Author: Emil Lazarian

EXTREMISTS MANAGE TO KEEP EACH OTHER HAPPY
By Gwynne Dyer
Hamilton Spectator, Canada
Oct 18 2006
Words matter. The Holocaust of the Jews in the Second World War
was genocide. The mass deportation of Chechens from their Caucasian
homeland in the same war was a crime but not genocide, though half of
them died, because Moscow’s aim was to keep them from collaborating
with German troops, not to exterminate them. Which brings us to the
Armenians and the Turks.
On Oct. 12, France passed a law declaring that anyone who denies that
the mass murder of Armenians in Turkey in 1915-17 was genocide will
face a year in prison. But the French foreign ministry called the law
“unnecessary and untimely” and President Jacques Chirac called Turkish
Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan to apologize.
Why would the conservative majority in the French parliament
deliberately set out to annoy the Turks, knowing the law will
eventually be vetoed by the president? Because they hope to provoke
a nationalist backlash in Turkey that will further damage its already
difficult relationship with the European Union.
French public opinion is already in a xenophobic mood over the last
expansion of the EU, with folk tales of “Polish plumbers” working for
peanuts and stealing the jobs of honest French workers causing outrage,
especially among right-wing voters who never much liked foreigners
anyway. The prospect of 80 million Muslim Turks joining the EU, even
if it is at least 10 years away, is enough to make their blood boil.
So a row with Turkey should attract votes to the right’s presidential
candidate in next May’s election. That’s likely to be none other
than current Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy who said last month that
Turkey should never be allowed to join the EU: “We have to say who
is European and who isn’t. It’s no longer possible to leave this
question open.” The new law is not really about Armenians or Turks.
It’s about the French election.
Meanwhile, in Turkey, anti-EU nationalists have their own game. As
Turkey was busy amending its penal code to conform to EU standards in
the past few years, hard line lawyers and bureaucrats smuggled in a
new law, Article 301, that provides severe penalties for “insulting
Turkishness.”
In practice, that mainly means trying to ban public discussion of the
Armenian massacres. Some 70 prosecutions have already been brought
by the ultra-right-wing Union of Lawyers against Turkish authors,
journalists and other public figures.
For several generations Turkey flatly denied any guilt for the Armenian
massacres, insisting they didn’t happen and if they did, it was the
Armenians’ own fault for rebelling against Turkey in wartime.
Latterly, Turkish intellectuals have been saying that a million or
more Armenians did die in the mass deportations and that Turkey needs
to admit its guilt and apologize, though most still refuse to call
it genocide as that would put it in the same category as the Holocaust.
The prosecutions for “insulting Turkishness” — even against Turkey’s
greatest living novelist, Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk — are
not just attempts to stifle this dialogue among Turks, or between
Turks and Armenians. The ultra-nationalists also want to derail the
negotiations for EU membership by painting Turkey as an authoritarian
and intolerant state that does not belong in Europe. They are, in
effect, Sarkozy’s objective allies.
But Prime Minister Erdogan will probably repeal Article 301 once next
year’s elections are past. France’s law, which requires people not to
deny the Armenian massacres, the talks that 301 bans, will probably be
vetoed by Chirac. And Turkey’s best-known Armenian journalist, Hrant
Dink, who has already been prosecuted several times under 301, has
just announced he’ll go to France “to protest against this madness and
violate the law … and I will commit the crime to be prosecuted there,
so that these two irrational mentalities can race to put me into jail.”
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles
are published in 45 countries.
p/cs/ContentServer?pagename=hamilton/Layout/Articl e_Type1&c=Article&cid=1161121814335&ca ll_pageid=1020420665036&col=1112188062581
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

FRENCH NATIONAL ASSEMBLY MAKES DENIAL OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE A PUNISHABLE OFFENCE
By Peter Schwarz
World Socialist Web Site, MI
Oct 18 2006
The decision by the French National Assembly to make denial of the
genocide of Armenians in 1915 a punishable offence is a reactionary
provocation.
The prohibition primarily serves domestic purposes. In line with the
ongoing campaign against Islam, this latest ban uses religious and
ethnic issues to divert attention from increasing social tensions.
The new bill does absolutely nothing to help explain one of the
darkest chapters in the history of the last century. Quite the
contrary, the intrusion by criminal law into historical debate is
an attack on free speech and actually obstructs the clarification of
historical questions.
The law, which was passed by the National Assembly last Thursday by
106 votes to 19, threatens those who deny the genocide of Armenians
during the Ottoman empire with one year in prison and a fine of 45,000
euros. The new law supplements a law unanimously passed by the National
Assembly in 2001, which officially recognised the genocide conducted
against the Armenians.
The new law was introduced by the main opposition party, the Socialist
Party. Forty Socialist deputies voted in favour of the bill with two
voting against. The law was also supported by the French Stalinist
Communist Party (PCF).
The Gaullist government rejected the law on the basis of foreign
policy considerations. But the governing UMP (Union for a Popular
Movement) cleared the way for the law by freeing its deputies from
party discipline and recommending non-participation at the vote. In
the event, 49 UMP deputies, led by former minister Patrick Devedjian,
who is of Armenian origin, voted for the new bill with 17 voting
against. The vast majority of the Assembly’s 577 deputies did not
attend the vote.
In order to become law the bill has to be agreed by the second
chamber, the Senate. It is up to the government to decide if and when
it introduces the bill into the Senate and it may well be the case
that this will never happen. Nevertheless, the vote by the National
Assembly has already had significant consequences.
Reaction has been particularly pronounced in Turkey, which has its own
law making the opposite claim, i.e., affirmation of the genocide of
1915, a punishable offence. The extreme-right Nationalist Movement
Party (MHP) had organized demonstrations against the French bill
even before the vote was taken. Other organizations have called for
a boycott on French goods and the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has
threatened to retaliate with economic sanctions, including calling
off a planned French-Turkish armaments deal, and a ban on French bids
to construct a nuclear power plant.
Significantly opposition movements and representatives of the Armenian
community in Turkey have also condemned the French law. They fear
that it plays into the hands of right-wing, nationalist forces and
could provoke repressive measures against the Armenian people.
They are also opposed to the fact that France wants to enforce
recognition of the Armenian genocide with the same measures Turkey
is utilising denying it-i.e., penal law.
“How can we in future argue against laws that forbid us to talk about
a genocide if France, for its part, now does the same thing? That
is completely irrational,” commentated Hrant Dink, publisher of
the Armenian Turkish weekly Argos. Dink, who was condemned to six
months in prison on probation last year over the Armenian question,
and currently faces renewed repression over the issue, has even
threatened to go to France and, contrary to his own opinion, deny
the genocide in defiance of the new law.
Another Armenian journalist, Etyen Mahcupyan, from the daily paper
Zaman, sees a danger that the tenuous discussion begun in Turkey
over the Armenia question could be jeopardised by the French law. For
the first time ever a congress has been held in Istanbul to publicly
discuss the Armenian question. Mahcupyan warned: “The action of the
French parliament brings the Turkish population nearer to the state,
which can then manipulate them more easily.”
Prominent historians in France have also expressed their vehement
opposition to the law. In a statement entitled “Freedom for history”
they condemned the law as an attack on the “freedom of expression.”
The law served to reduce “teachers once more to the status of
hostages.”
The French government and the European Commission have expressed
objections to the law because they fear a deterioration of relations
with Turkey. There is much at stake for French businesses. Should
Erdogan stick to his threat then orders of up to 14 billion euros
are at risk. Additional losses could be recorded by the French
supermarket chain Carrefour, which has a substantial share of the
market in Turkey, as well as the auto concern Renault, which has a
big factory near Istanbul.
Nevertheless, all this has not prevented the National Assembly from
passing a law that punishes undesirable opinions on an event which
took place 90 years ago and in which France played no substantial role.
The only other similar law in France is one which forbids any denial of
the Holocaust, in which the French Vichy regime did play an important
role. Other crimes with much more immediate relevance-such as the
torture and massacres carried out by French colonialism in Algeria
and Indochina-are not subject to legal sanction and are occasionally
officially denied.
Just last winter, when the government sought to pass a law emphasising
the “positive role” of French colonial policy in school textbooks,
the Socialist Party argued that parliament had no right to issue
laws dealing with history and that politicians could not determine
historical issues. Now they have thrown this principle overboard and
are doing the same themselves.
Why this law?
The principal aim of the new law is to garner electoral support. Both
Segol ène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy, the probable candidates of the
Socialist Party and the UMP for the presidential elections next year,
have declared their support for the new law. Both candidates are
seeking to win support from the approximately half million Armenians
living in France, the majority of whom back the law.
However there is more at stake than the Armenian electorate. The new
law is also aimed against Turkey’s plans to join the European Union.
President Chirac led the way in this respect 10 days ago when, during
an official trip to the Armenian capital of Yerevan, he declared
that Turkey must recognize the genocide of the Armenians before being
accepted into the European Union-a condition that the European Union
does not require.
Right-wing politicians throughout Europe have used agitation against
Turkish membership in the European Union as a means of mobilising
backward layers of the electorate. In a similar manner to the current
campaign being waged against immigrants and Muslims this question is
being exploited to encourage xenophobia and divert social fears and
tension away from the ruling elite. While Conservative politicians
generally argue for the “defence of the Christian civilisation,”
French socialists are using the Armenian question for the same purpose.
The fact that the French Socialist Party has undertaken such an
initiative with the active support of the Communist Party speaks
volumes over the extent of the decline of these organizations. Unable
to provide any sort of answer to the growing social crisis, they are
both playing the card of xenophobia.
The officer’s daughter Segol ène Royal, who has been systematically
groomed by the media as the Socialist presidential candidate, has
sought on a number of occasions to outflank her UMP rival Nicolas
Sarkozy on the right-for example with her appeal to entrust the army
with the education of rebellious young people. She has now gone even
further with her advocacy of the Armenian law.
As usual the Communist Party is seeking to shout even louder.
Communist deputy Frederic Dutoit praised the new law before the
National Assembly as an “immense progress for the Armenian cause
and for humanity as a whole.” He then threatened, “It is a first
step, others must follow.” The newspaper La Marseillaise, which has
close links to the PCF, celebrated the “prohibition of denial” as an
“expression of respect for universal values.” In the world of the
French Stalinists censorship remains the highest form of freedom!
Following a series of strike movements and revolts in recent years
directed at both Gaullist and Socialist Party-led governments, the
Socialist and Communist parties are prepared to go to any lengths to
prevent a further intensification of social protest.
–Boundary_(ID_FIVFUo4sSOuQWAJNfCjviw)–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

CENSORING IDEAS
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist
Boston Globe, MA
Oct 18 2006
DID THE Ottoman Turks commit genocide against the Armenians in 1915?
Careful — in some places you can be arrested if you give the wrong
answer to that question. Under Article 305 of the Turkish Penal Code,
for example, those who promote “recognition of the Armenian genocide”
are subject to prosecution, while Article 301 makes the denigration of
“Turkishness” a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. The
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk , winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for
L iterature , is among those who have been charged under Article
301. His offense was to tell a Swiss interviewer that “30,000 Kurds
and a million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but
me dares to talk about it.”
Yet if acknowledging the Armenian genocide is a crime in Turkey,
gainsaying it could soon be a crime in France. Last week the French
National Assembly voted to approve a bill under which anyone denying
the 1915 genocide could be sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and
a 45,000-euro ($56,000) fine. That matches the penalty under French
law for denying the Nazi Holocaust .
The French legislation is meant to uphold the truth — the Armenian
genocide, like the Holocaust, is a fact of history — while the point
of the Turkish law is to debase it. Both, however, are intolerable
assaults on liberty. Beliefs should not be criminalized, no matter
how repugnant or absurd. As I wrote when David Irving was convicted
of Holocaust denial in Austria earlier this year, free societies do
not throw people in prison for giving offensive speeches or spouting
historical lies.
We Americans should know this better than anyone. The right to speak
one’s mind is supposed to be a core article of our civic faith. Yet
the would-be censors are busy here, too.
THE ‘SHUT UP’ FACTOR: How serious a problem is censorship today? Are
would-be censors smothering debate?
At Columbia University two weeks ago, a forum on immigration was to
feature a speech by Jim Gilchrist of the Minutemen, a group that
monitors the US-Mexico border for illegal immigrants. But moments
after Gilchrist began speaking, protesters led by members of the
International Socialist Organization stormed the stage, overturning
tables, unfurling banners, and yelling insults. After 15 minutes of
pandemonium, campus police shut down the program .
In Seattle, two teachers are suing the affluent Lakeside prep school
for illegal racial discrimination and the creation of a hostile
work environment. “Among the plaintiffs’ complaints,” reports the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “was Lakeside’s invitation to conservative
commentator Dinesh D’Souza to speak as part of a distinguished lecture
series.” But D’Souza, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and
a veteran of the Reagan White House, never gave the lecture: Faculty
members opposed to his views howled when he was invited, and the
school’s headmaster, bowing to the censors, rescinded the invitation.
Asked about the campaign against him, D’Souza had said: “I am coming
to speak on one day. If they think what I am saying is so awful, they
have the rest of the year to refute it.” But that isn’t enough for
the enemies of free speech. They insist not only that speakers with
politically incorrect opinions be shunned, but that anyone offering
them a platform be punished as well.
Then there is “Grist,” an environmental webzine whose staff writer
David Roberts recently proposed that global warming skeptics be put
on trial like Nazi war criminals.
“When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming . . . we
should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of
climate Nuremberg,” Roberts wrote. Negative publicity led him to
recant, but he is far from the only one invoking the Holocaust as a
way to silence global warming heretics.
Environmental writer Mark Lynas, for example, puts dissent on
climate change “in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial —
except that this time the Holocaust is yet to come, and we still have
time to avoid it. Those who try to ensure we don’t will one day have
to answer for their crimes.” This totalitarian view is taking root
everywhere, making skepticism on climate change taboo and subjecting
anyone reckless enough to question the global-warming dogma to mockery
and demonization. Former vice president Al Gore lumps “global warming
deniers,” some of whom are eminent scientists, with the “15 percent of
the population (who) believe the moon landing was actually staged in a
movie lot in Arizona” and those who “still believe the earth is flat.”
The silencers are at work in the marketplace of ideas, using hook
or crook to smother opinions they dislike. The lust to censor is as
powerful as ever. If only liberty’s defenders were equally vigilant.
Jeff Jacoby’s e-mail address is [email protected].
e/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/10/18/censo ring_ideas/
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

OFFICIAL INFORMATION
Azat Artsakh, Republic of Nagorno Karabakh
Oct 17 2006
On October 12 NKR President Arkady Ghukassian met with Envoy Andrzej
Kasprzyk, the personal representative of the OSCE CiO. They discussed
the findings of the recent monitoring of the special OSCE mission in
the territories on both sides of the Karabakh-Azerbaijani front line
and the regions which suffered from fires. They also discussed the
plan monitoring near the village of Gyulistan, the region of Shahumian,
NKR on October13.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

NKR PRESIDENT MET WITH DIRECTOR OF HALO TRUST PROJECT ON KARABAKH
Azat Artsakh, Republic of Nagorno Karabakh
Oct 17 2006
On October 5 NKR President Arkady Ghukassian met with Valon Kumnova,
director of the Karabakh project of the HALO Trust, which deals with
humanitarian mine clearance, and Mathew Howell responsible for the
Balkan and Caucasian countries. The guests told the president about
the activities of the HALO Trust and the achievements. In particular,
they mentioned that about 100 sq km of area was cleared of mines and
over 43 thousand mines and unexploded ordnance were rendered to pose
no threat. For his part, Arkady Ghukassian mentioned that thanks to
the high quality of work the people of Artsakh respect and trust the
HALO Trust. The president thanked the organization and reasserted
the readiness of the Karabakh government to assist the project of the
HALO Trust in Artsakh. On October 5 NKR President Arkady Ghukassian
conducted a working consultation on several current issues on the home
and foreign policies. During the consultation the president instructed
the government to sum up the results of the survey on the social and
economic state in the region of Kashatagh and prepare the question for
discussing it in the upcoming meeting of the NKR Council of Security.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

FAUNA OF ARTSAKH TO BE STUDIED
Laura Grigorian
Azat Artsakh, Republic of Nagorno Karabakh
Oct 17 2006
Several days ago Professor Wiaclaw Bogdanovitz, director of
the institute of biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and
Professor Martha Gayevska, a DNA specialist of the same institute,
visited Artsakh. The aim of the visit was to study the fauna of our
highlands. Wiaclaw Bogdanovitz said the purpose of their visit is
to set up relations between the universities of Yerevan and Artsakh
and study the fauna of the region together to find out what kinds
of rodents and bats live here and how much damage they inflict on
agriculture. In Artsakh the guests met with the NKR minister of
agriculture and the rector of Artsakh State University. They also
visited the cave near the village of Azokh.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

PRESIDENT KOCHARYAN MET WITH TORBEN HOLTZE, HEAD OF THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION DELEGATION
Public Radio, Armenia
Oct 17 2006
October 17 President Robert Kocharyan had a farewell meeting with
Head of the European Commission delegation to Armenia Torben Holtze.
The parties thanked each other for the productive joint work.
The President noted with appreciation that during Mr. Holtze’s tenure
in office serious progress was registered in Armenia-EU relations.
These turned more coordinated and entered a very important phase for
our country. Robert Kocharyan expressed confidence that the Action
Plan in the framework of the New Neighborhood Policy will provide
the opportunity to work more closely and effectively.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

U.S. ENVOY DISMAYED BY KOCHARIAN SNUB
By Emil Danielyan
Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
Oct 18 2006
The U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe expressed on Wednesday dismay at President Robert Kocharian’s
refusal to meet her on her first-ever visit to Armenia that focused
on democratization and other political reforms.
Ambassador Julie Finley, who arrived in Yerevan on Tuesday, said she
received assurances from other Armenian officials that next year’s
Armenian parliamentary elections will be free and fair. She also urged
Yerevan to allow the OSCE to monitor the entire electoral process.
“I am very, very disappointed I did not have even a brief meeting
with your president,” Finley said. “Usually in my travels [to OSCE
member states] I do meet with the head of state.”
Asked about the official reason for Kocharian’s apparent snub, she
said: “His schedule was full. I asked.”
Kocharian, according to his press service, held two meetings on
Wednesday, receiving a delegation of Russian parliamentarians and the
outgoing head of the World Bank office in Yerevan, Roger Robison. He
similarly failed to meet Britain’s visiting Minister for Europe Geoff
Hoon last week. Both Britain and the United States had declined to
officially congratulate Kocharian on his hotly disputed victory in
the last Armenian presidential election criticized as undemocratic
by OSCE observers.
Finley spoke to RFE/RL and the Mediamax news agency after meeting
with other senior Armenian officials, including Justice Minister
David Harutiunian, Prosecutor-General Aghvan Hovsepian, Deputy
Foreign Minister Arman Kirakosian and the chairman of the Central
Election Commission, Garegin Azarian. She also met civil society
representatives campaigning for political reform in the country.
The diplomat said the officials assured her that the Armenian
authorities will do their best to ensure the freedom and fairness
of the 2007 elections. “I am willing to accept in good faith what
certain people in the government so far have told me, just as I am
perfectly willing to take in good faith what certain people outside
of the government have been telling me,” she said. “I am trying to
balance everything.”
“We all want these elections to run right because these elections
are one of the four main pillars of a democracy,” Finley said. “And
I am assuming that I am in a country that has decided it wants to be
a true democracy.”
Officials from the European Union have already warned that a repeat
of serious vote irregularities would seriously undermine Armenia’s
efforts to forge closer links with the EU and its participation in
the bloc’s European Neighborhood Policy program in particular .
Finley, who worked for the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy
before taking over the U.S. mission at the OSCE’s Vienna headquarters
last year, would not be drawn on what the consequences would be for
U.S.-Armenian relations. She seemed worried about the fact that the
authorities in Yerevan have yet to officially invite the OSCE to
monitor the 2007 elections.
“The assurance that the government of Armenia has been elected freely
and fairly to the international community is very, very important for
Armenia,” Finley said. “The OSCE is the gold standard for monitoring
elections.
“They are coming to the United States to monitor our mid-term elections
in November. Why the heck shouldn’t they be over here to monitor the
Armenian elections?”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

ARMENIAN BILL NO EXCUSE FOR ARTICLE 301
By Zaman, Istanbul
Sabah, Turkey
Oct 18 2006
Hansjorg Kretschmer, head of European Commission Delegation to
Turkey, said that a bill recently passed by the French parliament
criminalizing the denial of the purported Armenian genocide should not
be used as an excuse to keep Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code,
which restricts the freedom of expression.
Kretschmer made his last speech on Tuesday as the head of European
Commission Delegation to Turkey.
Kretschmer said the Turkish government must make more progress in
the areas of human rights and basic freedoms, religious freedoms,
women’s rights, relations between civilians and military officials,
and an independent justice system.
Kretschemer said the likelihood of Turkey becoming an EU member
depended on Turkey itself rather than the European Union
He said that as with all other military officials, the Turkish military
officials had also come to the realization that the battle with
terrorism was not done only with guns, because there were cultural,
political, as well as economic dimensions to the problems at hand.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

OSCE REACTS TO FRANCE’S ARMENIAN BILL
By Selcuk Gultasli, Brussels
Zaman, Turkey
Oct 18 2006
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has
reacted to France, whose parliament adopted a bill on Thursday that
makes it a crime to deny that an Armenian genocide occurred in Turkey
during World War I.
In a warning to France, the OSCE explained that if the Armenian
bill became law, Paris would set a dangerous example for other OSCE
member countries.
In a written statement, the OSCE called on the French Senate to reject
the draft if it came before them.
OSCE Media Freedom representative Miklos Haraszti sent a letter to
the president of the French Senate, Christian Poncelet, and expressed
his concerns.
Haraszti asked French senators to reject the Armenian bill on the
grounds that adopting this law would cause serious concerns for
international standards of freedom of expression.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress