Author: Kanayan Tamar

ASSEMBLY OF ETCHMIADZIN AND CILICIA PATRIARCHIES AT HOLY SEE OF
ETCHMIADZIN
YEREVAN, MARCH 7. ARMINFO. An assembly of representatives of the
Patriarchies of Holy Etchmiadzin and the Great House of Cilicia was
held at Holy See of Etchmiadzin March 4-5.
The press service of Holy See Etchmiadzin informs ARMINFO that the
meeting aimed preparation of a single project of the two Patriarchies
“Renewal of the Armenian Apostolic Church.”
On March 4 Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II received the
assembly participants. The current canonic situation in the AAC,
Christian education of the Armenian flock, maintenance of spiritual and
cultural heritage, training of priests, development of inter-confession
relations, the Church-state relations, as well as protection of the
Armenian people’s rights and use of up-to-date technical means were
discussed.
The meeting resulted in preparation of a joint document for its further
submission to Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II and Catholicos
of the Great House of Cilicia Aram I.

“TURN KEY” SOLUTIONS FROM SOURCIO OR COMMERCIAL OPEN SOURCE
YEREVAN, MARCH 4. ARMINFO. The commercial project Open Source
lab. Sourcio will offer open source “turn key” solutions for small and
medium-sized companies, says the co-founder of the project, director
of Lycos/Armenia Hovhannes Avoyan.
The project’s task is not to design new open source products but to
use and integrate them. The key sales markets are Europe and North
America while Armenia for Sourcio is rather a source of experience
than a profit generator. “We consider Armenia a kind of ground for
testing new applications and pilot programs,” says Avoyan.
Based on the experience of open source specialists Sourcio will offer
solutions in E-Government, E-Medicine, E-Education, e-document and
other spheres.
The emphasis is laid on low price – $1 per an employee of a
client-company (some $500 for average small European company). The
authorized capital of Sourcio projects will also be small. The clients
will also be offered a close hosting (in Europe rather than in
Armenia) as well as advising and training services.
Lycos/Armenia was founded with the financial assistance of Lycos,
USAID/Armenia and EIF. The cost of the project is over $1 mln. Experts
says that in Armenia Open Source is developing much more intensively
than in the other CIS countries.

Artsakh Public TV says Karabakh shocked by Azeri editor’s murder
Artsakh Public TV, Stepanakert
4 Mar 05
[Presenter over video of journalists and public figures] Nagornyy
Karabakh journalists and public are shocked by the assassination of an
Azerbaijani journalist and the editor-in-chief of Monitor magazine,
Elmar Huseynov.
Artsakh Public TV has interviewed some journalists and public figures
and they said the following:
[Karen Ogadzhanyan, head of Karabakh Helsinki Initiative-92] I
personally knew Elmar Huseynov. He was a man with a broad and
democratic outlook. I want to offer my condolences to Elmar’s
relatives. I think that his assassination is a step towards the return
of terror in Azerbaijan, which can also spread to other countries in
the South Caucasus. I think that democratic forces in Azerbaijan and
abroad should unite and stop the spread of terror. The spread of
terror will affect Azerbaijan’s democratic development and the
Nagornyy Karabakh conflict settlement. It will be much more difficult
or even impossible to settle the conflict with undemocratic
Azerbaijan.
[Gegam Bagdasaryan, president of Stepanakert (Xankandi) press club]
The assassination of Elmar Huseynov shows that something is wrong in
Azerbaijan. It shows that the authorities put their own interests
above those of the public. The assassination also has a direct impact
on the Nagornyy Karabakh conflict settlement. If the Azerbaijani
authorities kill people of the same nationality, what will they do to
people of other nationalities? Anyway, it is also a tragedy for the
family of Elmar Huseynov and I offer my condolences to Elmar’s family.

Maknews.com
March 04, 2005
Paris Peace Talks of 1919
Part 2 – The End of the Ottomans
by Risto Stefov
[email protected]
February 2005
Read Part I
The following text (pages 366 to 380) was taken from the book “Paris 1919”
by Margaret MacMillan.
Part 2 (chapter 26 of MacMillan’s book) deals with the peace talks of 1919
with respect to the destruction of the Ottoman empire and the birth of
modern Turkeys.
Part 3, (the last part) will provide excerpts from the minutes of the
committee on new states and for the protection of minorities at the Paris
Peace Conference. Part 3 will also contain proposals that were tabled for
the formation of a Macedonian State.
Margaret MacMillan, the author of the book from which this article was
taken, is the great-great granddaughter of David Lloyd George. David Lloyd
George (1863-1945) was British Prime Minister of the Liberal party during
the 1919 peace talks and was responsible for drafting the Treaty of
Versailles.
Margaret MacMillan received her Ph.D. from Oxford University and is provost
of Trinity College and professor of history at the University of Toronto.
This is an important article for those who are interested in learning about
the wheeling and dealing that went on in the1919 peace talks as well as the
charismatic Mustafa Kemal better known as Ataturk. They say, Ataturk had
startling blue eyes and was born in Solun. He had a peasant mother who could
barely read and write and his father was an unsuccessful merchant. Show me a
Turk from Solun with blue eyes and I will show you a Macedonian. Enjoy
reading the article.
FAR AWAY FROM PARIS, at the southeast tip of Europe, another great city had
been lamenting the past and thinking uneasily about the future. Byzantium to
the Greeks and Romans, Constantinople to the peacemakers, Istanbul, as it
was to the Turks, had once been the capital of the glorious Byzantine empire
and then, after 1453, of the victorious Ottoman Turks. Now the Ottoman
empire in its turn was on a downward path. The city was crammed with
refugees and soldiers from the defeated armies, short of fuel, food and
hope. Their fate-indeed, that of the whole empire-appeared to depend on the
Peace Conference.
Layers of history had fallen over Constantinople, leaving churches, mosques,
frescoes, mosaics, palaces, covered markets and fishing villages. The
massive city walls had seen invaders from Europe and the East, Persians,
Crusaders, Arabs and finally the Turks. The last Byzantine emperor had
chosen death there in 1453, as the Ottoman Turks completed their conquest of
his empire. Underneath the streets of Istanbul lay the shards of antiquity;
walls, vaults, passageways, a great Byzantine cistern where Greek and Roman
columns held up the roof Above, the minarets of the mosques-some of them,
such as the massive Santa Sophia, converted from Christian churches-and the
great tower built by the Genoese brooded over the city’s hills. Across the
deep inlet of the Golden Horn, the old city of Stamboul, with its squalor
and its magnificence, faced the more spacious modern quarter where
foreigners lived. It was a city with many memories and many peoples.
All around was the water. To the northwest, the Bosphorus stretched up into
the Black Sea toward Russia and central Asia; southwest, the Sea of Marmara
led into the- Dardanelles and the Mediterranean. Geography had created the
city, and geography had kept it important through the centuries. From
antiquity, when Jason sailed through and Alexander the Great won a great
victory over the Persians nearby, to more modern times, when Catherine the
Great of Russia and Wilhelm II of Germany both reached out to grasp it, the
city had always been a prize.
Much of the diplomacy of the nineteenth century had revolved around
controlling vital waterways such as this. Russia longed for warm-water ports
with access to the world’s seas. Britain in turn bolstered an ailing Ottoman
empire to keep the Russians safely bottled up in the Black Sea. (Only in the
most desperate moments of the war had the British conceded Russian control
over the straits; fortunately, owing to the revolutions of 1917, Russia
would not be collecting its prize.) The Ottoman Turks, who had once reached
the gates of Vienna, had little to say. Even the Young Turk revolt just
before the Great War did little to arrest their decline. Their empire
shrank, in the Balkans and across North Africa.
In 1914, the Ottoman leaders decided to confront Russia, now allied to their
old friend Britain: the empire joined the war on the side of Germany and
Austria-Hungary. It was a gamble that failed. The Ottoman empire fought
astonishingly bravely, given its relative weakness. In Mesopotamia and at
Gallipoli, Turkish soldiers humiliated the Allies, who had expected quick
victories. But by 1918, Ottoman luck had run out. The collapse of Bulgaria
in September opened the road to Constantinople from the west, while British
and Indian troops pushed in from the south and east. Out on the eastern end
of the Mediterranean, Allied warships gathered in ominous numbers. Only on
its northeastern borders, where the old Russian empire was disintegrating,
was there respite, but the Ottomans were too weak to benefit. Their empire
had gone piecemeal before the war; now it melted like snow. The Arab
territories had gone, from Mesopotamia to Palestine, from Syria down to the
Arabian peninsula. On the eastern end of the Black Sea, subject
peoples-Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Kurds-struggled to establish new
states in the borderlands with Russia. “General attitude among Turks,”
reported an American diplomat, “is one of hopelessness, waiting the outcome
of the Peace Conference.” Like so many other peoples, they hoped the
Americans would rescue them; self determination might salvage at least the
Turkish-speaking areas in eastern Thrace and Anatolia. In Constantinople,
intellectuals founded a “Wilsonian Principles Society.”
The men who had led the empire into the war resigned in the first week of
October and fled on a German warship, and a caretaker government sent word
to the British that it wanted peace. The British government agreed to open
talks promptly at the Aegean island of Mudros, partly to keep the French on
the sidelines. Although the British had consulted with the French on the
armistice terms, they made the dubious argument that since the Ottoman
empire had contacted them first, it was Britain’s responsibility to handle
negotiations. The French government and the senior French admiral at Mudros
both protested in vain. All negotiations were handled by the British
commander, Admiral Arthur Calthorpe.
The Ottoman delegates were led by Hussein Rauf; a young naval hero and the
new minister of the navy. On October 28 they arrived at Calthorpe’s
flagship, the Agamemnon. The negotiations were civil, even friendly. Rauf
found Calthorpe honest and straightforward-and reassuring when he promised
that Britain would treat Turkey, for that was all that remained of the
empire, gently. Constantinople probably would not be occupied; certainly no
Greek or Italian troops, particular bugbears of the Turks, would be allowed
to land. When Rauf arrived home, he told a reporter. “I assure you that not
a single enemy soldier will disembark at our Istanbul.” The British had
treated them extraordinarily well: “The armistice we have concluded is
beyond our hopes.” Even though they had accepted all the clauses put forward
by the British, Rauf trusted Calthorpe, who promised that the armistice
terms would not be used unfairly. The British were really only interested in
free passage through the straits; why would they want to occupy
Constantinople, or indeed anywhere else? Rauf told himself that, after all,
the British had already taken the Arab territories. “I could think of no
other area they would want from the point of view of their national
interests and so might try to seize.”
When the two men put their signatures to the armistice on October 30, they
cheerfully toasted each other in champagne. Rauf; the Agamemnon’s captain
wrote to his wife, “made me a very graceful little speech thanking me for my
hospitality and consideration to him as a technical enemy.” The photograph
of the captain’s young twin sons, said Rauf; had been a source of
inspiration to him. “Wasn’t that nice?”
In London, the British cabinet received the news of the armistice with
delight and fell to discussing how Constantinople ought to be occupied,
given “the mentality of the East.” The British and their allies had every
intention of enforcing the armistice rigorously. All Turkish garrisons were
to surrender; all the railways and telegraphs would be run by the Allies;
and Turkish ports were to be available for Allied warships. But the most
damaging clause was the seventh, which read simply “The Allies have the
right to occupy any strategic points in the event of a situation arising
which threatens the security of the Allies” Years later Rauf looked back.
“There was a general conviction in our country that England and France were
countries faithful not only to their written pacts, but also to their
promises. And I had this conviction too. What a shame that we were mistaken
in our beliefs and convictions!”
>From his post far away to the south, by the Syrian border, a friend of
Rauf’s who was also a war hero wrote to his government with dismay: “It is
my sincere and frank opinion that if we demobilize our troops and give in to
everything the British want, without taking steps to end misunderstandings
and false interpretations of the armistice, it will be impossible for us to
put any sort of brake on Britain’s covetous designs.” Mustafa Kemal-better
known today as Ataturk-dashed north to Constantinople and urged everyone he
could see, from leading politicians to the sultan himself to establish a
strong nationalist government to stand up to the foreigners. He found
sympathy in many quarters, but the sultan, Mehmed VI, preferred to placate
the Allies. In November 1918, Mehmed dissolved parliament and tried to
govern through his own men.
The great line of sultans that had produced Suleiman the Magnificent had
dwindled to Mehmed VI. His main achievement was to have survived the rule of
three brothers: one who was deposed when he went mad; his paranoid and cruel
successor, so fearful of enemies that he employed a eunuch to take the first
puff of every cigarette; and the timid old man who ruled until the summer of
1918. Mehmed VI was sane but it was difficult to gauge whether there were
many ideas in his bony head. He took over as sultan with deep misgivings. “I
am at a loss,” he told a religious leader. “Pray for me.”
The power of the throne, which had once made the world tremble, had slipped
away. Orders from the government, reported the American representative,
“often receive but scant consideration in the provinces and public safety is
very poor throughout Asia Minor.” Although Constantinople was not officially
occupied at first, Allied soldiers and diplomats “were everywhere-advising
and ordering and suggesting,” Allied warships packed the harbor so tightly
that they looked a solid mass. “I am ill,” murmured the sultan, “I can’t
look out the window. I hate to see them.” had a very different thought: “As
they have come, so they shall go.
Ataturk was a complicated, brave, determined and dangerous man whose
picture, with its startling blue eyes, is still everywhere in Turkey today:
In 1919 few foreigners had ever heard of him; four years later he had
humbled Britain and France and brought into existence the new nation-state
of Turkey. The tenth of November, the anniversary of his death, is a
national day of remembrance. He could be ruthless, as both his friends and
his enemies found; after his great victories, he tried some of his oldest
associates, including Rauf for treason. He could also be charming, as the
many women in his life discovered. Children loved him, and he loved them; he
always said, however, that it was just as well he was childless since the
sons of great men are usually degenerates. He had a rational and scientific
mind, but in later life grew fascinated by the esoteric. He refused to allow
Ankara radio to play traditional Turkish music; it was what he listened to
with his friends. He wanted to emancipate Turkish women, yet when he
divorced the only woman he ever married, he did so in the traditional Muslim
way; He was a dictator who tried to order democracy into existence. In 1930
he created an opposition party and chose its leaders; when it started to
challenge him, he closed it down. He was capricious, but in his own way
fair. His subordinates knew that any order he had given at night during one
of his frequent drinking bouts should be ignored.
The man who made Turkey was born on the fringes of the old Ottoman empire in
the Macedonian seaport of Salonika. His mother was a peasant who could
barely read and write, his father an unsuccessful merchant. Like the Ottoman
empire itself Salonika contained many nationalities. Even the laborers on
the docks spoke half a dozen languages. About half of Salonika’s people were
Jews; the rest ranged from Turks to Greeks, Armenians to Albanians. Western
Europeans dominated the trade and commerce, just as European nations
dominated the Ottoman empire.
Early on Ataturk developed a contempt for religion that never left him.
Islam-and its leaders and holy men-were “a poisonous dagger which is
directed at the heart of my people.” From the evening when, as a student, he
saw sheikhs and dervishes whipping a crowd into a frenzy, he loathed what he
saw as primitive fanaticism. “I flatly refuse to believe that today; in the
luminous presence of science, knowledge, and civilization in all its
aspects, there exist, in the civilized community of Turkey, men so primitive
as to seek their material and moral well-being from the guidance of one or
another sheikh.”
Over his mother’s objections, he insisted on being educated in military
schools. In those days these were not only training leaders of the future;
they were centers of the growing nationalist and revolutionary sentiment.
Ataturk’s particular aptitudes were for mathematics and politics. He learned
French so that he could read political philosophers such as Voltaire and
Montesquieu. When he was nineteen, Ataturk won a place in the infantry
college in Constantinople. He found a worldly, cosmopolitan capital. Less
than half its population was Muslim. The rest were a mix of Sephardic Jews
whose ancestors had escaped from Christian Spain centuries before, Polish
patriots fleeing tsarist rule, and Orthodox Armenians, Rumanians, Albanians
and Greeks. Despite four centuries of Ottoman rule, the Greeks still
dominated commerce. (Even after the Second World War, over half the members
of Istanbul’s chamber of commerce had Greek names.) Europeans ran the most
important industries, and Western lenders kept the government solvent and
supervised its finances. The Ottomans were now so weak that they were forced
to give Westerners even more of the special privileges, which first started
in the sixteenth century capitulations, which included freedom from Turkish
taxes and Turkish courts. As a Turkish journalist wrote sadly: “We have
remained mere spectators while our commerce, our trades and even our
broken-down huts have been given to the foreigners.”
The infantry college where Ataturk studied was on the north side of the
Golden Horn, in the newer part of the city, with its wide streets, gas
lighting, opera house, cafes, chamber of commerce, banks, shops with the
latest European fashions, even brothels with pink satin sofas just like
those in Paris. Ataturk explored it with enthusiasm, carousing and whoring
and reading widely, but he always remained ambivalent about Constantinople.
It was a place to be enjoyed but dangerous to governments. He later moved
the capital far inland to the obscure city of Ankara.
Like many young officers in the years before 1914, Ataturk dabbled in secret
societies which swore to give the empire a modern constitution. He shared
the hopes of the revolution of 1908, and the disappointments when it failed
to make the empire stronger. In 1908 Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina
and Bulgaria declared its independence. In 1911 Italy, the weakest of the
European powers, declared war and seized Libya. After the Balkan wars of
1912 and 1913, Albania, Macedonia and part of Thrace, including Salonika,
were gone. By 1914 the European part of the empire, which had once stretched
into Hungary, was reduced to a small enclave in Thrace tucked under
Bulgaria. In six years, 425,000 square miles had been lost.
When the Great War started, Ataturk was enjoying life as a diplomat in
Bulgaria. He went to his first opera in Sofia; fifteen years later, he put
an opera house into the plans for his new capital of Ankara. He took up
ballroom dancing; later, in his new republic, civil servants were made to
dance at official balls because “that was how they do it in the West.” At
the beginning of 1915, he was offered command of a new division which was
being thrown into the defense of the Gallipoli peninsula. Many Allied
reputations were destroyed at Gallipoli; his was made. As the author of the
official British history later wrote, “Seldom in history can the exertions
of a single divisional commander have exercised, on three separate
occasions, so profound an influence on the course of a battle, but perhaps
on the fate of a campaign and even the destiny of a nation.”
The Constantinople Ataturk found at the end of the war was very different
from the city he remembered. There was no coal and very little food. A Turk
who was a boy at the time remembered his mother struggling to feed the
family: “It seemed to us that we had lived forever on lentils and cabbage
soup and the dry, black apology for bread.” The government was bankrupt. On
street corners distinguished officers sold lemons because their pensions
were worthless. And more refugees were pouring in: Russians fleeing the
civil war, Armenians searching desperately for safety, and Turks abandoning
the Middle East and Europe. By the end of 1919 perhaps as many as 100,000
were sleeping on the streets of the city. The only Turks who prospered were
black marketeers and criminals. Crazy rumors swept through the city: one day
crowds rushed to Santa Sophia because it was whispered that Christian bells
were being hung again.
Local Greeks, intoxicated by the hope of restored Hellenic rule, hung out
the blue-and-white flag of Greece; a giant picture of Venizelos went up in
one of the main squares. The Greek patriarch sent aggressive demands to
Paris, denouncing the Turks and demanding that Constantinople be made Greek
again. His office told Greek Christians to stop cooperating with the Turkish
authorities. The Greeks were, said an English diplomat, “apt to be uppish.”
Some hotheads jostled Turks in the streets and made them take off their
fezzes.
Allied officers and bureaucrats arrived in increasing numbers to supervise
the armistice. “Life,” recalled a young Englishman, “was gay and wicked and
delightful. The cafes were full of drinking and dancing.” In the nightclubs,
White Russians sang melancholy songs and pretty young refugees sold
themselves for the price of a meal. You could race motorboats across the Sea
of Marmara, ride to hounds on the Asian side of the Bosphorus and pick up
wonderful antiques for pennies. The Allies unofficially divided up
Constantinople into spheres of influence and took over much of its
administration; they ran the local police and set up their own courts. When
the Turkish press was critical of their guests, the Allies took over press
censorship as well. When Constantinople was officially occupied in March
1920, it was hard to tell the difference.
Outside the city, in Thrace and Asia Minor, Allied officers fanned out to
monitor the surrender. The French occupied the important southern city of
Alexandretta (today Iskenderun) and by early 1919 were moving inland. On the
whole, the British were more popular; as one lady in the south commented,
“Les anglais ont envoyes les fils de leurs ‘Lords,’ mais les francais ont
envoyes leurs valets” (“The English sent the sons of their lords, but the
French sent their valets”). The sultan’s government, as weak and demoralized
as its figurehead, did nothing, seeking only to placate the Allies. The
Allies were not in a mood to be placated. Some, such as Curzon, who chaired
the cabinet committee responsible for British policy in the East, thought
the time had come to get rid of “this canker which has poisoned the life of
Europe.” Corruption, nameless vices and intrigue had spread out from
Constantinople to infect the innocent Europeans. The Peace Conference was
the chance to excise the source of such evil once and for all: “The presence
of the Turks in Europe has been a source of unmitigated evil to everybody
concerned. I am not aware of a single interest, Turkish or otherwise, that
during nearly 500 years has benefited by that presence.” Although as a
student of history he should have known better, Curzon argued: “Indeed, the
record is one of misrule, oppression, intrigue, and massacre, almost
unparalleled in the history of the Eastern world.” His prime minister shared
his sentiments; like many Liberals, Lloyd George had inherited his hostility
to the Turks from the great Gladstone.
For Curzon the question was, What would replace the Ottoman empire? Britain
still wanted to ensure that hostile warships did not use the straits. It
still needed to protect the route to India through the Suez Canal. There was
a new factor, too: the increasingly important supplies of oil from Mosul in
the Ottoman empire and from Persia. Britain did not want to take on the
whole responsibility itself and Greece certainly could not; on the other
hand, it did not want another major power moving in, such as its ally
France. After all, the two countries had fought for centuries, over Europe,
North America, India, Africa and the Middle East. Their friendship, by
comparison, was a recent affair. It had stood the test of the war but it was
not clear that it would stand the test of peace. There had already been
trouble over the Arab parts of the Ottoman empire. Did Britain really want
French ships at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, French bases up and
down the coast? Curzon was quite sure that it did not:
A good deal of my public life has been spent in connection with the
political ambitions of France, which I have come across in Tunis, in Siam,
and in almost every distant region where the French have sway. We have been
brought, for reasons of national safety, into an alliance with the French,
which I hope will last, but their national character is different from ours,
and their political interests collide with our own in many cases. I am
seriously afraid that the great Power from whom we have most to fear is
France.
It would be a great mistake, he went on, to allow the French to acquire
influence in the Middle East: “France is a highly organised State, has
boundless intrepidity, imagination, and a certain power of dealing with
Eastern peoples.”
The French did not trust the British any more than the British trusted them.
And France had considerable interests in the Ottoman empire, from the
protection of fellow Christians to the extensive French investments. For
France, though, what happened to the Ottoman empire or in the Balkans was
much less important than dealing with Germany. Clemenceau, whatever his
colonial lobby thought, would compromise with Britain because he needed its
support in Europe. While he did not want to see the Asian part of Turkey
disappear completely, Clemenceau did not, at least initially, have strong
views about Greek claims there. As far as Europe was concerned, he supported
Greek claims to Thrace. If Greece blocked Italian claims, so much the better
for France.
During the war, Britain, France and Russia had held a number of discussions
about the future of the Ottoman empire. In 1916, the British and French
representatives, Sir Mark Sykes and Georges Picot, had agreed that their two
countries would divide up the Arab-speaking areas and that, in the
Turkish-speaking parts, France would have a zone extending north into
Cilicia from Syria. The Russians, who had already extracted a promise that
they would annex Constantinople and the straits, gave their approval on
condition that they got the Turkish provinces adjacent to their borders in
the Caucasus. The decision of the new Bolshevik government to make peace
with the Central Powers effectively canceled that agreement. Britain and
France were now left as the major powers in the Middle East, and as the war
wound down, they circled suspiciously around each other.
In the Supreme Council on October 30, Lloyd George and Clemenceau quarreled
angrily over Britain’s insistence on negotiating the Turkish truce on their
own. “They bandied words like fish-wives,” House re- ported. Lloyd George
told Clemenceau:
Except for Great Britain no one had contributed anything more than a handful
of black troops to the expedition in Palestine, I was really surprised at
the lack of generosity on the part of the French Government. The British had
now some 500,000 men on Turkish soil. The British had captured three or four
Turkish Armies and had incurred hundreds of thousands of casualties in the
war with Turkey. The other Governments had only put in a few nigger
policemen to see that we did not steal the Holy Sepulchre! When, however, it
came to signing an armistice, all this fuss was made.
It was an unfair argument; as Clemenceau pointed out on a later occasion,
the British had sent correspondingly fewer troops to the Western Front.
“My opinion was and remains that if the white troops which you sent over
there had been thrown against the Germans, the war could have been ended
some months earlier.” The French nevertheless backed down on the armistice,
as Pichon said, “in the spirit of conciliation which the French government
always felt to apply in dealing with Britain.” There was not to be much of
that spirit when it came to dividing the spoils.
The peacemakers did not get around to the Ottoman empire until January 30,
1919, and then it was only in the course of that difficult discussion over
mandates for the former German colonies. Lloyd George, who had spent the
previous week bringing the Americans and his recalcitrant dominions to
agreement, mentioned the Ottoman empire briefly as an example of where
mandates were needed. Because the Turks had been so bad at governing their
subject peoples, they should lose control of all their Arab
territories-Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine and Arabia itself. Since the Arabs
were civilized but not yet organized, they would need outside guidance. The
Ottomans also ought to lose territory on their northeast frontier. They had
behaved appallingly to the Armenians, and clearly an Armenian state should
come into existence, probably as a mandate of an outside power. There might
have to be a Kurdistan, south of Armenia. That still left the predominantly
Turkish-speaking territories, the slice in Europe, the straits and Anatolia
in Asia Minor. Those, Lloyd George said airily, could be settled “on their
merits.” (He did not mention the parcels of land stretching inland from the
coast of Asia Minor that had been promised to the French, the Italians or
the Greeks.)
The other important thing, Lloyd George argued, was to keep all the various
groups within the empire from attacking each other. This was not a
responsibility Britain wanted. As Lloyd George pointed out, the Allies had
over a million troops scattered across the Ottoman empire and Britain was
paying for the lot. “If they kept them there until they had made peace with
Turkey, and until the League of Nations had been constituted and had started
business and until it was able to dispose of this question, the expense
would be something enormous, and they really could not face it.” He had to
answer to Parliament.
Lloyd George hoped that Wilson would take the hint and offer the United
States as the mandatory power at least for Armenia and the straits. Better
still, the Americans might decide to run the whole of the Turkish areas.
House certainly hinted at the possibility. However, the Americans had not
really established a clear position on the Ottoman empire beyond an
antipathy toward the Turks. American Protestant missionaries, who had been
active in Ottoman Turkey since the 1820s, had painted a dismal picture of a
bankrupt regime. Much of their work had been among the Armenians, so they
had reported at first hand the massacres during the war. Back in the United
States large sums of money had been raised for Armenian relief. House had
cheerfully chatted with the British about ways of carving up the Ottoman
empire, and Wilson had certainly considered its complete disappearance.
The United States had never declared war on the Ottoman empire, which put it
in a tricky position when it came to determining the empire’s fate. The only
one of Wilson’s Fourteen Points that dealt with it was ambiguous: “The
Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure
sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule
should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested
opportunity of autonomous development.” What were the Turkish portions? Who
should have autonomous development? The Arabs? The Armenians? The Kurds? The
scattered Greek communities?
When the Inquiry, that collection of American experts, produced its
memorandum in December 1918, it said both that Turkey proper (undefined)
must be justly treated and that subject races must be freed from oppression
and misrule, which in turn meant “autonomy” for Armenia and “protection” for
the Arab parts. Oddly contradicting this, the official commentary on the
Fourteen Points, which had come out in October 1918, talked about
international control of Constantinople and the straits, perhaps a Greek
mandate on the coast of Asia Minor, where it was incorrectly said that
Greeks predominated, and possibly American mandates for Constantinople,
Armenia, even Macedonia in the Balkans. Before the Peace Conference started,
it was generally assumed that, at the very least, the United States would
take a mandate for Armenia and the straits. Not everyone was pleased.
British admirals, having got rid of the Russian menace, did not want to see
a strong United States at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. The India
Office was also concerned. Mehmed VI was not only the Ottoman sultan but
also the caliph, the nearest thing to a spiritual leader of all Muslims.
Turning him out of Constantinople, even putting him under the supervision of
an outside power, might enrage Indian Muslims. Lloyd George simply ignored
their objections.
As so often, the Peace Conference delayed difficult decisions. At that
January meeting, Wilson suggested that the military advisers look at how the
burden of occupying the Turkish territories could best be shared out. “This
would clarify the question,” said Lloyd George. Of course, it did not. The
report duly came in and was discussed briefly on February 10; it was put on
the agenda for the following day but in the event the boundaries of Belgium
proved to be much more interesting.
On February 26, the appearance of an Armenian delegation before the Supreme
Council briefly reminded the peacemakers that the Ottoman empire remained to
be settled. Boghos Nubar Pasha was smooth, rich and cultivated; his father
had been prime minister of Egypt. His partner, Avetis Aharonian, was a
tough, cynical poet from the Caucasus. Boghos spoke for the Armenian
diaspora, Aharonian for the homeland in the mountains where Russia, Persia
and Turkey met. In what was by now a familiar pattern they appealed to
history-the centuries that Armenians had lived there, the persistence of
Armenian Christianity-to their services to the Allies (some Armenians had
fought in Russia’s armies) and to Allied promises. And, like other
delegations, they staked out a claim for a huge area of land, stretching
south and west from the Caucasus down to the Mediterranean. Less typically,
they also asked for the protection of an outside power, a wise request for a
country with such neighbors and such a past. They placed their hopes on the
United States. “Scarcely a day passed,” said an American expert, “that
mournful Armenians, bearded and blackclad, did not besiege the American
delegation or, less frequently, the President, setting forth the really
terrible conditions in their own native land.”
The Armenians brought one of the saddest histories to the conference.
Between 1375, when the last independent Armenian state was conquered, and
the spring of 1918, when nationalist forces had proclaimed the republic of
Armenia on what had been Russian territory, they had lived under alien rule.
After the Russians had advanced down into the Caucasus at the start of the
nineteenth century, the Armenian lands were divided up among Russia itself;
Ottoman Turkey and Persia. The Armenians, many of them simple farmers, had
become Russian, Turkish or Persian, but as ideas of nationalism and
self-determination swept eastward, the vision of a reborn Armenian nation
took shape. It was not a coherent vision- Christian, secular, conservative,
radical, pro- Turkish or pro-Russian, there was no agreement as to what
Armenia might be-but it was increasingly powerful. Unfortunately, however,
Armenian nationalism was not the only nationalism growing in that part of
the world. “Who remembers the Armenians today?” Hitler asked cynically. At
the Paris Peace Conference, the horrors of what the Turks had done to the
Armenians were still fresh, and the world had not yet grown used to attempts
to exterminate peoples. The killings had started in the 1890s, when the old
regime turned savagely on any groups that opposed it. Ottoman troops and
local Kurds, themselves awakening as a nation, had rampaged through Armenian
villages. The Young Turks, who took over the government in 1908, promised a
new era with talk of a secular, multi-ethnic state, but they also dreamed of
linking up with other Turkish peoples in central Asia. In that Pan- Turanian
world, Armenians and other Christians had no place.
When the Ottoman empire entered the war, Enver Pasha, one of the triumvirate
of Young Turks who had ruled in Constantinople since 1913, sent the bulk of
its armies eastward, against Russia. The result, in 1915, was disaster; the
Russians destroyed a huge Ottoman force and looked set to advance into
Anatolia just when the Allies were landing at Gallipoli in the west. The
triumvirate gave the order to deport Armenians from eastern Anatolia on the
grounds that they were traitors, potential or actual. Many Armenians were
slaughtered before they could leave; others died of hunger and disease on
the forced marches southward. Whether the Ottoman government’s real goal was
genocide is still much disputed; so is the number of dead, anywhere from
300,000 to 1.5 million.
Western opinion was appalled. In Britain, Armenia’s cause attracted
supporters from the duke of Argyll to the young Arnold Toynbee. British
children were told to remember the starving Armenians when they failed to
clean their plates. In the United States, huge sums of money were raised for
relief. Clemenceau wrote the preface for a book detailing the atrocities:
“Is it true that at the dawn of the twentieth century, five days from Paris,
atrocities have been committed with impunity, covering a land with
horror-such that one cannot imagine worse in time of the deepest barbarity?”
The usually restrained Lansing wrote to Wilson, who was strongly
pro-Armenian, “It is one of the blackest pages in the history of this war.”
“Say to the Armenians,” exclaimed Orlando, “that I make their cause my
cause.” Lloyd George promised that Armenia would never be restored to “the
blasting tyranny” of the Turks. “There was not a British statesman of any
party,” he wrote in his memoirs, “who did not have it in mind that if we
succeeded in defeating this inhuman Empire, our essential condition of the
peace we should impose was the redemption of the Armenian valleys for ever
from the bloody misrule with which they had been stained by the infamies of
the Turks.”
Fine sentiments-but they amounted to little in the end. At the Peace
Conference, even heartfelt agreement on principle faltered in the face of
other considerations. Armenia was far away; it was surrounded by enemies and
the Allies had few forces in the area. Moving troops and aid in, at a time
when resources were stretched thin, was a major undertaking; what railways
there were had been badly damaged and the roads were primitive. Help was far
away, but Armenia’s enemies were close at hand. Russians, whether the armies
of the Whites or the Bolsheviks, who were advancing southward, would not
tolerate Armenia or any other independent state in the Caucasus. On
Armenia’s other flank, Turks deeply resented the loss of Turkish territory,
and the further losses implied in the Armenian claims.
In Paris, Armenia’s friends were lukewarm and hesitant. The British, it is
true, saw certain advantages for themselves in taking a mandate for Armenia:
the protection of oil supplies coming from Baku on the Caspian to the port
of Batum on the Black Sea, and the creation of a barrier between Bolshevism
and the British possessions in the Middle East. (In their worst nightmares,
the British imagined Bolshevism linking up with a resurgent Islam and
toppling the British empire.) On the other hand, as the War Office kept
repeating, British resources were already overstretched. The French Foreign
Office, for its part, toyed with ideas of a huge Armenia under French
protection which would provide a field for French investment and the spread
of French culture. Clemenceau, however, had little enthusiasm for the
notion. The Italians, like the French, preferred to concentrate their
efforts on gains on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey and in Europe. That
left the Americans.
On March 7, House assured Lloyd George and Clemenceau that the United States
would undoubtedly take on a mandate. Lloyd George was delighted at the
prospect of the Americans taking on the “noble duty,” and relieved that the
French were not taking on a mandate. House, as he often did, was
exaggerating. Wilson had warned the Supreme Council that “he could think of
nothing the people of the United States would be less inclined to accept
than military responsibility in Asia.” It is perhaps a measure of how far
Wilson’s judgment had deteriorated that, on May 14, when Armenia came up at
the Council of Four, he agreed to accept a mandate, subject, he added, to
the consent of the American Senate. This ruffled the French because the
proposed American mandate was to stretch from the Black Sea to the
Mediterranean, taking in the zone in Cilicia promised to France under the
Sykes-Picot Agreement. While Clemenceau, who took little interest in the
Turkish-speaking territories, did not raise an objection, his colleagues
were furious. From London, Paul Cambon complained: “They must be drunk the
way they are surrendering. .. a total capitulation, a mess, an unimaginable
shambles.” Although no one suspected it at the time, no arrangement made in
Paris was going to make the slightest difference to Armenia.
Many other schemes for the Ottoman empire were floating around the
conference rooms and dinner tables in Paris that spring. “Let it be a manda
[buffalo] ,” said one wit in Constantinople, “let it be an ox, let it be any
animal whatsoever; only let it come quickly.” If all the claims,
protectorates, independent states and mandates that were discussed actually
had come into existence, a very odd little Turkey in the interior of
Anatolia would have been left, with no straits, no Mediterranean coast, a
truncated Black Sea coast, and no Armenian or Kurdish territories in the
northeast. What was left out of the calculation in Paris, among other
things, was the inability of the powers to enforce their will. Henry Wilson,
chief of the British Imperial General Staff: thought the politicians
completely unrealistic: “They seem to think that their writ runs in Turkey
in Asia. We have never, even after the armistice, attempted to get into the
background parts.” Also overlooked were the Turks themselves. Almost
everyone in Paris assumed that they would simply do as they were told. When
Edwin Montagu, the British secretary of state for India, cried, “Let us not
for Heaven’s sake, tell the Moslem what he ought to think, let us recognize
what they do think, ” Balfour replied with chilling detachment, “I am quite
unable to see why Heaven or any other Power should object to our telling the
Moslem what he ought to think.” That went for the Arab subjects of the
Ottoman empire as well.

I-NewsWire Press Release
March 4 2005
HUMAN RIGHTS EXHIBITION OPENS AT HEADQUARTERS ON 4 MARCH
To mark the conclusion of the United Nations Decade for Human Rights
Education (1995-2004) and the launch of the new World Programme for
Human Rights Education (2005-2007), the Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the United Nations Postal
Administration (UNPA) are sponsoring the opening of an exhibit by the
Armenian artist Yuri Gevorgian in the South Gallery of the General
Assembly Visitors’ Lobby on Friday, 4 March.
i-Newswire, 2005-03-04 – The exhibit consists of six canvases — each
measuring 6 feet high and 55 inches wide — and is the largest
commissioned stamp art in the UNPA’s history. The artwork was
designed for commemorative stamps dedicated to human rights education
and encompasses a variety of themes set forth in the 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and the Preamble to the United Nations
Charter `to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the
dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and
women and of nations large and small’. The exhibit will be on
display in the South Gallery until 31 March.
In conjunction with this exhibit, there will be a reception and dance
recital from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. in the South Gallery. Statements will
be made by Mr. Gevorgian, the artist; Craig Mokhiber, Deputy Director
of the New York Office, OHCHR; and Robert Gray, Chief of the UNPA.
For more information about this exhibit, please call Jan Arnesen,
Department of Public Information ( DPI ), at tel.: ( 212 ) 963-8531;
Robert Stein ( UNPA ) at tel.: ( 212 ) 963-4329; or Sharon
Brandstein ( OHCHR ) at tel.: ( 212-963-7021 ) or visit the Web site
at
Related Web sites: Yuri Gevorgian: ; LKW Dance
Company: ; OHCHR: ; UNPA:
If you have questions regarding information in these press release
contact the company listed below. Please do not contact us as we are
unable to assist you with your inquiry. We disclaim any content
contained in this press release.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Masco Corporation Announces Live Webcast of
Presentation at Investor Meeting
PRNewswire-FirstCall
Wednesday March 2, 2005
TAYLOR, Mich., March 2 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Masco Corporation’s
(NYSE: MAS) Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Richard Manoogian
will present at the Raymond James Institutional Investors Conference
in Orlando, Florida on March 8, 2005 at 7:30 a.m. ET.
Masco’s presentation will be webcast live on the Internet at
or via the Company’s website at
. A replay of the webcast will be available via
the above link or via Masco’s website through April 1, 2005.
Headquartered in Taylor, Michigan, Masco Corporation is one of the
world’s leading manufacturers of home improvement and building
products as well as a leading provider of services that include the
installation of insulation and other building products.
Statements contained herein may include certain forward-looking
statements regarding Masco’s future sales, earnings growth potential
and other developments. Actual results may vary materially because of
external factors such as interest rate fluctuations, changes in
consumer spending and other factors over which management has no
control. The Company believes that certain non-GAAP performance
measures and ratios, used in managing the business, may provide users
of this financial information with additional meaningful comparisons
between current results and results in prior periods. Non-GAAP
performance measures and ratios should be viewed in addition to, and
not as an alternative for, the Company’s reported results under
accounting principles generally accepted in the United
States. Additional information about the Company’s products, markets
and conditions, which could affect the Company’s future performance,
is contained in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange
Commission and is available on Masco’s website at
. Masco undertakes no obligation to update any forward- looking
statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or
otherwise.
Source: Masco Corporation

Agency WPS
DEFENSE and SECURITY (Russia)
March 2, 2005, Wednesday
BRIDGEHEAD FOR THE YANKEES
SOURCE: Novye Izvestia, February 28, 2005, p. 4
by Mekhman Gafarly
“The Pentagon does not want Russia to oppose US military presence in
Azerbaijan and Georgia,” said Charles Wald, US Second-in-Command in
Europe. “It will be nice to get a chance to run exercises and
operations there.”
Wald visited Azerbaijan and Georgia more than once, discussing
military cooperation with the United States. he is in charge of the
new American military initiative Silky Way (non-proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction in the Caucasus and Central Asia), these
days. The list composed by the US Congress includes Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Still, the Pentagon concentrated on
Azerbaijan and Georgia which in expert opinion may be ascribed to the
American attack on Iran.
Not so long ago, Azerbaijani media reported with references to Cmag
of Canada that the United States was preparing for a strike at Iran
and that the US Administration had already begun consultations with
allies including Azerbaijan. Some newspapers referring to military
sources reported the plan of the future attack. Ekho newspaper (Baku)
wrote that American experts had drawn a scenario of a military action
against Iran from the territory of Azerbaijan (not only Azerbaijan).
The American strike aimed to ruin nuclear objects of this Islamic
state and install a new regime there was designed by the American
Committee of Iranian Specialists including all sorts of experts (some
of them military). The authors called the operation “Iran – Strategic
Surprise”. It stipulates establishment of American military bases in
Azerbaijan within 20 days. Bases will be established simultaneously
with rotation of American troops in Iraq. Air strikes and ground
operations in Iran will follow for 30 days after that. The attack
will proceed against 30 targets. THAAD gear will be installed in
certain locations (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq),
capable of detecting missiles practically at launch and taking them
out. Azerbaijani military experts acquainted with the plan call it
quite realistic.
Azerbaijan is expected to play a key role in the American operation.
Azerbaijani airfields Gala on Apsheron, Baku-Bina, Nasosny in
Sumgait, Garachala in Salian and civilian airports in Lenkoran,
Kyurdamir, Yevlakh, Gyandzh, Dallyar, and Nakhichevan will be used in
the operation. Validity of these forecasts is confirmed by
Azerbaijani military expert Uzeir Dzhafarov.
According to the plan, US State Secretary will personally coordinate
the operation with the governments of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Iraq.
Air strikes will come from Iraq, special forces from Afghanistan,
special forces and landing forces from Azerbaijan. Distracting
maneuvers will take place in the Persian Gulf. All the same, the
Americans cannot guarantee Azerbaijan’s safety in a war on Iran.
Hence the intention to deploy special anti-missiles on Apsheron.
According to Azerbaijani media outlets, 10 radars were already
installed on the Azerbaijani-Iranian border. The radars and the 5
helicopters America has in the area gather intelligence information
for the United States. What information is already available enables
the Americans to maintain that Tehran is forcing development of
nuclear technologies and will possess nuclear weapons by 2006. Iran
already has delivery means and will double their quantity by 2008.
The United States is settling in Georgia too where 100 American
instructors train the Georgian military. Tbilisi received $10 million
from Washington in late 2004 within the framework of Initiative Silky
Way. Moscow fears therefore that once it withdrew its bases from the
territory of Georgia, Washington will immediately establish its own
bases there.

Reuters, UK
March 3 2005
Killings of journalists in former Soviet Union
03 Mar 2005 12:42:52 GMT
Source: Reuters

BAKU, March 3 (Reuters) – Popular Azerbaijan opposition journalist
Elmar Huseinov was shot dead late on Wednesday at the entrance to his
home. These are some of the most high-profile killings of other
journalists in the former Soviet Union:
*In March 1995, Vladislav Listyev, a popular TV anchorman and
executive with Russia’s Channel 1 television station, shot dead in
Moscow. His killers have never been found.
*In October 1995, Dmitry Kholodov, reporter with Russia’s Moskovsky
Komsomolets paper, blown up in his Moscow office. He had been
investigating alleged defence ministry corruption.
*In Sept 1998, Tajik opposition figure and professional journalist,
Otakhon Latifi, shot dead leaving his home in the capital Dushanbe.
*In September 2000, Ukrainian Internet journalist Georgiy Gongadze
disappeared. His headless body later found in a wood outside Kiev.
Authorities this week said they had arrested his killers.
*In July 2000, Dmitry Zavadsky, cameraman with Russia’s Channel One,
disappeared in Belarus. His body has never been found.
*In July 2001, television journalist Ihor Alexandrov, who reported on
corruption from the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, bludgeoned to
death.
*In July 2001, Georgy Sanai, anchor on Georgia’s Rustavi 2 television
station, shot in the back of the head. Big protests in Tbilisi
followed the killing.
*In December 2002, chairman of the board of Armenian public
television and radio Tigran Naghdalyan shot dead in Yerevan.
*In October 2003, Alexei Sidorov, editor of campaigning Russian
provincial newspaper Togliatti Review, stabbed to death. His
predecessor was killed about 18 months earlier.
*In July 2004, U.S citizen Paul Klebnikov, editor of the Russian
edition of Forbes magazine, shot dead outside his Moscow office.
(Reporting by Reuters bureaux in Moscow, Yerevan, Tbilisi, Baku,
Almaty, Minsk, Kiev)

Turkish Press
March 3 2005
Evans Had To Correct His Statement Again After Using ”genocide” In
His Apology

WASHINGTON – US Ambassador in Yerevan John Evans had to correct his
statement one more time using the expression ”genocide” regarding
the relocation of some Armenians under Ottoman rule during the past
century, despite formal policy of the United States.
Evans, at a meeting he had with the representatives of Armenian
community living in the United States, criticized formal policy of
Washington, affirming that the incidents should be described as
”genocide”.
As a reaction, US State Department posted a statement of apology
signed by Evans, on the website of US’s Yerevan Embassy. In this
apology, Evans said that to use the term of ”genocide” was his
personal position, refuting any change in US policy. Evans also
apologized for causing misunderstandings.
However Evans, in his apology, said, ”there was no change in
Armenian genocide policy of US”, and secretly included the term
”genocide” to the text.
Turkey’s Ambassador in Washington Faruk Logolu reacted to this.
Ambassador Logoglu reminded his interlocutors in the State Department
that the United States did not recognize ”Armenian genocide” noting
the expression in Evans’ apology was unacceptable.
Justifying Turkey’s warning, US State Department made Evans to issue
a ”correction” for the apology.

The Media
Conversation with David Barsamian
ElectronicIraq.net
24 February 2005
Interviewed by Omar Khan, Electronic Iraq
Journalist, author, and lecturer, David Barsamian is perhaps best
known as the founder and director of Alternative Radio, a weekly
one-hour public affairs program that began in 1986 and today reaches
millions of listeners from on top of an alleyway garage in Boulder,
Colorado. Like Dahr’s Dispatches, Alternative Radio is a news medium
sustained solely by the support of individuals.
Omar Khan: You’ve said of the media that “most of the censorship
occurs by omission, not commission.” Can you illustrate this in the
case of US news coverage of Iraq?
David Barsamian: There is a structural relationship between media and
state power. They are closely linked. Who are the media? Not just in
the United States, but around the world, they’re a handful of
corporations that dominate what people see, hear, and read. They have
been able to manufacture consent, particularly in the United States,
for imperialist wars of aggression. That’s exactly what I call Iraq –
an illegal, immoral war. I’ll just give you one example: the New York
Times, this great liberal newspaper, had 70 editorials between
September 11, 2001 and the attack on Iraq, March 20, 2003. In not one
of those editorials was the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Tribunal, or any
aspect of international law ever mentioned. Now, those guys know that
these things exist, and that’s a perfect example of censorship by
omission. And so if you were reading the New York Times over that
period, during the buildup to the war, you would not have had the
sense that the United States was planning on doing something that was
a gross violation of international law, and national law for that
matter.
The reporting on Iraq has been so atrocious: people talk about how the
bar has been lowered in journalism. I don’t think it’s been
lowered. I think it’s disappeared. It’s not visible anymore. The
servility and sycophancy of journalism has reached appalling levels,
and the catastrophe that’s unfolding in Iraq is a direct result of
this. There are huge consequences for not reporting accurately. And,
sadly, it’s the Iraqi people that are paying in huge numbers, and
Americans to a lesser extent.
OK: You’ve called the media “a conveyer belt.” This departs from a
view of such omissions to be the result of delinquency on the part of
media professionals. Your metaphor instead seems to suggest a mode of
production, rather than any kind of conspiracy.
DB: To describe objective reality is not to conjure a conspiracy
theory. “Conspiracy theory” has become a term of derision that is used
against people that engage in analysis of the official story. One way
to dismiss anyone who challenges the official interpretation of events
is to say that you’re a conspiracy theorist. In other words, you’re a
jerk, you’re a moron, you believe in UFOs, aliens, flying saucers. Of
course there are clearly sectors of the military-industrial complex
that benefit from war. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a
fact. We know who they are: Honeywell, General Dynamics, General
Electric, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon. These
are the major military contractors that have raked in hundreds of
millions of dollars in contracts for weapons. They are major weapons
traffickers. They don’t meet on a rollercoaster, on a ferris wheel, or
on a carousel. They meet in offices. They sit down at tables. They
drink coffee, they eat donuts. It’s clear, it’s out in the open.
The United States makes 50% of all the weapons that are being exported
around the world. The US spends more money on the military than the 15
largest countries combined. And that spending is increasing
exponentially. The military budget is approaching half a trillion
dollars. So there’re clearly winners and losers. And if you have
stocks in those corporations I just mentioned, you’re raking it in,
man. It’s a picnic for you.
OK: How has the increase in media concentration affected this?
DB: In Ben Bagdikian’s “Media Monopoly” in 1983, he said there were 50
corporations that control most of the media. Then it became 28, then
23, then 14. Then 10. Then, in his latest book, it’s down to 5. 5
corporations control the media. And by the media, I don’t just mean
TV. I mean Hollywood movies, radio, DVDs, magazines, newspapers,
books, books on tapes, CDs. 5 corporations.
>From 1983 to today, 2005, increase in concentration in the media has
paralleled that of state and corporate power, and also of the
increasing tendency of the United States to become even more
aggressive and militaristic: witness the invasion of Grenada, the
invasion of Panama, the first Gulf War, the bombing of Yugoslavia, the
invasion and ongoing occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
And I am convinced that if Iraq had gone the way the neo-cons
predicted – that they would be greeted with sweets and flowers, and
that the war would be a cakewalk, as they said – they would have
turned their gun sights on Syria and Iran. But right now, because of
the level of resistance in Iraq – and don’t forget about Afghanistan,
as well – they’ve had to slow down.
OK: So what fundamentally distinguishes commercial news from
advertising?
DB: The distinction has become increasingly blurred. There are
instances we know of where the Pentagon generated video news reports
and then gave them to various TV stations. This is spoon-fed
propaganda coming straight from the Pentagon and being broadcast as
news. Yes, there’s supposed to be a difference, but that difference is
increasingly blurred. There’s a dependency relationship between
corporate media journalists and state power. They depend on government
for news, for information, for favors, for all kinds of perks. Thomas
Friedman boasted that he used to play golf with the Secretary of State
James Baker. Brit Hume said he played tennis with Colin Powell. If, on
the other hand, you’re a working journalist, and let’s say, you’re
assigned to the White House – and you ask challenging
questions. Pretty soon, you’re not going to get called on at these
press conferences. Pretty soon when you request a meeting with the
Deputy Secretary of State for Middle East Affairs, your phone calls
aren’t returned. In other words, you’re being blacklisted. Your editor
is flummoxed because he needs stories from people in power – they
depend on people in power for information. That’s the kind of
incestuous relationship, that the dynamic that’s going on there. You
risk your career when you go up against power. I remember Erwin Knoll
used to be the editor of the Progressive Magazine. He died a few years
ago. He told me once that, when he was a reporter in Washington – he
asked Lyndon Johnson a very challenging question. Johnson kind of
brushed him off, and after that, Knoll got the cold shoulder from the
White House.
OK: I hate that.
DB: After that, he was transferred. That’s the way they can control
the game. It’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s the way power
works. Look, if you’re a powerful person and I’m a journalist,
wouldn’t you want me to write flattering things about you –
OK: Definitely
DB: –to praise your accomplishments to a wider, national audience? Of
course you would. But there’s also a structural relationship. The
electronic media is actually licensed by the federal government, by
the Federal Communications Commission. So here’s another area where
there’s this relationship. The airwaves belong to the people of the
United States; they constitute – probably, it’s hard to measure – the
most valuable physical resource in the United States.
You can’t grab the airwaves. You can’t put up your finger right now
and touch them. But the airways are part of the patrimony of the
people of the United States. And what has the FCC done over many
years? It has given away this valuable resource, and we don’t even get
anything for it. They don’t even pay for the right to propagandize-we
pay for the right to receive propaganda. All this despite that the
Federal Communications Commission enabling legislation specifically
says that the airways belong to the people.
OK: What about telecommunications reform in 96-97?
DB: The Clinton Telecommunications Reform of 1996 unleashed a tsunami
of mergers and takeovers. It has produced the greatest concentration
of media in the history of the world. That’s when clear channel went
from a few dozen stations, out of its base in San Antonio, to today
where it’s over 1200 radio stations. It’s become /the/ dominant radio
monopoly. And that was under the liberal Clinton, Gore – and I
remember very specifically, the liberal New York Times editorialized
at the time, when the legislation was enacted, that this legislation
would produce a bonanza for the American public. They’ll get more
variety, they’ll get more diversity. They’re the real winners.
Bruce Springsteen had that song about ten or fifteen years ago, “57
Channels and Nothing on.” And now, if he were rerecording that, he’d
have to put a zero at the end. Now there are 570 channels and nothing
on. There is so little information of value that is available to
American consumers of commercial TV.
OK: Thank God for PBS and NPR.
DB: They were created to be genuine alternatives to commercial
media. But they themselves have become largely commercialized. They
have what is now called “enhanced underwriting.” What does that mean?
That means commercials. They have moved way to the right, in terms of
their programming. PBS, for instance, which I call the Petroleum
Broadcasting Service. So much of its revenue comes Exxon Mobil, and
Chevron-Texaco. NPR has become a mere shadow of its former self. I
mean – and I don’t want to overstate it, since it was never
spectacular – in its early days, it still had some cojones, it still
had some sense of rebelliousness. It’s been largely tamed now. You
hear the commentaries, the discussions on Iraq…it’s not that
different from commercial media. It’s different in a key area of
sophistication and civility. They’re very sophisticated. They’re very
polite. People speak in complete sentences. You’re not interrupted. No
one’s yelling at you. (These are the characteristics of “Hardball,”
and the shout shows of commercial TV.) And so it’s seductive in that
way, particularly to the kind of ruling class. They like that. People
who’ve gone to Ivy League colleges, you know, they like to have to
have their news, sip a glass of port, and listen to some “reasonable
discourse.” I listen, particularly to National Public Radio; their
range of opinion – maybe it’s A to D. Whereas the commercial media,
maybe it’s A to B. That’s not a big difference. They both pick from
the same golden rolodex of pundits and experts from the Washington and
New York think tanks: the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato
Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Georgetown Center for
Strategic Studies, the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
There’s one woman in particular that I listen to, on NPR. She hosts
“Sunday Edition” in the morning, her name is Lianne Hanson. She
constantly has people like Walter Russell Meade, from the Council on
Foreign Relations, or Kenneth Pollack from the Brookings Institution
in D.C. These guests come on, and they make the most outrageous
comments. Those comments simply go unchallenged. And they come back
time and time again. They’re part of the golden rolodex, this list of
these names that circulates. And people like Michael Parenti, Noam
Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and many others who are critical – they don’t
get airtime. But they’re saying the wrong things. They’re not saying
the things that are acceptable; they’re saying things that are outside
the spectrum of legitimate opinion.
Any kid with a basic education can figure this out. If you watch the
programs, or listen to the programs, or you read Newsweek, Time, the
New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, and
the other newspapers and magazines, and whose name appears? How often
does it appear? How are the pundits that are on talk shows on Sunday
morning? Who gets on “Meet the Press”? “Face the Nation”? It’s not
complicated.
OK: All of this talk of expertise sort of reminds me of a reason given
for all sorts of problems that the US military encounters abroad: “bad
intelligence.” This reason is cited across party lines by folks who
know full well the repressive role the CIA and FBI have played
throughout the last century.
DB: And keep in the mind the utter condescension for international law
that this implies. If we have a smarter CIA, we can fight aggressive,
illegal wars more effectively.
OK: Contrast this voice in both commercial and public media with the
one that you’ve been putting on radio stations every week for almost
20 years.
DB: I started Alternative Radio very much with the mission of public
broadcasting in mind – to provide a voice for groups that may
otherwise be unheard. I took on this mission because public
broadcasting had abandoned it. We don’t chase money from corporations
and foundations, so actually have the means to pursue it. We need to
build coalitions with marginalized groups here and in the Third
World. Today, on the radio and in my other projects, I’m trying to
bring more voices from the Third World. Two of the books I’m working
on right now, for example, are with Arundhati Roy and Tariq Ali. I
think it’s important to reach out to other groups who are also
struggling for justice.
OK: On behalf of Dahr Jamail, Abu Talat, and Webmaster Jeff Pflueger,
thank you for your time.
Omar Khan is a writer and editor in Oakland. He is writing regular
analysis, ‘Covering Iraq’, for Dahr Jamail’s website. ‘Covering Iraq’
provides analysis and discussion of US mainstream news in light of
Dahr Jamail’s reports and photographs from Occupied Iraq. Its intent
is to identify unreported news from Iraq and to make a broader
audience aware of events there. ‘Covering Iraq’ encourages your
comments, reactions, and participation.