Author: Vasilian Manouk

MALKHAZ GULASHVILI: TIME WILL SHOW WHETHER RUSSIA WILL HELP AZERBAIJAN RESOLVE THE KARABAKH CONFLICT

Daily Georgian Times
Dec 15 2008
Georgia

In his annual live Q and A session recently broadcast Russian Prime
Minister Vladimir Putin claimed that Russia was ready to help Georgia
restore its territorial integrity but its authorities had spoiled
everything. Azeri news agency 1news Az contacted Malkhaz Gulashvili,
President of The Georgian Times Media Holding, to interview him
concerning this statement. This interview is reprinted below.

Q: In the Talks with Putin programme the Russian Prime Minister said
that the Russian Federation "was ready to help Georgia restore its
territorial integrity but its authorities had spoiled everything." How
sincere do you believe Putin was in this statement?

A: It’s difficult to say, but I can tell you what I think about
Russia. Sooner or later Moscow will have to reconsider its decision
of recognizing the separatist republics [South Ossetia and Abkhazia]
and think of a new formula, together with the Georgian people, for
how this problem can be solved, if it wants to halt the processes
which may lead Russia itself into dismemberment.

Q: Putin added that they had recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia
as the August war had demonstrated it was impossible to restore the
territorial integrity of Georgia. Do you think this was a mistake?

A: I believe there are no impossible things in politics, especially now
Germany and Russia, having once fought a bloody war, are emerging as
allies. No one could have expected that. I believe a common language
can be found in the Caucasus and Russia’s national interest – which
sees Georgia’s NATO membership plans as jeopardizing its security –
should also be taken into account.

I support Russia in this particular aspect. I believe the South
Caucasus and its three countries should become a neutral region. The
Caucasian states should pursue an active policy of neutrality
guaranteed by both Russia, Turkey and Iran and the US, China and
the EU.

I believe Russia and Georgia will still find a common language and
a third party hampers the development of their relations, making
the Georgian Government feel strongly anti-Russian. Russia tried
to hold Georgia responsible for that, not the ones who conduct the
orchestra. We are not the ones who conduct the orchestra, we just
play the music. If Russia is a strong power it should react against
those who conduct the orchestra, not us.

I personally believe that without restoring the territorial integrity
of Georgia we will not achieve much. We have to bring those people
back and pursue a policy free of military rhetoric. It seems to
me that Obama’s rise to the Presidency will give a push to this
process. The August war did not bring anything good to Russia or,
especially, Georgia.

Q: We know you are developing a peace plan which envisions the return
of the IDPs to their homes. You chair the Georgian delegation, while
Maksim Shevchenko, a representative of the Russian Public Council,
heads the Russian side. Has this Commission started to work?

A: Yes, it is already working. We have conducted four sessions. Before
the one in Georgia we had meetings in Baku, Berlin and Vienna. We
also had a TV transmission bridge between Tbilisi and Moscow. Now we
are planning a trip to Moscow to discuss more specifically how the
IDPs can return. We will select two or three villages to start with.

Those who work actively in the Russian Public Commission will act as
guarantors of their security. The Commission includes Olga Kostina,
Marina Riklina, Bishop Theophan and others.

The Georgian Commission also includes well known public figures,
like the publisher and editor of the Svabadnaia Gruzia newspaper Tato
Laskhishvili, political analyst Mamuka Areshidze, famous directors
and actors, Gogi Kavtaradze, a member of the Georgian Academy who is
also an IDP from Sokhumi, Soso Jachvliani the director and actor etc.

We believe that the Commission will work productively, not only on
the return of IDPs but on many other issues. All the contacts between
the Russian and Georgian Governments have been severed and there is
a vacuum. Now society has to fill in this vacuum and unfortunately
the people have not played any role so far.

We have agreed that politicians will not be involved in the Commission,
neither in Georgia nor Russia. The Russian Public Council is an
influential organisation and has contacts with the President and Prime
Minister. So the initiative comes from Russia and we believe it is
poised to improve relations and help the IDPs return home. Rumours
flew that the IDPs would have to take Russian citizenship but this
has been ruled out. They are all citizens of Georgia.

Q: Azerbaijan too has an unresolved conflict. Do you think Russia
will help Azerbaijan settle this issue?

A: I believe that Russia has reevaluated its policy in the Caucasus. I
think Russia can become a guarantor of stability and security not
only in the Caucasus but in the Euroasian space, if it wants to be
a leader, not a ruler which sows fear.

If it wants to become a regional leader, it has to create the
conditions for economic prosperity and mutually beneficial cooperation
in energy. It will become a leader naturally if it does this. But if
it tries to resolve issues by force it will collapse and dismember,
and the status quo will change for the benefit of those countries
which lost the territories. Therefore Russia’s dismemberment will be
more bane than boon. So, it’s up to Russia to make a choice between
becoming a leader or ruler.

It has to look at separatism issues from a different angle. We know
that Karabakh is a part of Azerbaijan. I don’t believe Azerbaijan will
manage to govern this region on its own, but some joint mechanisms
can be developed through economic projects.

Time will show whether Russia will help Azerbaijan resolve its
territorial disputes. Some shifts are taking place in this direction,
but still no outcome is in sight.

Pridon Dochia, translated from the Georgian edition fo The Georgian
Times newspaper 2008.12.15 13:55

EDWARD NALBANDYAN: A LOT IS DONE TO IMPLEMENT PACE RECOMMENDATIONS

Panorama.am
19:01 15/12/2008

In this recent period a lot is done to implement the reforms and
the PACE recommendations of resolutions 1609 and 1620, announced
the Foreign Minister of Armenia Edward Nalbandyan during a press
conference today.

"There are some points on which the authorities still work. This is
not the point to implement reforms in a day or two. I don’t think that
somewhere else so much work could be done in a short period of time,"
mentioned that Minister.

The Foreign Minister said that making reforms is a continuous action
and the authorities do it consciously as our country and people
need them.

Blogger News Network
Dec 13 2008

Azerbaijan Demolishes Priceless Medieval Christian Monuments And
Western Nations Yawn

Posted on December 13th, 2008 by The Stiletto in All News, Archeology
& Antiquities News, California News, History News, Michigan News,
Middle Eastern News, New Jersey News, Religious News, Society and
Culture, The United Nations, World Politics

In describing the Taliban’s destruction of the two colossal Buddhas of
Bamiyan in March 2001, The Wall Street Journal noted:

History has accustomed us to the persecutions that intolerance
exercises on those persons whom it intends to subjugate and to the
destructions inflicted on the monuments that represent their beliefs
and convictions. ¦ The case of Afghanistan is unprecedented.

Sadly, such `cultural genocide’ is by no means unprecedented,
according to architecture and design critic Robert Bevan. In his 2006
book, `The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War’ (Reaktion Books
Ltd.), Bevan makes the case that throughout history, a crime against
humanity has inevitably been followed by the destruction of monuments,
because wiping out all traces that the victims ever existed `is both a
denial of a victor’s deeds and a mark of the incomplete nature of that
victory.’

To cite but one example, Bevan writes that while the Ottoman Turks
destroyed hundreds upon hundreds of churches, monasteries and
monuments during the Armenian Genocide, `Turks have continued to
remove, stone by stone, the evidence of millennia of Armenian
architectural and art history following the mass murder and exile of
the Armenian people.’

In the year before Bevan’s book was published, the medieval Armenian
Christian cemetery of Djulfa (Jugha in Armenian) in the Azerbaijani
exclave of Nakhichevan `vanished.’

For years, Azeris had toppled or vandalized the cemetery’s headstones
in retaliation for the six-year Nagorno-Karabakh War that ended in
1994 with 30,000 people dead, a million others displaced and resulted
in the creation of an independent republic out of a 1,700 square mile
area that Azerbaijan has claimed since the newly-established Soviet
Union redrew the borders between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1921 and
put the regions of Nakhichevan and Nagorno-Karabakh on the Azeri side.

According to several accounts ` and a real-time videotape by observers
on the other side of the Araks river in Iran – in a final paroxysm of
violence over the course of a week beginning December 10, 2005 some
100 Azerbaijani soldiers smashed thousands of headstones to bits with
sledgehammers, throwing the chunks into the Araks. This documentary
(video link) incorporates footage from the videotape.

But these weren’t just any headstones. Known as khachkars (in Armenian
`khatch’ means cross and `kar’ means stone), they were unique
archeological artifacts ` intricately carved monuments between six and
eight feet high that dated back between the 9th to 16th centuries.

A June 2006 article in Archeology magazine notes that `[n]o formal
archaeological studies were ever carried out at the cemetery ¦ and
its full historical significance will never be known,’ and explains
the destruction of the cemetery as `symbolic violence against the dead
¦ used as an expression of modern enmity.’

Global Response Ranges From Indifferent To Ineffective ¦

In letters to members of Congress and the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), University of Chicago
anthropologist Adam T. Smith and a group of archaeologists from six
Western nations called the destruction of the cemetery `a violation of
the memories of ancestors and an assault upon the common cultural
heritage of humanity.’ Armenia’s foreign minister at the time Vartan
Oskanian sent his own letter to UNESCO in December 2005 that called
the destruction `tantamount to ethnic cleansing.’

Reps. Joe Knollenberg (R-MI) and Frank Pallone (D-NJ), co-chairs of
the Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues, condemned the act of
cultural extermination in a letter to the Azerbaijani government,
prompting the Azeri ambassador to the U.S., Hafez Pashayev, to dispute
the videotaped evidence, and asserting that it was impossible to
identify either the cemetery as Armenian or the perpetrators as Azeri
soldiers.

After the Armenian National Committee of America initiated a fax
campaign to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice demanding that our
government condemn this act of `cultural cleansing,’ Rep. Grace
Napolitano (D-CA), a member of the House Committee on International
Relations, followed up with an inquiry about the U.S. position on the
matter to Rice. Rice acknowledged that the State Department was aware
of the `allegations of desecration of cultural monuments’ and
indicated that the U.S. `encouraged Armenia and Azerbaijan to work
with UNESCO to investigate the incident.’ In other words, the official
U.S. position was to shrug and look the other way.

The European Parliament issued a resolution condemning the events at
Jugha in February 2006. In the typically namby-pamby multi-cultural EU
MO, the resolution aimed to offend no one. The `objective’ resolution
condemned Armenia and Azerbaijan for mutual crimes against cultural
heritage – though not one case of destruction of Azeri monuments by
Armenians was cited.)

Left unsaid by the resolution: Christian graves were desecrated. For
Armenians it is a particularly cruel blow as the one million genocide
victims who literally dropped dead in their tracks during the forced
march through the Syrian desert never received Christian rites and
proper burials, their bodies left to be fed upon by wild beasts as a
final act of humiliation by Ottoman Turks.

To this day, the European Parliament has yet to inspect the site to
verify the `allegations’ of its destruction, but in April 2006 a
reporter with the nonprofit, London-based Institute for War and Peace
Reporting (IWPR), attempted to ascertain the facts. Escorted by Azeri
security officers, he was kept away from the cemetery itself but was
close enough to see that there were no monuments or headstones left.

Writing about the IWPR’s findings, The Times of London noted that
`Foreign organisations had been unable to visit the cemetery because
it is in Nakhichevan, a tiny enclave of Azerbaijan cut off by Armenia
and Iran and accessible only by air’ and quoted a spokesman for the
Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry asserting that there had never been an
Armenian cemetery or any Armenian cultural relics in the area visited
by the IWPR.

In order to sustain this fiction, Azerbaijan denied access to the
cemetery to 10 EU Members of Parliament who had traveled to
Nakhichevan to check out IWPR’s report, according to this article
published in The Independent:

Fears that Azerbaijan has systematically destroyed hundreds of
500-year-old Christian artefacts have exploded into a diplomatic row,
after Euro MPs were barred from inspecting an ancient Armenian burial
site. ¦

The works – some of the most important examples of Armenian heritage –
are said to have been smashed with sledgehammers last December as the
site was concreted over. ¦

The president of Icomos, Michael Petzet, said: `Now that all traces of
this highly important historic site seem to have been extinguished all
we can do is mourn the loss and protest against this totally senseless
destruction.’

¦ And Now, To Ignominious

Adding insult to injury, earlier this month Baku, Azerbaijan hosted a
little-noticed two-day conference of Council of Europe culture
ministers to discuss `Intercultural dialogue as the basis for peace
and sustainable development in Europe and its neighboring regions.’ In
his opening remarks to the attendees Azeri president Ilham Aliyev,
astonishingly claimed:

`Azerbaijan has rich history and the cultural monuments here are duly
preserved, and a lot is being done in this direction. The country
pursues independent policy. There is no serious discord in society and
the peoples unite around the idea of modernism and Azerbaijanism.’

The high point of the conference was the signing of the `Baku
Declaration for the Promotion of Intercultural Dialogue’ which is
`firmly based’ on the European Convention on Human Rights ¦ as well
as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Vienna
Declaration and Plan (Programme) of Action, which bound the
participants to:

  affirm cultural diversity between and within countries as a
common heritage of humankind;

  agree to contribute to sustainable economic, social and personal
development, favourable to cultural creativity;

  promote a sustained process of intercultural dialogue, which is
essential for international co`operation, with a view to promoting
Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law;

  reaffirm the important role of cultural policies at national,
regional and local level and their contribution for promoting
intercultural dialogue;

  promote intercultural dialogue, including its religious
dimension, as a process that requires a coherent interplay between
different policy sectors and the full participation of the different
stakeholders ` including public authorities, the media and civil
society.

In all the `dialogue’ about `affirming,’ `promoting’ and
`reaffirming,’ it seems the topic of the destruction of the Jugha
cemetery never came up, and none of the attendees made the impolitic
observation that Azerbaijan had either violated the UNESCO World
Heritage Convention if its soldiers had perpetrated the reprehensible
act, or had violated the Valetta Convention by not protecting the
Armenian khachkars from destruction by `the real perpetrators,
whomever they may be.’

Just as the Armenian community in the U.S. is hopeful that an Obama
Administration will champion the Armenian Genocide Resolution, there
is reason to be optimistic that his foreign policy team will also have
a very different response to the ongoing stonewalling by the Azeris
than Rice’s utter disinterest, which is rooted in the Bush
administration’s pro- Azerbaijani, pro-Turkey foreign policy.

In addition to secretary of state nominee Hillary Clinton ` who led
the US delegation to a 1995 UN conference on women’s rights in Beijing
(`If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let
it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are
human rights, once and for all.’) ` prospective U.N. Ambassador Susan
Rice has a particular interest in genocide and is an advocate of
military action to stop mass killings rather than ineffective
`dialogue’ as slaughters continue apace. And Harvard professor
Samantha Power, author of `A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of
Genocide’ (2002), has been quietly advising Obama behind the scenes,
even after falling on her sword during the campaign after making a
comment about Hillary Clinton that caused a ruckus.

Given that past is prologue, with these women’s combined emphasis on
championing human rights and genocide prevention, it will not be easy
for the Obama administration to ignore or overlook the genocide that
preceeded – and encouraged – all others in the 20th and 21st
centuries, or the ongoing `cultural genocides’ in Azerbaijan and
Turkey against the archeological remains of a once-thriving,
centuries-old Armenian population that is no more.

One of The Stiletto’s favorite poems is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s
`Ozymandias’ ` her mother gave it to her to read and ponder in an
attempt to temper her teenage tendency towards hubris. The Stiletto
had always assumed that the ruination of those vast and trunkless legs
of stone and the shattered visage ` as well as the works of which the
ancient king had boasted in his epitaph – had occurred bit by bit from
centuries of erosion by wind-whipped particles of sand until nothing
remained except the boundless and bare desert for as far as the eye
could see. Contemplating Azerbaijan’s destruction of Jugha’s
irreplaceable khachkars, it now occurs to The Stiletto that Ozymandias
and his monuments could also have been consigned to oblivion by the
vengeful hand of man ` such a deliberate and purposeful obliteration,
that he and his people may as well never have existed in the annals of
human history.

BTW: To learn more about the Jugha cemetery and the Armenian cultural
heritage in Nakhichevan, Azerbaijan, check out the Djulfa Virtual
Memorial and Museum.

Photos and more links at

RUSSIA TRYING TO DISSOCIATE ITSELF FROM KARABAKH CONFLICT

PanARMENIAN.Net
12.12.2008 14:42 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Russia is de facto trying to dissociate itself from
the Nagorno Karabakh conflict and doesn’t want to come to loggerheads
with anyone, a Russian politician said.

"Statements and declarations do not help but Russian presence
foils any attempt to resolve Caucasus conflicts by use of force,"
Viatcheslav Igrunov, Director of the International Institute for
Humanities and Political Studies, member of Russian Duma in 1993-2003,
told a PanARMENIAN.Net reporter.

"Certainly, Russia would like to have the entire South Caucasus
as an outpost. But the fact is that Russia doesn’t have sufficient
influence on Azerbaijan, so the republic’s concerns about possible
shift in the Russian policy are quite understandable," he said.

At the same time, Mr. Igrunov noted that Russia’s positions in the
South Caucasus strengthened after the 5-day August war. "First,
Russia managed to stop NATO expansion eastwards. Second, the Moscow
declaration of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict was signed. Third, there
will be no armed conflict in the Caucasus in the near future. Besides,
the Caucasian mentality seems to have changed. So, I do not see
negative consequences of the August war," he said.

EU SUMMIT TO FOCUS ON EASTERN PARTNERSHIP

PanARMENIAN.Net
11.12.2008 15:09 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The EU leaders are gathering for a summit on December
11 and 12 to discuss the Eastern Partnership plan developed by European
Commission members, Pravda.ru reports.

The Eastern Partnership will supersede and go beyond the EU’s current
European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) with the five countries: Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. The door has also been left
open to a sixth country, Belarus.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said he is convinced
that the Partnership would demonstrate the "power of soft power" and
acknowledged that the conflict in Georgia in August had influenced
the decision to launch the Partnership. He nonetheless insisted that
the proposal should not be seen as an attempt to establish a "sphere
of influence" vis-a-vis Russia. "We don’t need a new Cold War,"
he said. "We need cool heads."

PRESIDENT OF BULGARIA: ARMENIAN-BULGARIAN ECONOMIC COOPERATION HAS GREAT POTENTIAL

ArmInfo
2008-12-11 14:18:00

ArmInfo. The Armenian-Bulgarian economic cooperation has great
potential, President of Bulgaria Gheorgi Pirvanov said today at the
opening ceremony of the Armenian-Bulgarian business-forum in Sophia,
ArmInfo special correspondent reported from Sophia.

‘We have got a wide basis for that, in particular, common historical
past, which is the key idea in the context of potential of the
economic relations development between Bulgaria and Armenia’, – the
president said. He also added it is very much important to establish
the political dialogue at all the levels of executive power, including
the presidents, governments and even local power bodies. ‘This cannot
but affect business. I would like to emphasize that Armenian-Bulgarian
relations have stronger basis than the relations of Bulgaria with
other European states.’, – Bulgarian president said. At the same time
he added that Armenian-Bulgarian economic relations lag behind the
political ones because of several reasons the main of which is bad
transport communication between the two states. The president hopes
that Armenian-Turkish talks will succeed.

STATE BODIES HELPESS AGAINST AREA APPROPRIATION RAID?

A1+
[07:30 pm] 09 December, 2008

The parliament held hearings on "Urbanization and Transportation Issues
in Yerevan" today with the mayor of Yerevan, Ministers of Communication
and Transport, Urbanization and Environmental Protection. Not one of
the ministers had rejected the invitation.

RA Deputy Minister of Urbanization, RA Chief Architect Narek Sargsyan,
chief architect of Yerevan Samvel Danielyan and Deputy Minister of
Communication and Transport David Yeritsyan made their speeches and
answered questions raised by NGOs and interested parties. The speech
made by David Yeritsyan did not correspond to reality and many deputies
paid no attention, yet it was the issue of utmost importance-road
junctions and transportation in Yerevan.

However, deputies listened attentively to Narek Sargsyan and asked
him most of the questions, despite the fact that the city council is
mainly responsible for issues concerning urbanization.

Architect of Yerevan Samvel Danielyan evaded talking about greeneries
or tree-cutting, permission for construction of multi-story buildings
in inappropriate places and preferred to talk about road junctions
and the newly remodeled streets. Meanwhile, there are a number of
issues concerning architecture.

In her speech, organizer of the hearings, ARF deputy Lilit Galstyan
recalled that by the July 15, 2005 decision of the mayor of Yerevan,
the altitude of buildings constructed near Republic Square must
be limited "so that the buildings surrounding the square would not
cast shadows." Galstyan complained about the high-story buildings
constructed near the square and the situation on Mastots street. Even
state structures are helpless against the area appropriation raid. "The
building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs can’t be seen due to the
construction going on near the building."

This and other complaints brought up by other deputies remained
unanswered. Narek Sargsyan is not competent to give answers to the
construction going on in the city today and it wasn’t in the interest
of Samvel Danielyan to recall their questions and give answers.

The allusion made to the construction going on behind the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs referred to Deputy and contractor of the construction
Melik Gasparyan. Galust Sahakyan was present from the Republican
Party because the parliament was going to discuss issues concerning
transportation.

Among participants of the hearings were members of the "Heritage"
party and the ARF

ARMENIA REMEMBERS VICTIMS OF 1988 EARTHQUAKE

The Associated Press
December 7, 2008

GYUMRI, Armenia: Armenians marked the anniversary Sunday of a
devastating 1988 earthquake that left 25,000 people dead — even as
some of the survivors, 20 years later, remain homeless.

President Serge Sarkisian and the head of Armenia’s Orthodox Church,
Karekin II, unveiled a monument to the victims in the northern town
of Gyumri, which was nearly leveled by the magnitude 7.0 quake.

People throughout Armenia, a small Caucasus nation, observed a moment
of silence 11:41 a.m. (0741 GMT)_ the time the quake struck the
then-Soviet republic, leaving tens of thousands injured and homeless.

Critics attribute the high death toll to the poor quality of apartment
buildings and the inefficient response of emergency officials.

The Soviet government had promised to restore the area and
accommodate the homeless within a few years, but in 1991 Armenia
gained independence.

Restoration efforts were also stalled by Armenia’s war with neighboring
Azerbaijan over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Sarkisian promised Sunday to provide housing for 6,000 families who
still live in makeshift huts built shortly after the quake.

OBAMA’S TURKISH PARTNERS
By Mustafa Akyol

Newsweek

Dec 6 2008

A democratic Turkey that has respect in Muslim capitals is exactly
what the West needs.

For years Ankara’s foreign policy was fixated on a few narrow
topics–how to handle the Greeks, the Kurds and Armenians–and Turkish
policymakers seemed unable to solve even these chronic problems, let
alone the problems of others. But these days Turkey has tackled such
regional concerns with a new gusto–making the first real headway
on the Cyprus issue in decades, for instance–while playing a far
larger role in global affairs. In May Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan’s government mediated indirect peace talks between
Syrian and Israeli officials in Istanbul. The talks are now ongoing,
and further meetings have reportedly been scheduled. Erdogan also
recently stepped forward to offer help to U.S. President-elect Barack
Obama to deal with Iran, which Turkey’s prime minister and many others
expect to be Obama’s biggest foreign-policy challenge. On November
11 Erdogan told The New York Times his government was willing to be
the mediator between the new U.S. administration and Tehran. "We are
the only capital that is trusted by both sides," he reiterated later
in Washington. "We are the ideal negotiator."

This surge of interest in becoming something of a global
peacemaker is in part the result of the ongoing process of Turkish
democratization. The nation’s old elite consisted of the more
isolationist Kemalists, the dedicated followers of Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk, who established a republic without democracy in 1923 to
westernize and secularize the nation. For many decades to come,
society remained divided between the dominant Kemalist center and
the more traditional periphery it kept under its thumb. But things
fundamentally changed after the election victories of Erdogan’s
Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002 and 2007. The "other
Turkey" was now out of the periphery and into power, and while it
proved to be more religious than the old elite, it also proved to be
more pro-Western, and more committed to the European Union accession
bid than its growingly xenophobic secular rivals.

This was not simply a convenient tactic, as some have argued. Turkey’s
conservative Muslims had been undergoing a silent reformation since the
1980s, as evidenced by the country’s growing "Islamic bourgeoisie,"
which sees its future in global markets, not Sharia courts. Ideas
about the compatibility of Islam and liberal democracy flourished,
as recently evidenced by headscarved women rallying in the streets
for civil liberties for all.

Meanwhile, Ahmet Davutoglu, an erudite scholar who became Erdogan’s
chief adviser, outlined a new foreign-policy vision. Turkey had
unwisely denied its cultural links with the Middle East for decades,
he argued, but the time had come to turn Turkey into a "soft power"
that exports peace, stability and growth in its region. Hence came the
rapprochement in recent years and months with Greece, Lebanon, Iraq,
Iraqi Kurdistan and most recently Armenia, where President Abdullah
Gul paid an ice-breaking visit in September.

Kemalist Turks dislike this "neo-Ottoman" approach, which prescribes
closer relations with other Muslim nations. When Erdogan greets his
Arab counterparts "in the name of God," they are horrified and argue
that the country’s secular principles are under threat. And to garner
support from Westerners who are concerned about political Islam,
for good reasons, they try to depict the AKP as Taliban in sheep’s
clothing. But, in fact, a democratic Turkey that has respect in Muslim
capitals, that can speak their language and that is willing to use this
leverage for peace and reconciliation is exactly what the West needs.

Some in the West fear this approach as well, taking notice of AKP’s
interests in Islam and the rampant anti-Americanism in Turkey, and
sometimes conflating and confusing the two. Yet that anti-American
wave is a reaction to the Iraq War and its aftermath. By empowering
the Kurds in the north, the post-Saddam era unleashed the deepest
of all Turkish fears: the emergence of a Greater Kurdistan. In other
words, anti-Americanism is almost a derivative of anti-Kurdism, and,
not too surprisingly, is strongest in the nationalist circles, which
include the Kemalists. These groups, represented by the two main
opposition parties, deride the AKP as American puppets and Kurdish
collaborators. A 2007 bestselling book, whose Kemalist author was
covertly financed by the military intelligence, even argues that both
Erdogan and former AKP member President Gul are actually covert Jews
who serve "the elders of Zion" by undermining Ataturk’s republic.

Turkey’s new elites are not covert Jews as some fringe Kemalists
fantasize, of course. But neither are they creeping Islamists as
smarter Kemalists portray. In fact they are Muslim democrats, who
can both take Turkey closer to becoming a true capitalist democracy
and inspire other Muslim nations to follow a similar route. For
sure, they need to combat ugly nationalism inside their borders and
take continued steps toward deepening liberal reforms. With such a
combination of sound domestic leadership and visionary foreign policy,
they would be ideal partners for the Obama administration in its own
effort to reach out to the troublesome actors in the Middle East.

Akyol is a columnist for Istanbul-based Hurriyet Daily News &
Economic Review.

TURKISH FM SAYS AZERI, ARMENIAN SIDES HAS POLITICAL WILL FOR SOLUTION

Dec 5 2008
Turkey

Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan said Friday talks between Turkey
and Armenia as well as Azerbaijan and Armenia were going well.

"I can say that things are going well both in the process between
Azerbaijan and Armenia as well as between Turkey and Armenia and
I hope that the talks would yield the desired result, which is the
total normalization of relations," Babacan told reporters in Helsinki
where he participated the 16th Ministerial Council Meeting of the
Organization for the Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Babacan said the Upper Karabakh problem was a complicated issue with
many levels, but added that both Azeri and Armenian presidents had
the political will to find a solution.

The Turkish foreign minister said the U.S., Russia and France also
extended support for the process between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

"I have told all parts that they should not miss the opportunity for
a solution, and I hope these efforts will yield result to help create
a new atmosphere of peace, stability and security in the Caucasus,"
Babacan said.