PRESTIGIOUS EVENT AT BRITAIN’S PARLIAMENT
By Edwina Charles
KurdishMedia.com
2/12/2007
Hrant Dink’s Memorial at the House of Commons –
On January 30th 2007, at the House of Commons, the Great old Britain’s
neo-gothic Parliament building, a most prestigious commemoration
was held for Hrant Dink’s untimely death. The event was organised
by Eilian Williams of Armenia Solidarity and supported by the London
Nor Serount Cultural Association.
A select group of people including Lord Avebury, gathered at 1 pm
(London time) for a vigil at Parliament Square, led by the famous
defender of Human Rights from the House of Lords.
The proceedings inside the Commons (committee room 8) opened, with
the reading of a special message sent by Tony Simpson, an Editor
of the Quarterly The Spokesman, from Professor Ken Coates, Chairman
of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, answering a call from his
cherished friend, Professor Khatchatur Pilikian, who took the floor
to pay his tribute to Hrant Dink, with consummate dramatic skill and
poetic panache, holding the audience in spiritual turmoil.
An original poem dedicated to Hrant Dink followed, written and read
by the authoress herself, Ms Seta Cox.
The second main Speaker was Professor Hovhannes I. Pilikian. He
captivated the guests with his biting humour, and scholarly
references. With the cold eye of an historian, Professor Pilikian
made plain that there were harsh lessons to be learnt from what he
saw as the cold blooded political murder of Hrant Dink, his personal
friend. He spoke fondly of the memories of his friend sitting behind
his dingy desk in a dark and dank newspaper-office (of the AGOS Hrant
published) in the European section of Istanbul …Unlike a post-modern
Western news-media Mogul, Hrant hadn’t made a penny out of his popular
newspaper, still on shoe-strings, after a decade of existence!
Respectfully, Pilikian described Hrant as the pure ‘poor’ traditional
intellectual, totally disinterested in sordid money-making; Hrant was
a pioneer of Armenian Turkish reconciliation and it is for this reason
that Pilikian found his assassination an act of impure politics and
sheer stupidity.
Pilikian spoke movingly and passionately, wanting his captive audience
to understand that Hrant’s unlawful death need not be in vain. "There
are four important lessons to be learnt from this" said the Professor
addressing the audience directly.
As Lesson No.1, Professor Pilikian mourned the waste and sheer
stupidity of political assassinations – he drew a parallel with
the ex-Israeli PM Ariel Sharon’s self-declared assassination – with
approval from the American government – of the Palestinian President
Yasser Arafat, who throughout his life had made every possible
concession to … Israel, finally delivering the much derided Oslo
Agreement … securing Israel’s interests for good!
In Lesson No. 2 we learnt of the abuse of the Armenian question
from the moment of its invention by the Western imperialist powers –
Britain, Germany, Tsarist Russia etc. In their need to control their
Muslim populations, they used the stick of the Christianity of the
Armenian people to beat the Ottoman Sultanate with, to plunder its
economy and finally divide up its vast colonial spoils.
Professor Pilikian proved exhaustively that the genocide of the
Armenians was never caused by a religious war, as even the German
Kaiser, Queen Victoria’ s grandson and a prime culprit of the First
World War, had intended. A pamphlet in Arabic published by the
German Embassy in Syria had survived calling on the Muslim Arabs
(the co-religionists of the Ottoman Turks) to declare jihad=Holy War
upon the Armenians. Not only the true Muslims, the Arab peoples of
the Middle East failed the Imperial German efforts, they moreover
ultimately rebelled against them (the Arab Revolution led by
Shariff Hussein), and received the Armenian survivors of the Ottoman
genocide with open arms in the Middle East. Today, Euro Christian
fundamentalists (perhaps led by the Vatican itself) endanger the
safety of the Armenian communities in the Arab countries by cynically
exploiting the "Christian Armenian" card to keep Turkey out of
the European Union, not because it is ruled by a fascist military
political elite, but because it is a … Muslim country! Professor
Pilikian labelled this " the racist pornography of genocidal politics".
Lesson No. 3 consisted of the similitude between the Jewish Holocaust
and the Genocide of the Armenians, which served as the paradigm for
the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Referring to the pioneering work
of the Sociologist Professor Vahakn Dadrian, Professor Pilikian
emphasized the fact that the national archives (in Bonn) of the
German governments is awash with the eye witness reports of the German
imperial functionaries in Istanbul at the time of the genocid, some,
with notes on the margins by the hand of the Kaiser himself!
Two thousand officers of the German imperial army commanded the Ottoman
armies in situ … and later became the Nazi hierarchy, including
Hoss, the Commandant of Auschwitz. The Jewish- American Ambassador in
Istanbul, Morgenthau frequently made the point in his famous Memoires,
that if the German Imperial Government wanted to, could have instantly
stopped the genocide of the Armenians let alone guide its execution.
The audience sat in hushed silence awaiting for the final Lesson No. 4;
the revelation of what Professor Hovhanness Pilikian labelled as
"the grand secret of the British Empire"/ – complex socio-economic
ideological factors that resulted in setting the British imperialist
mindset, secretly provoking genocides, for world-domination.
Similar views are well-established by the work of the American
Professor Noam Chomsky, concerning the attempts at world-domination
by the American political elite.
What was highly original in Professor Pilikian’s own theorizing
was the extraordinary fusion of well-rehearsed historical facts –
the Malthusianism of British politics still active today in the
Thatcherism of the New Labour – blaming the poor for their lot, and
wishing to control their fertility ; The birth of the grotesque Eugenic
movement in Britain, with modern echoes in the US perpetrated by Ku
Klux Clan-type organizations ; He spoke about Social Darwinism which
advocated the Superiority of the Western Christian race – meaning
of course, the Victorian British – entirely grounded on Darwin’s
pseudo-scientific Origin of the Species, the original First Edition
(1859) title of which is nevermore published (thank god!). It reads
(incredibly for modern tastes) – "On the Origin of Species by Means
of Natural Selection or the preservation of favoured Races in the
Struggle for Life". In that use of the conjunctive "or" – Professor
Pilikian pointed out, hangs a genocidal tale … It manifested the
British imperialist Establishment’s ‘secret’ intention to find a
respectable ‘scientific’ theory to justify causing global wars (and
two world wars did follow… in obscene frequency) for ‘the survival
of the fittest’ " Favoured Race" to emerge as a ‘naturally selected’
ruler of the world …
Professor Pilikian’s contention was that the Industrial economic
Revolution created in Britain was evolving (in a Darwinist manner)
into the 19th c British imperialism, with voracious appetites for
global markets – very much the case, he felt, of present so-said
Globalization. Britain let rip the First World War led by Queen
Victoria’s grandson, the German Kaiser who considered himself to be
the better … British! And the trigger for this murderous Darwinian
"laboratory"exercise was the genocide of the Armenians in 1915!
Siegfried Sassoon, an Establishment figure (like Darwin), but an active
war-poet, had "almost" worked this secret out, when he had accused
the British government of deliberately prolonging the first world
war for imperialist greed. As a punishment, the British Establishment
disgraced Sassoon labelling him as mentally ill.
Professor Pilikian concluded his historical analyses with an astounding
conclusion; that these ideas were not in the past, but in fact very
active today in Anglo-American global politics. He referred to British
Prime Minister, Tony Blair’s recent much-trumpeted speech advocating
global warmongering. Mr Blair had successfully destroyed all the
distinctive Socialist traditions of the Labour Party, except one –
its Pacifism. The Prime Minister now wanted to ensure that before
he resigned, he "could genocide" that last Socialist survivor of
Old Labour…
The stunned silence of the distinguished audience was broken by the
woman MP Nia Griffith, fixing Professor Pilikian with a warm stare and
thanking him for all she had learnt today. Turning to the guests, she
added that the stream of information passing through an MP’s office
is unimaginable, and that the process of learning is slow but worth
it, when it is properly organized by constituents as effectively
as today. Ms Griffith herself had put down a Parliamentary Motion
recording Hrant Dink as a campaigner for the Recognition of the
Genocide of the Armenians by Britain.
Among the guests were Lord Rea (with Lord Avebury) very well-known
for his defence of Human Rights issues in the House of Lords;
Dr. Fariudin Hilmi, ex Cabinet Minister of the first government of
Kurdistan in Iraq, who was invited by the Chair Eilian Thomas to pay
his own personal tribute; Paddy Tipping, MP, member of the All-Party
Parliamentary Group on Armenia; David Howard, Liberal Democrat MP;
Martin Short, famous author and documentary film-maker (Inside the
Brotherhood on modern Freemasonry, Crime Inc. on the US Mafia etc.);
Manvel Atamian, an award-winning Armenian poet and Editor of The Voice
of Nor Seroont, the sole London-Armenian bilingual (Armenian/English)
weekly; Vaughan Pilikian, award-winning film-maker, Sanskrittist
Editor and Translator of Clay Sanskrit Library (of a Hundred Volumes)
; Artour Oshakantsi – the renowned Painter from Armenia, regarded as
the Founder of ‘Abstract Naturalism’; Ms Estella Schmid, an excellent
orator, the very well-known London activist and the long-battling
fighter for Kurdish Rights ; the distinguished Turkish human Rights
journalists Koray Duzgoran, his wife Arman, and Mustafa Yasacan,
who paid tribute in the name of progressive Turkish journalists,
and spoke movingly of his personal prediction of the murder a whole
year before it happened …
The guests parted company on an intellectual high … while
congratulating Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian for his radical
insight into the genocidal politics of the British Empire framing
the genocide of the Armenians as the first of its kind, urged him to
write down his speech, and dispatch copies by e-mail … for further
circulation on the world-wide Net.