Armenians
abandoned and dead in atrocious suffering. It is by the hundreds
that these mounds are numbered where sleep anonymously in their last
sleep these outcasts of existence, these victims of barbary without
qualification.” Morgenthau repeatedly confronted the Ottoman Interior
Minister, Mehmed Talât, with the contents of these dispatches, telling
him that the Americans would “never forget these massacres.” But the
warnings made no impression. During one session, Morgenthau later
recalled in a memoir, Talât turned to him and asked if he could
obtain a list of Armenians who had purchased life-insurance policies
with American firms. “They are practically all dead now, and have no
heirs left to collect the money,” the Interior Minister reasoned, and
therefore the unclaimed benefits rightfully belonged to the government.
The official explanation for the Armenian deportations was that
they were necessary for security reasons, and this is still the
account provided by state-sanctioned histories today. “Facts on
the Relocation of Armenians (1914-1918),” a volume produced by the
Turkish Historical Society, was published in English in 2002. It
begins with an epigram from John F. Kennedy (“For the great enemy
of the truth is very often not the lie-deliberate, contrived, and
dishonest-but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic”)
and the reassurance that it is “not a propaganda document.” The book
argues that Russia and its allies had “sown the seeds of intrigue and
mischief among the Armenians, who in turn had been doing everything in
their power to make life difficult for Ottoman armies.” Deciding that
“fundamental precautions” were needed, the Ottoman authorities took
steps to “relocate” the Armenians away from the front. They worked to
insure that the transfer would be effected “as humanely as possible”;
if this goal was not always realized, it was because of disease-so
difficult to control during wartime-or rogue bands of “tribal people”
who sometimes attacked Armenian convoys. “Whenever the government
realized that some untoward incidents had taken place . . . the
government acted very promptly and warned the local authorities.” In
support of this “Arbeit Macht Frei” version of events, “Facts on the
Relocation of Armenians” cites the very Ottoman officials who oversaw
the slaughter. Turkish officials, in turn, now cite works like “Facts”
to support their claim that the period’s history remains contested. In
March, 2005, just before the commemoration of the ninetieth anniversary
of the Day of Remembrance, the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, called for an “impartial study” to look into what had really
happened to the Armenians. The International Association of Genocide
Scholars responded that such a call could only be regarded as still
more propaganda. “The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented
by thousands of official records . . . by eyewitness accounts of
missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by
decades of historical scholarship,” the association’s directors wrote
in a letter explaining their refusal to participate. An academic
conference on the massacres planned for later that spring in Istanbul
was banned by a court order. (After much maneuvering, it was held at
a private university amid raucous protests.)
The Ottomans formally surrendered to the Allies on October 30, 1918.
The Paris Peace Conference opened the following year, and it took
another year for the Allies to agree on how to dispose of the empire.
The pact that finally emerged-the Treaty of Sèvres-awarded Palestine,
Transjordan, and Mesopotamia to the English, Syria and Lebanon to
the French, Rhodes and a chunk of southern Anatolia to the Italians,
and Izmir and western Anatolia to the Greeks. Eastern Anatolia, with
a prize stretch of Black Sea coast, was to go to the Armenians. The
Bosporus and the Dardanelles were to be demilitarized and placed under
international control. From an imperial power the Turks were thus
transformed into something very close to a subject people. This was
the final disgrace and, as it turned out, also the start of a revival.
As the rulers of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks had been fighting
against history; they had spent more than a century trying-often
unsuccessfully-to fend off nationalist movements in the regions
they controlled. Now, in defeat, they adopted the cause as their
own. In the spring of 1920, the Turkish Nationalists, led by Mustafa
Kemal-later to be known as Ataturk-established a new government in
Ankara. (The government’s founding is celebrated every April 23rd,
one day before the Armenian Day of Remembrance.) During the next
three years, the Nationalists fought a series of brutal battles,
which eventually forced the Allies to abandon Sèvres. A new treaty
was drawn up, the Treaty of Lausanne, and the Republic of Turkey
was created. The big losers in this process were, once again, the
Armenians: Lausanne returned all of Anatolia to Turkish control.
In Akcam’s view, what happened between 1920 and 1923 is the key to
understanding the Turks’ refusal to discuss what happened in 1915.
The Armenian genocide was what today would be called a campaign of
ethnic cleansing, and as such it was highly effective. It changed
the demographics of eastern Anatolia; then, on the basis of these
changed demographics, the Turks used the logic of self-determination
to deprive of a home the very people they had decimated. Although
the genocide was not committed by the Nationalists, without it the
nationalist project wouldn’t have made much sense. Meanwhile, the
Nationalists made sure that the perpetrators were never punished.
Immediately after the end of the war, the Three Pashas fled the
country. (The Interior Minister, Talât, was assassinated in Berlin
by an Armenian who had been left for dead in a pile of corpses.) In
an attempt to mollify the Allies, the Ottomans arrested scores of
lower-ranking officials and put some of them on trial, but, when the
Nationalists came to power, they suspended these proceedings and freed
the suspects. A separate prosecution effort by the British, who were
keeping dozens of Ottoman officers locked up in Malta, similarly came
to nothing, and eventually the officers were sent home as part of
a prisoner-of-war exchange. Several went on to become high-ranking
members of Mustafa Kemal’s government. For the Turks to acknowledge
the genocide would thus mean admitting that their country was founded
by war criminals and that its existence depended on their crimes.
This, in Akcam’s words, “would call into question the state’s very
identity.” And so the Turks prefer to insist, as “Facts on the
Relocation of Armenians” puts it, that the genocide is a “legend.”
It is, of course, possible to question Akcam’s highly psychologized
account. Turkey has long sought to join the European Union, and,
while a history of genocide is clearly no barrier to membership,
denying it may be; several European governments have indicated that
they will oppose the country’s bid unless it acknowledges the crimes
committed against the Armenians. Are the Turks really willing to risk
their country’s economic future merely in order to hide-or pretend
to hide-an ugly fact about its origins? To believe this seems to
require a view of Turkish ethnic pride that gets dangerously close to
a national stereotype. In fact, many Turkish nationalists oppose E.U.
membership; from their perspective, denying the Armenian genocide
serves an eminently practical political purpose.
That being said, Akcam clearly has a point, and one that Americans, in
particular, ought to be able to appreciate. Before the arrival of the
first Europeans, there were, it is estimated, at least forty million
indigenous people living in the Americas; by 1650, fewer than ten
million were left. The decline was the result of casual cruelty on the
one hand-diseases unwittingly spread-and systematic slaughter on the
other. Every November, when American schoolchildren are taught about
Thanksgiving, they are insistently told the story of how the Pilgrims,
in their gratitude, entertained the kindly Wampanoag. We now know
that the comity of that original Thanksgiving was entirely atypical,
and that, by 1621, the Wampanoag were already a dying nation. While it
was cowardly of Congress to pull H.R. 596, passing it would, in its own
way, also have been problematic. We may side with the Armenians, but,
historically speaking, we probably have more in common with the Turks.
icles/061106crbo_books2
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GOVERNMENT PROMOTES LOCAL SUGAR PRODUCTION
Panorama.am
18:37 02/11/06
The government approved today amendments in the customs law aimed to
promote sugar production in the country. Government press services
report that the bill will provide equal opportunities for economic
units in the sector and will boost local demand of sugar. It was
pinpointed that sugar plan in Georgia exports its products to Armenia
without customs duty.
In fact, the local producers appear in unequal conditions whereas
foreign economic units enjoy more favorable taxation.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

SETTLEMENT OF NAGORNO KARABAKH CONFLICT POSSIBLE ONLY IN THE FRAME OF TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY OF AZERBAIJAN
AzerTag, Azerbaijan
Nov 2 2006
FM of Azerbaijan Elmar Mammadyarov on November 1 met Francesco
Bascone, Ambassador of Italy to the OSCE, foreign ministry’s press
service reported.
F. Bascone expressed satisfaction with the cooperation of the country’s
governmental structures with the OSCE Baku Office, interested in
views of the Foreign Minister about the current processes connected
to the negotiations for settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan, Nagorno
Karabakh conflict.
Speaking of the works done for resolution to the conflict, Minister
Mammadyarov said it is possible only in the frame of territorial
integrity of Azerbaijan. It also stipulates the highest self-government
status for Nagorno Karabakh within Azerbaijan, stressing necessity of
ensuring peaceful co-existence of the Armenian community in region. The
Minister said that first the Armenian armed forces should be withdrawn
from the occupied territories which are to be restored, the refugees
and internally displaced persons return to their homelands, then the
communications be opened.
Noting the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh are the citizens of
Azerbaijan, Elmar Mammadyarov said the governments of Republic is
interested in development of this area as a part of the country.
F. Bascone stressed necessity to reach agreement on major principles
for settlement of conflict, to follow with the further mutual trust
building processes.
The sides had comprehensive exchange of views on a number of questions
of mutual interest.