Author: Khondkarian Raffi

System of a Down
Dan Silver at the Astoria, WC2
The Times
April 6, 2005
SYSTEM OF A DOWN are not your run-of-the-mill metal band. As
head-scratchingly eccentric as they are heart-poundingly extreme, the
Californian-based quartet’s unique sound incorporates seemingly
disparate influences including Scandinavian black metal and the
traditional music of the band members’ Armenian ancestral homeland
into a cohesive – if cacophonous – whole. Their lyrics, meanwhile,
veer wildly from the obliquely personal to the overtly political –
usually within the space of the same song, and sometimes even the
same line.
The band have clearly struck a chord, though; the combined sales of
their first three albums come in just shy of the 10 million mark, and
they’ve already sold out three summer shows at the Brixton Academy.
Either side of those dates are two headlining appearances that
demonstrate the dichotomy at the band’s heart: one will close
Donington’s Download festival and the other Souls 2005, a Los
Angeles charity gig commemorating the 90th anniversary of the
Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire during the First
World War.
They also have two new albums, entitled Mezmerize and Hypnotize, due
to be released, Kill Bill style, six months apart, although only a
couple of compositions received an early airing at this white-hot
warm-up show. Perhaps inevitably they were informed by recent events
in the Middle East – the guitarist Daron Malakian has relatives in
the region – with particular scorn reserved for George W. Bush. BYOB
equated the invasion of Iraq to an apocalyptic party, the singer Serj
Tankian describing the Allied troops “dancing in the desert, blowing
up the sunshine”, before angrily asking, “Why don’t the presidents
fight the war? Why do they always send the poor?”
The soundtrack to that scathing commentary was a testing torrent of
thrashing riffs interspersed with snatches of melody, and therein
lies a problem that has dogged System of a Down from day one. While
they have plenty of worth to say, the message is often missed amid
the maelstrom.
Elsewhere, Roulette saw Tankian and Malakian harmonising exquisitely
over delicately picked folk guitar, Bounce, a hyperactive paean to
pogoing, provoked the desired response from the fans. It all made for
a compelling – if challenging – performance.

PARUYR HAYRIKIAN ASSURES THAT HE WILL BEST OF ALL FULFIL ROLE OF “RA
PRESIDENT OF TRANSITIONAL PERIOD”
YEREVAN, APRIL 5, NOYAN TAPAN. We should transfer the cooperation
of democratic forces to practical level and applying our experience
lead the people to success in the nearest future. Expressing such an
opinion during the April 2 meeting, Paruyr Hayrikian, Chairman of the
National Self-Determination Union, declared that there are serious
preconditions for this: “It remains to achieve unification without
secret political intentions.” Hayrikian again mentioned the idea
of a president of transitional period (elected for 2 years) voiced
still during the first presidential elections. In the opinion of the
chairman of National Self-Determination Union, this role may be best
of all fulfilled by “Paruyr Hayrikian, leader of the organization on
struggle for national liberation, United National Party, who has the
most significant contribution in our modern history.” Hayrikian also
said that the National Self-Determination Union plans to participate
in the arrangement on the occasion of the first anniversary of the
events of early morning of April 13, 2004.

Russian power grid chief pays brief visit to Armenia
Aravot, Yerevan
5 Apr 05
Aravot [Morning] newspaper has said that the head of the Russian UES
[Unified Energy Systems of Russia] joint-stock company, Anatoliy
Chubays, paid a few-hour-long visit to Yerevan last night [4 April].
He met some high-ranking officials of the country.
The head of the Russian UES also met the leader of the New Times Party,
Aram Karapetyan.
When an Aravot correspondent asked what issues were discussed during
the meeting, Aram Karapetyan replied: “No comment.”

ARMENIAN NATIONAL FOOTBALL TEAM COACH RETIRED
05.04.2005 04:03
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Today President of the Football Federation of Armenia
Ruben Hayrapetian dismissed Armenian national team coach French
Bernard Casoni. As PanARMENIAN.Net got informed from own sources,
unsatisfactory work as the Armenian national football team coach
resulted in Bernard Casoni’s retirement. In R. Hayrapetian’s words,
within 10 days he will make public the name of the new instructor of
the Armenian football players and now active talks with candidates
for the position are held. As Ruben Hayrapetian noted, he will keep
attracting foreign specialists as Armenian national team coaches.

Messenger.ge, Georgia
Tuesday, April 5, 2005, #061 (0835)
Judges from Caucasus and Germany meet to to discuss improving courts
By Christina Tashkevich
Georgia’s third international conference of judges has opened
discussions at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel. Organized by the German
Technical Cooperation Association (GTZ) the conference, opened on
Monday, focuses on the effectiveness of the judicial system in the
participant countries.
Judges from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Germany are all
participating in the event.
“The conference will review the level of sentences, the organization of
courts, education and the improvement of the skills level of judges,”
said the head of the GTZ project on Judicial and Legal Reforms in
South Caucasus Zeno Reichenbecher while opening the conference.
German Ambassador to Georgia HE Uwe Schramm welcomed a German
delegation at the conference saying their participation “proves the
readiness for cooperation better than words.”
Modern Georgian law is modeled largely on the German legal system.
The judges from Germany included the head of the supreme court of
Berlin and the head of the court of first instance of Bremen.
The conference was opened by the head of the Supreme Court Kote
Kublashvili.
GTZ has been supporting the South Caucasus countries in reforming
their justice systems since 1993. It helped establish offices in the
Constitutional Court of Azerbaijan and in the ministries of justice
of Georgia and Armenia. German lawyers as well the local specialists
are working in GTZ’s offices.
According to GTZ , its project on Judicial and Legal Reforms in the
South Caucasus aims to promote South Caucasian countries’ cooperation
in the field of legal reforms and in doing so contribute to crisis
management and conflict reduction.
GTZ has two other projects in Georgia – support of legal system
and judicial systems implemented in partnership with the Ministry
of Justice.
One of the conference speakers, the head of Tbilisi district court
Giorgi Gogiashvili, presented a report on the amount of appeals in
Georgia in 2004. The appeal chamber of civil cases in the Tbilisi
district court received more than 3,000 appeals last year and the
court overturned decisions in approximately 500 appeal cases.
The conference ends on Tuesday evening.

Saakashvili Comments on the Armenian President’s Visit
Baku Today
04/04/2005 18:16
In an interview with the Rustavi 2 television network on April 3,
President Saakashvili said that there was nothing surprising in
Armenian President Robert Kocharyan’s unplanned visit to Georgia on
April 1-2.
“When there are some issues that need to be discussed, or even if there
are not any, we can visit each other without any prior notifications
and meet and have a talk. We will always have something to talk about
with our neighbors, including Armenia and Azerbaijan. Because, we
are inter-linked, inter-dependent, there are many mutual problems,
so you would be a fool to reject these contacts,” said Saakashvili.
Saakashvili denied speculations that Robert Kocharyan arrived in
Tbilisi at the request of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Armenia
is an independent state and a well-disposed country towards Georgia,”
Saakashvili said.
This is a partner post from Civil Georgia

Kurds and Disappointment
Source: Turkish Daily News,
04 April 2005
Dogu Ergil
We are a nation that often confuses results with reasons. However,
we are not unique in this flaw, otherwise there would be no social
science or social theory. Yet, when a nation collectively chooses to
deal with results without pondering on reasons, problems mount up,
changes shape and, at times, turn into intractable conflicts. Then
super or superior powers are blamed for the creation of these problems
that have exceeded our ability to contain them. Three such problems
block our path to healthy relations with the rest of the world:
The Cyprus, the Armenian and the Kurdish problems. There are enough
experts to offer meaningful assessments for the first two. Allow me
to address the latter.
When one studies what may be called the “Kurdish problem” with a
historical perspective (from the 1880s through 1940s) there is enough
documentation in the archives in the form of reports by governors,
inspector generals and military commanders, in addition to special
investigators, that show objective reasons that have hardly been
noticed by officials who thought they could rule a vast country like
Turkey from an Ankara through direct orders. Well, they were wrong.
Almost all reports repeat the same point with approximately five-year
intervals written after turmoil and recurring riots in the east.
These reports allude to the poverty of the local people due to
large landlordism (aga-lik) and their dependence on the local
notables (clientelism) that allows neither entrepreneurship nor
individualization that could be the basis of democratic involvement.
The second issue is tribalism that drives a wedge between communities
who are in constant competition over pasture and cultivable land. The
keen competition among tribes has developed a harsh militant attitude
against the “others” that evinces itself in the form of armed conflict
among tribes and riots against the central authority as well as
cultural patterns like blood feuds (vendetta) and honor crimes.
Rather than eliminating these pre-capitalistic and anachronistic
socio-economic formations consonant with its vision of transforming a
traditional society into a modern one, the republican elite found it
more expedient to form alliances with the agas, tribal chieftains
and local sheiks to maintain the rural status quo for the sake
of security and stability. Of course this poor strategy betrayed
its expected purpose. Dispossessed and dissatisfied, local Kurdish
populations followed their leaders in their rebellion against the
government who tried to tighten the reigns of local notables in order
to implement the centralist policies of the new nationalist regime.
All rebellions were crushed brutally.
In the 1960s Kurdish intelligentsia sought their place in the
mainstream leftist movement of Turkey to no avail. Neither the leftist
movement succeeded in creating a more pluralist democracy due to the
lack of popular support (Turkey is a haven of small enterprise and
proprietorship), nor the ruling elite gave it a chance to do so.
The 1971 military coup swept through the country like a bulldozer
and left nothing standing other than the official view and official
organization of the state. Incipient expression of Kurdish identity
was one of the targets of official wrath that wiped out all buds of
democratic organizations. The last organization left standing was
the one that took on the challenge of an armed struggle, ultimate
hardship like living in the mountain caves and wandering from one
country to another looking for opportunities to hit back and hurt.
This illegal armed organization headed by a university dropout, a
peasant boy fashioned after Stalin proved to be the leader of a rural
movement that wanted to get rid of the traditional socio-economic
structure that dwarfed the region as well as the central authority
that neither acknowledged their cultural identity nor communicated
directly with the people in order to improve their lives. The name of
the organization was the Kurdistan Workers Party  (PKK). It carried
on a guerilla type of warfare with militia up to 15,000 at its heyday
between 1984 and 1999 until its military defeat and capture of its
leader Abdullah Ocalan (Apo).
Apo apologized to the people of Turkey for the destruction and lives
lost in the armed struggle he led for a decade and half and declared
his strategy foul. Instead he proposed to work for and to dedicate
his life to the building of a democratic republic instead of the
bureaucratic republic, which he saw as the cause of problems. He
ordered his militia to leave Turkey and wait for his orders in North
Iraq. Since February 1999 Apo has been on an island prison in the
Marmara Sea. He kept the paramilitary wing of the PKK intact to bargain
for his life and to use it as a rump card in return for obtaining
concessions from the government for his organization and his followers.
How representative is Apo and his organization of the Kurds of Turkey,
who are estimated to be approximately 15 million? My own research into
the attitude of the Kurds realized at the height of armed struggle
(1994-1995) revealed that the PKK was a locomotive intended to go to
the last station: independent Kurdistan. Only about 10 percent of Kurds
wanted to go along to the last terminal station with the PKK. The rest
got on and off the train pulled by the PKK at different stations like
cultural rights, self-respect, good governance, liberties, more income,
employment, better healthcare and educational services etc. This
data afforded clues to differentiate the militant/terrorist from the
sympathizer, which the government never acknowledged. For the ruling
elite of Turkey, the Kurdish intransigence was a security matter and
only stringent measures could eradicate it. The complex nature of the
matter was neither understood nor guided policy implementation. This
was indeed an indication of the eclipse of rational politics.
On the Kurdish side, although a small portion of Kurds support the
PKK, and the majority of whom do not vote for political parties
(HEP, DEP, HADEP, DEHAP consecutively) that it has given life to,
this organization has become the symbol of Kurdish defiance to
submission and condemnation to poverty and underdevelopment. Many
families have lost their sons in the course of struggle led by the
PKK and young women identify with it as an instrument of women’s
emancipation because the organization also defied the traditional
authorities and social relations they upheld in the region. Yet the PKK
brought more misery and pain to the Kurdish people in Turkey because
the journey it started as a staunch Marxist-Leninist organization
evolved into Kurdish nationalism that runs counter to the latter and
more reasonable proposal of Apo: A Democratic Republic that would be
the guarantee of pluralism, multiculturalism and good governance.
The inbuilt contradiction in nationalism is that it never ceases
to breed and sharpen other nationalist groups. Just as much as
Turkish nationalism is intent on Turkifying the whole population,
it has created a strong sense of Kurdish nationalism of irredentist
inclinations, Kurdish nationalism, in turn, is reinforcing Turkish
nationalism. A pluralist democracy built on culture of tolerance and
reconciliation finds it very hard to flourish in this environment. It
is no wonder that Apo had to abandon this “democratic republic”
thesis and came up with a surprising revelation last week: a “stateless
democratic confederation.” Don’t you try encyclopedias or theory books;
there is no such thing either in constitutional law or international
relations books It seems that this “people’s leader” as he calls
himself, “claims the honor of declaring this brand new invention”
(Ozgur Politika, March 22, 2005) which is no more than falling
back to his declaration of an independent Kurdistan. However,
carving a Kurdistan out of Turkey does not satisfy him. He wants
similar formations to appear in neighboring Syria, Iraq and Iran as
well. Then, these smaller statehoods will unite as a confederation
that in turn will be a part of a concentric confederation with states
out of which they have emerged. Yet, there will be no statehood over
this agglomerate. How about it?
You may not be speechless with the brilliance of the revelation
or the invention, but the four Kurdish (DEP) former M.P.s who have
suffered through a ten year prison term until recently are waiving
this proposal in their hands as the most democratic offer put forth
by the Republic of Turkey. You expect them to be wiser after ten long
years of contemplation especially after observing that while there
are about eight million voters of Kurdish origin in this country only
2 million vote for a Kurdish (nationalist) party that falls short of
the 10 percent national election threshold. Kurds simply do not see
Kurdish nationalism as a panacea to their problems, they vote for other
parties whom they believe may serve them better in practical life.
What happens in the end is the stark truth that those Kurds who are
still loyal to the PKK and its leader cannot put their weight and
energy behind the reformation and democratization of the system.
By not doing so their expectations of normalization, by which they
can have more rights, less discrimination and more power sharing
is delayed. This delay is perceived as victimization and feeds
into a vicious circle of defiance and the system’s resistance of
accommodating them.
What a pity! The six million Kurds who remain aloof to the PKK inspired
political climate is either unorganized or are intimidated by this
organization. At the same time that lack the encouragement of the
government to create a different political climate, organization and
leadership. Thus, they remain ineffective to check and neutralize the
influence of the PKK and its irrational reflexes. Millions of Kurds
remain unrepresented in the void of organizations and leaders who
would defend their cultural identities as well as their legal rights
just because they are equal citizens but at the same time assure
the government and the public at large that they are loyal citizens
of the country and they do not pose a danger to the unity of the
nation. Thus far Ms. Leyla Zana and her comrades who are preparing
to launch another Kurdish political party by consuming existing DEHAP
and other organizations affiliated with the PKK really do not offer
a fresh alternative which the country is so much in need of. Instead
they follow the instructions of a political leader in prison who
has replaced the traditional tribal system with a political one and
offering irrelevant recipes by relying on an armed guerilla force
that has no place in a democracy. With this eclipse of the mind,
how in the world can Kurds expect to have an honorable and equal
place in a democratic system which they consciously or (more likely)
unconsciously refrain from contributing to its making.
–Boundary_(ID_i3u8fr86A7H640l3UmVnaQ)–

Institute for war and Peace
01-Apr-05
Georgian Resettlement Scheme Blamed for Tensions
In an ethnically mixed part of Georgia, tensions are high as locals blame
new settlers for crime wave.
By Zaza Baazov in Tsalka, southern Georgia (CRS No. 280, 01-Apr-05)
Ethnic issues are playing a part in growing communal frictions in a region
west of the Georgian capital. But both the government and local residents
say the tension is more about crime, poverty and bad policies than real
animosity in this diverse part of the country.
Rising crime has worsened relations between original residents in the Tsalka
district – mostly Armenians and Greeks – and newcomers from other parts of
Georgia.
Feelings run so high that Tbilisi deployed a ten-man unit of crack police in
the village of Avranlo after an inter-communal clash.
The police’s job is to keep the Armenians and Georgians in check, not to
make peace between the communities.
“They haven’t been dispatched here as peacekeepers to reconcile the
Armenians and Ajarians,” said a local resident. “Instead, they are operating
at night – combating criminals, and checking the documents of everyone they
meet on the streets.”
The trouble began when an elderly Greek couple, the Kaloyerovs, were victims
of a violent mugging which left them both in hospital.
The couple’s relatives, who are Armenian, took matters into their own hands
and attacked Ajarian newcomers in Avranlo, beating up about 15 of them and
damaging a local school.
The clash was serious enough for Georgian interior minister Vano
Merabishvili to come to the village himself.
Tsalka district has always been ethnically diverse, with most villages there
inhabited by Armenians, Azerbaijanis and Greeks.
The demographics shifted radically in the Nineties: after Georgia became
independent in 1991, the collapsing economy drove many people to leave the
country. As in other parts of Georgia, many opted for Russia, but the
minorities in this district also emigrated to Armenia and Greece.
By the mid-Nineties, the area received an influx of people resettled from
landslip-prone mountainous areas of Ajaria, in southwest Georgia, and
Svanetia, high in the Caucasus mountains, under a government programme to
offer such vulnerable rural communities a more secure future.
The arrival of the settlers soon created frictions between old and new
residents of Tsalka district. And because the newcomers belonged to the
ethnic majority, the media started talking about inter-ethnic violence.
Svans are closely related to the Georgians, while Ajarians are ethnically
Georgian, differing only in that they have a Muslim rather than Christian
heritage.
Many Armenians here believe the resettlement policy is a deliberate
government attempt at social engineering, to create a more Georgian
population mix.
Not all Armenians agree with this analysis. Razmik Anesyan, from the village
of Ozni, said, ” The people who have described this as an ethnic problem are
journalists who’ve spent one hour here and drawn some odd conclusions.”
Leila Metreveli, Georgia’s deputy minister for refugees and resettlement,
says the assertion that the government has embarked on some kind of ethnic
project is nonsense. “Tsalka district was chosen [for resettlement] because
there’s a lot of abandoned houses and uncultivated land there, not because
of its ethnic composition,” she told IWPR.
Guram Svanidze of the Georgian parliament’s human rights committee, sees
ethnic differences as incidental to the real problem.
“I wouldn’t describe these conflicts as ethnic,” he told IWPR. “They are due
to another reason – social disorder and economic problems. The local,
established population consists of Greeks and Armenians, while the ethnic
Georgian newcomers have not settled in.”
Slavik Kuchukyan, who heads the Armenian community in Tsalka, says no one is
against Georgians coming into the area. “On the contrary, it is actually
better for us. We can learn the Georgian language from contact with them. If
you don’t know Georgian, you won’t be accepted into public service.”
However, language differences have proved a barrier to good relations, since
many young people in the area do not know Georgian, while their counterparts
from Ajaria often cannot speak Russian – a common lingua franca – and
certainly would not understand Armenian.
Many Armenians told IWPR they believed religious differences played a part,
with the Muslim Ajarians at odds with local Armenian and Greek Christian
practices.
Razmik Anesyan says that Ajarians in his village of Ozni “go to pray in a
mosque in an Azerbaijani village several kilometres away, and they can’t
bury the dead in Christian graveyards. It’s rumoured that there have been
acts of vandalism [of cemeteries. It all increases the tension”.
Attempts by the local authorities to build bridges between communities have
often failed to overcome the hostility. A friendly football match between
local lads and migrants in the village of Kizil-Kilisa descended into a
massive fistfight.
Many Armenians and Greeks are conscious that they too were once newcomers –
the two communities began arriving as refugees from Ottoman Turkey two
centuries ago.
Hayk Meltonyan, a local member of the Georgian parliament, says the
longstanding residents just want to see some order imposed to a chaotic
migration process. “The only thing that we want is to stop the mass
resettlement temporarily,” he said. “We need to take a look at the issues,
and provide legal arrangements for the lives of those who have already moved
to Tsalka.”
Other local officials also believe the resettlement programme has been
mismanaged. The scheme to move communities away from mountain areas prone to
landslides and avalanches started up in 1988, when Georgia was still part of
the Soviet Union.
The demand remains high – the ministry for refugees and resettlement
estimates that about 200,000 people in the highlands of Ajaria alone need to
be relocated to lower-risk areas.
But not enough new homes have been built for the settlers, and it is only in
the last six years that the authorities have started buying existing houses.
Impatient settlers have simply moved into unoccupied homes, often in Greek
villages, and tilling the farmland.
As a result, desperate migrants started illegally occupying houses and
farmland, mostly in Greek villages. Others find themselves in a subordinate
position as tenants on land owned by the original residents, and the
situation is worsened by the lack of clearly regulated ownership and
distribution of farming land
There has also been an upsurge in crime, which gets blamed on the newcomers.
“The fact is that both the local population and the migrants are hostages to
the government’s lack of professionalism and concern,” said Tsalka district
administration chief Mikheil Tskitishvili.
According to district police chief Zurab Keshelashvili, “There is zero
criminality among the local population, with the exception of minor brawls.
It is the migrants who are mostly involved in thefts, robberies and
brigandage. Visitors, as they are called, were involved in the two most
recent attacks on Greeks.”
Some villagers draw a distinction between the earlier migrants who have now
established themselves and more recent arrivals, whom they blame for much of
the trouble.
Vardo Yegoyan, from Kizil-Kilisa, recalled that after a couple of difficult
years, original residents and the early wave of settlers became good
neighbours. “The current conflicts have to do with a new group of migrants,
most of whom did not move here as part of the environmental resettlement,”
he said. “Robberies and bandit attacks have become regular occurrences.”
Yegoyan added, “No one would justify beating people or smashing things up,
but when the police stand idly by, the only thing people can do is to
resolve their own problems themselves.”
Police chief Keshelashvili said it had been hard to cope given the few
resources he had before Tbilisi sent down the extra ten-man squad, “Fifteen
policemen with two cars can hardly cope with the crime situation in 42
villages.”
Settlers say they are being unfairly branded as troublemakers because of
offences committed by a small number of criminals.
“We’re peasant farmers. Most of us never even leave our land holdings,” said
an Ajarian settler who gave his name as Jumber, “but the rules round here
are that if one person commits a crime, everyone gets beaten for it.
Property left behind by [emigrating] Greeks is being stolen, and Ajarians
are getting the blame.
“So it’s the robbers who are fomenting trouble, setting people against each
other.”
Zaza Baazov is a freelance journalist in Tbilisi.

CHARLES AZNAVOUR DEMANDS THAT GERMANY AND TURKEY RECOGNIZE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
YEREVAN, MARCH 31. ARMINFO. Turkey must recognize the Armenian
Genocide or it will not be able to live with this burden from
generation to generation, says internationally known singer Charles
Aznavour says in an interview to Die Zeit.
Descendent of the Genocide survivors Aznavour says that sooner or
later Ankara will be forced to recognize the fact of Armenian
massacres in Ottoman Empire adding that only after that Armenia and
Turkey can reconcile.
Aznavour demands that the Genocide be acknowledged by Germany too as
being Turkey’s ally during WWI this country is also responsible for
the massacres. Germany must follow the example of Switzerland and
France who have officially recognized the Armenian Genocide, says
Aznavour.

SwissInfo, Svizzera
Martedì 29 marzo 2005

Svizzera-Turchia: missione delicata
La ministra degli esteri elvetica, Micheline Calmy-Rey, rende visita
alla Turchia. Il viaggio era in programma già tempo fa, ma Ankara lo
aveva fatto cancellare.

Nell’autunno del 2003, la Turchia aveva revocato l’invito alla
ministra elvetica, dopo che un parlamento cantonale aveva
riconosciuto il genocidio degli armeni.
La consigliera federale Micheline Calmy-Rey sarà in visita ufficiale
in Turchia da martedì 29 a giovedì 31 marzo. Ad Ankara, la
responsabile del Dipartimento federale degli affari esteri (DFAE)
sarà accolta dal vicepremier e ministro degli affari esteri Abdullah
Gül. Il programma prevede anche una visita di cortesia ad Ahmet
Necdet Sezer, presidente della Repubblica turca.

Colloqui di lavoro

L’ultima visita ufficiale di lavoro tra la Svizzera e la Turchia a
livello di ministri degli affari esteri si è svolta nel 2001. I
colloqui ufficiali con Gül saranno incentrati sulle relazioni
bilaterali tra la Svizzera e la Turchia.
Stando al consigliere diplomatico di Micheline Calmy-Rey, Roberto
Balzaretti, all’ordine del giorno ci sono argomenti quali i diritti
umani, le minoranze, le relazioni economiche.
Mercoledì, la consigliera federale sarà a Dyarbakir, una cittadina
curda situata nel sudest della Turchia. Sono previsti incontri con i
rappresentanti delle amministrazioni locali e con diverse
organizzazioni non governative. Giovedì, infine, Micheline Calmy-Rey
pronuncerà un discorso presso la Camera di commercio elvetica a
Istanbul.

Il difficile confronto sul genocidio

Non si sa ancora se durante la visita in Turchia, la ministra degli
esteri elvetica affronterà il tema del massacro degli armeni avvenuto
nel 1915. Il consigliere diplomatico di Micheline Calmy-Rey ritiene
che sarà difficile evitare di parlare di un argomento come questo,
che ha creato tensione tra i due paesi. Un precedente viaggio della
consigliera federale nel 2003 era stato annullato a causa del
riconoscimento da parte del parlamento del canton Vaud del genocidio
armeno da parte dell’Impero Ottomano.
La liberale Françoise Saudan, membro della commissione di politica
estera del Consiglio degli stati, invita ad essere prudenti quando si
affronta questo tema con i Turchi. A suo avviso, il genocidio rimarrà
un problema latente fintanto che la Turchia non farà luce sul suo
passato, un po’ come ha fatto la Svizzera riguardo ai fondi ebraici
in giacenza. Ad ogni modo, la Saudan si dice a disagio quando la
Svizzera vuole impartire lezioni all’estero.
Per il momento, la Turchia non accetta che si parli di genocidio per
i fatti avvenuti tra il 1915 e il 1918. Per questo era calato il gelo
sulle relazioni diplomatiche tra i due paesi, quando in Svizzera si
era cominciato a chiedere da più parti (parlamento del canton Vaud,
Consiglio nazionale, parlamento della città di Ginevra) di
riconoscere ufficialmente il «genocidio» degli armeni invece di
parlare solo di «massacri».
La visita di questi giorni dovrebbe aiutare a superare il momento di
crisi. Un primo passo era già stato fatto ad inizio 2004, quando in
occasione del Forum economico mondiale di Davos, l’allora presidente
della Confederazione Joseph Deiss era riuscito a far incontrare
Micheline Calmy-Rey con il primo ministro turco Erdogan.
swissinfo e agenzie