Category: News

Turkish Daily News
24 July 2004
When you don’t care about life…
Let’s not find someone to pin the blame on.
Mehmet Ali Birand
What will happen if we find out that the train driver was going too fast or
the rail tracks were too old.
Nothing.
We will learn more about the responsibilities of the train driver, the
Turkish Railways (TCDD) general manager’s and the transportation minister.
When we find out who is responsible, our job will be done.
Everything will return to the way it has always been.
However, the real problem lies with our respect for human lives. A society
that respects human-beings would act differently.
The train driver would go a different speed.
The general manager or the political chief makes more detailed analysis.
Yes. Such accidents happen all around the world. However, the reasons behind
these accidents are not the differences between developed and undeveloped
nations.
The rail tracks laid in developed countries are different. The education the
train drivers receive are different. Security precautions taken are entirely
different.
In countries like ours, every project starts with: “Let’s just make do for
now and will take care of it later.” Such an attitude results in such
tragedies.
The only victims are those who lose their lives for nothing.
Paris Embassy should be congratulated
Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul should be proud of his team.
Especially the entire personnel of the Embassy in Paris did a great job.
If you permit, let me give my assessment as a correspondent who has been
following such official visits for the last 40 years.
This perfect visit was organized by a team led by Ambassador Uluc Ozulker,
together with the councils in various French cities, public relations and
tourism representatives.
Nothing was out of synch.
In today’s world, everything running smoothly is a very important factor.
Ambassador Ozulker was like a very successful orchestra conductor.
Unfortunately, he will be vacating his post at the end of the year, due to
the procedural practice in the Foreign Ministry.
Ozulker not only excelled in the visit’s organization, passed the test in
every matter including, the briefing of the press and explaining facts to
the French. Moreover, he is such an experienced ambassador that he needs to
prove himself to nobody.
I am sure no one from the Foreign Ministry called him to tell him: “Thank
you for all your help. You did a great job.” Especially those among the
200-strong Turkish delegation, including the prime minister, will not call
him.
I would at last like to thank the team in Paris, lead by the ambassador, and
the young people at the Prime Ministry Press Bureau for helping us for all
my colleagues.
Turkey made up for the helicopter fiasco
I don’t know if you remember, but in 2000-2001, Turkey, all of a sudden,
forced France out of its helicopter tender. Until then Turkey had made many
promises to French President Jacques Chirac on the matter, and had told them
that France had a good chance on winning it. For Chirac, this was a matter
of honor. He was preparing to show how his policy of having closer links to
Turkey would pay of.
And then one day, before notifying Chirac or explaining the reasoning behind
it, France was removed from among the countries that had reached the last
stage of the tender.
Paris was shocked.
Without any explanations, it received a slap in the face. I don’t exactly
remember, but Ankara had got angry because of a law on Armenians or another
matter, and had decided to punish the French. However, that decision
resulted in a complete severing of all the bonds between Chirac and Ankara.
Since then, the French president is a little lukewarm towards Turkey. He had
lost his trust in those governing Turkey.
He openly said he had lost his trust.
This visit made amends for this gaffe that was made four years ago. I am not
talking about not giving France the helicopter tender. You decide on who you
are going to give the tender, depending on your political and economic
interests. However, if you are a little polite and clever, you will notify
your friends beforehand about your decision and try not to disappoint them
too much.
However, I don’t know why, we like to smash things.
Why is Gurel angry with the Ecevits?
Once upon a time, he couldn’t say enough about the Ecevits. When he was
chosen by the Ecevits as the foreign minister, he was seen as Democratic
Left Party (DSP) leader Bulent Ecevit’s right hand man.
Sukru Sina Gurel is very angry with the Ecevit’s these days. Those who used
to stand to attention when Bulent Ecevit’s wife DSP deputy-leader Rahsan
Ecevit entered a room are now up in arms.
The reason is simple.
Ecevit’s chose a different candidate for leadership for the DSP to replace
them. Former pro-Ecevit supporters are very angry with the Ecevit’s for not
chosing them as their candidate. Gurel is saying that Rahsan Ecevit can
remain as the head of the party organization, adding that if he is elected,
he would remove her from that post.
We will never understand what goes on in politics. I guess the Ecevits chose
the best possible candidate to replace them.
NOTE: This article appears in daily Posta and, on the same day, in daily
Hurriyet’s all foreign publications, on Hurriyet’s internet site
(), on Milliyet’s internet site ()
and, after being translated by the Turkish Daily News staff, in both that
newspaper and on the Turkish Daily News internet site
().

Tehran Times
July 24 2004
MagMart Amu Darya
License Holder: Center for Study of Central Asia and Caucasus
The new issue of the English Iranian journal of Central Asian studies
`Amu Darya’ recently hit the Iranian newsstands.
In this issue, you may find articles on security arrangements in
southern Caucasus, the Karabakh conflict: legacy of ethnic challenges
in the Soviet era, the GUUAM Alliance: formation, challenges, future
prospect and an article which surveys the importance of Caspian Sea
for the countries have interest in the region.
This edition also releases a full report on the 10th International
Conference on Central Asia and the Caucasus Developments, which was
held January 20 until January 21, 2003 at the Iranian Institute for
Political and International Studies in Tehran. Foreign Policy License
Holder: Foreign Ministry of the Islamic Republic of Iran
The contents of the new edition of the Iranian journal are as
follows: Identity of Government and Foreign Policy, Comparative Study
of Political Development in Iran and Turkey, Persian Gulf and Middle
East as the Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zones, UN Intervention
in the Post-Cold War Era: Threat to the Sovereignty of States, the
Interaction of International Environment and Development Mechanism
with National Priorities, and the Ambiguities of Security Council
Resolution 1422 (2002).
The journal also has reports and analyses on international law and
Muslim world, appraisal of the U.S. foreign policy in global
strategy, achievements and teachings of contemporary China, and
Libya’s disarmament and the role of UN Security Council. The journal
brings reviews on the books of Stephanie Cronin’s `The Making of
Modern Iran: State and Society under Reza Shah,’ Valery Fedorov’s
`Putin’s Era’ John Eric Lynne’s `Politics and Society in Western
Europe,’ and Ian Branley’s `International Law in Final Years of the
20th Century.’

PanArmenian News
July 23 2004
ARMENIAN MILITARY INSTITUTE CADET TO ENTER GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS
BOOK
Zarzand Mkhitarian, cadet of the Military Institute of the Armenian
Defense Ministry will enter the Guinness Book of World Records for
performing a peculiar exercise called “lift with rotation around the
horizontal bar”. As reported by the press service of the RA Defense
Ministry, the registration ceremony will take place in the Military
Institute on July 27.

The Economist
July 24, 2004
U.S. Edition
King Mikhail the good?;
Nationalism
The persistence of nationalism in ex-communist hot spots is a puzzle
Georgia’s leader may succeed as a nationalist who believes in law
CAN there be such a thing as a good nationalist, in regions where
violent chauvinism – asserting the interests of one nation, ethnic
group or faith at the expense of all others – has already taken a
terrible toll in blood? In the wilder bits of the ex-communist world,
that is something more than just a brain-teaser for political
scientists.
Mikhail Saakashvili, the charismatic young president of Georgia, is
trying to persuade the world that this question has an affirmative
answer (see page 33). Since taking power half a year ago, he has
tugged hard on his people’s patriotic heart-strings. He has devised
new state symbols and displayed them prominently; and he can deliver
thumping nationalist speeches when the occasion demands.
But in fairness, Mr Saakashvili has also been quite careful to tell
the world, and his compatriots, what his gestures do and do not mean.
He does want to extend the writ of Georgian government to the whole
of its territory, including the breakaway South Ossetia region; but
he has pledged to deal generously and inclusively with non-Georgian
minorities, amounting to at least 30% of the population. That is in
healthy contrast to the early years of Georgian independence.
Boris Tadic, the new Serbian president, is another pro-western
politician who knows how to beat the patriotic drum. At his
inauguration this month, he caused a sensation by playing Serbia’s
monarchist anthem, “God of Justice” – not heard in official places for
many decades – and pointedly kissing the Serbian flag. Nobody suspects
Mr Tadic of being an ultra-nationalist, but he clearly feels he must
assuage his compatriots who do lean in that direction.
For the western institutions that have spent billions of dollars
trying to exorcise the demon of chauvinism from the Balkans and the
Caucasus – and to promote the idea that nations and ethnic groups must
co-operate to solve their post-communist problems – the persistence of
nationalism is a puzzle and a disappointment. Bosnia’s protectors are
frustrated by the fact that after eight years of foreign tutelage,
politics there is still dominated by parties which assert the
interests of one ethnic group – Muslim, Serb or Croat – rather than the
whole country. Meanwhile, Kosovo’s protectors would rejoice if
Albanians and Serbs merely stopped killing each other; a wave of
anti-Serb violence in March was a severe setback. In the Caucasus,
years of international mediation have brought the conflict between
Armenians and Azeris no closer to a solution, and there is a powerful
lobby in Azerbaijan which favours going back to war.
Given that nationalism shows no sign of disappearing, can there be a
meaningful distinction between the “good” and “bad” varieties? Here
is one possible litmus test: is nationalism being used to promote the
rule of law, or to defy it?
At its mildest, nationalism can be a galvanising force, and perhaps a
necessary device, for any leader who is struggling to construct a
law-based state in places where government of any kind has all but
collapsed. That is what Mr Saakashvili says he wants: if he can turn
his ramshackle polity into a minimally efficient machine for
collecting tax, providing services and guarding its citizens, then it
should automatically earn people’s loyalty – whatever their ethnic
background.
At the other extreme, nationalism has often been a cover for exactly
the opposite: policies which stir up hatred both inside and outside a
country’s borders, and use the resulting conflict as a smokescreen
for behaviour which mocks the rule of law – stealing from the public
purse, robbing the victims of war and maintaining irregular armies
which live off larceny. In the chaos, and above all uncertainty over
property rights, which followed the collapse of communism, the
anti-law variety of nationalism was an irresistible temptation for
politicians who wanted to play on people’s fears and grab a share of
the loot. Serbia’s strongman, Slobodan Milosevic, was perhaps the
prime exponent of this tactic – but by no means the only one. From the
Adriatic to Central Asia, the politics of the ex-communist world have
been marred by warlords who steal or smuggle while exercising
authority in the name of tribal, national or ethnic sentiment.
If Mr Saakashvili can prove that his nationalism is of the
law-promoting, rather than the law-scoffing kind, then he will have
performed a valuable service – not just for his own country, but for
all the hard-pressed policymakers who are wondering how to put
conflict zones together again.

examiner.net
July 24, 2004
Out of the cold
Armine Burutyan Fong overcomes Soviet opression to become top coach
By Bill Althaus
The Examiner
Jeff Stead/the Examiner
Armine Burutyan Fong works with young gymnasts at Great American
Gymnastics Express in Blue Springs. Burutyan Fong was a top gymnast in
Armenia as a child but now shows what she has learned to area gymnasts.
The tiny girl stands in two feet of snow, blowing into her hands in an
unsuccessful attempt to keep them warm. She has a school backpack slung over
her right shoulder and a gym bag hanging over the left.
It is hours before the sun will rise in the small community in Armenia, yet
she peers down the roadside at 5:30 a.m., hoping to catch a glimpse of the
bus that will take her to her gym.
This is a daily ritual for 9-year-old Armine Barutyan, who will one day
become one of the most celebrated gymnasts in her country.
She didn’t view the daily trip by bus as a hardship. Her father worked three
jobs, yet there wasn’t enough money in the budget to buy gasoline to drive
his daughter to her early-morning workouts.
Jeff Stead/the Examiner
Burutyan Fong works with Courtney McCool as she warms up for practice.
McCool and Terin Humphrey both train at GAGE and have both qualified for the
U.S. Women’s Gymnastics team that will compete in the Olympics next month in
Athens, Greece.
For six years, in sub-zero temperatures, driving rain or mind-numbing heat,
Barutyan would never miss the opportunity to fine tune her skills – skills
that were light years ahead of their time.
It was the early 1980s, and this petite dynamo was executing a triple back
off the bars or a double layout off the beam.
Judges were so stunned by the moves, they didn’t know how to judge the
Armenian gymnast who seemed destined for Olympic gold.
But her dreams were dashed because of the type of political skullduggery
that most of us only experience in a big-budget summertime movie.
While Barutyan was about to burst on the international scene, the former
Soviet Union was hand picking representatives for its gymnastics team.
The Soviets wanted a pure team, and that did not include anyone from
Armenia.
“They asked me to move to the Soviet Union,” she said, “but I did not want
to leave my family.”
Officials even asked her to change her last name from Barutyan to Barutyana,
thinking that the extra vowel at the end of her name would make the world
think she was the pride of the USSR.
Jeff Stead/the Examiner
Armine Burutyan Fong talks with young gymnasts at GAGE in Blue Springs.
She refused – and soon disappeared from the international gymnastics scene.
Eventually, she and her family moved to the United States where she became a
gymnastics coach in Los Angeles.
“It’s a tragedy,” said Al Fong, the owner and coach at Great American
Gymnastic Express in Blue Springs. “Armine could have been one of the most
respected and honored gymnasts in the world – but she was never given the
chance to perform, to show what she could do.”
Fong speaks with great passion.
He loves his sport, and will take two gymnasts to the Summer Games in
Athens – Courtney McCool and Terin Humphrey.
He will also be joined by Armine Barutyan Fong, his wife of nine years, who
along with her husband earned Coach of the Year honors by USGA (United
States of America Gymnastics).
Barutyan Fong’s story is one of great disappointment, tempered by courage
and a fiery determination that could not be extinguished by the Soviet
Union.
“Al talks about revenge, and how sweet it must be to be going to the
Olympics,” Armine said, sitting in a small office at the Great American
Gymnastic Express.
“But I don’t see it as revenge. I see it as a great opportunity to show the
world what we have accomplished here at GAGE.”
The Fongs have no children of their own, but Armine is quick to point out
that, “Every girl at GAGE is like our child. We love them all.”
Jeff Stead/the Examiner
Armine lines up a group of young gymnasts during practice at GAGE.
But oftentimes, that affection is tough love.
“I came to the gym a week after Al and Armine were married,” said Humphrey
of Bates City, Mo.
“I kind of feel like her kid. I know she loves me, but I know how strict she
can be. What Armine says, goes. And that’s all right with me because she’s
always right. She knows what she’s talking about.”
Lee’s Summit resident McCool, who has been at GAGE the past six years,
agrees.
“We know that Armine could have been in the Olympics, she was good enough,
but she never made it because of politics,” McCool said. “I think you pay
closer attention to someone who has experienced what you’re going through.
“There are days you don’t feel like spending eight hours in the gym, but you
look over at Armine and see how much it all means to her, and you get back
to work. She’s a real inspiration to all of us.”
Humphrey’s family moved from Albany, Mo., to Bates City to be close to the
Fongs’ Blue Springs club.
McCool’s family could select any club in the metro area to train and they
selected GAGE.
“We wanted to work with Al and Armine,” Terin said. “I mean, I was too young
to really know what was happening when I first came, but I’m sure glad my
folks made the decision to have me work and train here.”
While McCool and Humphrey have put in countless thousands of hours to
realize their dreams of going to the Olympics, Armine and Al Fong have
dedicated their lives to the young ladies who train there.
“We spend a lot of time here,” Armine said, chuckling. “But we’re not
complaining. This is all so important to us. We want to build something
special, and I think we are.”
When asked about the hardships she had to endure, before leaving Armenia
with her family, Armine sighs and looks wistfully into the gym.
“Even though my father worked very, very hard at three jobs, we never had
much money,” she said. “Winters in Armenia are very cold, but I walked to
that bus stop every morning at 5:30 a.m.
“We’d get to the gym, and it wasn’t heated. We would keep our coats and
gloves on until it time to perform. We would do our routines, then put our
coats back on so we could get warm.
“Looking back on it, it was very difficult. But I was just a child. I
thought it was something that everyone went through and experienced.”
That’s why a recent conversation with GAGE parent didn’t sit very well with
Barutyan Fong.
“A mother said she didn’t want to drive 45 minutes to our gym,” Armine said.
“I thought, ‘I woke up at 5 a.m. I walked to the bus stop, made two changes
along the way and worked out at a gym with no heat.’
“Uh, I didn’t have much sympathy for that mother. She was talking to the
wrong person.”
Although she missed out on the glory and prestige that comes from being an
Olympic athlete, Armine can revel in the fact that she has been honored as
the top coach in the country.
She has no peers when it comes to choreography and she is about to live her
dream.
“We’re going to the Olympics,” she said, “we’re going to the Olympics.”

Aberdeen Press and Journal
July 23, 2004
Anne needs help to free musical spirit of azerbaijani youngsters
Impoverished and deprived children whose musical talents have lain
undiscovered in Azerbaijan schools are being given the chance to
shine. Ballater woman Anne Jack, 48, a music teacher and honorary
member of the London College of Music, has been teaching about 50
children at schools in the city of Sumgayit.
After moving to Azerbaijan because of her husband Bill’s work, Mrs
Jack found many children were taught traditional instruments by their
fathers but had no knowledge of theory.
“I found it very, very interesting, because these children are
extremely talented,” she said. “They are beautiful players, but they
don’t have a clue what they’re doing – it’s just natural talent. I
think their lives have been so repressed they haven’t had time for
anything else.” The country regained its independence after the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and, for the next three years,
was in armed conflict with Armenia.
Unemployment in Sumgayit is about 80%, while corruption is rife and
the promise of widespread wealth from Azerbaijan’s petroleum
resources remains largely unfulfilled.
Classrooms have no pianos or keyboards and musical instruments are
not readily available.
Mrs Jack started off by taking 100 recorders and moved on to the
guitar and woodwind instruments.
She is now hoping to receive donations of instruments “in any form”
to further the children’s education, but would particularly like a
drum kit.
Music even helps pupils with their arithmetic, Mrs Jack says, as they
count the beats.
Anyone wishing to donate an instrument or money should e-mail Mrs
Jack at annejack100 @hotmail.com Instruments can also be dropped off
at the Aberdeen offices of KCA Deutag, Minto Drive, Altens, Aberdeen.

JOHN ORDWAY: “ARMENIAN PEOPLE HAS GREAT POTENTIAL FOR BUILDING OF FREE,
INDEPENDENT AND ECONOMICALLY DEVELOPING COUNTRY”
YEREVAN, July 22 (Noyan Tapan). John Ordway, the Ambassador
Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the US to Armenia, who is
finishing his diplomatic mission in Armenia, had the last meeting with
representatives of Armenian mass media on July 22. In his opening
speech in Armenian he mentioned that in 3 years he had an opportunity
of being in all the regions of the Republic of Armenia, saw the beauty
of the country and the cultural values, got acquainted with many
interesting people. The Ambassador said that during his numerous
visits he was able to estimate the results of the American aid on the
spot and to get acquainted with the problems of people. According to
him, these 3 years were very efficient: “Jointly with the RA
government we tried to develop economy, establish supremacy of law and
form a civil society.” Ambassador Ordway mentioned that the US highly
estimates the assistance of the RA government in the issue of struggle
against terrorism. The US, in particular, wants the principles of
democracy to strengthen, poverty to reduce, economic reforms to go on
and investment field to improve in Armenia. According to him, security
and stability in the whole region should be strengthened. John Ordway
declared that the US will continue working with the co-chairmen of the
OSCE Minsk Group for the purpose of “fair and mutually admissible
solution” of the Artsakh problem. “Having the experience of these 3
years, I may say with confidence that the Armenian people has a great
potential for building of a free, independent, economically developed
and prospering country, being the US Ambassador to RA and having a
contribution to development of Armenian-American relations is an
honour for me,” the Ambassador declared. John Ordway expressed his
gratitude to Armenian journalists for efficient work and wished them
success.

THE INTERNATIONAL FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
EXCHANGE (IFEX) CLEARING HOUSE
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IFEX – News from the international freedom of expression community
_________________________________________________________________
PRESS RELEASE/UPDATE – TURKEY
23 July 2004
IPA concerned about dangers threatening publishers in lead up to
consideration of Turkey’s membership in the EU
SOURCE: International Publishers’ Association (IPA), Geneva
**Updates IFEX alert of 15 June 2004**
(IPA/IFEX) – The following is a 19 July 2004 IPA press release:
NGOs meet Commissioner Verheugen on Turkey
The International Publishers Association (IPA) is deeply concerned
about the dangers that threaten Turkish publishers when pursuing their
profession. “We call upon the Turkish authorities to implement the
many reforms that were passed. Implementation is key and must not
surrender to bureaucratic conservatism or any other hurdle,” says
Ana-Maria Cabanellas, President of the IPA.
On 15 July 2004, eight international NGOs met with Enlargement
Commissioner Günter Verheugen in Brussels to discuss the progress made
by Turkey in the field of Human Rights.
The Commission will issue a recommendation this September on whether
EU member states should start membership negotiations with Turkey in
December 2004 or not. It is indeed in December that Heads of States
and Governments will decide on this. They have already indicated that
they would follow the recommendation issued by the Commission.
The IPA recalled that last year 43 books were banned and 37 writers
and 17 publishers were put on trial. To date in 2004, at least 15
books have been banned in Turkey.
While welcoming the legislative and constitutional changes in Turkey,
the IPA expressed its three main concerns: 1. the legal impediments to
the practice of the right to freedom of expression in Turkey; 2. the
current tendency of Turkish Security Courts to harass writers,
journalists and publishers by putting them on trial more and more
often, fining them or just postponing their trials indefinitely;
3. the lack of implementation of legal reforms regarding freedom of
expression.
Lars Grahn, Chairman of IPA’s Freedom to Publish Committee, says, “The
six following taboos are obvious hurdles to freedom of expression and
to publishing in Turkey: Position of the Military, Kurdish Question,
Armenian Genocide, Kemalism, Women’s Liberation and Islamic
Law. Treating writers, journalists and publishers as potential
terrorists or criminals and judging them in the same courts as drug
traffickers and/or real terrorists is unacceptable.”
For further information, contact IPA, 3, avenue de Miremont, Ch-1206,
Geneva, Switzerland, tel: +41 22 346 30 18, fax: +41 22 347 57 17,
e-mail: [email protected], [email protected], Internet:
The information contained in this press release/update is the sole
responsibility of IPA. In citing this material for broadcast or
publication, please credit IPA.

New York Times, NY
July 24 2004
New Kids on the Block
By MARK KAMINE

THERE are first novels writers can’t seem to match — Ralph Ellison’s
”Invisible Man” is the archetype here. There’s the posthumous first
novel — John Kennedy Toole’s ”Confederacy of Dunces,” for example
— that makes you wonder what might have been. There are fireplace
firsts, books that young writers, sometimes wisely, push into the
flames instead of into print. Harry Crews had four novels rejected
before publishing ”The Gospel Singer.” (”Burn it, son,” one of
Crews’s writing teachers told him about an early manuscript. ”Fire’s
a great refiner.”) Contemporary first novels are tougher calls. You
weigh the chance of discovering a terrific new voice against the fear
of plunking down $24 for an apprentice work. It’s safer to wait a few
novels, for a reputation to grow. But there’s nothing like getting in
early.
No need to wait on Lucia Nevai. Her novel, SERIOUSLY (Little, Brown,
$23.95), is full of elements that might be found in any first novel:
a yearning young narrator who’s a bit at sea; a tragic family
history; a brush with romance; a discovery of vocation. Its
protagonist, Tamara Johanssen, has landed in Dustin, a small town in
upstate New York. She’s on the rebound from a life lived recklessly
and demolished early by her crazy mother, who burned down the
family’s house, killing herself and Tamara’s father and younger
sister. Tamara’s story unfolds episodically. Each chapter focuses on
one or two people she has known: the cranky couple who run the local
insurance agency; her older sister, Nora, who is a TV producer; her
gentlemanly lover, Boz; her trashy but proud neighbor, Glorine. The
novel skips back and forth in time, building cumulatively and almost
effortlessly, until we arrive at a moment that upends Fellini’s ”8
1/2,” placing Tamara at the center of a group of ex-lovers and
admirers. Along the way, Nevai delivers pleasures both large and
small in sly, lively prose. She has a neat ability to make her
descriptive sentences do double duty as jokes: ”There was Henry in
his hat out in back of both our stores, looking for something to take
apart and never put back together.” She has a sure sense of
metaphor. (Girls press themselves against a wall until they are
”flat as stickers”; an economy car sounds ”as if the same motor
were used in blenders.”) ”There was something sprightly in the
technique,” Tamara says of a drawing she admires. This assured novel
— the author has also published two previous story collections — is
sprightly and then some. Nevai’s voice has wisdom and charm, and with
”Seriously” she announces a large talent. It will be interesting to
see where it takes her.
Judith Claire Mitchell’s first novel, THE LAST DAY OF THE WAR
(Pantheon, $24.95), is set at the end of World War I and just after.
Yael Weiss is 18 and looking for adventure. She finds it when she
meets Dub Hagopian, an American soldier with an unlikely name who
secretly works for an underground group of Armenian exiles intent on
avenging the Turkish massacres of 1915. Yael falls instantly in love
with Dub, and in quick succession she falsifies her age, changes her
name to Yale White, denies her Jewish heritage and heads overseas,
ostensibly as an aid worker but actually in pursuit of Dub.
Mitchell’s novel tracks Yale, Dub and their associates from St. Louis
and Providence to Paris and Berlin, convincingly modulating among
characters as various as the dying leader of the Armenian
underground, a 13-year-old victim of Turkish abuse and a young German
soldier in the formative days of the Nazi Party, all the while
keeping her focus on Yale and Dub and the intermingling of their
romance with history.
The blistering conclusion feels both satisfying and inevitable,
thanks to the skill with which Mitchell assembles the pieces of her
story and the light touch with which she incorporates thorny issues
of prejudice and national identity into what is essentially a
historical spy novel. It’s a bravura performance, Alan Furst with a
dash of Tintin, and Mitchell may have pulled off in her first try
that greatest of oxymorons, the intelligent beach book.
Adam Langer lacks Nevai’s consummate craft and Mitchell’s pleasing
dramatic flair. Yet his ambitious first novel, CROSSING CALIFORNIA
(Riverhead, $24.95), hits high points of comic empathy. The
geographic and symbolic center of Langer’s novel is Chicago’s
California Avenue, which neatly divides the wealthy Jewish
professionals on its west side from the struggling Jews and blacks
across the way. The action is bracketed by the Iranian hostage crisis
of 1979-81, though only Jill Wasserstrom, an eighth grader, is
actively political (she wears a ”Better Red Than Dead” button to
her bat mitzvah). Langer’s other characters are enmeshed in personal
struggles. Jill’s classmate Muley Wills, brilliant and resourceful,
spends his time working on animated movies made to impress Jill, with
whom he’s in love. Jill’s sister, Michelle, wants to dominate her
high school drama program, and her sometime boyfriend, Larry Rovner,
is trying to land a recording contract for his Jewish rock band,
Rovner! (One song title: ”It’s Not the Meat, It’s the Moshe.”)
These characters cross paths regularly as they cross and recross
California Avenue. More often than not, however, they fail to
connect. Langer connects sometimes. His depiction of the ubiquitous
and casual racism of the era feels on the money. His portrayal of the
Jewish loser Charlie Wasserstrom, no match for his brilliant
daughters, is funny and complex. Yet the novel often feels forced and
slack — Langer has an unsteady hand on the rudder. He thoroughly and
elaborately exposes the narrow goals and narcissistic motivations of
his middle-class Midwestern characters. He now needs to find a more
fluent method of bringing them to life.
When he does, he might ship his recipe south to Mindy Friddle, whose
novel, THE GARDEN ANGEL (St. Martin’s, $23.95), will please only
those who like their soap operas typed out instead of broadcast.
Friddle’s story of Southern sisters squabbling over a family legacy
is sunk both by cliched moments (a desk-clearing sex scene) and
cliched writing: ”For once, I imagined a different kind of place in
life, from which I could look around and enjoy the view.” Things are
not quite as dire in Mary Helen Stefaniak’s novel, THE TURK AND MY
MOTHER (Norton, $24.95). This multigenerational story tracks the
paths of a handful of Croatians forced by war and other hardships
from their Balkan village to Siberia and Milwaukee. Early on,
Stefaniak invokes the movie ”Doctor Zhivago,” and her novel is a
folksier, jokier, more down-to-earth version of that
historical/literary bodice-ripper. Stefaniak’s novel reads, at times,
like a not-quite-confident translation: ”It was as if she had
dissolved into the air, as if a cloud of her filled the room.”
Seth Kantner’s first novel, ORDINARY WOLVES (Milkweed, $22), is a
magnificently realized story about a boy’s coming-of-age in a
difficult, distant place. Cutuk Hawcly, along with his brother and
his sister, has been dragged to Alaska by his dropout dad, Abe, an
artistic Luddite; he mixes Eskimo ethos and ecology as he raises his
children in a bunkerlike house miles from civilization. Mail-order
textbooks are small hurdles for kids schooled in surviving subzero
winters on a diet of caribou pelvis and other local meats eaten
”dried, cooked, raw or frozen” in the midst of mice, moose, shrews,
hungry wolves and rabid foxes. During periodic visits (by dogsled) to
the Inupiaq village of Takunak, Cutuk learns what it’s like to be an
outsider as Eskimo children taunt and fight with him for being
”dumb” and ”white,” lessons he’ll learn all over again when he
grows up and moves for a time to Anchorage. There, backwoods smarts
can’t help him with malls and town girls. There are some hilarious
moments. A cute Eskimo girl named Dawna asks Cutuk, ”You ever try
Pralines ‘n’ Cream?” Cutuk doesn’t reply, ”in case it was a common
narcotic or some kind of bent-over sex everyone else had had.”
”Ordinary Wolves” has scope and a style to match its subjects, the
wide-open spaces of Alaska and youth, and Kantner, who was born and
raised in the Alaska wilderness, manages along the way to touch on
the dissolution and devastation visited upon the state’s native
population, the youthful yearning for experience and guidance and the
abiding love of an odd, isolated frontier family. His novel comes
across as smart and authentic. It’s hard to imagine a better start.
Mark Kamine is a critic whose reviews have appeared in The Times
Literary Supplement in London, among other publications. He is the
assistant production manager for the television series ”The
Sopranos.”

The Globe and Mail, Canada
July 24 2004
An Ottoman epic

By CAMILLA GIBB

Birds Without Wings
By Louis de Bernières
Knopf Canada, 625 pages, $36.95
It’s been 10 years since Louis de Bernières’s much-loved Captain
Corelli’s Mandolin was published, nine since it was honoured with the
Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, and three since Hollywood
stripped it of all its charm and fervour — the very things that made
the book so glorious — and offered it up as a politically castrated
piece of wooden sentimentality. Trust Hollywood to take Kobe beef —
beer- and music-fed and massaged by loving hands — and grind it into
meat loaf.
For this, Corelli’s author and architect cannot in any way be blamed
(he neither wrote the screenplay nor cast its grossly miscast crew).
“It would be impossible for a parent to be happy about its baby’s
ears being put on backwards,” is the extent of de Bernières’s public
comment on the subject of film adaptation.
The movie, and sales of the book (on the order of 2.5 million),
parachuted him into the international spotlight, from which he
quickly averted his gaze. He bought a large Georgian rectory in
Norfolk, where he indulges his hobby of restoring and puttering about
the countryside in antique cars, has developed proficiency on several
musical instruments, and enjoys the leisure of being able to write
only if and when he feels like it.
There’s been much of the “most anticipated novel” promotional
preamble that accompanies the subsequent work of any hugely
successful author, along with a predictable tension nurtured by
critics posing the question of whether his new work can possibly
measure up. The fact is, de Bernières was already a highly successful
author by the time the world caught up with him, having written,
among other things, a much celebrated and wildly passionate trilogy
before Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. He is to be understood not as a
one-hit wonder who arrived from nowhere one year and then
disappeared, generating whispers of writer’s block for the next 10,
but as a prolific and ambitious writer with a rather astonishing body
of work, notable for its dense lyricism, fierce wisdom, soaring
passion and remarkable wit. In this tradition, Birds Without Wings is
pure de Bernières.
It may well be the case that Birds will have less mass-market appeal
than its predecessor — any novel of more than 600 pages requires the
attention and surrender of its reader, and the setting, Anatolia
rather than Greece, in the First rather than Second World War, is
less known and less familiar — but this is again a rich and
passionate story of love and war, and in many ways a much more
ambitious and important one.
Set in the small and out-of-the-way town of Eskibahce in southwestern
Anatolia, de Bernières’s novel paints an idyllic portrait of an
Ottoman town at the beginning of the 20th century. As in many other
places in the empire, Muslims and Christians have lived here together
for centuries, calling each other infidels in the same breath as they
call each other best friends and betroth their sons and daughters to
one another. Muslims pay homage to the image of the Virgin in the
church; Christians are always to be found among the Muslims stoning
to death some criminal of their faith in the public square; and the
imam and the priest engage in debate throughout the night.
De Bernières may well “do character” better than any writer alive
today: Even cats and horses and birds in his world are bestowed with
full and endearing personalities. There are the children we come to
know — the innocents who will grow up to be soldiers and war brides
and exiles and madmen — and their parents, including an imam, a
drunkard, a potter and a goatherd. Everyone has his place in this
town, as well as a voice in this book, from an Armenian apothecary to
a poor snow-bringer, an Orthodox priest, a resentful Greek
schoolteacher fighting the futile fight against the barbarism of the
Turkish tongue, a leech-gatherer, a couple of idle gendarmes, a
bird-seller and, most powerful of all, in both economic terms and in
terms of this narrative, a distinguished gentleman and wealthy
landowner named Rustem Bey.
Rustem Bey might be singled out as the closest thing to a protagonist
here. He’s a formal man, his emotional expression trapped by the
demands of his station, and one whose wife has never loved him. When
Rustem Bey discovers his wife with a lover, he promptly kills him,
then escorts her to the public square where she is stoned to
near-death by those who, in any other context, are called friends and
neighbours. Later, and with much humiliation, he buys himself a
mistress from a house of ill-repute in Istanbul. The love that
develops between them is genuine and touching, though tainted both by
Rustem Bey’s guilt about his wife, now resident and syphilitic in the
local whorehouse, and his mistress’s secret that she is actually a
Christian.
Stories of grand passions move the novel: conjugal, fraternal,
interspecies. Many are delivered in an episodic, fragmentary and
provocative manner, interspersing voices in first and third person to
create a rich, mottled chorus, an amalgam of subplots that weave and
complement each other in such a way that the town itself might be
better called the central character. One principal thread runs like a
taut current throughout: that documenting the evolution of Mustafa
Kemal, who will one day be known as Ataturk, Turkey’s great liberator
and modernizer, the founder and first president of the Republic of
Turkey.
Long before Kemal’s vision can be realized, however, Balkan wars will
be fought, during which the Russians will exterminate millions of
Muslims and drive millions more as refugees into Ottoman lands, and a
world war will occur, in which the Ottomans will naturally side with
the Germans against the Russians, but in so doing will drive out the
Armenians, who have lived among them for centuries. Ultimately, the
Ottomans and their allies will lose, the war will end, and the empire
will erupt in civil war now that the rhetoric of nationhood and
self-determination has become an intractable part of the vernacular.
The town’s people are already torn apart both by the loss of their
Muslim sons to the war effort, and the realization that their
Armenian friends and neighbours have been driven out and massacred
only several miles from home. But with Mustafa Kemal’s ascendance, a
whole new world order is about to shape their destinies. Much to
everyone’s amazement, then horror, half the town — the Christians
who have lived here for centuries — are rounded up to be relocated
to Greece, a country they have never known.
“When the committee came to value our property, none of us was very
concerned. We didn’t think we would be deported, anyway, because we
didn’t speak Greek,” says the beautiful and broken-hearted Philotei,
whose lover Ibrahim, to whom she has been betrothed since childhood,
has lost his mind to the effects of war.
“And we said, ‘We aren’t Greek, we are Ottomans,’ and the committee
said, ‘There’s no such thing as Ottoman any more. If you’re a Muslim
you’re a Turk. If you’re Christian and you’re not Armenian, and
you’re from around here, you’re Greek.’ ”
This is the story of individual fates determined by the bigger
political forces of a succession of wars, the combined effect of
which set in motion the determination and shape of borders, the
constitution of populations and the consequent civil wars and
xenophobic campaigns waged throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle
East into the present day.
Where de Bernières is critical of all sides in equal measure, his
stance on nationalism is unequivocal. It’s a “miserable stupidity”;
combine nationalism with religion, and you’ve got “unholy spouses
from whose fetid conjugal bed nothing but evil can crawl forth.” To
read de Bernières’s portrait of the town before it becomes a pawn in
this bigger play is to feel the acute devastation wrought by agendas
that lead to young men “shitting out” their entrails in trenches and
women and children being forced from their homes, only to be robbed,
raped and bludgeoned to death with rifle butts. A miserable
stupidity, indeed.
For those who do not devour it immediately, Birds Without Wings will
sit as great epics sit, on one’s shelf demanding to be read, making
one feel irresponsible and guilty, provoking resolutions of “must
read this before death.” Do read it before you die. It would be a
terrible thing to have missed a work of such importance, beauty and
compassion.
Camilla Gibb’s third novel, Sweetness in the Belly, largely set in
revolutionary Ethiopia, is forthcoming in March, 2005.