Author: Vorskanian Yeghisabet

Paper notes growing number of Azeri asylum-seekers in Europe
Ekho, Baku
7 Dec 04 p 3
A total of 30 per cent of asylum-seekers in Sweden are citizens of
Azerbaijan, the Azerbaijani newspaper Ekho has quoted Swedish sources
as saying. The paper backed up its report by comments from well-known
rights campaigner Eldar Zeynalov who said that most of them are
complaining about persecution by the authorities after participating
in the October 2003 election demonstrations in Baku. The flow of
appeals has really increased, and not only to Sweden, but also to
other European countries, he said. In turn, another campaigner Azar
Allahveranov pointed out that many of these people are often Armenians,
Jews and Russians who used to live in Azerbaijan, moved to other
countries and have now decided to try their luck in Sweden. Therefore,
it is impossible to regard these people as citizens who have lived in
Azerbaijan over the last 10 years, Allahveranov said. The following is
the text of N. Aliyev and R. Orucov report by Azerbaijani newspaper
Ekho on 7 December headlined “Every third refugee in Sweden is
a citizen of Azerbaijan” and subheaded “The state bodies have no
information about that”; subheadings have been inserted editorially:
Azerbaijani asylum-seekers in Sweden
Well-informed sources in Sweden have told Ekho about interesting
statistics for Azerbaijani refugees in that country. As has become
clear, this year Sweden registered a serious influx of people wishing
to receive refugee status. According to Swedish officials, this year
Azerbaijani citizens accounted for 30 per cent of all people seeking
asylum in this Scandinavian country. The source did not cite specific
figures, however, Tahir Haciyev, head of the western Europe sector of
the Azerbaijani state committee for Azerbaijanis living abroad, told
Ekho that “only 585 citizens of Azerbaijan have been granted asylum
and the right of abode in Sweden throughout the period of the country’s
independence”. The official does not have information about any growth
in the number of Azerbaijani citizens seeking asylum in Sweden.
The subject of Azerbaijani refugees is being actively discussed in the
Swedish media as well. The papers are describing the fate of a Rafiq
Sirinov. He failed to find his feet in Sweden and was deported to
Azerbaijan on 21 August this year. According to information received
by the Swedish press, Sirinov was arrested immediately after arriving
in Azerbaijan and died of a heart attack two days later.
Oestgoeta Correspondenten newspaper quoted an Azerbaijani refugee,
a Masuma Mammadova, as saying on 16 October that Rafiq Sirinov was
arrested at the airport and then killed.
On the whole, the refugees living in Sweden maintain that at Baku
airport there is a special department dealing with Azerbaijani citizens
deported from abroad.
Well-known rights campaigner Eldar Zeynalov has information about the
growth in the number of appeals to the Swedish authorities. “Most of
our countrymen complain about persecution by the authorities after
participating in last year’s October events after the presidential
elections [post-elections riots]. The flow of appeals has really
increased, and not only to Sweden, but also to other European
countries, and they are linked exactly with this reason.” According
to Zeynalov, about 800-900 citizens of Azerbaijan sought asylum in
European countries in 2004, which is above the medium limit. “Although
I cannot guarantee that these people have gone to Europe because they
were persecuted in Azerbaijan.”
Changing dynamics
In turn, Azar Allahveranov, head of the migration resource centre,
drew attention to the fact that the reported number of refugees
from Azerbaijan might not even correspond to the real state of
affairs. “Among these people there are often many Armenians who used
to live in Azerbaijan. In all the documents of Sweden’s immigration
services they are listed as refugees from Azerbaijan. Respectively,
there is an impression in Europe that a great number of immigrants
are coming from Azerbaijan.”
The expert said their organization polls the population twice a
year in order to find our the general dynamics of immigration moods
in society. “According to the results of the polls conducted in the
last three or four years, the tendency is falling. There are various
reasons for that. For example, European countries are toughening their
immigration laws and it is becoming more and more difficult to get
refugee status. In the first quarter of 2004, there were slightly
more people wishing to leave the country. Our polls are conducted
among about 200 people, and if such moods were common among about
40-50 of them, their number is much smaller now.”
Experts also found out the causes of the changing dynamics of moods –
“the respondents said that the economy of society is gradually being
reformed, new jobs are being created and there is some political
stability”.
According to Allahveranov, most of those who appeal to the Swedish
authorities under the guise of Azerbaijani citizens are “Armenians,
Jews and, in some cases, Russians who first moved to Russia and other
countries and then decided to try their luck in Sweden. That’s to say,
it is impossible to regard these people as citizens who have lived
in Azerbaijan over the last 10 years.”

Grave and cowardly acts, says papal nuncio
AsiaNews.it, Italy
Dec 7 2004
Baghdad (AsiaNews) – Fernando Filoni, apostolic nuncio in Baghdad
told AsiaNews that today’s attacks against the Bishop’s Palace and
the Armenian Catholic church are “grave and cowardly acts against
defenceless Christian symbols and institutions”.
Mgr Filoni said that the Armenian church “was supposed to be
inaugurated on Christmas day”. The attack against it shows “how little
respect terrorists have for people and holy places”.
The nuncio points out that the Bishop’s Palace in Mosul “had been
receiving threats for some time” and “today became reality”, proof
of the absurdity and premeditation of such acts.
For Mgr Filoni, “the terrorists have no respect for places that are
holy”. In reference to US action in Falluja, they promised “they
would destroy a church for every mosque that was attacked. But all
these acts stem from an exasperated violence that especially strikes
those who are defenceless”.
The nuncio does not believe that there is a link between the escalation
and Advent. For him, these “people just want to do harm”.
As for the future, he says that there is no way “he can predict
if and when other attacks will take place. “These days,” he said,
“things are not really good”. (DS)
–Boundary_(ID_7X8/8c12LyEwetmAp50dcA)–

Azeri opposition paper critical of foreign minister’s Karabakh policy
Yeni Musavat, Baku
7 Dec 04 p 4
Text of Zahid report by Azerbaijani newspaper Yeni Musavat on 7
December headlined “Mammadyarov’s groundless optimism” and “The
minister claims that the Karabakh talks have entered ‘a second stage'”
The traditional annual meeting of OSCE foreign ministers started its
work in Sofia yesterday. Azerbaijan is represented by Foreign Minister
Elmar Mammadyarov at the meeting. According to available information,
the minister is expected to address his foreign counterparts. He
is also planning to meet Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanyan
within the framework of the summit. It is curi ous that although it
was reported earlier that all three co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk
Group would join the meeting, Oskanyan said that only one of them
will come to Sofia.
If this fact is confirmed, this will be another confirmation
that there is really no constructive atmosphere in the Nagornyy
Karabakh talks. Otherwise, the mediators would be happy to join
the discussions. It seems that the mediators are also tired of the
tedious and nonproductive settlement process. The only person that
does not get tired is our foreign minister. Ostensibly, Mammadyarov
is very keen on sitting and chatting with his Armenian friend. He is
so keen that he used the following pithy phrase in connection with
the forthcoming meeting: “The first stage of the negotiations has
ended successfully and we are starting the second stage.”
Of course, there are some questions in this case. First, if the
negotiations are really successful, why did official Baku have to
raise the issue with the UN? On the other hand, what “second stage”
is he talking about? What miracle or progress happened and what did
we achieve in the first stage of the negotiations to make Mammadyarov
say now that “it is time to step into the second stage”? Maybe Mr
Mammadyarov thinks that the public still believes such fairy tales
by Azerbaijani officials? Maybe, he has not lived in the country for
a long time. For this reason, he probably thinks that the regime’s
plan of lies and falsifications has not been fulfilled yet.
And Oskanyan did not share the optimism of his Azerbaijani counterpart,
of course. If this man keeps saying on behalf of his government almost
every week and what’s more with full confidence that “Nagornyy Karabakh
has never been and will never be part of independent Azerbaijan”,
what rapprochement and “already completed first stage” is Mammadyarov
talking about? No-one, apart from the foreign minister himself,
knows for whom and why this stage has come to an end.
According to information received yesterday evening, the ministers
finally met. The meeting is said to have taken place with the OSCE
Minsk Group co-chairs in attendance. The sides discussed the prospects
for solving the Nagornyy Karabakh problem. But as can be seen from
everything, the Karabakh conflict is still not a priority issue
for the OSCE. The subject of Ukraine is in the focus of the OSCE’s
Sofia summit.

HOLY SMOKE
by JOAN ACOCELLA
The New Yorker
Dec 6 2004
What were the Crusades really about?
In its original meaning, a crusade was a Christian holy war, and in
that sense it was a contradiction in terms. Christ’s whole teaching
was to love thy neighbor, not kill him. But, like everyone else,
the early Christians had enemies, whom they needed to fight on
occasion. So the Church fathers went to work on the doctrine, and
by the eleventh century it was agreed that in certain circumstances
God might not only condone war but demand it. Of course, there had
to be an important cause. The Church claimed that it had such a
cause: Jerusalem had fallen into the hands of infidels. Actually,
that had happened more than four hundred years earlier, and in the
ensuing period Christians were generally treated far better in the
holy city than non-Christians were in Europe. But there was another
call to arms: Alexius I Comnenus, the emperor of Byzantium—that is,
of Catholic Europe’s Eastern brother—had asked the Pope for help
against Muslim forces threatening his borders. Again, however, this
was something less than an emergency. Byzantium and Islam did fight,
but no more frequently than most neighboring powers of the time.
According to many modern historians, what triggered the Crusades was
not an external cause but an internal one: a campaign, beginning with
Pope Gregory VII, in the late eleventh century, to reform the Church.
This was a two-pronged effort. One goal was to stamp out immorality:
get the priests to stop marrying, stop selling ecclesiastical offices,
live by their vows. A second, and probably more important, objective
was to strengthen the Papacy. In religion as in politics, Europeans
of that period had little respect for centralized authority. The
Pope’s sovereignty was disputed not just by secular rulers but
within the Church. When Urban II, Gregory’s successor, was elected,
in 1088, it took him six years to get a rival, German candidate out
of the Lateran Palace. (He finally had to bribe him.) This is not
to speak of the fact that the Pope had no control over the Eastern
churches, the dioceses of the Balkan peninsula, Asia Minor, Syria,
and Palestine. Most of these territories were under the jurisdiction
of the Byzantine Empire and hence of the Greek Orthodox Church,
which, to Rome’s abiding fury, had broken with the Western Church
in 1054. The Vatican wanted to get mightier and holier, and Urban II
took on the job.
In 1095, he went on a tour of France, and one afternoon in Clermont he
gave a sermon calling on Christians to journey to the East and reclaim
the Holy Land. “A race absolutely alien to God,” he said, was defiling
Christian altars, raping Christian women, tying Christian men to posts
and using them for archery practice. None of this was true, but it had
the desired effect. First, as the postcolonial theorists would say, it
“otherized” the Muslims. Second, it gave the European nobles a cause
that could distract them from warring with their neighbors—a more
or less daily occupation of knights in that period—and unite them,
for a holy purpose. In the months that followed, at convocations
across Europe, between sixty thousand and a hundred thousand people
came forward and knelt to “take the Cross.”
Thus was launched the crusading movement, whose high tide lasted
for two centuries. As time went on, a “crusade” no longer meant
just a march against the Muslim infidel. Any perceived enemy of
the Church—the Wends, in Germany (pagans); the Cathars, in southern
France (heretics)—could be the target of a crusade. But the Crusades
against Islam were the model, and the two most interesting were
the first (1095-99) and the fourth (1202-04). The First Crusade is
important because, apart from being first, it was successful, at
least in the Church’s terms: the men recruited by Urban did capture
Jerusalem, together with other rich territories in the East, and
in consequence—because those lands had to be defended—they made
the later Crusades to the East necessary. The Fourth Crusade is
famous for the opposite reason. In Christian terms, it was the least
successful—indeed, a scandal. The Crusaders never got to Jerusalem;
instead, they attacked Christian cities, notably Constantinople, the
capital of the Byzantine Empire, which they effectively destroyed.
They thus shifted the center of Christian civilization from East to
West, and permanently altered the history of the world. These two
expeditions are the subject of a pair of recent books, “The First
Crusade: A New History” (Oxford; $35), by Thomas Asbridge, and “The
Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople” (Viking; $25.95),
by Jonathan Phillips. Both authors are young lecturers in medieval
history at the University of London, both have written previous books
on the Crusades, and they think alike.
To the nineteenth century, the Crusades, like most things medieval,
were exotic, heroic, and spiritually fine. In Walter Scott’s “The
Talisman,” in Verdi’s “I Lombardi,” brave knights, their standards
whipping in the wind, ride off to save Christendom from godless people
with scimitars. The popularity of the subject was tied to the movements
for national unity that dominated the period. On the surface of “I
Lombardi,” medieval Lombards are fighting the Saracens; beneath the
surface, nineteenth-century Lombards are fighting the Austrians,
and Verdi is rooting for them. The theme survived well into the
twentieth century. Lloyd George, when he published the speeches he
gave during the First World War, called the book “The Great Crusade”;
Eisenhower’s memoir of the Second World War was entitled “Crusade in
Europe.” Whenever a war needed to be viewed as a sacred enterprise,
the word came up. Shortly after September 11, 2001, George W. Bush
used it to describe his war on terrorism.
Unlike his predecessors, however, President Bush was quickly warned
off that term, which had negative associations for Muslims and,
by this time, for others as well. Between Ike’s war and Bush’s, the
notion of ideological warfare fell into bad odor with intellectuals.
The most important influence here, aside from the Cold War, was
the great English medievalist Steven Runciman, whose three-volume
“History of the Crusades” was published between 1951 and 1954 and
achieved wide popularity. Far from regarding the crusading movement
as a noble endeavor, Runciman described it as “a vast fiasco,”
whose main result was simply to create an undying enmity between
Islamic and Christian peoples. Faith may have inspired the Crusaders,
but not for long, Runciman said: “High ideals were besmirched by
cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow
self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a
long act of intolerance in the name of God.” That sentence is now fifty
years old, but the opinion is still widely held. John Julius Norwich,
in his 1995 “Byzantium: The Decline and Fall,” calls the crusading
movement “one of the blackest chapters in the history of Christendom”
and says that the Fourth Crusade, at least, was basically about loot.
The trend is reversing again, however. Many of today’s young
historians in Britain and America are tired of the economic—and
therefore iconoclastic—analyses that were so popular with their
professors and, perhaps not unaffected by the spectacle of people
in the Middle East blowing themselves up for Allah, are returning
to the study of ideology as the wheel of history. That, in any case,
is what one gathers from recent writings on the Crusades. As Jonathan
Riley-Smith, another expert on the movement, sees it, the disasters
of twentieth-century history so poisoned ideological warfare in the
minds of historians that they could not imagine its being waged even
by people who lived eight centuries earlier. They had to believe
that the Crusaders were after property, pillage. They could not
understand, though the evidence was there, “how intellectually
respectable the Christian theory of positive violence was” to the
medieval mind. Positive violence—what is that? Just what it says:
the idea that killing is virtuous. According to Riley-Smith, a number
of historians now accept this belief as key to the Crusades.
Asbridge and Phillips are of that party. Both are writing for the
general public, and in their view there are two facts about the
Middle Ages that nonspecialist readers must get into their heads. The
first is that violence was a normal fact of medieval life. Seizing
your brother-in-law’s castle, cutting off his nose—these were
unremarkable activities. The second is the pervasive religiosity of
the period—above all, the fear of damnation, especially on the part
of the knights. They were usually the ones committing the violence.
Yet every sermon they heard told them that killing was an abomination
to God; every church portal they gazed up at showed grinning devils
hauling the violent down to Hell. So they were caught in a vise:
the thing they were trained to do was also a thing that was going to
cause them to burn for all eternity. They tried to stave this off.
They went on pilgrimages; they made donations to monasteries. (The
rise of the monastic orders in the Middle Ages owes much to knightly
guilt.) Still, they knew they were living in a state of sin.
Then Urban, in preaching the First Crusade, offered them a solution.
He called upon them to kill, and told them that on this occasion it
was not a sin—indeed, that it would win them remission of past sins.
By the Fourth Crusade, participants were guaranteed absolution of
all confessed transgressions—in other words, a ticket straight to
paradise. The arrangement that Urban offered to the men of the First
Crusade is less clear, but they were promised “eternal rewards.” So
it was two in one: the knights could go on slaughtering people and
get to Heaven thereby. That was “positive violence,” and, according
to Asbridge and Phillips, it was the motor of the Crusades.
Asbridge, in his account of the First Crusade, reminds us of this
point continually. But it is just his bass line, not his theme. His
theme—unavoidable, in the history of that expedition—is disunity. The
First Crusade had no single commander. Basically, the army was made
up of four contingents: the northern French, the southern French,
the Germans and Lotharingians, and the southern-Italian Normans—all
of them, despite their varying origins, called “Franks” by early and
late historians of the Crusades. Each group had a different leader
and spoke a different language; some hated others, by reason of past
conflict. Add to this another contingent, the so-called People’s
Crusade, a rabble got up—independently of Urban, and probably to his
dismay—by a charismatic French monk, Peter the Hermit, and, in the
words of one chronicler, including as many “adulterers, murderers,
thieves, perjurers” as it did pious folk. All the divisions travelled
separately to the East. The People’s Crusade departed first, crossing
Europe on foot and, figuring that the rout of infidels might as
well begin at home, slaughtering a large portion of the Rhineland
Jews as they passed through that territory. They were the first to
reach Constantinople, where Emperor Alexius I took one look at them
and shipped them across the Bosporus, into Asia Minor. Probably to
the relief of their allies as well as their enemies, they were soon
wiped out, almost to a man, by the Turks.
Then the official Crusade reached Constantinople, and began its
dealings with Alexius, who must be counted as another competing leader
of the expedition. He regarded the Crusaders as his tool—Urban had told
him that they were coming to defend his territories—so, after loading
them down with gifts, he extracted promises from the leading knights
that they would turn over to him any captured territory that had once
been part of the Roman Empire, of which, in his view, Byzantium was
the continuation. The knights departed and shortly began betraying
their vows to Alexius, as he began violating his promise to send them
supplies and reinforcements. They captured the important Turkish city
of Nicaea (which they did turn over to Alexius). Then they began
the gruelling march across Asia Minor. When it was over, half the
Crusade’s men, and more than half of its horses, were dead. Whatever
their commitment to “positive violence,” the survivors seem to have
decided that if they were going to suffer this they should get some
material reward. At every subsequent engagement, there were ferocious
disputes over booty. The Crusaders spilled each other’s blood, shook
hands in the morning, and then took out their grievances on the towns
that lay in their path.
Chief among these was Antioch, a great trading city. In order to
conquer Jerusalem, the Franks had to take Antioch first, to cover their
backs, but the city was well supplied and had seemingly impregnable
walls. The siege of Antioch lasted more than seven months, during
which period many men deserted and many others died of hunger. By
the time it was over, the Crusaders were in no mood for mercy. They
killed almost everyone, including the resident Christians. And now
the quarrels over who would get what escalated. Jerusalem was three
days’ march down the road, but it took the Crusaders half a year to
set out on that journey, because two rival knights were fighting over
control of Antioch, and neither would leave the city in the other’s
hands. Finally, a large contingent left for Jerusalem. Outside the
city, they tarried for another month, building war machines and
arguing again over the division of the anticipated spoils. Then
they attacked. According to contemporary accounts, they left not
one Muslim alive. The city’s Jews took refuge in their temple; the
Franks barricaded the exits and set the building on fire. At the end
of the sack, Asbridge writes, the Crusaders “came, still covered in
their enemies’ blood, weighed down with booty, ‘rejoicing and weeping
with excessive gladness to worship at the Sepulchre of our Savior
Jesus.'” (He is quoting an eyewitness.) They had fulfilled their vow.
The story is not just brutal; it is thick with ironies. By the time
the Crusaders got to Jerusalem, the Seljuk Turks, their primary enemy,
had lost the city to the Egyptian Fatimids, who were in diplomatic
negotiations with the Crusaders. So the people from whom the Crusaders
took the city were not their foes but their hoped-for friends. Pope
Urban II never heard of the victory; he died two weeks after it
occurred. Most of the wealth that the soldiers had acquired was spent
on their return passage; many arrived home penniless. The Eastern
Christian sects—the Armenians and Copts and others whose freedom to
worship in the city was one of the Crusade’s foremost stated goals—were
expelled from Jerusalem. Nevertheless, the Franks had established the
Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which, despite various losses (notably
the city of Jerusalem), did not fall for two hundred years.
Asbridge, in keeping with his aim to produce a popular history,
writes with maximum vividness. Some of this gets a little
hokey—there are cliff-hangers galore—but I am grateful that he
stooped to entertain us. Mad Hugh and Basil the Bulgar-Slayer were
fun to read about. Raymond of Toulouse, one of the leading knights,
was reputed to have had an eye plucked out in an earlier conflict,
and to have carried this shrivelled organ in his pocket afterward,
“as testament to his suffering.” Asbridge says that there’s no good
evidence for this story, but he includes it anyway. As long as we’re
on the gallows, he’ll give us some gallows humor. There is also
a note of comedy in the competition among the knights, with their
nasty little treacheries, and with the lesser soldiers running back
and forth between tents to figure out who’s on top—and therefore whom
they should ally themselves with—today.
Asbridge tries to put everything in concrete, practical terms. In
particular, he takes pains to explain the actual warfare, which
in those days had everything to do with walls. Walls—huge, thick
walls—were how a city protected itself, and they were what the
besiegers had to breach. The Franks had ingenious machines—the
petraria, the mangonella—for catapulting rocks over the battlements.
And, when the townspeople retaliated by pouring burning grease and
pitch down on the attackers, there were other machines—the vulpus,
the testudo—to protect them. Walls were also the stage of medieval
warfare’s psychological theatre. The Muslims hung the Christian dead
from the top of the walls and left them there, so that their friends
could watch them rot. In turn, the Christians, when they beheaded their
prisoners, did so in front of the walls, so that the enemy could get
a good look. Then they lobbed the heads over the battlements. In the
face of such tactics, Asbridge has to work hard to remind us of the
holy principles underlying the Crusade.
Asbridge’s problem is small, however, compared with that of Jonathan
Phillips, in his book on the Fourth Crusade. As appalling as the
First Crusade was, the fourth was far worse. The goal, again,
was to recapture Jerusalem, which had been seized by the Turks in
1187. This time, the leaders of the expedition decided that everyone
must go together, by sea. In 1201, a delegation was sent to Europe’s
mightiest seafaring power, Venice, which was ruled at that time by a
bold, crafty man, Doge Enrico Dandolo, who, though he was blind and
probably over ninety years old, was to become the chief policy-maker
of the Fourth Crusade. The delegates told Dandolo what they needed:
enough ships to transport thirty-three thousand five hundred soldiers
and their horses, enough men (it turned out to be thirty thousand,
the equivalent of half the adult population of Venice) to rig and
sail the ships, and enough food to get everyone through the journey.
This was a tall order, and the Doge asked a great price—eighty-five
thousand marks. (According to Phillips, that was twice the annual
income of the kings of France and England.) The Franks swallowed
hard and signed the contract, and the Venetians spent more than a
year preparing the fleet. Then, as agreed, the Crusaders mustered
at Venice, but instead of the thirty-three thousand five hundred
men who were expected—and absolutely needed, for the Doge’s price
was to be met by each of the men paying his own portion—only a third
of that number showed up. True to form, the European knights didn’t
like taking orders. Some preferred to sail, with their forces, from
Marseilles or Genoa. Of those who had come to Venice, the rich dug
into their pockets, but still they could come up with only a little
more than half of what they owed.
What could they do now? To turn back would be a betrayal of their vow,
and of their knightly honor. But what could the Doge do? He thought
about it, and he came up with an idea. On the Dalmatian coast there
was a city, Zara—a rich city, with excellent oak for shipbuilding—that
had recently thrown off Venetian control and gone over to the King
of Hungary. If the Crusade would agree to besiege Zara and restore
it to Venetian rule, the Doge would postpone (not forgive—he drove a
hard bargain) payment of the Franks’ debt. For the Franks, this was
a shocking proposal. Their mission was to make war on infidels. Zara
was a Christian city, and under the spiritual rule not of the Greek
Orthodox Church but of the Pope in Rome. Furthermore, the King
of Hungary had taken the Cross, which meant that his property was
under the protection of the Vatican and could not be legitimately
attacked by anyone. That was part of the deal offered by the Church
to any Crusader.
Nevertheless, the Franks accepted the Doge’s proposal. The Pope
soon got wind of their plans, and as they were camped outside Zara
they received a letter from him forbidding them to lay a hand on the
city and promising excommunication to anyone who did. At this point,
a bitter quarrel broke out among the knights, and a few defected,
with their men. (Indeed, as the fleet left Venice for Zara, the
putative leader of the Crusade, Boniface of Montferrat, found that he
had urgent business to attend to back home in Piedmont. He rejoined
the forces at Zara, but only after the city had been taken.) A core
group of influential knights decided to go ahead, and make it up
to the Pope later. They did not share the contents of the Pontiff’s
letter with the common soldiers; they just led them to the walls of
Zara and conquered the city in short order. The Pope then fired off
a new letter, excommunicating them all.
News of their difficulty spread quickly to the courts of Europe,
and reached Alexius Angelos, the crown prince of Constantinople, who
at that time was living in exile in the West. Seven years earlier,
Alexius’s father, Isaac II, the rightful emperor of Byzantium, had
been deposed by his (Isaac’s) brother, now Alexius III, who threw him
into a dungeon and had his eyes gouged out. Prince Alexius had been
trying for years to induce some European power to help him reclaim
his inheritance. Now, like Dandolo, he saw in the Fourth Crusade’s
troubles an opportunity for himself, and he sent a delegation to
the Crusaders at Zara. Since the Crusade was pledged to the service
of God and justice, the delegates said, its duty, clearly, was to
make a detour to Constantinople and expel the usurper. If they did
so, furthermore, Prince Alexius would pay them two hundred thousand
silver marks, provision the entire army, provide ten thousand men to
go with them to Egypt (this was another of their planned side trips),
and, for as long as he lived, protect Frankish possessions in the
East. Finally, he would place the Greek Orthodox Church under the
rule of Rome. The last item was crucial, the very thing the Crusaders
needed. If they could return proud, schismatic Byzantium to Roman
control, this would quickly solve their problems with the Pope. Also,
the promised two hundred thousand marks would more than pay their
debt to Dandolo. The Doge, who was with them, favored the plan for
other reasons as well. Byzantium had threatened Venetian trade routes;
if it had a ruler who owed his throne to Venice, this would be good
for business. So the offer was accepted. Alexius, who now arrived in
person, was taken on board, and the Crusaders, with stops at various
Byzantine ports to demand the people’s allegiance and make off with
their food supplies, proceeded to Constantinople.
Byzantium at that time was the greatest civilization in Christendom.
In 395, the Roman Empire had been divided in two. The Western
half—that is, Europe—soon fell to the barbarians, while the Eastern
half survived, as the inheritor of the empire and the repository of
its culture. Constantinople, its capital, was ten times larger than any
city in Western Europe. Situated on the Bosporus, smack in the middle
of the trade route between the West and the Orient, it was also far
richer than any European city. It had palaces of gold and marble; its
basilica, Hagia Sophia, dwarfed any European cathedral and, together
with the city’s other churches, housed priceless relics—the Virgin
Mary’s robe, the Crown of Thorns, two heads of John the Baptist. The
city was sophisticated, cosmopolitan, with luxurious habits. Its
ladies, watched over by twenty thousand eunuchs, wore silks and
jewels and white wigs. The Constantinopolitans—or Greeks, as they
were known—regarded the Europeans as grunting tribesmen. The Franks,
in turn, viewed the Greeks as pantywaists, and probably enjoyed
the thought of having to rescue them. Arriving in June of 1203,
they attacked quickly and in one day put Alexius III to flight.
Isaac was brought up from his dungeon and restored to power.
Then a delegation from the Crusade went to Isaac, enthroned among
his nobles, and informed him of the bargain that his son had made
to achieve this result. (Apparently, the agreement included Prince
Alexius’s being made co-emperor, Alexius IV, for that happened soon
afterward.) The court was not happy, nor, after twenty years of
political unrest, was it in a position to meet the terms. But it had
no choice. Oppressive taxes were levied on the people; the silver lamps
of Hagia Sophia were taken down and melted into coin. As this went on,
the Constantinopolitans came to hate the Franks, and, as the payments
started to come late, and then stopped coming at all, the Franks hated
them back. Finally, the Franks threatened war. In response, a flotilla
of “fire ships”—flaming vessels—was sent out one night from the port
of Constantinople to destroy the Venetian ships. (It failed.) Soon
afterward, Isaac and Alexius IV were deposed by a Constantinopolitan
nobleman determined to get rid of the Franks. Isaac died of grief,
probably with some assistance; Alexius was murdered. With the latter
gone, the Franks knew that they would never be paid, and they decided
to take the city instead. They did so in two days.
Even amid the other horrid events of the Crusades, the sack of
Constantinople is notorious. Not only did the Crusaders rape and
massacre; they made a party of it. They hatted out their horses in the
white wigs of the Constantinopolitan ladies. A prostitute straddled the
Patriarch’s throne in Hagia Sophia and sang songs. The Franks gathered
up booty wholesale; what they couldn’t carry, they destroyed. The
Venetians, who had better taste—and who, in keeping with their
still unpaid debt, were allowed two-thirds of the spoils—quietly
crated up the city’s finest treasures. As a result, St. Mark’s
basilica, in Venice, houses one of the world’s foremost collections
of Byzantine art, including the four golden horses that once stood
in Constantinople’s hippodrome and were now installed over St. Mark’s
main portal. As for the territories, Dandolo shrewdly took what he knew
Venice could defend: Crete, Corfu, the ports in the Peloponnese. The
huge power of the Venetian republic during the Renaissance owed
much to those acquisitions. The Franks took the interior, which they
then spent years fighting over with outraged locals and, as usual,
with each other. Baldwin of Flanders, one of the Crusade’s leaders,
was made emperor of Byzantium. He was captured and killed by the King
of Bulgaria within a year. Nor did the Frankish rule of Byzantium
last long. The Greeks retook Constantinople a half-century later, in
1261; in 1453, the city, or what was left of it, fell to the Turks,
who occupy it still. So a great, ancient civilization was destroyed,
in the name of God.
Phillips, even more than Asbridge, is determined to put this story over
to the general public. He is not just vivid; he basically storyboards
the Crusade, beginning with an elaborate flash-forward to the rugged
Baldwin being crowned in Hagia Sophia. (Baldwin changes his woollen
hose for stockings of red samite. He receives in his calloused hands
a ruby the size of an apple. He thinks of his wife, a denizen of
“cold, marshy” Flanders, whom he must now summon to be the empress of
Byzantium.) And that’s just the prologue. These scenes are exciting,
but Phillips’s most substantial achievement is his analysis of the
Realpolitik of the Fourth Crusade, his effort to show these knights
not as greedy cynics, which is what Steven Runciman called them, but as
men impelled by many conflicting motives, among which, like Asbridge,
he places religion very high. At some points, he has trouble with this
argument. For example, in the matter of the knights’ worries about
Zara, he writes that damnation was “the greatest possible concern to
all medieval people.” Clearly not, however, for the knights ignored
the Pope’s threat of excommunication—that is, damnation—and attacked
Zara anyway. It gets a little confusing. Nevertheless, that is often
what people’s decisions are like when their backs are to the wall,
and one has to admire Phillips for trying to juggle so many causes.
We are left with one question about these two books. The insistence
on the Crusaders’ sense of religious duty, as opposed to bloodlust
and greed, comes across as a justification. However much the authors
may historicize it, it starts to sound virtuous. Does this mean that
Asbridge and Phillips think the Crusades were O.K.? Not according to
many of their statements, particularly about the sack of Jerusalem
and of Constantinople. But before those events, as the Franks are
lobbing the stones and mounting the battlements, our chroniclers
are full of admiration for them. Asbridge praises the “inspired
and audacious” tactics of the leaders of the First Crusade, their
“military genius”; Phillips roots for the men of the Fourth Crusade
as, with their boats swaying beneath them and with scores of Greek
bowmen firing at them, they climb their ladders and jump out onto the
walls of Constantinople. Later, the authors bemoan the slaughter,
but what did they think the audacious tactics were for? There is a
curious amorality here. It may be endemic to military history. (What
an exciting battle! Oops, what a lot of dead people!) Still, it
is strange.
And it is even stranger in relation to current events. Asbridge never
mentions the war in Iraq. Phillips gives Al Qaeda a few sentences in
his introduction. But these two books are aimed at the common reader,
and the authors know very well that their customers will be thinking
about what is now happening in the Middle East. (Or Asbridge knows
it. In the American edition of his book, a new subtitle has been
added: “The Roots of Conflict Between Christianity and Islam.”) And
if I have noticed certain resemblances between the Crusades and the
war in Iraq—the exaggeration of the threat, to get the war going;
the enormous financial cost to the attacking country; the mixture
of idealistic and commercial motives; the surprise of finding that
the liberated may not thank you, indeed, may attack you—Asbridge and
Phillips have surely also noted the parallels. They are silent on the
subject, but in the resulting void, and with the constant emphasis
on the religious motive, there is a strong suggestion, intentional
or not, that we should consider whether today, too, there might be
such a thing as positive violence.
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Karabakh authorities to spend more funds on regional development
Mediamax news agency
3 Dec 04
YEREVAN
A session of the Security Council chaired by the president of the
Nagornyy Karabakh Republic [NKR], Arkadiy Gukasyan, discussed on the
evening of 2 December in Stepanakert the results of the telethon held
in the USA to raise funds for the construction of the North-South
highway in the Nagornyy Karabakh Republic. More than 11m dollars were
raised in the telethon.
The NKR president confirmed that the funds raised during the telethon
will be used to complete the construction of the North-South highway,
which is of strategic importance to Nagornyy Karabakh, Mediamax news
agency reports.
Arkadiy Gukasyan instructed the participants in the session to start
preparations for the next telethon. He said that it is necessary to
channel the money raised during the next telethon into the development
of Mardakert District in the north of the NKR, which suffered more
damage from Azerbaijan’s military aggression. Gukasyan said that in
the future, the telethons should be directed at the development of
Sushi and other districts of Nagornyy Karabakh.
Speaking about the political results of his visit to the USA, the NKR
president noted that representatives of the diaspora and Armenian
political parties operating abroad expressed their readiness to lobby
more actively for the position of Nagornyy Karabakh in various
international structures.

Azeris urge Europe’s football body to ban Karabakh FC from Armenian league
Ekho, Baku
1 Dec 04

Text of E. Aliyev’s report by Azerbaijani newspaper Ekho on 1 December
headlined “AFFA protests at the Karabakh team’s participation in the
Armenian championship”
The secretary-general of the Association of Football Federations of
Azerbaijan (AFFA), Fuad Asadov, has sent a letter to the UEFA chief
executive, Lars-Christer Olsson, asking the European body to
investigate the participation of FC Lernain Artsakh from Xankandi
[Stepanakert] in the Armenian championship.
The point is that according to the well-known Russian weekly magazine
Football, the team from the self-styled republic played in the second
division of the Armenian championship this year and won the right to
play in Armenia’s first division next year.
“We have addressed UEFA twice. In our letters, we alerted UEFA to the
fact that FC Lernain Artsakh is playing in the Armenian
championship. This is completely illegal because Nagornyy Karabakh is
an integral part of Azerbaijan and teams from one country cannot take
part in the championship of another. This runs counter to the
principles of UEFA and FIFA,” Fuad Asadov told Ekho.
After AFFA’s letters, UEFA addressed the Armenian football federation
which started denying the information. The secretary-general of the
Armenian federation, Armen Minasyan, whom Fuad Asadov met in
Switzerland, denied the reports as well.
“Minasyan told me: ‘Do you really think that we don’t know the laws of
international football organizations?’ However, the material published
in Football proves that the Armenians lied, which is quite typical of
them. I hope UEFA will look into the issue and ban this team from
playing in the Armenian championship,” he said.

Number of AIDS cases in Armenia reaches 16-year high – agency
Arminfo
30 Nov 04
YEREVAN
Since Armenia registered its first AIDS victim 16 years ago, the
highest number of AIDS cases, 45, was registered this year.
We should note that about a week ago the number of AIDS patients stood
at 42 people. According to the HIV/AIDS prevention centre, the number
of women who have contracted the disease has sharply increased to 13
cases this year. Seven women and one child have died. The first AIDS
fatality was registered in 2001. Most women were not engaged in
prostitution and were not drug addicts but contracted the “curse of
the mankind” thanks to their husbands who, in turn, picked up the
infection in CIS countries, namely, in Russia and Ukraine.
In the course of the last 13 days, the number of people who contracted
the AIDS infection has considerably increased. While 50 cases were
registered as of 17 November, the number has already risen to
60. According to official statistics, there are 304 HIV-positive
cases, including 288 citizens of the republic, while only two weeks
ago the number was 296.
The highest rate of the disease is observed in Yerevan – 143 cases or
49.7 per cent of Armenia’s total. However, specialists from the
HIV/AIDS prevention centre say the official statistics do not reflect
the real situation in the republic because real figures are 10 times
higher. Specialists believe that there are more than 3,000
HIV-positive cases in Armenia.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Le Figaro
29 novembre 2004
« Là où on expose le meilleur de l’homme, montrer le pire »;
Sylvia Bourdon
Vianney AUBERT
Dans moins d’un an, au mois d’octobre 2005, pour commémorer les
soixante ans de la découverte des camps de la mort nazis par les
troupes alliées, la Cité des sciences et de l’industrie exposera Les
Ténèbres de l’humanité du peintre allemand Rolf Maria Koller, une
oeuvre monumentale de 42 tableaux et 48 mètres de long qui voyagera
ensuite dans toute l’Europe. A l’origine de ce projet, Sylvia Bourdon
raconte l’histoire de cette entreprise titanesque.
LE FIGARO. Comment vous est venue l’idée d’organiser une exposition
autour de l’oeuvre monumentale de Rolf Maria Koller ?
Sylvia BOURDON. Par hasard. Une vieille tante allemande m’avait
offert le catalogue de l’oeuvre de Koller. Je l’avais regardé
distraitement, et je n’avais pas eu de vrai choc artistique. Plus
tard, quand j’ai pris conscience de la montée de l’antisémitisme en
France, je me suis dit qu’il fallait faire quelque chose, alors je me
suis souvenu de ce fameux catalogue. Je l’ai cherché fébrilement, et
là quand j’ai commencé à le regarder attentivement, j’ai été submergé
par l’émotion. La grande force de Koller est de peindre la souffrance
sans jamais montrer l’acte qui l’engendre.
Les Ténèbres de l’humanité ont-elle déjà été exposées ?
Une fois, dans une grange spécialement aménagée pour la recevoir près
de Cologne. Depuis, elle est conservée, ironie de l’histoire, dans un
entrepôt du groupe Thyssen, au coeur de la puissance sidérurgique
allemande.
N’est-il pas incongru de la présenter à la Cité des sciences et de
l’industrie à la Villette, espace dédié au progrès scientifique ?
On m’a conseillé d’autres endroits plus propices au recueillement
comme le couvent des Récollets, mais je préférais la Cité des
sciences car c’est un endroit de passage pour la jeunesse et c’est à
elle que je veux m’adresser en priorité. Et puis, je crois que là où
on expose ce que l’homme a fait de mieux, il faut aussi montrer ce
qu’il a fait de pire. Car à travers le génocide juif, je veux
commémorer tous les génocides, ceux du Cambodge, d’Arménie et du
Rwanda. Plus qu’une exposition artistique, c’est un message politique
que je veux faire passer car la « Bête immonde » est toujours là,
prête à ressurgir. Il nous faut reconnaître que nous sommes tous
racistes, xénophobes et intolérants, mais nous devons conserver la
capacité de nous indigner contre nous-mêmes.
Un message que vous voulez porter au-delà des frontières.
Il a fallu dix ans à Koller pour peindre cette oeuvre, il faudra dix
ans pour la montrer. L’inauguration mondiale aura lieu à la Cité des
sciences mais nous voulons la faire voyager dans l’ensemble des pays
du Conseil de l’Europe. Après la France, Les Ténèbres de l’humanité
seront exposées en Allemagne et en Pologne, deux pays qui sont
principalement concernés.
Qu’apporte, selon vous, cette peinture par rapport aux films déjà
diffusés sur la Shoah ?
C’est un complément. Tout ce qui a été montré sous la forme de films
est important, il faut continuer d’ailleurs. En revanche, une oeuvre
d’art excite plus l’imagination qu’une photo ou un film. Le film est
destiné à informer, la peinture est destinée à émouvoir profondément.
Je souhaite mettre en scène cette énorme oeuvre de manière dramatique
afin de remuer les consciences. Je veux que la réaction du public
soit forte, dégoûtée, émue, concernée.
Comment ?
La peinture est dramatique, mais il faut encore l’accentuer. Comme
l’art n’est pas aisément accessible à tout le monde, il faut
l’accompagner par la voix et la musique afin de mettre le spectateur
dans un état où jamais il n’oubliera. Nous sommes dans une société du
spectacle, les gens ne comprennent que cela. Il faut utiliser
décemment les ficelles du spectacle comme savent le faire les
Anglo-Saxons. En France, on préfère accompagner les gens mais moi, je
veux les laisser avoir peur, et avancer dans leur peur.
Un des panneaux de l’oeuvre de Koller, Les Ténèbres de l’humanité.
(DR.)
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Baku, Rome sign joint declaration
Assa-Irada, Azerbaijan
Nov 26 2004
Italian Deputy Foreign Minister Margherita Boniver arrived in
Baku on Thursday as part of her tour of the South Caucasus region.
The Italian diplomat met with President Ilham Aliyev, Prime Minister
Artur Rasizada and Deputy Foreign Minister Khalaf Khalafov. Boniver
and her Azerbaijani counterpart Khalafov discussed issues related to
prospects for cooperation, expanding participation of Italian companies
in Azerbaijan’s energy and non-oil sector, as well as the situation
with the settlement of the Upper Garabagh conflict. In conclusion of
the discussions, the Azerbaijani and Italian deputy foreign ministers
signed a joint declaration on a consultative forum on economic issues.*

Newropeans Magazine, France
Nov 25 2004
Turkey: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow?
– 1st Part –
© Newropeans Magazine
An exhibition currently at the German Historical Museum on the Unter
den Linden in Berlin entitled Myths of the Nations has attracted
considerable attention with its displays of how people from different
nations have formed and reformed the narratives of their experiences
both of WWII and the Holocaust over the past sixty years. The purpose
of the exhibition is to impress upon the visitor that national memory
is really the past continuously re-interpreted through the present.
United Kingdom , our partner
Nowhere have the memories of the war faded. On the contrary, they are
constantly being renewed in ever-changing variations (German
Historical Museum, Berlin, November 2004)
However, experiencing the layered myths of Berlin at an exhibition
would remain incomplete if does not also include a long look in the
mirror. The Germans have accepted the responsibility for untangling
their past. But there is such terrible history elsewhere – the Gulag,
the ‘disappeared’, Cambodia, Rwanda – that needs to be stripped of
congealed myth and denial.
This congealed myth and denial also applies to Turkey and the
massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman regime against Armenians in
Turkey between 1896 and 1923 – including the Armenian Genocide of
1915. And it becomes even more vivid and germane today as Turkey
gears up to enter into negotiations with the EU with a view toward
membership of the European Club some time after 2015 – assuming that
the negotiations proceed on time and without major hitches.
It is therefore understandable that Turkish candidacy to the EU has
opened up discussions regarding Turkish ‘appurtenance’ to this
regional club. My earlier article of 31 August 2004 entitled Dreaming
West, Moving East focused on some of the issues – from geography to
demography to history to human rights – that are part of the present
discourse. A Convention in Brussels organised last month by the
European Armenian Federation also focused, inter alia, on Turkish EU
membership.
So it seems churlish to re-hash those same points today, save to add
that there are serious concerns voiced by Armenians and non-Armenians
alike not so much over the issue of candidacy per se as much as over
the conditions under which Turkey is being admitted into the EU. In
my view, these conditions or criteria are still not being met today.
Happy is he who calls himself a Turk is the slogan that was devised
by Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, as he set about
forging a fresh ‘European’ identity for his people. And for most of
the past eighty years, those principles have been held sacrosanct by
the Turkish authorities that have brooked no criticism and tolerated
no dissent or divergence of opinion.
As the latest edition of the Economist magazine writes, Turkey has
indefatigably tried to consolidate its European character over the
past century. It joined the Council of Europe on 9 August 1949, and
later the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation on 18 February 1952. As
far back as 1963, General Charles de Gaulle and Chancellor Adenauer
had already acknowledged Turkey’s ‘vocation’ to join the European
Community. A Customs Union Treaty was signed on 1 January 1996, and
ever since the EU Council of Ministers’ summits of Helsinki (1999)
and Copenhagen (2002), a tacit understanding was concluded that
negotiations would open between Turkey and the EU in 2005.
But this tacit understanding was also clearly predicated on a number
of ‘pre-conditions’ that Turkey would need to fulfil in the
political, legal and socio-economic spheres prior to negotiations. I
would argue that some of those fundamental criteria have not been met
by Turkey to date. It is quite true that we have witnessed a number
of reforms toward democracy under the present Turkish government.
State-run military courts are in the process of disappearing, the
death penalty has been abolished, the defence of ‘attenuating
circumstances’ in honour killings has been suppressed and the
penalisation of adultery has been abandoned. Also, as the
London-based Minority Rights International qualified in a recent
report, there have been noticeable improvements in the case of
minorities – notably the Kurds.
However, this veneer belies some serious inconsistencies and abuses
of human rights that are either being fudged or side-stepped by the
European Commission in its assessment of Turkey’s readiness toward
negotiations and eventual possible accession. Let me provide simply
one example that underlines a culture of repression still prevalent
within the Turkish establishment that makes sharp distinctions
between reforms on paper and implementation in practice. Three years
ago, the Turkish government set up a panel to take a broad look at
questions of human rights and identity, and to suggest how matters
could be improved on the ground. But the government got more than it
expected: the Board’s report, out last month, included statements
that were considered almost unutterable in Turkey, triggering a sharp
backlash.
Dr Harry Hagopian, Ecumenical, Legal & Political Consultant
Armenian Apostolic Church – London
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