Author: Emil Lazarian

GEORGE HORTON: AN AMERICAN WITNESS IN SMYRNA
By James L. Marketos
GREEK NEWS, New York
Oct 16 2006
Posted on Monday, October 16 @ 12:00:57 EDT by greek_news
Exactly eighty-four years ago yesterday (September 13, 1922), a
massive fire broke out in the Armenian quarter of Smyrna (modern-day
Izmir). Ever since, controversy has raged over who started the fire,
whether it was an intentional act of genocide, and how many people were
killed. Estimates range from one or two thousand to over 100,000. There
is no dispute, however, that this was the 20th centuryʼs first
holocaust.
In 1922, Smyrna was a large and important commercial port on the Asia
Minor coast. Its population was about 400,000. Roughly 43% were Turkish
Muslims, 45% were Greek and Armenian Christians, 6% were Jews, and 5%
were foreigners. The Greek and Armenian Christians had deep roots in
Smyrna going back countless generations. Many owned successful and
long-established businesses. Others were professionals, artisans,
or educators. They had a thriving cultural life.
The fire raged for four days. A strong breeze drove the flames away
from the Turkish quarter and toward the waterfront, and with it
the cityʼs horrified Greeks and Armenians. The fire eventually
consumed all of the city except the Turkish quarter.
By late afternoon of the 13th, the fire had pinned thousands of victims
on the harborside quay, where they had fled hoping to finds means of
escape. On the narrow quay they found themselves trapped between the
raging fire at their backs and the deep harbor in front.
There they were subjected to unspeakable atrocities while the
uncontrollable fire burned itself out. And over the following weeks
and months, more perished from starvation and exposure while waiting
to be evacuated.
Tragically, the entire scene was witnessed by representatives of
the Allied Powers. They had pledged themselves to neutrality at the
Paris Peace Conference following World War I, and so they watched from
warships anchored about 250 yards offshore. All vessels that had been
tied up along the quay (including the U.S. destroyer Litchfield) had
to move off due to the intense heat of the fire. The foreign crews
evacuated their respective nationals from any danger in Smyrna and
plucked from the sea as many victims as could swim out to the ships.
At night, the foreign vessels drowned out the terrible screams coming
from the quay with band music and tried to keep rapes and murders to
a minimum with occasional sweeps of their powerful searchlights.
Some Turkish apologists contend that resentful, demoralized retreating
Greek army troops started the fire. Others contend that Armenians,
some disguised as Turkish soldiers, started the fire. They also
question why Turks would want to burn such a rich city.
By contrast, the Greek and Armenian version of events is that regular
Turkish army soldiers started the fire by spreading and igniting
petroleum in houses and other locations, and that the numbers
that perished are at the higher end of the estimates. This version
also contends that Turkish nationalist troops rampaged through the
city before and during the fire, assaulting, looting, and killing
Christians. The Greek and Armenian case is persuasively supported by
the testimony of an American eyewitness:
George Horton.
Biographical Information Horton was a literary man. He was a scholar
of both Greek and Latin.
He translated Sappho. He wrote a guide for the interpretation of
Scripture. He wrote several novels and was a renowned journalist in
Chicago, a member of what was called the “Chicago Renaissance.”
He was also a professional diplomat who loved Greece. He became U.S.
Consul in Athens in 1893, where he actively promoted the revival of the
Olympic Games and inspired the U.S. teamʼs participation. He wrote
a lyrical visitorʼs guide to Athens and composed a reflective
description of a few monthsʼ stay in Argolis. And he married
Catherine Sacopoulo, a Greek American woman.
He served twice as U.S. Consul in Athens (1893-1898; 1905-1906). He
also served in Thessaloniki (1910-1911) and then in Smyrna up to the
U.S.ʼs break-off of diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire
(1911-1917) in World War I. He served again as consul in Smyrna
after the war (1919-1922) and remained in Smyrna until after the
fire began on September 13, 1922, spending the last hours before his
evacuation signing passes for those entitled to American protection
and transportation to Piraeus.
Today, George Horton is best remembered for his book about the events
leading up to and during the fire. The book was published in 1926,
and its title, The Blight of Asia, unabashedly refers to the abominable
behavior of the Turks. By the time of publication Horton had resigned
his diplomatic commission, and he wrote strictly in the capacity of
a private citizen, drawing on his own observations and those of the
people he quotes. In these remarks, I draw mostly on Hortonʼs
book, but also informative is the long cable he wrote to the State
Department from the Athens consulate two weeks after the fire.
Horton wanted his book to make four main points.
First, he wanted to illustrate that the catastrophic events in Smyrna
were merely “the closing act in a consistent program of exterminating
Christianity throughout the length and breadth of the old Byzantine
Empire.”
Second, he wanted to establish that the Smyrna fire was started by
regular Turkish army troops with, as he put it “fixed purpose, with
system, and with painstaking minute details.”
Third, he wanted to emphasize that the Allied Powers shamefully
elevated their selfish political and economic interests over the
plight of the beleaguered Christian populations of Asia Minor, thereby
allowing the Smyrna catastrophe to unfold without any effective
resistance and, as he said, “without even a word of protest by any
civilized government.” And fourth, he wanted to illustrate that pious
western Christians were deluded in thinking they were making missionary
headway in the Muslim world. I will address only the first two points.
Historical Background To understand these two points, we first need to
review briefly the key events in Asia Minor in the period leading up to
1922. In World War I, the Ottoman Empire sided with Germany. Horton,
you will recall, was at his consular post in Smyrna during the war
until 1917.
After the war, the victorious Allies gathered at Versailles to
formulate peace terms. Among the Peace Commissionʼs thorniest
tasks was partitioning the defeated Ottoman Empire.
Greece entered the war late, but sided with the eventually victorious
Allies. At the Peace Conference, Greeceʼs prime minister,
Eleutherios Venizelos, lobbied hard for the annexation to Greece of
Eastern Thrace, Constantinople, and a large territory along the Asia
Minor coast. In all of these areas there were large populations of
indigenous Greek Christians engaged mostly in commerce and agriculture.
In May 1919, the Supreme Council of the Paris Peace Commission
endorsed the Greek armyʼs landing at Smyrna and the establishment
of a Greek administrative zone. From Smyrna, the Greek army pushed
eastward into Anatolia, the Turkish heartland, successfully expanding
the Greek zone; and Greeceʼs claims not only to this zone but
also to Eastern Thrace were ratified by the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres,
which the Great Powers imposed on the humbled Ottoman Empire.
There remained, however, the problem of a rising Turkish nationalist
movement in Anatolia led by a charismatic former Ottoman army officer,
Mustafa Kemal, whose military strength the Great Powers and Greece
dangerously underestimated. The result was the rout of Greeceʼs
over-stretched, war-weary army by Kemal near Afyonkarahisar on August
30, after which Kemalʼs nationalist troops began a relentless
advance toward Smyrna. Before them they drove the remnants of the
Greek army and hordes of frightened Christian farmers and villagers.
According to Horton, news of the Kemalist advances began reaching
Smyrna soon after the Greek defeat and produced immediate panic among
the Christian population. Their panic was completely understandable,
he said, as he had predicted in a consular dispatch that if the
Greek Army retreated in Asia Minor it would be followed by the entire
Christian population. His prediction was based on his nearly thirty
years of consular service and, as he put it, on “some things which
all men who have had long residence in this country absolutely know.”
First, the city filled with refugees from the interior, mostly
small farmers, who were lodged in the churches, schools, and other
public institutions. Many got away in the first days on steamers and
sailboats. “Then,” says Horton, the defeated, dusty, ragged Greeks
soldiers began to arrive, looking straight ahead, like men walking
in their sleep. . . .
In a never-ending stream they poured through the town toward the
point on the coast to which the Greek fleet had withdrawn. Silently
as ghosts they went, looking neither to the right nor the left. From
time to time some soldier, his strength entirely spent, collapsed on
the sidewalk or by a door.
Then they learned that the Turkish army was moving on the city. The
Turkish cavalry units arrived on the morning of September 9, filing
along the quay toward their barracks at the Konak (the Turkish
administrative headquarters building) at the other end of the city.
In the evening of the same day, the looting and killing began in the
Armenian quarter. The following morning, Americans began to report
seeing corpses lying in the streets in the interior of the city.
Horton himself saw Turkish civilians armed with shotguns watching
the windows of Christian houses ready to shoot at any head that
might appear.
The shooting continued in the Christian quarters the night of September
10. Throngs of frightened people were begging to be let into various
American institutions. After the Armenian quarter had been thoroughly
sacked for nearly four days, the fire erupted in the Armenian quarter.
**** A lecture by James L. Marketos at the AHI Noon Forum, on September
14, 2006
To be continued
php?name=News&file=article&sid=5594
–Bou ndary_(ID_wiHhiUstPzP2J68a2RHEKg)–

FRENCH AMBASSADOR: “TURKISH-FRENCH RELATIONS WILL BE HURT BY PASSAGE OF THE ARMENIAN BILL”
Turkish Press
Oct 16 2006
Appearing on television yesterday, France’s Ambassador to Ankara
Paul Poudade commented on the French Parliament’s passage of the
Armenian bill, saying that French-Turkish relation could be hurt by
the decision. Poudade pointed out that the bill was passed by the
lower house of Parliament, but had not yet become a law. “Accepting
the so-called Armenian genocide claims is not a precondition for
Turkey’s European Union membership bid,” said Poudade, adding that
dialogue between the sides on the issue should be should be improved.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

AZERI AND TURKISH DIASPORA IN CZECH PROTEST DECISION OF FRENCH PARLIAMENT
AzerTag, Azerbaijan
Oct 16 2006
Representatives of the Azerbaijani and Turkish Diaspora in the Czech
Republic held a rally of protest before the embassy of France in
Prague, against the French Parliament’s bill establishing punishment
for rejection of the “Armenian genocide”.
During 15 minutes, the protesters have stood before the Embassy with
posters in their hands exposing falsification of historical events
in Czech language.
Chairman of the Azer-Czech Society Elshan Nazarov has presented
to the Embassy employees a book, “The Armenian Terror”, in French,
Armenian and Turkish, and a CD, demanded form the democratic France
to refrain form its pro-Armenian position.
Since February 2007, the Azer-Czech Society is going to hold numerous
actions on the Khojali tragedy.

HUSEYNOV: I TOLD EDWARD O’HARA THAT THERE WAS NOT ARMENIAN CROSSES IN NAKHCHIVAN
Azeri Press Agency, Azerbaijan
Oct 16 2006
“The delegation organized by COE General Secretary Terry Davis is more
reliable, because it includes different experts from different fields.
They will investigate cultural heritage of Azerbaijan, Georgia and
Armenia,” Rafael Huseynov, the member of Azerbaijani delegation to
COE told journalists, APA reports. He said the experts are expected
to visit the region soon. Huseynov also mentioned that Terry
Devis mission’s visit to Azerbaijan before South Caucasus cultural
co-rapporteur Edward O’Hara interests Azerbaijan. “The mission can
arrive at more objective truth. Their decision can impact on the
decision of the co- rapporteur. Terry Devis was expected to visit
the region in October, but the visit was postponed because of more
than enough composition of the delegation members.
Huseynov said O’Hara planned to visit Azerbaijan together with the
mission organized by Terry Devis. The visit was postponed, because
Armenian Parliament appealed to PACE.
“They stated in their report that Azerbaijanis razed Armenian crosses
in Nakhchivan. I am the member of the same commission. I told him
that there were Alban monuments, but not Armenian ones. I also said
that they have razed Azerbaijan monuments and still continue to. I
convinced him to visit not only Azerbaijan, but also Armenia and
Nagorno Garabagh. Now he plans to visit Azerbaijan, Armenia and
Georgia,” he said.
Huseynov said O’Hara plans to visit the region at the end of the year,
but the visit in the spring of the next year is not excluded too.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

TURKEY CALMS RESPONSE TO VOTE
By Andrew Borowiec
Washington Times, DC
Oct 15 2006
NICOSIA, Cyprus — Despite threats of retaliatory action and national
anger, Turkey appears to be stepping back from a prolonged clash with
France over a French parliamentary bill on the 90-year-old Armenian
massacres.
“The focus is on limiting the damage” after the French National
Assembly voted on Thursday to make any denial of the Ottoman mass
killings of Armenians a punishable offense, according to one diplomatic
report.
France’s leading politicians, including President Jacques Chirac
and his rivals, are on record in favor of keeping Turkey out of the
European Union unless it admits the massacres as genocide.
However, the French political class generally has remained lukewarm
following the decision by the lower house of Parliament, influenced
by the vocal Armenian lobby.
Only 106 of the 577 Assembly members voted for the proposed law,
with most others absent during the vote.
In his latest statement on the subject, Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan said his government was studying retaliatory measures,
although the French Senate still would need to approve the National
Assembly’s action for it to become law.
“Turkey’s foreign trade volume with France is $10 billion, and
this is equal to 1.5 percent of France’s whole trade,” Mr. Erdogan
said. “We are going to make the proper calculations and then take
the necessary steps.”
A potential, though unofficial, act of retaliation occurred yesterday,
when a statue in Chaville, France, to commemorate the Armenian
massacres was reported stolen.
The bronze monument, installed in front of the train station in the
Paris suburb of Chaville in 2002, disappeared either Friday night or
yesterday morning, said authorities for the Haut-de-Seine region.
The police have not ruled out the possibility that the statue, which
weighs several hundred pounds, was stolen to be sold as scrap metal,
said Stephane Topalian, who serves on the board of the local chapter
of the Armenian church. However, Mr. Topalian stressed the timing
of the robbery, which followed the bill’s approval in France’s lower
house of Parliament.
The European Union, locked in difficult accession negotiations with
Turkey, opposes the French bill as provocative and fueling Turkish
nationalist anti-European sentiments. For their part, the nationalists
said they feel that Turkey has been slighted by the barrage of EU
demands to adjust its laws to European requirements.
Can Baydarol, a Turkish analyst, said the French vote was “proof of
the hostile attitude of France” to Turkey’s EU candidacy.
Last year, French voters rejected a proposed European Constitution,
in part because of fears that its adoption would facilitate Turkey’s
entry into the European Union.
The Armenian quest for international recognition of their national
tragedy received a significant boost when Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s best
known novelist and critic of its treatment of minorities, received
the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature — on the day of the French
Parliament’s vote.
A succession of Turkey’s republican governments systematically has
denied any policy targeting its Armenian population but admits that
several hundred thousand Armenians died of ethnic strife and hardship
during a “resettlement march” to Syria between 1915 and 1917.
Members of the Armenian diaspora, mainly descendents of those who
escaped the massacres and settled in other parts of the world, claim
that Ottoman troops killed up to 1.5 million of their compatriots.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

A PRISM HELD TO TURKEY
Reviewed by Anne Julie Wyman
San Fransisco Chronicle
Oct 15 2006
Mystic, kaleidoscopic novel by writer often compared to Pamuk
The Gaze
By Elif Shafak; translated by Brendan Freely
MARION BOYARS BOOKS; 264 Pages; $14.95 PAPERBACK
Orhan Pamuk, some say, is writing Turkey. Writing books, too, but
mostly crafting his country’s identity right before our astonished
Western eyes.
While there’s some truth to that — Pamuk himself admits that
Turkey had few very prominent writers a generation or two ago —
he’s certainly not doing it alone. Elif Shafak, his most talented
contemporary, provides a type of insight into Turkey’s spiritual
bloodlines that Pamuk often does not. Funnily enough, Shafak, the
daughter of a Turkish diplomat, born in France and educated in Spain,
professes that she never felt quite at home in Turkey anyhow.
Like Istanbul itself, Shafak is multicultural, multivalent,
multi-ethnic. At 35, she has already lived many lives away from
Istanbul, in Germany and Jordan as well as France and Spain (currently,
she’s an assistant professor at the University of Arizona). Her
characters are Turkish, Siberian, American, Spanish, Armenian,
Jewish, young, old, ageless, Eastern, Western and sometimes none
of the above. Even her prose circles endlessly, every last syllable
tumbled against its fellows to an almost blinding shininess.
Her most recent English release, “The Gaze,” is set in Istanbul
(and Russia and France and two other centuries), but for Shafak it’s
standard issue — it’s disjointed, and it’s dazzling.
Which is not to say it’s perfect. Bedazzlement is not clarity. Nor
is it very satisfying, nor does it preclude frustration.
Good thing, then, that for the most part Shafak knows what she’s
doing. A very good thing, as “The Gaze” splits itself along two rather
convoluted lines. In one, a morbidly obese anonymous bulimic woman
lives with her lover, a dwarf named B-C. The two dress in drag every
so often and leave their apartment for the express purpose of being
seen, punishing themselves and others for looking. In the other, an
immortal faceless man recruits two women, one impossibly ugly and one
impossibly beautiful, and stages a fantastical circus in 19th century
Istanbul. His performances are for single-sex audiences, focusing
on the differences in the ways men and women see — and by seeing,
damage — themselves and each other. The lovers’ sections are further
fractured by entries from the Dictionary of Gazes, B-C’s massive
tome-in-progress of Turkish words related to sight. Also included
are extended dream sequences and flashbacks of childhood trauma,
narrated by the obese woman. The circus section includes lengthy
jaunts to 19th century France and 17th century Siberia via folklore.
Complicated enough? Shafak’s style is repetitive, supersaturated
and usually entertaining, but at times heavy-handed. “The Gaze’s”
structure is similarly complex. Its twin plots are at first so rigidly
separated that when they finally merge, it’s like witnessing a little
literary miracle of life, inspiring and confusing all at once. What
a trick she pulls — the book’s ending lays bare the beginning of its
creation. This is the way Shafak works: She piles it on and piles it
on, and then, just when you feel you’ve been buried alive, she yanks
it all away and you get to see heaven.
Shafak herself is deeply spiritual, if not religious. Her first novel,
“Pinhan,” which has not been released yet in English, received a
Turkish prize for mysticism and transcendentalism in literature.
The narrative structure of another novel, “The Flea Palace,”
corresponds to the architecture of an apartment building. It’s the most
accessible of her less linear work. “The Gaze” was published in Turkey
in 1999 and released in the United States after “The Saint of Incipient
Insanities.” “The Bastard of Istanbul” was released in Turkey in 2005
and will be published in the United States by Viking in January.
Both “The Saint of Incipient Insanities” and “The Bastard of Istanbul”
were written in English, a move perceived by many nationalist Turks as
a betrayal of what Shafak calls Turkey’s language-cleansing project, a
state-sponsored purge of tens of thousands of old or foreign words from
Turkish. As “The Gaze’s” complex Dictionary attests, Shafak pays more
attention to her terminology than almost any other writer. For example:
“ayna (mirror): The odalisques in the harem couldn’t get their fill
of looking at their unsurpassed beauty in the mirrors that had been
brought from Venice. Their greatest desire was for the Sultan to see
what the mirror showed.”
As “The Gaze” so idiosyncratically probes, a mirror’s real magic —
and its danger — is not at its surface but in the depths of the
person reflected in it. Shafak’s narrator hates how others see her,
but her shame is achingly deep, expressed through both her eating
disorder and her relationship with B-C. “Love is a corset,” she says.
“In order to understand why it lasts such a short time you have to
be exceedingly fat.”
As such piercing reflection attests, two factors, shame and honesty,
determine the crystallization or destruction of identity in “The
Gaze.” But the narrator’s search for an intact self represents a
nearly universal process. It’s one that occurs in the relationship
of self to body, in the soul, on the page, in families, marriages,
communities. The relationship of contemporary Turkish writers to
Turkey, to each other and to themselves is also one mediated by
individual honesty and collective shame. What do I admit? That the
Ottoman Empire committed acts of genocide? How much trouble will I
get in for admitting it? What does Turkey want the rest of the world
to see? Do I care? What is Turkey? Is it Eastern or Western? Can it
be both? Istanbul is a jeweled city; Istanbul is a rotting city. It
is here, between mortification and pride, where Turkish writers are
often at the mercy of their country’s more defensive instincts.
“The Bastard of Istanbul” mentions the 1915 massacre of hundreds of
thousands of Armenians by the Turks. It was for those mentions that
Shafak was recently accused of violating Article 301 of the Turkish
Penal Code, which provides grounds for as much as three years of
imprisonment for “insulting Turkishness.” In December, Pamuk was
charged under Article 301 for remarks he made about the Armenian
genocide to a Swiss magazine.
He was the keynote speaker at this year’s PEN/International World
Voices festival; according to the organization’s notes on Turkey,
dozens of Turkish writers have faced similar charges, though most
have not been jailed. Article 301 is one of the reasons Turkey has not
yet been admitted to the European Union. Imprisoning your writers —
to put it bluntly — looks pretty bad. Pamuk’s charges were dropped
in January, the week the EU began its scrutiny of the Turkish Penal
Code. Shafak’s were dropped in September, six days after the birth
of her first child.
Stylistically, the two novelists are not often compared, though both
have produced a number of intricate puzzles. In novels such as “Snow”
and “My Name Is Red,” Pamuk makes much of suspense, deception and
stories within stories.
Shafak, too, loves structural conceit, masquerades and hide-and-seek.
Pamuk’s prose is much more reserved than Shafak’s; in “Istanbul:
Memories and the City,” he admits he has a taste for monochromatics,
the exposed grays of Istanbul’s wooden palaces, the sooty cobbles,
the purity of the snow, while her “Gaze” shatters that same city and
shovels the pieces into a giant psychedelic kaleidoscope.
Still, reading Shafak and Pamuk side by side is a joyful project. For
example, in “The Gaze’s” Dictionary of Gazes, there’s an entry on
“Pamuk Prenses” — Snow White. And in “Snow,” Pamuk writes about Reat
Ekrem Kocu, the first native of Istanbul to make an encyclopedia of
the city’s spectacles.
These small pleasures — of which there are hundreds, despite Shafak
and Pamuk’s hugely different styles — signify that as a collective,
this new literary Turkey possesses an aesthetic richness to match
its sociopolitical complexities.
Pamuk lives in Istanbul, in the same apartment building in the
Nicantaci district his father and uncle built in 1951. Shafak splits
her time between Tucson and Turkey. She writes in two languages and
calls neither her mother tongue.
But in an increasingly hybrid world, it’s individual courage, not
blood, that ought to determine allegiances — and talent that ought to
subvert them all. Brave, gifted, Elif Shafak is an international gem.
Anne Julie Wyman is a writer in Palo Alto.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

IF THE PRINTED WORD IS IRRELEVANT, WHY WAS A RUSSIAN JOURNALIST ASSASSINATED?
Ian Bell
Sunday Herald, UK
Oct 15 2006
Print is dead. I read that somewhere. Text is antique, at least
according to the prophets of multiple media who can still string a word
or two together. To hear it endlessly told, fragile paper and smelly
ink are the last, stubborn obstacles to the shiny digital revolution.
There may be something in it. In a world in which its goofy founders
can flog off YouTube as an online home movie exchange for £880 million
after barely 20 months in business, and without once stooping to turn
a profit, words on paper might strike many as beside the point.
Think of all the educated people you meet who are “too busy” to read.
Think of Gore Vidal alleging that a majority of Americans are now
functionally illiterate: how, practically speaking, can you argue
with that? Print is dead and the dominant global literary form is
blog-standard: millions upon growing millions talking to themselves.
(See [email protected]).
My laptop, because it always knows better than I, just took that last
little joke to be an actual web address, and highlighted the thing
in fetching blue while offering to make the necessary connection,
without once asking if I minded. It, too, knows that print is dead.
It will still turn keystrokes into words, if I really insist, but you
can sense the meaning of its feeble little beeps. Wouldn’t I rather
click to YouTube?
Not as such. Websites and search engines never seem to grant the
complexity of information, meaning and intellectual experience I
need. Perhaps the fault is mine. But computers are a pest, most of
the time, and screens are bad for the eyes. The pretty pictures seem
to lack texture and the reporting of the world – when not derived
from one of those antediluvian printed things – is mostly facile,
superficial, untrustworthy, or some permutation of the three.
Print is dead, but I cannot function, as a grown-up, without a
newspaper or a book. Print is dead, but the useful content of the
web-world still depends, mysteriously, on those who place words on
paper. Print is dead, but not half as dead as some of its dedicated
servants.
Anna Politkovskaya did not have much time to worry about the
contemporary relevance of ink and pulped trees as a suitable medium in
the new information age. The reporter for Novaya Gazeta’s task was to
file and to stay alive. Her problem was that the former duty can make
the latter impossible in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The 48-year-old
Polit kovskaya persisted in writing about our valued ally’s slide
towards autocracy, particularly in the brutalisation of Chechnya,
and last weekend another nameless thug did the regime another favour.
Politkovskaya was the 13th Russian journalist to have been assassinated
since the fall of the USSR. Her profile, not to mention her bravery,
was more conspicuous than most, but her crime was familiar, her death
almost predictable. She failed to keep silence, despite many threats
and previous attempts on her life. Her reward – three shots to the
chest, one to the head, in a lift in her own apartment block while a
CCTV camera recorded the scene – was a murder of professional quality.
Those who plotted her death paid Politkovskaya the greatest
compliment imaginable, though the fact is unlikely to console two
bereaved children. Her words on paper were not “irrelevant to modern
needs”. Her journalism mattered more to those who run Russia than any
rebellious billionaire, opposition politician, foreign government,
or patient democracy activist.
Thanks to an abundance of oil and gas, Putin’s regime can silence
squeamish Western powers while Russia’s democracy becomes a joke.
Thanks to a flexing of Kremlin muscle, the country’s broadcast media
are tamed. But Anna Politkovskaya, refusing to shut up, was a real
threat. People read and people believed: imagine that. She was a
careful reporter: nothing more, and never less. Just words on paper.
In this trade, we expect to lose five or six dozen colleagues in what
passes for an average year. War reporting, as ever, claims more than
its share. These days, equally, naive young freelancers in search of
a byline have been adding their blood, copiously, to the harvest.
Iraq and the madcap war on terror have meanwhile inflated the
general body-count: truth as collateral damage. But the killing of
Politkovskaya is a reminder of a new twist to the old game.
Journalists are being killed or intimidated while pursuing a lawful
trade in their own countries, and for the sake of their own people.
The list is too long, and never likely to be exhaustive. Fearless
journalism is unwise in Zimbabwe or Burma or Iran. It is ill-advised
in China or Saudi, in Tibet or Indonesia. It is suicidal in North
Korea or Syria. These states, and many more, have no real fears of
foreign propaganda. As in Russia, home truths are the authentic,
emerging enemy. Happy optimists once alleged that the growth of the
internet would cause the walls of tyranny to tumble everywhere. As
it turns out, no government has yet fallen to a blogger.
Why not? Perhaps because print must focus in order to function
while the web is diffuse. Perhaps because those words-on-paper are
imprinted with a kind of cultural memory, a thing of embedded, layered
associations and meanings. Perhaps we understand the language within
the language in a way that has become almost instinctual. We read
the signs even as we read the words. Perhaps. Or perhaps the truth
is less pretentious: one clear voice is preferable to Babel.
By all accounts, Orhan Pamuk doesn’t get out much. They say he spends
long hours in an Istanbul apartment, avoiding people, smoking steadily,
and writing endlessly. He has given his primary allegiance to print
in a 30-year career that saw him win literature’s Nobel last week at a
“young” 54.
The gesture by the Swedish Academy was “political”, no doubt, as
enraged right-wing Turkish nationalists have alleged. Those who award
the prize indulge the taste, from time to time, and why not? Art’s
relationship with society, like freedom of expression, is political.
Pamuk is deeply interested in both. Last year he found himself on trial
in his homeland for “insulting Turkishness” and breaching article
301 of Turkey’s legal code. His crime was merely to mention to a
Swiss journalist that the continuing official denial of the Ottoman
genocide of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, and of the state killing
of 30,000 Kurds in the 1980s and 1990s, was bad for the country.
Like the Nobel, his trial – won on “a technicality” – made news around
the world. That was just as well. Pamuk’s distress drew attention to
the 80-odd Turkish writers and journalists persecuted for mentioning
the unmentionable. Forty-five cases brought by nationalist lawyers
are waiting to be heard even now. All involve the simple right to
debate the truth. All depend on the peculiar potency of words on paper.
In a curious piece of timing, the national assembly of France was
passing a bill of its own last Thursday as the Swedish Academy’s
decision was being announced. If enacted – though that is unlikely –
the proposed legislation would render denial of the Armenian genocide
a crime, punishable by a year in prison .
Turkey has detected a barely hidden agenda – a desire to prevent its
accession to the EU – and threatened retaliation. Even some of the
Turkish and Armenian writers fighting for a true accounting of the
1915 slaughter have objected. Which country has told the whole truth
about its imperial past, after all? Not France. And how is freedom
advanced if anyone is muzzled?
That, of course, is Pamuk’s point. That was Politkovskaya’s point.
Journalism, so often despised, defends freedom by its very existence.
Art, so often abused or misused, illuminates the nature of that
freedom. You can end up giving comfort to the propagators of ideas
you despise: that’s the price, and the reason why a Turkish novelist
or a Russian journalist earn their honours the hard way.
If print dies, the lone, essential voices die with it. Two thousand
years of accumulated culture sink, unnoticed, into the Google swamp.
Every truth becomes relative. If print dies – and who will then
write the obituaries? – all that can remain, beautifully rendered,
technologically exquisite, open to one and all, is undifferentiated
noise. Sometimes, after all, a web is just a snare.
–Boundary_(ID_RDKjdlRd3eYYd8RgK3kTCA)–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

N. MAMMADOV: “FRANCE SHOULD TRY NOT TO PUT ITS ACTIVITY IN OSCE MG UNDER SUSPICION”
Today, Azerbaijan
Oct 14 2006
“We should be patient with the measures against France Parliament’s
decision. There is no need to hurry,” Novruz Mammadov, the President’s
Office International Relations Department chief told journalists.
He said this decision can damage international relations, APA reports.
“I regret that some French parliamentarians fell under Armenian’s
influence. I cannot believe that any citizen denying the historical
event which happened 100 years ago can be punished in France,” he said.
Mammadov said that Armenians bring false genocide to a focus though
France has recognized it.
Touching upon French co-chair activity in OSCE MG Mammadov said
that France should be careful in its activity for not to its neutral
position under suspicion.
URL:
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

EXPAT TURKS HAVE HIGH NUMBERS, LOW INFLUENCE
By Sezai Kalayci, Istanbul
Zaman, Turkey
Oct 14 2006
Armenians and Turks living abroad are equal in population but unequal
in influence.
Armenians have made 18 countries recognize the alleged Armenian
genocide whereas Turkey, which lacks a strong lobby, cannot defend
its own national causes.
The indifference of the Turkish state, lack of education and economic
weakness are Turkey’s main obstacles for a strong lobby.
The genocide bill passed by the French parliament has once again
underlined the importance of lobbying.
Nearly five million Armenians living in different countries can get
what they want through effective lobbying.
However, Turkey fails to bring its citizens abroad together.
Five million Turks living in 118 different countries cannot lobby as
efficiently as other nations.
The main reason for this is the lack of a common goal, authorities say.
Having conducted intensive research on the issue, Professor Tayyar
Ari complains that the Turkish state cannot form a policy on lobbying.
Ari described the organizational activities of Turks abroad as
insufficient.
German Green Party Deputy Cem Ozdemir stated the social power of the
Diaspora was more important than its numerical magnitude.
Turkish-origin deputies emphasized that artists and academics were
not close to the people.
Citizens of Turkish origin who can influence the agenda of the society
in which they live usually choose to act independently.
Another reason for inadequate lobbying is incompetence.
Low education levels and economic insufficiency make it hard for
Turks living abroad to express themselves.
Diplomatic representatives abroad are accused of not cooperating
enough with Turkish non-governmental organizations.
Turkey has a large amount of its population living abroad.
According to official figures more than five million Turks live abroad.
The number of Turks living in France is 359,000, according to data
from the Turkish Foreign Ministry.
This figure is 450,000, according to the French Interior Ministry.
However, Turks can not defend their national causes for several
reasons.
Authorities think the man reason for this that the Turks migrated to
Europe in the recent past.
Most Turks abroad are second-generation immigrants and their lack of
career advancement in economic and social terms makes it impossible
for them to influence the society in which they live.
The situation in Europe is not as bad as in the United States, but
the result is terrible when compared to the population potential.
There are over four million Turkish citizens in Europe and some of
them have already managed to take a position in the parliaments of
the countries in which they live.
Some Turks have even become members of the European Parliament.
Considering the lack of education as the biggest problem of the Turks
living in Germany, Cem Ozdemir said: “We have to bring this issue
to the agenda as frequently as possible. Turkey could be a part of
the solution.”
Associate Professor Talip Kucukcan from Foundation for Political,
Economic, and Social Research (SETA) believes minorities can be
efficient in the country they live in only by means of NGOs they
establish among themselves. Kucukcan emphasized Turks were weak in
regards to demanding their democratic rights.
Associate Professor Ahmet Kavas from Istanbul University said,
“We should first help our people to be useful for the society they
live in.” Kavas also thinks Turkey should stop the efforts to educate
Turks abroad with teachers and imams appointed from Turkey. He thinks
they should raise teachers, imams, lawyers and doctors from among
themselves.
Dutch Socialist Party Deputy Emine Bozkurt warns that if Turks
establishing associations abroad it could negatively affect their
integration into society. Bozkurt thinks this risk may be reduced to
a minimum if Turks’ are active in the society.
5 million Turks Live Abroad
According to the Foreign Ministry, the number of Turks living abroad
is 4,782,348.
The unofficial figure, however, is one million more.
The country with the largest Turkish population is Germany.
Two and a half million Turks live in Germany according to official
data.
There are 500,000 Turks in France, 351,000 in the Netherlands, 250,000
in the United States, 200,000 in Austria and 138,000 in Australia.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

AZERBAIJANI POLITICAL ANALYST: “OUR EUROPEAN MPS ARE THROWN MUD AT FOR DEFENDING NATIONAL INTERESTS”
Regnum, Russia
Oct 15 2006
REGNUM has received a statement made by Mubariz Ahmedoglu, Azerbaijani
political analyst, Head of the Center for Political Strategies and
Innovations (Baku). The statement contains his reaction to comment
made by David Babayan, political analyst from Nagorno Karabakh,
who spoke on reports that Azerbaijani female MPs at the PACE, as
a sign of protest against a decision by the French lower house of
parliament to introduce criminal punishment for refusal to recognize
the Armenian Genocide in 1915, called their female compatriots to
reject French-made goods and publicly refused to wear French-made
clothes. REGNUM publishes Ahmedoglu’s statement with minor abridgement.
“Motives of the attempt to throw mud at two European MPs Ganira
Pashayeva and Gyultekin Gadjyeva are evident: they both defend their
national interests from the high European rostrum and systematically
disclose lies of the official Yerevan. Pashayeva, speaking at PACE
about abandoning all French-made goods by Azerbaijani women, first
of all, meant make-up. If the fact cited in Babayan’s interview did
take place in reality, not only in the brain excited by hatred to
Azerbaijanis … let him prove his words by photo or video. I am sure,
he will not be able to do it, as well as to present his apologies.
There is a saying, ‘tell me who is your friend is, and I will tell
you who you are.’ Babayan, by his loathsome slander incompatible
with morality has once again shown the true face of chieftains of
the occupational regime in Nagorno Karabakh.”
It is worth mentioning, the law that introduces criminal punishment
for refusal to recognize the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire
was adopted by the lower house of the French parliament on October 12.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress