RAMIL SAFAROV’S SENTENCE LIKELY TO BE DECLARED
Azeri Press Agency, Azerbaijan
Oct 30 2006
On November 17 Hungarian court will hold court hearings on prison
officers’ claim against Ramil Safarov, Azerbaijani army officer, who
was sentenced to life in prison for murdering Armenian lieutenant
Gurgen Markarian in Hungary, Safarov’s lawyer Ikram Shirinov told
the APA.
Safarov’s family members and lawyers Ikram Shirinoiv and Elmar Kerimov
will participate in the hearings. Shirinov said that they will visit
Hungary on the first 10day of November. The lawyers said that Safarov
is expected to be sentenced on November 17. Hungarian lawyer Clara
Fisher will defend his rights on the case. The Azerbaijani lawyers
will meet with Safarov and Clara Fisher during the visit.
While being held in Hungarian prison in 2004, jailers wanted telephone
card from Ramil. But Ramil could not understand Hungarian which led
an incident between them. Eight police officers tied his hands and
used force. Though lawyers for the Azerbaijani lieutenant appealed to
court related to this matter, the court dismissed the appeal saying
there was no evidence. Then the opposite side claimed that Ramil
resisted officials.

DEAD RECKONING: THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND THE POLITICS OF SILENCE
By Elizabeth Kolbert
The New Yorker, USA
Oct 30 2006
On September 14, 2000, Representatives George Radanovich, Republican
of California, and David Bonior, Democrat of Michigan, introduced a
House resolution-later to be known as H.R. 596-on the slaughter of
the Armenians. The measure urged the President, in dealing with the
matter, to demonstrate “appropriate understanding and sensitivity.”
It further instructed him on how to phrase his annual message on
the Armenian Day of Remembrance: the President should refer to the
atrocities as “genocide.” The bill was sent to the International
Relations Committee and immediately came under attack. State Department
officials reminded the committee that it was U.S. policy to “respect
the Turkish government’s assertions that, although many ethnic
Armenians died during World War I, no genocide took place.”
Expanding on this theme, Secretary of Defense William Cohen, in a
letter to Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the House, wrote that while
he in no way wanted to “downplay the Armenian tragedy . . . passing
judgment on this history through legislation could have a negative
impact on Turkish-Armenian relations and on our security interests in
the region.” After committee members voted, on October 3rd, to send
H.R. 596 to the floor, Turkish officials warned that negotiations
with an American defense contractor, Bell Textron, over four and a
half billion dollars’ worth of attack helicopters were in jeopardy.
On October 5th, the leaders of all five parties in the Turkish
parliament issued a joint statement threatening to deny the U.S. access
to an airbase in Incirlik, which it was using to patrol northern
Iraq. Finally, on October 19th, just a few hours before H.R. 596
was scheduled to be debated in the House, Hastert pulled it from
the agenda. He had, he said, been informed by President Clinton that
passage of the resolution could “risk the lives of Americans.”
The defeat of H.R. 596 is a small but fairly typical episode in a
great campaign of forgetting. Like President Clinton, President Bush
continues to “respect the Turkish government’s assertions” and to issue
Armenian Remembrance Day proclamations each year without ever quite
acknowledging what it is that’s being remembered. If in Washington
it’s politically awkward to refer to the genocide, it is positively
dangerous to do so in Istanbul. Last year, Turkey’s leading author,
Orhan Pamuk, was prosecuted merely for having brought up the subject
in a press interview. “A million Armenians were killed and nobody but
me dares to talk about it, ” he told the Sunday magazine of the Swiss
newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. Pamuk, now a recipient of the Nobel Prize in
Literature, was accused of having violated Section 301 of the Turkish
penal code, which outlaws “insulting Turkishness.” (The charge was
eventually dropped, on a technicality.) A few months later, another
prominent Turkish novelist, Elif Shafak, was charged with the same
offense, for having a character in her most recent novel, “The Bastard
of Istanbul,” declare, “I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who
lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915,
but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide.” The charges
were dropped after Shafak argued that the statement of a fictional
person could not be used to prosecute a real one, then reinstated by
a higher court, and then dropped again.
It is in this context that Taner Akcam’s new history, “A Shameful Act:
The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility”
(Metropolitan; $30), must be considered. The book is dryly written
and awkwardly translated, but nevertheless moving.
Akcam grew up in far northeastern Turkey and was educated at Ankara’s
Middle East Technical University, where he became the editor of a
leftist journal. In 1976, he was arrested and sentenced to ten years
in prison for spreading propaganda. Using a stove leg to dig a tunnel,
he managed to escape after a year, and fled to Germany. Akcam is one
of the first Turkish historians to treat the Armenian genocide as
genocide-he now lives in exile in Minnesota-and in “A Shameful Act”
he tries to grapple both with the enormity of the crime and with the
logic of its repression.
Any writer who takes on genocide as his topic accepts obligations
that, if not exactly contradictory, are clearly in tension. The
first is to describe the event in a way that is adequate to its
exceptionality. (The original U.N. resolution on the subject, approved
in 1946, describes genocide as an act that “shocks the conscience
of mankind.”) The second is to make sense of it, which is to say,
to produce an account of the unspeakable that anyone can understand.
Akcam begins his history in the nineteenth century, when roughly
two million Armenians were living in the Ottoman Empire, some in
major cities like Istanbul and Izmir, and the rest in the provinces
of central and eastern Anatolia. Already, the Armenians were in
a peculiarly vulnerable position: Christians living in the heart
of a Muslim empire, they were subject by law to special taxes and
restrictions, and by tradition to extortion and harassment. As the
century wore on, the so-called Sick Man of Europe kept shedding
territory: first Greece, in the Greek War of Independence; and then,
following the Russo-Turkish War, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, and
Bosnia and Herzegovina. These humiliating defeats eroded the Ottomans’
confidence, which, in turn, Akcam argues, “resulted in the loss of
their tolerance.” Muslim assaults on Christians increased throughout
the empire, and the ancient prejudices against the Armenians hardened
into something uglier.
In 1876, Sultan Abdulhamid II came to power. Abdulhamid, who ruled
the empire for thirty-three of its last forty-six years, was a deeply
anxious man, perhaps paranoid. He maintained a vast network of spies;
turned Yildiz Palace, overlooking the Bosporus, into a ramshackle fort;
and demanded that each dish be tasted by his chief chamberlain before
being served. Abdulhamid soon took anti-Armenianism to new heights. (It
was rumored that the Sultan’s own mother, a former dancing girl, was
Armenian, but he always denied this.) He shut down Armenian schools,
threw Armenian teachers in jail, prohibited the use of the word
“Armenia” in newspapers and textbooks, and formed special Kurdish
regiments, known as the Hamidiye, whose raison d’etre appears to
have been to harass Armenian farmers. Encouraged by American and
European missionaries, the Armenians turned to the outside world for
help. The English, the French, and the Russians repeatedly demanded
that Istanbul institute “reforms” on the Armenians’ behalf.
Officially, the Sultan acceded to these demands, only to turn around
and repress the Armenians that much more vigorously. “By taking away
Greece and Romania, Europe has cut off the feet of the Turkish state,”
Abdulhamid complained. “Now, by means of this Armenian agitation, they
want to get at our most vital places and tear out our very guts. This
would be the beginning of totally annihilating us, and we must fight
against it with all the strength we possess.”
In the mid-eighteen-nineties, tens of thousands of Armenians were
murdered. The slaughter began in Sasun, in eastern Anatolia, where
Armenians had refused to pay taxes on the ground that the government
had failed to protect them from Kurdish extortion. The killings in
Sasun provoked an international outcry, which was answered with the
Sultan’s usual promises of reform, and then with a string of even
bloodier massacres in the provinces of Erzurum, Ankara, Sivas, Trabzon,
and Harput. In the wake of the killings, William Gladstone, the former
British Prime Minister, labelled Abdulhamid “the great assassin.”
Finally, in 1909, Abdulhamid was pushed aside. The coup was engineered
by a group composed, for the most part, of discontented Army
officers-the original Young Turks. The Young Turks spoke loftily of
progress and brotherhood-on the eve of the revolt, one of their leaders
is said to have declared, “Under the blue sky we are all equal”-and
the empire’s remaining Christians celebrated their ascendancy. But
the logic of slaughtering the Armenians had by this point been too
well established.
When the First World War broke out, the Young Turks rushed to join the
conflict. “That day of revenge, which has been awaited for centuries
by the nation’s young and old, by its martyrs and by its living,
has finally arrived,” the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies asserted in
a letter to the armed forces. By 1914, the empire was being led
by a troika-nicknamed the Three Pashas-composed of the Minister of
the Interior, the Minister of the Navy, and the Minister of War. In
December, the War Minister, Ismail Enver, decided to lead the Third
Army in an attack against the Russians on the Caucasian front. Enver
planned to press all the way east to Baku, in present-day Azerbaijan,
where he hoped to incite the local Muslims to join the Ottomans’ cause,
and, as a first step, he ordered his forces to divide up and follow
different routes to Sarikamish, a Russian military outpost. The idea
was for all the troops to arrive at the same time and surprise the
enemy with their strength; instead, they straggled in over a period
of several days, with devastating results.
The Ottomans lost about seventy-five thousand men at Sarikamish, out
of a total force of ninety thousand. A German officer attached to the
Third Army described the defeat as “a disaster which for rapidity and
completeness is without parallel in military history.” The Russians
had encouraged the Armenians to form volunteer regiments to fight
against the Ottomans, and some (though not many) had heeded this
call. The Armenians’ role in the disaster became one of the pretexts
for the genocide.
On April 24, 1915, some two hundred and fifty prominent
Armenians-poets, doctors, bankers, and even a member of the Ottoman
parliament-were arrested in Istanbul. They were split up into groups,
loaded onto trains, shipped off to remote prisons, and eventually
killed. (The Armenian Day of Remembrance is marked each year on the
anniversary of these arrests.) Around the same time, orders were
issued to begin rounding up Armenians wholesale and deporting them.
“Some regional variations notwithstanding,” Akcam reports, the
deportations “proceeded in the same manner everywhere.” Armenians
would be given a few days or, in some cases, just a few hours to
leave their homes. The men were separated from the women and children,
led beyond the town, and either tortured or murdered outright. Their
families were then herded to concentration camps in the Syrian desert,
often bound by ropes or chains. Along the way, they were frequently
set upon by Kurdish tribesmen, who had been given license to loot
and rape, or by the very gendarmes who were supposed to be guarding
them. A Greek witness wrote of watching a column of deportees being
led through the Kemakh Gorge, on the upper Euphrates. The guards
“withdrew to the mountainside” and “began a hail of rifle fire,”
he wrote. “A few days later there was a mopping-up operation: since
many little children were still alive and wandering about beside
their dead parents.” In areas where ammunition was in short supply,
the killing squads relied on whatever weapons were at hand-axes,
cleavers, even shovels. Adults were hacked to pieces, and infants
dashed against the rocks. In the Black Sea region, Armenians were
loaded onto boats and thrown overboard. In the area around Lake Hazar,
they were tossed over cliffs.
At the time of the deportations, the U.S. had not yet entered the
war. It maintained an extensive network of diplomats in the region,
and many of these provided detailed chronicles of what they had seen,
which Henry Morgenthau, the United States Ambassador in Istanbul,
urgently forwarded to Washington. (Other eyewitness accounts came from
German Army officers, Danish missionaries, and Armenian survivors.) In
a dispatch sent to the State Department on November 1, 1915, the
U.S. consul in Aleppo wrote:
It is extremely rare to find a family intact that has come any
considerable distance, invariably all having lost members from disease
and fatigue, young girls and boys carried off by hostile tribesmen,
and about all the men having been separated from the families and
suffered fates that had best be left unmentioned, many being done
away with in atrocious manners before the eyes of their relatives
and friends. So severe has been the treatment that careful estimates
place the number of survivors at only 15 percent of those originally
deported. On this basis the number surviving even this far being less
than 150,000 . . . there seems to have been about 1,000,000 persons
lost up to this date.
An American businessman who made a tour of the lower Euphrates the
next year reported having encountered “all along the road from Meskene
to Der-i-Zor graves containing the remains of unfortunate Armenians
abandoned and dead in atrocious suffering. It is by the hundreds
that these mounds are numbered where sleep anonymously in their last
sleep these outcasts of existence, these victims of barbary without
qualification.” Morgenthau repeatedly confronted the Ottoman Interior
Minister, Mehmed Talât, with the contents of these dispatches, telling
him that the Americans would “never forget these massacres.” But the
warnings made no impression. During one session, Morgenthau later
recalled in a memoir, Talât turned to him and asked if he could
obtain a list of Armenians who had purchased life-insurance policies
with American firms. “They are practically all dead now, and have no
heirs left to collect the money,” the Interior Minister reasoned, and
therefore the unclaimed benefits rightfully belonged to the government.
The official explanation for the Armenian deportations was that
they were necessary for security reasons, and this is still the
account provided by state-sanctioned histories today. “Facts on
the Relocation of Armenians (1914-1918),” a volume produced by the
Turkish Historical Society, was published in English in 2002. It
begins with an epigram from John F. Kennedy (“For the great enemy
of the truth is very often not the lie-deliberate, contrived, and
dishonest-but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic”)
and the reassurance that it is “not a propaganda document.” The book
argues that Russia and its allies had “sown the seeds of intrigue and
mischief among the Armenians, who in turn had been doing everything in
their power to make life difficult for Ottoman armies.” Deciding that
“fundamental precautions” were needed, the Ottoman authorities took
steps to “relocate” the Armenians away from the front. They worked to
insure that the transfer would be effected “as humanely as possible”;
if this goal was not always realized, it was because of disease-so
difficult to control during wartime-or rogue bands of “tribal people”
who sometimes attacked Armenian convoys. “Whenever the government
realized that some untoward incidents had taken place . . . the
government acted very promptly and warned the local authorities.” In
support of this “Arbeit Macht Frei” version of events, “Facts on the
Relocation of Armenians” cites the very Ottoman officials who oversaw
the slaughter. Turkish officials, in turn, now cite works like “Facts”
to support their claim that the period’s history remains contested. In
March, 2005, just before the commemoration of the ninetieth anniversary
of the Day of Remembrance, the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, called for an “impartial study” to look into what had really
happened to the Armenians. The International Association of Genocide
Scholars responded that such a call could only be regarded as still
more propaganda. “The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented
by thousands of official records . . . by eyewitness accounts of
missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by
decades of historical scholarship,” the association’s directors wrote
in a letter explaining their refusal to participate. An academic
conference on the massacres planned for later that spring in Istanbul
was banned by a court order. (After much maneuvering, it was held at
a private university amid raucous protests.)
The Ottomans formally surrendered to the Allies on October 30, 1918.
The Paris Peace Conference opened the following year, and it took
another year for the Allies to agree on how to dispose of the empire.
The pact that finally emerged-the Treaty of Sèvres-awarded Palestine,
Transjordan, and Mesopotamia to the English, Syria and Lebanon to
the French, Rhodes and a chunk of southern Anatolia to the Italians,
and Izmir and western Anatolia to the Greeks. Eastern Anatolia, with
a prize stretch of Black Sea coast, was to go to the Armenians. The
Bosporus and the Dardanelles were to be demilitarized and placed under
international control. From an imperial power the Turks were thus
transformed into something very close to a subject people. This was
the final disgrace and, as it turned out, also the start of a revival.
As the rulers of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks had been fighting
against history; they had spent more than a century trying-often
unsuccessfully-to fend off nationalist movements in the regions
they controlled. Now, in defeat, they adopted the cause as their
own. In the spring of 1920, the Turkish Nationalists, led by Mustafa
Kemal-later to be known as Ataturk-established a new government in
Ankara. (The government’s founding is celebrated every April 23rd,
one day before the Armenian Day of Remembrance.) During the next
three years, the Nationalists fought a series of brutal battles,
which eventually forced the Allies to abandon Sèvres. A new treaty
was drawn up, the Treaty of Lausanne, and the Republic of Turkey
was created. The big losers in this process were, once again, the
Armenians: Lausanne returned all of Anatolia to Turkish control.
In Akcam’s view, what happened between 1920 and 1923 is the key to
understanding the Turks’ refusal to discuss what happened in 1915.
The Armenian genocide was what today would be called a campaign of
ethnic cleansing, and as such it was highly effective. It changed
the demographics of eastern Anatolia; then, on the basis of these
changed demographics, the Turks used the logic of self-determination
to deprive of a home the very people they had decimated. Although
the genocide was not committed by the Nationalists, without it the
nationalist project wouldn’t have made much sense. Meanwhile, the
Nationalists made sure that the perpetrators were never punished.
Immediately after the end of the war, the Three Pashas fled the
country. (The Interior Minister, Talât, was assassinated in Berlin
by an Armenian who had been left for dead in a pile of corpses.) In
an attempt to mollify the Allies, the Ottomans arrested scores of
lower-ranking officials and put some of them on trial, but, when the
Nationalists came to power, they suspended these proceedings and freed
the suspects. A separate prosecution effort by the British, who were
keeping dozens of Ottoman officers locked up in Malta, similarly came
to nothing, and eventually the officers were sent home as part of
a prisoner-of-war exchange. Several went on to become high-ranking
members of Mustafa Kemal’s government. For the Turks to acknowledge
the genocide would thus mean admitting that their country was founded
by war criminals and that its existence depended on their crimes.
This, in Akcam’s words, “would call into question the state’s very
identity.” And so the Turks prefer to insist, as “Facts on the
Relocation of Armenians” puts it, that the genocide is a “legend.”
It is, of course, possible to question Akcam’s highly psychologized
account. Turkey has long sought to join the European Union, and,
while a history of genocide is clearly no barrier to membership,
denying it may be; several European governments have indicated that
they will oppose the country’s bid unless it acknowledges the crimes
committed against the Armenians. Are the Turks really willing to risk
their country’s economic future merely in order to hide-or pretend
to hide-an ugly fact about its origins? To believe this seems to
require a view of Turkish ethnic pride that gets dangerously close to
a national stereotype. In fact, many Turkish nationalists oppose E.U.
membership; from their perspective, denying the Armenian genocide
serves an eminently practical political purpose.
That being said, Akcam clearly has a point, and one that Americans, in
particular, ought to be able to appreciate. Before the arrival of the
first Europeans, there were, it is estimated, at least forty million
indigenous people living in the Americas; by 1650, fewer than ten
million were left. The decline was the result of casual cruelty on the
one hand-diseases unwittingly spread-and systematic slaughter on the
other. Every November, when American schoolchildren are taught about
Thanksgiving, they are insistently told the story of how the Pilgrims,
in their gratitude, entertained the kindly Wampanoag. We now know
that the comity of that original Thanksgiving was entirely atypical,
and that, by 1621, the Wampanoag were already a dying nation. While it
was cowardly of Congress to pull H.R. 596, passing it would, in its own
way, also have been problematic. We may side with the Armenians, but,
historically speaking, we probably have more in common with the Turks.
icles/061106crbo_books2
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AZERBAIJANI PRESIDENT REMARKS SUCCESS OF AZERBAIJAN-RUSSIA COOPERATION
Author: P. Kesamanski
TREND Information, Azerbaijan
Oct 30 2006
The President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, stated in his interview with
the foreign media accredited in Russia that the Government of Russia
takes steps for the peaceable resolution of the Armenian-Azerbaijani
conflict, Trend reports.
The President stated that Russia is a neighbor of Azerbaijan, whereas
Armenia does not border with Russia. In addition, Russia is also a
co-chair of the OSCE Minks Group, which is involved in the resolution
of the [Armenian-Azerbaijani] Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. “We hold
positive work experience with Russian officials and the Russian
policy in the settlement of the conflict. We succeeded to eliminate
all unsolved problems. Presently, the country has achieved great
successes in the economic, political and cultural spheres,” the head
of the sate reiterated.
Mr. Aliyev ruled out that good bonds between Russia and Armenia
impede Moscow’s bilateral relationships with Azerbaijan. ‘If to
compare Azerbaijan and Armenia, one can easily see which country
represents more importance. From the aspect of partnership, energy,
geographic situation, political situation, of course, Azerbaijan can
not be compared with Armenia,’ the President said.

ARMENIA’S PRESIDENT DUE IN MOSCOW
RosBusinessConsulting, Russia
Oct 30 2006
RBC, 30.10.2006, Moscow 10:26:59.Armenia’s President Robert
Kocharian is expected in Russia for an official visit on October
30-31, 2006. In Moscow, President Kocharian will have talks with his
Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. The two presidents are scheduled
to consider the most urgent cooperation issues and the performance of
top-level agreements with regards to enhancing the Russian-Armenian
interaction, specifically, in fuel and energy and transportation
spheres, as well as direct economic ties between various regions of
Russia and Armenia. The two heads of states will also share their
views concerning the intensification of interaction in the context
of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Efforts for the
recovery in the Caucasus as well as for the fostering of confidence
and cooperation will also be in the focus.
As reported earlier, 2005 was the Year of Russia in Armenia, and the
year 2006 will be celebrated in Russia as the Year of Armenia.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

AZERBAIJANI PRESIDENT STILL BELIEVES FRENCH GOVERNMENT WILL NOT LEGALIZE DOCUMENT ON SO-CALLED ‘ARMENIAN GENOCIDE’
Author: P. Kesamanski
TREND Information, Azerbaijan
Oct 30 2006
The President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, stated in his interview
with the foreign media accredited in Russia that Azerbaijan’s
official position on the adoption of the legislation penalizing
for denial of the so-called ‘Armenian genocide’ was commented in an
official statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in this
respect. Azerbaijan is very much concerned on the initiatives on the
consideration of the issue and voting.
The President noted that Azerbaijan is satisfied with the statement
by French officials urging that the government will never support
this law. The position has been recently sounded in a meeting of the
Foreign Ministers of Azerbaijan and France in Paris, as well as the
French embassy in Baku.
“We are cooperating with the MPs, and the government of France on
this matter. We are satisfied with the standpoints by this country’s
officials. We believe that France will never allow the legalization of
such anti-democratic document, based on unfair shuffling of historic
facts, because ideas sounded at the French parliament violate the
democracy and its major principles. It would be very difficult for MPs,
who voted for this legislation, to speak about democracy and teach
democracy representatives of different countries,” the Azerbaijani
Present assured.
“We negatively estimate the legislation and state that it does not
meet the truth. The so-called ‘Armenian genocide’ is an illusion of
the Armenian lobby. To justify their belligerent policy in respect
to Azerbaijan they introduce themselves as victims and consider they
are right in taking similar steps in respect to Azerbaijanis. The
Armenian committed genocide in Khojaly, where the Armenian armed forces
killed over 600 people, including children, women and elderly ones,”
Mr Aliyev said.
The Azerbaijani President also backed Turkey’s imitative in the
commencement of the talks with Armenian on the issue and publication
of the archive material.

WHAT IT TAKES TO BE ARMENIAN IN BULGARIA
A report by Dafina Boshnakova
Sofia Echo, Bulgaria
Oct 30 2006
PRESERVANCE: Priest Kusan from Holy Virgin Mary church keeps faith
and language alive for the Armenians in Sofia.A look at the past,
present and future of a community that has become an integral part
of Bulgarian life.
“I remember my childhood days in Varna when my family visited
relatives. Having guests is a ritual for Armenians. There would
always be a meal prepared and everybody would sit at the table eating,
drinking and talking. Sometimes we would go there at noon and leave
at late evening.
“The funniest part of the visit would start when someone would say
it was about time we had left. Then, all of a sudden, the hosts would
bring one more dish or start pouring coffee. In this fashion we would
spend another hour. When we would manage to get up and start for the
door, our relatives would stop us at the top of the staircase (for
the dining room in their house was on the first floor) and everybody
would continue chatting as if they hadn’t met for ages. Half an hour
more would pass.
“When we would finally get to the door on the ground floor, our
hosts would keep us there 30 minutes more, talking incessantly. So
traditionally it would take us about two hours to be actually able
to leave our relatives’ house.”
This story is one of the numerous memories of Mishel Gutsuzian, 27,
a representative of the youngest generation of Bulgarian Armenians.
Despite that his mother is a Bulgarian and that he presently lives
in Sofia, away from his relatives, Mishel feels proud of his Armenian
origin.
But what does it mean to be Armenian in Bulgaria? One general thing
could be said – Bulgarians don’t consider them different. They are
so well integrated, that usually only their surname ending with the
typical -ian gives them away. It strange but true – Bulgarians don’t
fancy Turks too much and they quite dislike Roma people. At the same
time, Bulgarians feel Armenians to be part of their nation and have
no negative stereotypes about them.
It could be the result of the hundreds of years of peaceful
co-existence. Protobulgarians and Armenians had their first interaction
1900 years ago, and Armenians have lived on the Balkans for more than
1500 years. Throughout this time, political changes have obviously
strengthened all the more the relationship between the two nations.
Armenians have a unique fate that probably could be likened only to
that of Jews. This talented nation has put its grandest historical
achievements not in its own state and culture, wrote English
Byzantologist R Genkins.
Centuries of trial Although Armenia is one of the most ancient and
still-existing countries, it has suffered numerous dominations and vast
parts of its territory were torn apart by its neighbours. In 387 the
Roman Empire and Persia finally divided Armenia in two parts. Since
then, over 1600 years now, the state of existence of two Armenias –
East and West – has continued. Their sovereignty and their belonging to
one or another foreign country changed through the centuries depending
on the geopolitical situation in the region and the world as a whole.
One sole fact speaks for itself – the present Armenian country is
fully within the borders of East Armenia. The rest of the historical
Armenian lands are in Turkey.
Armenians might very well be called a nation of fugitives. Today
there are about three million people living in Armenia, and another
10 million scattered all around the world. Migrating has become their
fate – Armenian mercenary armies were first settled in the lands of
nowadays Bulgaria by the Byzantine emperors in the sixth century.
With each new conqueror, new groups of Armenians were displaced and
very often sent to the Balkan Peninsula. Armenians left their lands
not only because of the oppression of foreign rulers. The unfavourable
natural resources and conditions in their territory were one more
reason that besides foreign occupations that urged Armenians to find
other places to live.
Even bigger were the migration waves during the period of Ottoman
domination. At that time, both Bulgaria and Armenia were within the
borders of the Turkish empire. Travelling for the purposes of trade
and crafts fostered the relations between the two peoples. Probably
that is the time when the Armenians realised they would stay in
Bulgarian lands for good. So they started building churches and
founding schools. The common faith – Christianity – also helped
Bulgarians and Armenians to grow closer.
The sad events in the history of the Armenian nation at the end of
the 19th and the beginning of the 20 century turned Armenians and
Bulgarians into close friends once and for all. Armenians still fight
for a worldwide recognition of the genocide inflicted on them.
Bulgaria is one of the few countries that openly accepted the refugees
from that period, and that is why Armenians are ever thankful to
the Bulgarians.
A nation of fugitives But let’s give it a clear explanation. By the
end of the 19th century, Bulgaria was already a free country. Its
liberation had been acquired through a war between Russia and the
Ottoman Empire, the battles held on Bulgarian lands with the active
participation of many Bulgarian volunteer detachments. Although
unstable and just starting to make its way through the complicated
situation of the day, Bulgaria was free. At the same time, the Ottoman
Empire was already on the deathbed, striving to survive and crumbling
under the pretence of its own ruler.
The sultan Abdul Hamit II feared to death that someone might undermine
his unlimited authority. Hence he had become hostile to every kind of
national-liberation movement in the empire. Armenians were first on his
list of culprits. During the 1880s, a vast plan for their genocide was
developed. It included depriving Armenians of the protection of law,
seizing by force of Armenian property, organisation to systematically
massacre them. Of course, everything was carried on unofficially. The
aim of the sultan was that Armenians revolt against such treatment,
which reaction would be the perfect pretext to officially use armed
force against them.
The result of the sultan’s 1894-1896 campaign: 300 000 victims and
500 000 refugees. Bulgaria reacted immediately: the ships Bulgaria,
Knyaz Boris and Istanbul transported Armenians to the Bulgarian Black
Sea ports for free. The government granted the refugees money and
exempted from taxation all petty tradesmen, craftsmen and those who
had managed to receive agricultural land.
Like everybody, Armenians hoped that the downfall of the Ottoman Empire
would mean end to the oppression. Wrong. The Young Turks proved to
be more barbaric even than the retrograde sultan had been.
Only one generation, 20 years, had passed. Armenians had fresh memories
of the loss of friends and relatives. And everything repeated all over
again, but on a grander, more horrifying scale, from between 1915-1916
and until there was mass Armenian deportation to the most distant
desert parts of Turkey. People were simply left out there and were
told they had to find a way to survive. Men, who were more likely to
fight against the Turks, were collected from around the towns and shot.
That period saw the loss of 1.5 million Armenian lives and the flight
of another 800 000 people. The fact that Bulgaria officially opened
its borders for the refugees is a credit to the state. Actually,
Bulgaria had just gone through three wars (two Balkan wars and World
War 1) that had exhausted its resources to the utmost extent.
Nevertheless Knyaz Boris III ordered with a decree that all Armenians
should be accepted into the country. They numbered about 20 000.
Nowadays, Armenians from all over the world celebrate April 24 as a
memorial day to the victims of the genocide. The date is used to launch
campaigns for recognition of the genocide, appointed by the respective
country’s parliament. Although the UN had acknowledged the genocide
back in 1945, many states still have no official standpoint on the
topic. The greatest problem probably is with Turkey, which stubbornly
continues denying that something like that had ever happened.
According to the official census from 2001, presently in Bulgaria
there live about 13 000 Armenians. Unofficial data of the Armenian
church gives even a larger number – about 20 000. Almost all of them
(about 95 per cent) live in towns and their occupation is very often
connected on trade, crafts or arts. There even exists such a stereotype
in Bulgarian minds about Armenians – that they are goldsmiths (or
other craftsmen, who are skilful in producing exquisite things),
and that they have never practiced hard physical work.
“Usually when I say my name, people recognise my Armenian origin,”
Anton Hekimian, 22, a student at Sofia University, explains. “Next
thing that happens is that everybody starts talking about us being
goldsmiths and so on,” he smiles. As a matter of fact, his grandfather,
one of the refugees from 1915-1922, had been a shoemaker. The other
curious fact is that only when his father married a Bulgarian,
did he “discover” the difference between the various agricultural
implements. “So it’s not true that Armenians never worked in the
fields. My farther did. Because of his love for my mother,” said Anton.
The role of faith There is one thing most characteristic of the
Armenian communities outside their home country. They keep tight
relationships, support each other and do their best to preserve their
cultural identity.
Their solidarity is so popular that Bulgarians started joking that all
you need is put three Armenians together and they will immediately
build a church, found a school and start publishing a newspaper. At
the same time, Armenians are not insular and they actively co-operate
to establish connection between themselves and the “host” peoples.
That is how Armenians in Bulgaria have both managed to keep their
traditions and still be active citizens, bringing prosperity to
the country. According to Kusan Hadavian, a priest at Sofia’s Holy
Virgin Mary church, the Armenian minority alone stand closest to the
Bulgarian nation. And that is why they have never created problems
for the government. “We have come here knowing clearly that we need to
obey local laws. But meanwhile we are called to preserve our language,
religion and culture. We shouldn’t allow what we call ‘djermak chart’
to happen – that means we shouldn’t give our traditions up,” Father
Kusan explained.
In the past, because of the numerous dominations that the people
of Armenia had suffered, the church played the role of a uniting
centre for all Armenians. It substituted the government, the court,
the schools. Today, with Armenians living abroad, the church again
plays as the centre of their universe.
It is at church service where most of the Bulgarian-Armenians talk
their native language. There people meet not only to pray to God,
but to socialise and to find out what’s new with their friends.
“Conditions of life have changed,” admits Father Kusan, “and they
have become more difficult”. That’s why the regular-goers have grown
fewer. But at least for tradition’s sake, the temple fills up on
Sundays and major feasts like Easter and at the Nativity.
Maybe preserving the Armenian consciousness is truly in their genes, as
a man from the congregation said. Religion, Christianity to be exact,
is a vital part of that consciousness. It is very unlikely that you
meet an Armenian who doesn’t know how Christianity was spread in his
country. Everybody you ask surely takes pride in the fact that the
religion had been widely popular in Armenia from the very beginning of
its existence in the first century CE. Another thing that you might
hear very often is the fact that the country officially accepted
Christianity even before the Roman Empire did, in 301.
Even though, at present, the Armenians in Bulgaria are less religious
than they were some 20 years ago, they still feel hurt if you neglect
the ancient history of their church. They also insist on making its
actual name clear. Officially it is the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox
Church, and they call it such because the first people to spread
Christianity in the lands of Armenia were two of Jesus’ disciples –
Thaddeus and Bartholomew. One other name for it is Lusavorchagan, after
the most-honoured Armenian saint. He is Krikor Lusavorich (257?-337?),
or Gregory the Illuminator, a reformer of the church during whose
time Christianity was proclaimed the official religion of the country.
Unfortunately, a misunderstanding about these names appeared. In
the 19th century Echmiadzin – the spiritual centre of Armenia – fell
within the borders of the Russian empire. The Russian constitution
demanded that the church bear the name of its founder. That’s why
Armenians started calling it Lusavorchagan, Russians – Enlightener’s,
and in Western Europe it became popular as Armeno-Gregorian. In truth,
the last name created a lot of confusion. Although it was attributed
to Gregory the Illuminator, Western people tend to believe it has
a relation to the Roman Catholic pope Gregory. Armenians deny this
concept as absolutely untrue. Actually this is one main reason why
they insist hard on the name Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Church.
The other reason, of course, is the fact that they want to uphold
their 2000-year-old heritage, starting with Thaddeus and Bartholomew.
Language during service turns out to be both a privilege and a
problem. For many Armenians, the church is the only place where they
can speak it in their otherwise Bulgarian habitat. On the other hand,
it’s so rich and complicated that sometimes it’s hard to understand
the words and chants of the priest. “In order to make ourselves clear
and to attract more pilgrims to service, we ought to use plainer
vocabulary,” Father Kusan admits. In his view, another tactic that
could bring more people to the church is publishing a booklet with
the order and texts of service in both Armenian and Bulgarian. That
could also stimulate people to learn the Armenian language better.
Recent challenges During the communist period, in the 1960s,
Armenian schools in Bulgaria were closed. The effects were all
negative. The interest in the study of Armenian language was lost to
a great extent. Twenty years later, when teaching could be resumed,
there were neither qualified professors, nor adequate books, which
created a lot of problems. The contemporary young prefer to study
Bulgarian because they live and work among Bulgarians. While in
past years, 76th elementary school William Saroyan in Sofia has
had classes full of Armenian children, now things have changed:
“There are more than 300 kids here,” said Headmistress Stefanova,
“but out of them only about 20 study Armenian language. I believe the
reason is the difference between the generations. The grandparents
insisted much more on knowing the traditions and language. Nowadays
parents are not so much up to that”. And there are some the adults,
too, who don’t speak Armenian even at home with their relatives.
It all seems to be connected – the young Armenians in Bulgaria tend
to break the dogmas of their ancestors. You should go to church,
you should speak Armenian, you shouldn’t marry a person who is from a
different nationality… Keeping the “purity” of the blood used to be
an obligation out of question for every Armenian in the country. But
some of its validity was lost 30 years ago, when intermarriages
started.
“A cousin of my father’s fell in love with a Bulgarian girl,” gave
Anton as an example. “After the wedding his parents didn’t speak
a word to him for 10 or more years. They were really mad that he
neglected the tradition.”
You might think that that’s the natural way for a development of
a nation – where young people revolt against the rules created by
their predecessors. And still there are interesting exceptions from
that like mixed families, where the Bulgarian partner speaks Armenian
perfectly. Anyway, the Armenian people have been put to the test of
time and have survived, keeping their identity intact. Massacres,
emigration, insecurity and assimilation proved weak and couldn’t wipe
them out. In spite of their having lived in Bulgaria for so long,
they keep their face and traits. But then again, they have managed
to integrate so well that no one considers them foreigners. That is
a life approach worth envying.
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RELEVANT BULGARIAN PHRASEOLOGY
Sofia Echo, Bulgaria
Oct 30 2006
“Go and complain to the Armenian priest” is a very popular idiom in
Bulgarian. Loosely it means that complaining is useless and you are
not going to find any help. The phrase mocks the person at whom it
is pointed because of his futile and irritating attempts to grasp
someone’s attention by whining.
Although nowadays Bulgarians use it in a negative, derisive way,
history scholars and many Armenians oppose this and call it a misuse.
They cite the memoirs of Bulgarian revolutionaries from the times
of the Ottoman domination who were exiled to the town of Diarbekir
(Turkish Armenia) suspected of plotting against the sultan and the
empire. Many of them managed to escape prison thanks to the local
Armenian priests – people with great influence on the Ottoman governors
– who fostered the Bulgarians both morally and financially.
Anyway, there are two views on that. Valya Pirova, assistant professor
at Sofia University, Bulgarian philology chair, says the expression
has always had a negative meaning. According to her, the Bulgarian
exiles had the right to post a complaint to the closest Christian
cleric (and that was the Armenian patriarch) once a year, but those
letters were never answered.
Brush up your joke repertoire
Every Balkan country tells jokes about its neighbours. Bulgaria makes
no difference but the anecdotes about Armenians aberrate slightly.
Actually, as the Armenian ethnic group is probably the best integrated
into the Bulgarian society, there are no “neighbourhood” jokes about
them. On the whole, Bulgarian humour contains no negative attitude
towards Armenians and although sometimes ridicules them, it is never
offensive.
Three types of anecdotes could be specified:
Where Armenians boast with their abilities, might, wealth. Very often
these jokes feature the characteristic desire of the Armenian to be
first in everything.
A Bulgarian, an American and an Armenian talk about their sports
facilities. The Bulgarian says: “We have a wonderful big stadium –
it holds 40 000 people”. The American laughs and says: “Our biggest
one has a capacity of 120 000”. Then comes the Armenian’s turn: “The
capacity of the biggest stadium in my country is 120 000 seats in
the first row”. The other two ask amazed: “Why in the first row only?”
The answer comes with a grin: “Have you ever seen an Armenian sitting
in the second row?”
Where Bulgarians highlight Armenians’ affinity for plump women.
Radio Sofia: What shall one do if a woman is fat?
Radio Yerevan: Let her spin a hoop around her hips.
Radio Sofia: And if she can’t make it through the hoop?
Radio Yerevan: Then don’t spoil the fine lady!
Where Armenian people/institutions are used to discuss politics and
international affairs, to criticise over problematic issues. In such
cases, jokes usually have nothing to do with Armenians themselves.
Bulgarians simply use the frankness of Armenians to disguise biting
jokes, says Valya Pirova, assistant professor at Sofia University,
Bulgarian philology chair. The above-mentioned Radio Yerevan (Yerevan
is the capital of Armenia) and the Armenian guys Kirkor and Garabed
are most popular.
Radio Sofia: What would have happened had they shot Kruschchev during
his speech before the UN, instead of John Kennedy in Dallas?
Radio Yerevan is silent for a moment. Then says: It is difficult to
give an answer but one thing’s for sure – Aristotle Onassis would
have never married Nina Krushcheva.
Simply delicious
If you are fed up with ordinary restaurants, try one where they serve
Armenian cuisine. Almost all big towns with large groups of Armenian
residents offer that chance. One of the most popular places here is
Egur, Egur (literally Come, Come) in Sofia, owned by Hilda Kazasian,
a famous jazz singer.
Once having made up your mind that you want to try Armenian food,
you’d better be warned that it’s savoury but often either spicy or
quite sweet. If you’ve already eaten Bulgarian sarmi you’ll find
a similar thing on the Armenian menu, only the vine leave rolls
are stuffed not simply with rice but also with caramelised onions
and raisins. A lot of the dishes include eggplant – like Shtoratz,
where it is fried in thin slices and then rolled with milk filling,
or Carna salad, which includes also white cheese and tomatoes. If you
like meat, you might find Veal with sauce of green and black olives
a true delicacy. Although dessert comes last, in Armenian cuisine
sweeties are obviously held in honour. The must here is Anush abur.
It is translated as “sweet soup” and is a type of frumenty with boiled
wheat, dried fruit (figs, apricots, raisins) and various nuts.
In truth, cooking typical food is one of the traditions which the
Armenian families in Bulgaria keep longest. The recipes are passed on
to each new generation. Many Bulgarian girls, married to Armenians,
also get to know the secrets of their cuisine.

PUTIN, KOCHARYAN TO DISCUSS NATGAS COOPERATION, SECURITY ISSUES
ITAR-TASS, Russia
Oct 30 2006
MOSCOW, October 30 (Itar-Tass) – Russian President Vladimir Putin on
Monday will for the fourth time this year meet his Armenian counterpart
Robert Kocharyan. A high-ranking Kremlin administration official told
Itar-Tass that the sides will focus on cooperation in the natural
gas supply sphere and improvement of the situation in the Caucasus.
Kocharyan is arriving in the Russian capital on a two-day working
visit on Monday.
The two presidents’ meeting “will be continuation of the active
political dialogue between Russia and Armenia that matches the
strategic character of Russo-Armenian partnership,” the Kremlin
administration representative believes.
According to the source, “the agenda of the meeting will centre on
issues of bilateral relations, new opportunities of economic ties,
and cooperation in the fields of energy, transport, investments, and
real economy where Russian interests are considerably represented
in the financial sphere and key branches.” He also stressed that
“there will be a detailed discussion of prospects of cooperation in
the natural gas sector.”
The Kremlin official said that “the discussion of interaction in the
trade and economy sphere will be one of the central subjects of the
meeting.” The official noted in this connection “a positive tendency in
this sphere” – in the first eight months of 2006 trade between Russia
and Armenia reached 278 million US dollars, a 60-percent increase
from the same period last year. “Russia is the most important trade
partner of Armenia and one of major investors in its economy,” he said.
The Kremlin official also highly assessed the existing “solid legal
base” of relations between Moscow and Yerevan. Thus, in 1997 the sides
signed a treaty on friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance and
declaration on ally partnership into the 21st century.
Over 160 interstate, intergovernmental, and interdepartmental treaties
and agreements have been concluded between Russia and Armenia.
“It is planned that in the course of the visit, the parties will
exchange opinions on the most important international and regional
problems. In principle, the two countries’ stances are very close or
coincide here,” the official said.
According to him, the sides intend “to discuss issues of further
interaction within the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)
– the improvement and reforming of the CIS structure.” He said,
“The Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) and Eurasian
Economic Community (EurAsEC) where Armenia has obtained the status
of observer will also be a subject for discussion.”
“It is planned to discuss issues related to the coordination of the
two countries’ efforts aimed at the improvement of the situation in
the Caucasus, using the potential of diverse cooperation, prevention
of new conflicts and settlement of remaining problems, in particular,
Nagorno Karabakh,” the Kremlin administration representative said.
From: Baghdasarian

UNION OF TURKISH ASSOCIATIONS IN EUROPE PROTESTS FRANCE
Anatolian Times, Turkey
Oct 30 2006
BERLIN – The Union of Turkish Associations in Europe laid black
wreaths in front of French consulates general in four German cities
–Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, Munich and Stuttgart– to protest the bill
criminalizing denial of so-called Armenian genocide that was approved
by French national assembly on October 12th, 2006.
Recep Yildirim, chairman of the Union of Turkish Associations in
Europe, said that France, which defended human rights and freedom of
expression, has blackened its history due to adoption of the bill.
Yildirim added, “we hope that the bill will not be approved in the
Senate.”

WHY FRANCE SHOULDN’T LEGISLATE TURKEY’S PAST.
by Philip H. Gordon & Omer Taspinar
The New Republic, DC
Oct 30 2006
Historical Crimes
Only at TNR Online | Post date 10.30.06 Discuss this article
As European nations debate the idea of accepting Turkey
into their ranks, vestiges of the country’s authoritarian
nationalism–particularly its tendency to constrain free speech in
the name of national honor and unity–have antagonized proponents
of the European Union’s accepted liberal values. For example, when
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk was recently prosecuted for claiming that
a million Armenians were massacred by the Ottomans during World War
I–in violation of a Turkish law that prohibits “insulting Turkish
identity”–Europeans howled in protest until the charges were finally
dropped. In recognition of his politics and his writing, Pamuk was
awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
More recently, the Turkish stance on the Armenian massacres themselves
is becoming an obstacle to its entry into the EU. On a recent visit
to Armenia, for example, French President Jacques Chirac suggested
that Turkey should not be allowed to join the EU until it recognizes
the Armenian genocide. The European Parliament has similarly requested
that Turkey “acknowledge” the genocide, although it has so far avoided
making that a formal condition for membership.
But, while liberal states that demand accountability for the past are
usually well-intentioned, they can also go too far–as new legislation
in France clearly shows. In a blatant ploy to win over France’s 500,000
residents of Armenian origin, the lower house of France’s parliament
passed a bill on October 12 that, if agreed to by the Senate, will make
it illegal to deny that the 1915 massacres of Armenians constituted
genocide. The Socialist-proposed bill, which gives sentences of up
to a year in jail or up to a ~@45,000 fine, passed by a lopsided vote
of 106-19, and it was supported by the two leading candidates in the
presidential election scheduled for next spring, Nicolas Sarkozy and
Segolène Royal. The parliament even rejected a proposed amendment to
exempt scholarly research from the reach of the bill.
Not surprisingly, the reaction in Turkey to all of this has been
furious. Well beyond the extremists demonstrating in the streets,
nearly all Turks–including the most liberal and pro-European
ones–resent seeing one of the most sensitive issues in their history
being used as a pawn in French politics. Pamuk himself, no flack for
the Turkish government, has criticized the French legislation. Turks
rightly see the legislation as a cynical ploy not only to win
Armenian votes but to put one more obstacle on the path to Turkey’s
EU membership, which France has formally, if unenthusiastically,
promised to negotiate. The backers of the new law claim that its
purpose is to facilitate Turkish-Armenian reconciliation; its effect
will likely be the opposite.
Worse, the French parliament’s vote is a dangerous step down a slippery
slope. If it is a crime to disagree that what happened to Armenians
90 years ago should be considered genocide, why stop there?
Shouldn’t it be a crime to minimize the impact of other historical
tragedies, such as colonialism or the slave trade? Should the
Turkish parliament pass a law making it a criminal offense to deny
that France practiced torture in Algeria or that a million Muslims
were killed there? Should African governments make it illegal to
deny that genocide took place in Rwanda? Once you go down that road,
it is hard to see where the line should be drawn.
Indeed, the new French legislation is just the latest illiberal
policy in Europe masquerading as liberalism. Since the end of World
War II, a number of European countries, including Germany, Austria,
and France, have passed laws against Holocaust denial. Proponents of
the laws argue that they allow these nations to atone politically for
their past sins, while working to ensure that Holocaust deniers could
not foster the same sort of anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust in
the first place. Now, however, they could also serve as inspiration to
scores of different ethnic and religious groups that wish to win legal
acknowledgement of their own past suffering and historical grievances,
as the Armenians have. But parliaments across Europe would be better
off taking the current legislation off the books than giving equal
treatment to every group’s claims. Do we really want the government to
start deciding that some historical views are acceptable but others
merit prison sentences? And would the historical narratives that won
legislative protection be those most clearly supported by “the facts”
or those which had the most powerful political support?
Moreover, though the laws against Holocaust denial were–emotionally
and politically–difficult to oppose, the consequences of compromising
free speech are becoming clear. This February, for example, several
months after European leaders defended the right of a Danish newspaper
to publish a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad that offended Muslims,
an Austrian Court sentenced historian David Irving to prison for
Holocaust denial. The trial exposed European free speech advocates to
charges of hypocrisy and undermined their efforts to convince Muslims
that their tolerance of the cartoons was based on principle–and not
a double standard.
To his credit–and despite his wish that Turkey acknowledge
the Armenian genocide–Chirac and his government opposed the new
legislation, arguing that history should be left up to historians,
not lawmakers. He took the same principled stance last year, when he
successfully opposed a law, backed by a majority in his coalition,
that praised the “positive role” of colonialism.
As Pamuk’s prosecution reminds us, Turkey’s own record on free speech
is far from pristine, and Turks would do well to be more open about
their past. Instead of prosecuting those who challenge the official
history, Ankara should support debating it openly and accepting its
scars. Already, there are signs that this is taking place. Last year,
Istanbul’s Bilgi University held a conference on Armenian history at
which a range of views were presented. Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan supported that conference, and he has also come out
in favor of a joint Turkish-American committee of historians to study
and report on the issue.
Turks should keep moving in this direction and do more to
acknowledge that atrocities–however characterized–occurred. But
these initiatives need to come from Turks themselves in a spirit of
reconciliation, instead of being imposed from the outside under threat
of prosecution. Ultimately, historians, not governments, should be the
ones to decide these sensitive issues. The response to illiberalism in
Turkey must not be illiberalism in France. What an irony if Turkey is
kept out of the EU because of its position on free speech by a country
that would put historians in jail for questioning the official line.
Philip H. Gordon is a senior fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the
Brookings Institution. Omer Taspinar is a professor at the National
War College and a research fellow at the Brookings Institution.
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