Middle East
By L. Carl Brown
>From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2006
The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the
Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. Donald Bloxham. : Oxford
University Press, 2005, 344 pp.$35.00
The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the
Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians
Donald Bloxham
Oxford University Press, 2005, 344pp., $35.00
The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide
Guenter Lewy
University of Utah Press, 2005, 356pp., $24.95
During World War I, the Ottoman decision to deport Armenians out of
the war zone in eastern Anatolia set in motion a massacre that
produced casualties probably numbering well over a million. As much as
40 percent of the prewar Armenian population in Anatolia may have been
destroyed, a destruction proportionally far greater than that of any
other people in the terrible carnage that was World War I. Was this a
premeditated plan to annihilate the Armenian population? Was it
genocide? The authors of both these books give unstinting attention to
the horrors that occurred, but they differ in their judgments about
whether the massacres were premeditated and about the Ottoman role.
Lewy sifts the available documentation and the charges and
countercharges of scholars to decide that although the Ottoman
government bears indirect responsibility for overreacting to the
possible security threat Armenians posed and for mishandling the
deportation, there was no plan to eliminate the Armenians; it was not
genocide. To Bloxham, it clearly was. He offers a broad historical
account of Armenian relations with the Ottoman Empire leading up to
the 1915 deportation orders and the ensuing massacre. Thereafter, he
weighs the “international response and responsibility” in this case of
genocide in the years since. A penultimate chapter offers a
penetrating review of official and unofficial U.S. responses from the
time the massacres were taking place to the present.

Naregatsi Art Institute
Vartanants St. 16/1
Yerevan, Armenia
Tel: 58-01-05
E-mail:
Nareg Seferian, Project Manager at [email protected] in Armenia
Seta Iskandarian at [email protected] in the US
PRESS RELEASE
August 1, 2006
The Naregatsi Art Institute (NAI) is proud to announce it has become
the Armenian national partner for the International Child Art
Foundation?s (ICAF) Third Arts Olympiad in Washington, D.C., the
world?s largest and most prestigious art competition for children aged
eight to twelve. The International Arts Olympiad involves three
million children in over 100 countries. Each national partner holds a
National Arts Olympiad, where the winning young artists represent
their countries during the week long festival and exhibition in
Washington, D.C. in June of 2007.
NAI has been chosen to be the national partner due to its dynamic and
growing presence in the art world of Armenia. NAI is dedicated to
serving Armenia?s existing cultural heritage through supporting
Armenian contemporary artists and creating a forum in which the spirit
of art and the common voice can resonate freely. Through its various
projects for children, NAI sees the artistic development of the
children of Armenia as an investment in the artists of tomorrow.
NAI invites all schools, art programs, orphanages, NGOs for children,
and community organizations throughout Armenia to participate in the
Armenian Children?s Arts Olympiad 2006. This free program for children
aged eight to twelve begins with a suggested lesson plan for teachers
in order to help students create paintings and drawings on the theme
?My Favorite Sport?.
Each school or organization may submit up to three artworks created by
their students by the deadline of October 5th, 2006. The Naregatsi
Art Institute?s independent and distinguished panel of judges will
choose the 50 best entries for an art exhibition in October, 2006,
when the 1st place winner will be announced.

Divided by a common language
story/0,,1830481,00.html
The internet is a global revolution in communication – as long as you use
letters from the western alphabet. Kieren McCarthy on the growing pressure
for a net that recognises Asian, Arabic and Hindi characters, too
Thursday July 27, 2006
The Guardian
According to Kaled Fattal, “People say the net works, but it only works for
those communities whose native language is Latin-based. The rest of the
world is totally isolated.” Fattal speaks perfect English but as chairman
and chief executive of the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC),
and an Arab, he knows that the majority of the world’s population does not.
And he knows that this means the internet is a bewildering and often
incomprehensible place for the billions of people who live east of Greece.
Despite everything you may have heard, the global resource we all know as
the internet is not global at all. Since you are reading this article in
English you probably won’t have noticed, but if your first language was
Chinese, Arabic, Hindi or Tamil, you would know very different. At most
websites you visit you will be scrabbling to find a link to a translated
version in your language, seemingly hidden amid tracts of baffling text.
Even getting to a website in the first place requires that you master the
western alphabet – have you ever tried to type “.com” in Chinese letters?
If you think this situation needn’t worry you as an English speaker, think
again. At a meeting in the House of Commons this month, a number of
prominent MPs and industry experts listed internationalised domain names
(IDNs) as one of the internet’s most pressing priorities. In June, at a
meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann)
in Marrakech, the “father of the internet” himself, Vint Cerf, highlighted
the introduction of IDNs as vital for the future of the net.
Why the urgency? Because a number of companies – and even countries – that
are frustrated by years of delays have started offering the internet in
their own languages by working outside the existing domain name system
(DNS).
The DNS is the internet’s global directory and links particular websites to
particular computers, so if you type in, say, “guardian.co.uk”, no matter
where you are on the internet you always end up at the same website. The
problem is that, at the moment, the DNS works only with western languages.
The logic of maintaining a single global directory has so far prevented
people from building and using a different system that includes their
language, but in the past few years there has been such a build-up in demand
from millions of new internet users that the previous agreements are
starting to unravel and risk causing a split in the internet itself.
If that were to happen, the web address you type in could suddenly end up at
an entirely different website depending on where in the world you are, or
which ISP you use. You may want to buy a book from Amazon.com but find that
you end up at a Russian website all about the world’s longest river. Email
sent to you could end up with someone you don’t know in Korea.
The internet community received a scare in February when China announced it
had created three new top-level domains that were the Chinese equivalents of
“.com”, “.net” and “.china”. If China had decided to break away from the
global internet,others would certainly have soon followed. There was a huge
wave of relief when the Chinese government explained that it had made the
new domains available only within China itself. But the fact that experts
didn’t doubt that China was capable of and willing to separate from the
global internet was a wake-up call in itself.
And it’s not just China. Israel has set up its own internal system for
domains in Hebrew. Korea has done the same in its language – as has Iran,
Syria and Japan.
But as the world grows smaller, these countries are no longer prepared to
stick with their add-on systems, accessible only when they are in their own
country. They want to register a domain name that is accessible across the
world in the same way that western domains have been from day one.
At a May meeting of the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva,
however, the western world finally woke up. MINC’s Fattal demonstrated a
prototype system that worked with the existing internet but also allowed new
languages to be added to the global system.
“We have found a way of connecting these islands [of different-language
networks] and also connecting to the global internet,” Fattal explains.
“With this approach, we can leave the current DNS untouched and safe while
helping coordinate between other countries in the namespace. In other words,
now there’s a choice.”
In Fattal’s presentation, suddenly the internet that we all understand as
the global internet today was represented as the “ASCII ‘English’ internet”,
which took its place alongside the Arabic internet, Persian internet,
Chinese internet, Indian internet, Korean internet and so on.
To understand how we have reached the position where there is a real risk of
the internet fragmenting, you need only review the term ASCII itself. It
stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and it is the
code devised to enable computers to represent and process all the characters
in the English alphabet (a through to z, plus 0 to 9 and the various symbols
you get on your keyboard such as % and &).
It was first developed in 1967 and written into the internet’s foundations
by American scientists. It is now so hardwired into the net that the only
way to include other characters such as accents on letters, or Chinese or
Arabic script, is to use complex combinations of letters that don’t exist in
English words in order to represent them.
Linguists have created long tables to represent all the possible
combinations and permutations of different languages. In the case of
internet domain names, the address is preceded by “xn--” and then an agreed
code. For example “www.rémax.com” is represented as “;.
Using this method, it suddenly becomes possible to have internet domain
names containing foreign characters, and hence foreign language domain
names.
>From the western perspective this approach was sufficient for the rest of
the world to use the internet. But the problem is that each of these domains
still has to use the existing domain system with “.com” or “.net” – suffixes
that are virtually incomprehensible to non Latin- derived language users.
The problem was initially overcome by keyboard manufacturers adding buttons
with “.com” printed on them that did nothing but add “.com” to the end of
what a user had typed. But as the number of new top-level domains has
expanded over time, this sticking plaster approach has proved unworkable.
People want their own domains in their own language, as was made clear by a
recent addition to Japan’s own internal domain name system that advertised
itself: “At last – the domain name you can spell!”
There is only one organisation that can add new top-level domains to the
existing global internet, and it is a not-for-profit company based in
California and controlled by the US government: Icann.
Icann was first approached in the year it was created – 1998 – with the aim
of introducing “internationalised domain names” into its system. But it has
yet to introduce a single one. Many members of the global internet community
have cried foul at the endless delays from a company based in the least
linguistically diverse area of the world (the US has speakers of 170
different languages, compared to 364 in Europe and 2,390 in Africa).
These accusations have only been strengthened by the fact it is American
companies that own and run the existing global domains and so have the most
to lose from new foreign-language additions. These companies not only have
disproportionate influence over Icann but have also been insisting on being
given automatic ownership rights to any foreign versions of their domains –
an argument of such corrupt logic that the very fact it is even discussed is
a major cause of concern.
On top of that, the proud and ancient cultures of Asia, Africa and the
Middle East are offended by the very suggestion that they should need to
apply to a private US company in order to have their language accepted as
legitimate on the internet.
As overall coordinator of the domain name system, Icann is caught in a bind
in which it is desperate to avoid the political repercussions of approving
or not approving languages, whilst at the same time maintaining overall
charge of the domain name system to prevent everything falling apart.
Icann has successfully delayed the day it has to make such decisions by
pointing to the complex technical issues that have to be decided first.
However, with non- Latin-language networks becoming increasingly advanced,
China making it clear it is prepared to break away from the internet, MINC
touting a solution that could bypass its processes altogether and, perhaps
most crucially, Microsoft deciding to include IDN10 technology in the new
version of Internet Explorer, out later this year, Icann has been left with
no choice but to speed up the technical side of internationalised domain
names in a bid to keep the net together.
Once that technical side is completed, it will take a masterstroke of
international political will to keep the internet as we now know it together
in one piece.
The sore reality is that global internet politics mean nothing to users in
Korea, Syria or Egypt. They simply want to be able to use this remarkable
medium in their own language, in their own way.

Turkish Assyrians Condemn Israeli Attacks
Zaman Online, Turkey
July 30 2006
The Assyrian Christian community in Turkey has condemned the ongoing
Israeli aggression against Lebanon, criticizing Israel for massacring
innocent people.
Christian Assyrian Church priest Gabriel Akyuz labeled the Israeli
attacks as savagery. Akyuz said that the attacks were not justified.
“The United Nations should immediately call for a ceasefire in
Lebanon,” he said.
“We, as men of religion, can only pray for peace,” Akyuz added.
Father Akyuz said that thousands of Assyrian in Lebanon were living
in fear due to the Israeli attacks. “Some Assyrians who fled from
Beirut found shelter with the Assyrian community in Antakya.”
“We are all members of the same family; there is no discrimination
among Muslims, Christians, Jews and Armenians. The war should be
stopped.”

Azerbaijan: Caucasus powder keg
The Halifax Chronicle Herald, Nova Scotia (Canada)
July 30 2006
Strategic country on the East-West fault line sets its sights on
better ties with the West as it prepares for new oil wealth and fresh
conflicts with neighbours
By SCOTT TAYLOR Special to The NovaScotian
‘WE WERE engaged in heavy fighting with Armenian troops near my home
village of Lachin when a mortar shell hit my friend’s trench. When I
got to him I saw that his belly had been ripped open by the shrapnel
and he was screaming in mortal pain. He died in my arms as I tried
to stuff his intestines back inside him.”
At this point the storyteller suddenly goes silent as he relives the
horror of that experience, which occurred nearly 14 years ago. Now
37, Gurhan Iliyev was just a 23-year-old sergeant in the Azerbaijan
civil defence force when war erupted with Armenia in 1992. With
the international media focused at that time on the break-up of the
former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda, this border dispute in
the Caucasus region got very little news coverage in North America.
Yet it was a brutal clash spanning 24 months that left 30,000 dead
(mostly civilians), 100,000 wounded and nearly one million people
forced from their homes. Armenia and Azerbaijan were both former
republics of the Soviet Union and were formally granted (along with
Georgia) their independence in May 1992. All three republics were
allocated the same amount of Soviet military material to form their
own independent armies.
Within the recognized borders of Azerbaijan there is a mountainous
region known as Nagorno-Karabakh where a sizeable Armenian minority
resided. Taking advantage of Azerbaijan’s post-independence political
disorder, the Armenian army entered the territory in 1992.
“We fought back, but our local defence battalion was short of heavy
weaponry – we had only two trucks and 650 men,” said Iliyev. “The
Armenians were well equipped and they were assisted by the Russian 366
Motorized Rifle Regiment. As a result, we took enormous casualties.”
After completely securing the region, the Armenians continued to push
into Azerbaijan. Ethnic Azeris were forcibly removed from the newly
occupied territories.
Having successfully ousted his political rivals, then-president Heydar
Aliyev was able to solidify his leadership of Azerbaijan in 1993 and
ordered creation of a formal army to deal with the crisis situation
in Nagorno-Karabakh. Within 12 months the Azeris had managed to train
and field six full infantry brigades, and their deployment to the
front reversed the Armenian advances.
“In one offensive in the south we were able to recapture 12 villages
occupied by the Armenians,” said Maj.-Gen. Ramiz Najafov, one of the
key architects of the fledgling Azerbaijani army. “While in the north
we were able to destroy an entire Armenian regiment in just three
days of heavy fighting.”
The campaign became a stalemate, and a ceasefire was signed in 1994.
After the ceasefire, Armenian forces fortified their positions in the
occupied Azerbaijani territories; the Azeris built trenches around
the disputed region and the root causes for the conflict remained
unresolved. What had been a little-regarded war would soon become an
almost completely forgotten, but still simmering, flashpoint.
My discussion with Gurhan Iliyev took place at a pleasant outdoor
restaurant close to the train station in Saatly, southern Azerbaijan.
In the company of two other Canadian journalists and escorted by
officials from the foreign ministry, we had been brought to the city
to observe firsthand the ongoing plight of the nearly 800,000 Azeris
who were forcibly displaced during the 1992-94 war.
Across the tracks from this restaurant is a four-kilometre stretch
of railway boxcars, which serve as temporary homes for some 2,000
Azeri internally displaced persons.
There is minimal privacy because on average, two families share a
single boxcar. Even after 14 years of continuous residence, there
are few comforts.
“Every (displaced person) is entitled to a monthly ration, which
includes flour, rice, sugar and oil,” said Senan Huseynov, the
Azerbaijani director for refugees. “On top of that they receive an
allowance of 30,000 manats ($8 Cdn) per month to purchase meat and
other foodstuffs.”
As well the Saatly boxcar compound we visited a camp of crudely
constructed mud brick houses, home to about 10,000. The standard
layout for these shelters is three tiny rooms totalling 240 square
feet of space and housing up to seven people. The luckiest of the
refugees are now being relocated into custom-built compounds complete
with community centres and medical clinics.
These new housing developments are still intended to be temporary.
The displaced Azeris remain in virtual limbo – pawns in a political
process that has been bogged down for 12 years.
When the 1994 ceasefire was first brokered, the Organization of
Security and Co-operation in Europe established the Minsk Group to
oversee and monitor the agreements. To date the United Nations has
passed a total of four resolutions calling upon the Armenians to
withdraw their military from the occupied territories as a first step
to resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh situation.
That was supposed to be followed by the resettlement of the displaced
people into their former homes.
With no threat of any international military force being deployed to
enforce these resolutions, the Armenians have refused to pull back
their forces.
Fact-finding missions and the security organization continually
report that the Armenians continue to destroy Azeri infrastructure
while building their own facilities inside the occupied territories
in flagrant violation of the ceasefire.
One of the main roadblocks to settling this crisis is that both
Azerbaijan and Armenia refuse to budge on a referendum on the
future state of Nagorno-Karabakh. The Armenians want any decision on
self-determination to be limited to people who live in the region. If
Azeris are returned to the area before such a vote, the Armenians
would still represent about a 3:1 majority in Nagorno-Karabakh. The
Azerbaijani position is that any such referendum must be decided
by all 8.5 million residents of the country, which would certainly
reject any separation of the territory.
Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov recently conceded that Azerbaijan
would grant Karabakh the “highest level of autonomy in exchange for an
immediate withdrawal.” But the Minsk Group has grown frustrated with
the lack of any real progress. In a statement released earlier this
month, U.S. co-chairman Matthew Bryza chided both the Armenian and
Azerbaijani presidents for their failure to make any concessions.
In response to the OSCE report, the Azerbaijani president said
he remains “committed to peace, but he cannot accept the current
situation.”
To up the political ante, Azerbaijan has embarked on a massive
military build-up.
“By next year we will have doubled our defence budget up to a total
of $1.2 billion (U.S.),” said Maj.-Gen. Najafov. “We will be spending
the equivalent of the entire Armenian federal budget just on defence.”
While such a build-up would certainly change the regional strategic
balance, international observers say this posturing is a long way
from resulting in war. “Most of the money being spent is to increase
their own salaries, not to add to their tactical capability,” said
one Baku diplomat.
“They are not out purchasing attack helicopters right now, but if
they start to do that we’ll know they’re serious about settling this
by forceful means.”
That is not to say that the international community takes the
Nagorno-Karabakh situation lightly. The same diplomat summarized the
crisis as being mistakenly identified as a frozen conflict. “There
are tens of thousands of soldiers equipped with tanks manning trenches
and occasionally shooting at each other,” he said.
“When people are being killed, it is difficult to say the conflict
is frozen.”
Next week: A new oil pipeline has raised the stakes, and Azerbaijan
struggles to westernize. Scott Taylor is a columnist for The Chronicle
Herald and editor in chief of the military affairs magazine Esprit de
Corps. First of a two-part series by The Chronicle Herald’s military
affairs columnist.
an/518912.html

Novelist takes on Turkish ‘taboo’
Arizona Republic, AZ
July 30, 2006
University of Arizona Professor Elif Shafak has a freedom problem.
She used the freedom of speech to exercise the freedom to tell
her truth.
But by doing so, she may have cost herself, well, her freedom.
advertisement
Shafak, a 35-year-old native of Turkey, is waiting to stand trial
in Istanbul on charges of “insulting Turkishness.” A trial date has
not been set. The reputed insults appear in her novel The Bastard of
Istanbul, written in English but translated into Turkish and published
in Turkey on March 8. The book is already a bestseller there.
The problem comes down to a disagreement about what happened to the
Armenian population living in Turkey in 1915. Ethnic Armenians say
Turkey killed up to 1.5 million of their people during a genocidal
war that lasted about eight years.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars, the definitive
body of researchers who study genocide, has affirmed the historical
fact of the Armenian Genocide. Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when
he coined the term genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination
of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining
examples of what he meant.
A character in Shafak’s book talks about “genocide survivors who lost
all their relatives in the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915.”
In a telephone interview from Turkey, Shafak said that “the Armenian
Question is one of the biggest political taboos in Turkey.”
Though she hasn’t been jailed and is free to do what she wants,
Shafak has endured weeks of interrogation by a Turkish prosecutor.
She was indicted under Turkey’s Article 301.
That law states that “a person who publicly denigrates Turkishness,
the Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, shall be
punishable by imprisonment of between six months and three years.”
Shafak calls it “a huge obstacle in front of freedom of expression”
in her native land.
So does the European Union, which has repeatedly warned Turkey that the
existence of the law could hinder its chance to become an EU member.
“The biggest danger concerning the article is its vagueness,” Shafak
said. “It penalizes those who ‘defame Turkishness’ but what exactly
that means, no one knows. The article is so vague, it is open to
interpretations and therefore, misinterpretations.”
Many authors, publishers and journalists have been charged under
Article 301.
What’s unusual about Shafak’s case is that she has been indicted
for writing a work of fiction. The ultranationalist lawyers have
specifically singled out Armenian characters in the book for
denigrating Turkishness.
One of Turkey’s newspapers even asked, “Are you going to bring
fictional characters into court?”
Minister Counselor Tuluy Tanc of the Turkish Embassy in Washington,
D.C, points out another element of uncertainty in implementing
Article 301.
“In the last paragraph it says that expressions of opinion made for the
purpose of criticism cannot be a crime. If the purpose is criticism,
then that’s all right. It’s a good point: What’s the difference?”
Tanc, too, said the law is too general.
But, Tanc said, just as the Turkish government does not view
what happened to the Armenians in 1915 as genocide, the Turkish
government does not view Article 301 as the suppression of the
freedom of speech. Despite acknowledging the international criticism
of Article 301, he said that due to the separation of powers under
Turkey’s democracy, “the government cannot comment on its merits. The
Parliament has passed it. The courts that interpret this are also
entirely independent of Parliament. Anything I would say would be an
invasion of their duties.”
Tanc added that Turkey is not concerned about the criticism of
Article 301.
A Turkish court convicted an Armenian-Turkish journalist in February
under that law. He received a suspended six-month sentence.
Tanc said case law will determine how Shafak’s and others’ indictments
are handled.
Authors, artists, scientists and professors in the United States and
around the world are campaigning for the charges against Shafak to
be dropped.
Shafak appreciates the international community’s passion for her cause.
Yet, she emphasizes that it is precisely because Turkey’s culture is
becoming more progressive that this tension between ultranationalist
and democratic forces has arisen.
Shafak urges those outside Turkey to ally themselves to the
progressives within her country to propel democracy forward. She
cautions people not to paint all of Turkish society black.
“This is precisely what the Turkish ultranationalists want. They
want to increase the distance between Turkey and the Western world
by defining them as mutually exclusive. We need to prove them wrong
by building more and more intercultural dialogues that transcend
nationalist and religious boundaries.”
For discussion on this article, go to
of0730.html
From: Baghdasarian

An ‘Armenian’ in Kenya: Are they Armenian? Are they brothers? The
latest corruption scandal to hit Kenya is a strange one in a dizzying
series of corruption cases that are hurting the country’s potential
The Gazette (Montreal)
July 30, 2006 Sunday
Final Edition
By BARRY MOODY, Reuters
NAIROBI
A government inquiry does not know the real names of two men it is
investigating, nor their nationality, nor whether they are brothers
as they claim.
A lawyer trying to represent the two alleged “Armenians” was sent
away and told to come back when he works out who they are.
These are two of the more bizarre aspects of a dizzying series of
corruption scandals, piled one on another, which have deepened Kenya’s
reputation as one of the most graft-infested places in the world,
rated 144th out of 158 in the latest survey by the Transparency
International (TI) corruption watchdog.
And in another surreal twist, the Kenyan branch of TI last month
fired its executive director. For corruption.
Recently, new scandals have involved the central bank – whose
governor is on trial for nepotism – a private bank suspected of money
laundering, Kenya’s biggest supermarket chain accused of massive
tax evasion and perhaps most seriously a glaring security breach at
Nairobi airport.
This is in addition to two long-running graft cases worth more than
$1.2 billion U.S. that have forced the resignation of three ministers
in President Mwai Kibaki’s government this year.
The new wave of corruption, stunning even by local standards, has
caused deep disappointment among both Western donor nations and
Kenyans who voted Kibaki to a sweeping victory in 2002 on promises
to root out endemic graft.
“Until we deal comprehensively and ruthlessly with corruption, we
can’t even begin to talk about being proud to be Kenyan,” said Lucy
Oriang, a Daily Nation newspaper columnist.
An official commission of inquiry is now sitting to investigate the
self-styled Armenians, known as the “two Arturs” – partly because
despite their fraternal claims, they have different surnames, which
are believed to be false anyway.
Kibaki ordered the commission after the Arturs were summarily deported
to Dubai after an incident where they stormed into the closed security
area at Nairobi airport carrying guns.
According to evidence at the inquiry, the men, alleged to have wide
criminal connections, also punched a customs official and drew weapons
to confront a hostile crowd.
Not only had they somehow been given passes to the closed areas of
all airports in Kenya, but furnished with the rank of deputy policy
commissioners.
The incident caused howls of protest from Western envoys deeply
concerned at the breaches in aviation security.
“This was another incident of the rot going deep,” said a Western
diplomat in the region who asked not to be named.
Press transcripts of the commission hearings are compulsive reading
for many Kenyans, though there is widespread cynicism over whether
senior officials will be prosecuted.
Opposition politicians say the hurried deportation of the “Armenians”
and the commission itself are a cover-up to hide the fact they enjoyed
protection from powerful figures.
The Arturs, known for their tight black shirts, gold “bling” and big
parties, first came under public scrutiny in March when an opposition
leader accused them of being mercenaries who led a police raid on
Kenya’s second biggest media house.
Internal Security Minister John Michuki staunchly defended the raid
as being in the interests of national security despite a storm of
domestic and international criticism.
Spreading corruption has serious implications for Kibaki, who is
thought to be planning to run for re-election next year.
A recent survey by the government’s own anti-corruption body showed
that Kenyans saw the Security Ministry and the police as the country’s
most corrupt institutions and this is widely seen as contributing to
a rising wave of violent crime.
Taken with the security breaches at the airport, police corruption
concerns Western diplomats. They see Kenya as a growing centre for
narcotics trading, illegal immigration and money laundering.
They also believe corruption makes Kenya vulnerable to terrorism.
“We can’t achieve what we want on terrorism. We can’t work with the
police and security services,” one diplomat said.
“It is very difficult to deal with the country on terrorism if the
police force is corrupt, if the judiciary is corrupt, if ministers
are clearly up to their necks in it,” said Ian Taylor, senior lecturer
in International Relations at St. Andrew’s University, Scotland.
The graft also has an economic impact, frightening away Western
investors, although China and rising Asian powers are eager to step
into the breach.
“Corruption continues to hold back Kenya ,which is supposed to be the
economic powerhouse of east Africa. It gives a very negative perception
to potential investors particularly in the West,” Taylor said.
Both analysts and diplomats agree there is one bright side to the
current wave of scandals, saying a lively democratic press is playing
a leading role in exposing venal politicians.
“It is encouraging that scandals are being exposed. It shows more
progress in openness and transparency,” said Taylor.
Government Pledged to Fight Graft, So New Scandals Disappoint
A wave of graft scandals causing deep disappointment among both foreign
donors and Kenyans has rocked the government of President Mwai Kibaki,
who came to power in 2002 vowing to root out corruption.
Here are key facts about some of the latest scandals to hit east
Africa’s largest economy.
“ARMENIAN” SAGA
-Two men who identified themselves as Armenian brothers Artur
Margariyan and Arthur Sargsian burst into the limelight in March
after a politician accused them of being mercenaries hired by the
government to raid Kenya’s second largest media house.
-Accused of receiving high-level protection for shady dealings, the
flashy, jewellery-bedecked pair were deported to Dubai in June after
a scuffle with customs officers at Nairobi airport in which one drew
a gun. A government inquiry is under way.
NAKUMATT
-In what could be Kenya’s biggest corporate scandal, supermarket
chain Nakumatt was accused of evading millions of dollars in taxes,
helping put its main rival out of business.
-An unpublished 2004 central bank report said Nakumatt turned over
much larger volumes than its closest competitor Uchumi, but paid as
much as 20 times less tax.
CHARTERHOUSE BANK
-Charterhouse bank – accused of being used by Nakumatt and six other
firms to cover up massive tax evasion – was closed by Kenya’s central
bank in June. The small privately-owned bank has denied any wrongdoing.
MULLEI
-Kenya’s former central bank governor Andrew Mullei was asked to step
down from his position in March after he was charged with four counts
of abuse of office.
-Accused of awarding lucrative consultancies to his son and three
associates, Mullei’s trial started on July 12.
ANGLO LEASING
-The Anglo Leasing scandal surfaced in April 2004 when questions were
raised in parliament about why the government overpaid a tender for
forgery-proof passports.
-Contracts to a fictitious firm – covering a range of deals from
passports to naval ships and forensic labs – were believed to be
worth about $200 million. The money was mysteriously returned as
outrage grew.
GOLDENBERG
-The Goldenberg saga saw Kenya lose $1 billion in central bank money
via bogus gold and diamond exports in the 1990s.
-Kibaki ordered a probe into the scandal, which occurred under
then-president Daniel arap Moi. Four former high-ranking officials
are on trial over the scandal.

It’s really nothing new as war looms in the Middle East
Orillia Packet & Times (Ontario)
July 29, 2006 Saturday
By Pete McGarvey
I’m composing these paragraphs on a Tuesday afternoon, as Israeli
troops move into Lebanon and diplomats scurry to arrange a ceasefire.
The situation is tragic beyond words. Israel’s air and sea forces have
killed hundreds of innocent Lebanese and devastated the country’s
infrastructure – a savage blow to a nation still recovering from a
cruel civil war.
By some weird reasoning, Israel’s leaders figure the proper response
to an attack on innocent Israelis is an assault a hundredfold
greater on an innocent third party. Israel blames Lebanon for not
keeping Hezbollah terrorists in check, fully (and cynically) aware
the fragile government at Beirut lacks the military means to do so.
What’s certain is Israel’s determination to forever crush terrorist
factions in both Lebanon and the Gaza Strip that fire rockets into
Israel and dispatch suicide bombers against blameless civilians.
History teaches it doesn’t work. Massive counter strikes against an
elusive enemy tend only to increase the enemy’s resolution and build
political sympathy for its aims. Consider the American experience
in Vietnam.
Like it or not, Canada has been drawn in. When Prime Minister Stephen
Harper echoed the White House in declaring Israel’s massive response
to be “measured,” he abandoned two generations of a balanced Canadian
approach to the wars and politics of the region.
We are now considered staunchly pro-Israel. Things can only get worse
if Israel’s demand for a NATO peace-keeping force at the border is
heeded and Canadians become part of that contingent.
Over a period of 20 years I made three journalistic journeys to
the Middle East – to Israel in 1971 and 1991 and Lebanon in 1980.
Memories of those trips flood back every time CNN does a report from
the front.
The first volley of Hezbollah missiles in early July landed on Safed, a
town that figured in Cabalistic mystery and history in past centuries.
Thirty-five years ago last January, I spent an afternoon there,
interviewing Israelis under attack from El Fatah (PLO) guerrillas
on the Lebanese border. I took pictures of shell-holes in a dozen
homes and heard first-hand how locals spent nights huddled in their
basements.
Later that same week, I covered an angry Druzian demonstration in
Dalyat El Carmel, where Palestinian terrorists had kidnapped and
beheaded a farmer a few days before. Israel’s deputy prime minister
was helicoptered in to vow the crime would be avenged. Such was the
troubled Israeli/Lebanese border in the winter of 1971.
In Tel Aviv at the end of that week, I met future prime minister
Menachem Begin, one-time leader of the anti-British guerilla gang,
the Irgun Svai Leumi. He called his former warriors peace fighters,
justified rebels, as had been the slave Spartacus, facing down Roman
power in ancient times. By contrast, the PLO were ruthless thugs,
without a legitimate cause. Israel was under siege, he declared,
and would take whatever measures were necessary to survive. After
three and a half decades the players have changed, but not the script.
Nine years later, in April 1980, Eileen and I were in Lebanon,
gathering material for a documentary on the 65th anniversary of
the Armenian genocide. After 10 years of a civil conflict that
pitted Maronite Christians against Muslims, Beirut was a city in
ruins, enjoying a rare truce in the war. Lull or not, shells still
went whomp in the night and rifle fire was common. Palestinians and
Syrians maintained their own militias, generally supporting the Shiite
Muslims. Christian Armenians declared their neutrality and refused
to be drawn in by the Maronites. For protection they relied on the PLO.
Once more, we discovered nothing was simple or certain in a region of
complex politics, ancient hatreds and competing faiths. After a week,
we departed with huge relief, for the Soviet Union.
My final trip to the region was in 1991, retracing the route of
my Israeli journey 20 years before. Tel Aviv had doubled in size;
Jerusalem’s skyline was dotted with skyscrapers. Pilgrims of all major
faiths crowded the narrow streets of the old city, studiously ignoring
one another. I revisited the Masada plateau on the Dead Sea, and all
the Biblical sites – Bethlehem, Jericho, Nazareth and the Galilean
Hills (where I lunched at a dude ranch). I even returned to Dalyat El
Carmel, site of the Druzian demonstration two decades before. What had
been a rural hamlet was now a small city of large, western style homes.
There were changes everywhere, but not in the resolve of the people.
The land they proclaimed in 1948 was still holy ground, to be defended
from all enemies at whatever cost. Summer 2006 is just one more
chapter in a story that seems as endless as it is ancient.

Evacuation was massive undertaking
Canberra Times (Australia)
July 30, 2006 Sunday
Final Edition
THE Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade knew it had a
worse-than-normal crisis on its hands when the news that the Israelis
had bombed Beirut International Airport came through on Thursday,
July 13.
Over the next few days, department officers worked frantically around
the clock preparing the largest evacuation in Australia’s recent
history. The complexity and size of the task has been lost in the
sea of early reports of panic- stricken Australians trying to flee
the carnage. The evacuation was bigger than that for the 2004 Boxing
Day tsunami, the Bali bombings or May’s East Timor airlift.
Between 20,000 to 25,000 Australians were estimated to be in Lebanon
when the Israelis attacked. Those in Lebanon flooded the embassy and
friends and relatives sought DFAT help.
An Armenian junior dance troupe, stranded by the conflict, was among
the first to attract attention. With 45 young performers and 36
parents and supervisors, the troupe took refuge in its Beirut hotel
as the bombs rained down.
The troupe had to be a government priority, and it was. With the
airport down, and no ferry available, buses were the only option.
By Monday the troupe was out of Lebanon, albeit via a roundabout route
that took it north into Syria and then back south to the Jordanian
capital, Amman.
With Damascus, the Syrian capital, choked in congestion, the Amman
choice proved wise. The troupe was home on Thursday, July 21, a week
after the first bombs fell on the airport.
By Thursday of last week, 4515 Australians had been evacuated from
Lebanon, 3767 on Australian chartered vessels, 582 on ferries chartered
by other governments (350 by the British and 200 by the Greek navy)
and 166 on government-organised road convoys. In addition, Australian
chartered vessels evacuated 1236 foreign nationals.
The head of DFAT’s consular division, Rod Smith, observes that in
one day they lost the airports, the port was blocked and the main
overland route to Syria was bombed. With some understatement he says,
“This severely limited our options.”
The evacuation of 4500 people was an enormous undertaking, he says.
“It’s never been done before.”
The morning after the airport bombing, DFAT opened its crisis centre
and the first meeting of the inter-departmental emergency taskforce
was convened.
The first emergency response team of half a dozen officers left
Canberra on Saturday headed for Beirut. A small team was sent from
Cairo to Damascus and others went to Larnaca in Cyprus and Mersin
and Adana in Turkey.
Over the weekend, DFAT carried out detailed work on the evacuation,
expecting the first large-scale sea move by chartered ferry on
Wednesday.
But in a war zone things do not always go according to plan. With
governments around the world bidding for boats, the Turkish ferry that
was booked did not arrive, leaving Australians and many people of other
nationalities stranded on the docks. Nevertheless, on Wednesday and
Thursday, with the help of other governments, hundreds of Australians
got out.
In the end the sea operation that was planned for Wednesday started
on Friday and continued until Tuesday of last week.
The Mediterranean is not Australia’s back yard, as it is for France
or Greece. Australia does not have a naval presence there and had no
instant resources to call upon.
Closer to home, over the past few years Australia has managed the
evacuation of its nationals and all foreigners from crises in the
Solomon Islands, East Timor and Bali.
Over about the same period of time as the Lebanese evacuation,
Australian defence personnel evacuated 1000 people, including foreign
nationals from 30 different countries, from East Timor. The first
Bali evacuation did not have anywhere near the numbers as the Lebanese
evacuation but did have the added problem of handling severely injured
and burnt people.
In Lebanon, the United States used a helicopter air bridge to put
people into their missions and back-loaded it with US citizens they
wanted to evacuate.
The first Australian emergency response team got into Beirut thanks
to a British air bridge.
Contrary to popular opinion, the embassy stayed open to the public
for all but one day – Friday, July 14 – when it was closed to the
public for security reasons. However, even with this public closure
the ambassador and her small team were at their post, writing cables
and sending back reports.
Normally the Beirut embassy is staffed by three DFAT, three Department
of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs and one Australian Federal
Police officer, plus locally engaged staff.
Since July 15, the Government has deployed 228 additional staff
overseas to assist with the evacuation.
The Beirut embassy got 31 extra, DFAT 14 extra, the AFP two, and
Defence 15.
In Canberra, more than 450 staff have been working on the crisis.
Immigration Department spokesman Sandi Logan says staff worked 18-hour
days keeping the embassy counters open.
Television captured the images of passengers disembarking from the
ferries in Turkey suffering terribly from seasickness. But what they
did not reveal is that the Immigration Department officers had had a
double dose, having travelled on the vessel to Beirut and returning
on it to Mersin.
The war added greatly to the complexity of embassy work.
People arrived without appropriate documents. So many people turned
up without passports that emergency passport stock had to be shipped
into Beirut.
The computerised passport system enabled identity verification but
there were other complications. Immigration was confronted by people
with their fiancee or their spouse, whom they had married in recent
months. They wanted visas issued for their partner immediately,
a request that could not always be met.
Logan says in some instances clients demanded to see the ambassador
and made “a bit of a scene at the counter area”. The handful who could
not be granted visas left the office with an understanding that the
department could not break the law.
The South of Lebanon, which was being most heavily targeted by Israel,
presented particular difficulties. But a convoy of buses and taxis
was organised to Sidon.
Staff from Canberra and Beirut worked the telephones engaging taxis
to pick people up from their houses in surrounding villages to join
the convoy.
It was never going to be good enough to get people out of Lebanon
and leave them stranded in another country. As a result DFAT, which
was aided in its logistics operation by Defence personnel, managed
an airlift from Cyprus and Turkey, sometimes via Frankfurt. This was
organised despite stiff competition for charters and landing slots
from other countries trying to do the same for their citizens.
In its efforts DFAT was supported by Centrelink, the Emergency
Management Authority, the Department of Community Services, Families
and Indigenous Affairs, the AFP, Defence and Qantas. At last count
close to 4000 people had made it back to Australia.

Death, by any other name
The Straits Times (Singapore)
July 30, 2006 Sunday
By Janadas Devan
ON WORDSCONCENTRATION camp – the phrase automatically conjures in
our minds Auschwitz and Dachau, Buchenwald and Treblinka.
Actually, the phrase first occurred in English in the late 19th
century, long before the Nazis came on the scene. It was first
applied to the camps that the British established in South Africa
during the 1899-1902 Second Boer War.
Modelled on the camps the Spanish set up in Cuba in 1895 to
‘concentrate’ rural populations in settlements from which
anti-Spanish Cuban insurgents could be excluded, the South
African camps were established in areas where Boer guerillas were
active. Their intent was both humanitarian – to protect Boer
civilians from the ravages of war – as well as anti-insurgency –
to deny guerillas the aid and support of civilians. In the event,
the camps failed on both counts, for thousands of South Africans
confined in them died from disease and malnutrition.
The British had better luck with concentration camps in the
Malayan Emergency – though, of course, by then they were no
longer called ‘concentration camps’ but ‘New Villages’. Like the
Boer War camps, these villages were meant to concentrate the
rural population (in this case, more than 500,000 Chinese
Malayans) in secure locations so as to deny Malayan Communist
Party insurgents support and sustenance. The United States tried
the same scheme during the Vietnam War, but, lacking the
experience and skill of the British, its ‘Strategic Hamlet
Project’ in South Vietnam failed.
In what category would one place Palestinian refugee camps?
Serviced by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA),
there are 59 such camps today, spread across Jordan, Lebanon,
Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. The UN designates more than four
million Palestinians as refugees. Some camps were established as
long ago as 1949, following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, their
original occupants long dead, only to be replenished by their
descendants and fresh refugees from successive Arab-Israeli wars.
They certainly do not resemble by any stretch of the imagination
Nazi death camps. But nor do they resemble British Malaya’s ‘New
Villages’. They resemble most the original concentration camps,
the ones the British established in South Africa more than a
century ago – places of refuge that turned malignant. Only, in
this case, the malignancy is not biological but ideological.
Why is the world surprised that virulent organisations like Hamas
and Hizbollah thrive in the Middle East?
GENOCIDE – the word derives from the Greek genos, people or race,
and the Latin cida, cidium or caedere, kill. The Oxford English
Dictionary defines it thus: ‘The deliberate and systematic
extermination of an ethnic or national group.’
That has occurred countless times over the centuries, but the
word was first coined only in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish
Jewish scholar, in his book Axis Rule In Occupied Europe. And it
became a definable crime under international law only in 1945,
when it appeared in the third count of the United Nations’
indictment of 24 Nazi leaders.
HOLOCAUST – from the Greek holos, whole, and kaustos, burnt, thus,
holokauston, a sacrifice to the gods consumed wholly by fire.
Unlike genocide, this is an old word, occurring first in English
in 1250. William Tindale used it in his 1526 translation of the
Bible (‘A greater thynge than all holocaustes and sacrifises,’
Mark 12:33), as did John Milton in his 1671 Samson Agonistes
(‘Like that self-begotten bird/ In the Arabian woods embossed,/
That no second knows nor third,/ And lay erewhile a holocaust’).
The word did not have the connotation it does now.
In the 19th century it was applied to catastrophes in general,
and by 1950 it came to refer specially to Nazi Germany’s
extermination of Jews, Romani, Serbs and other ‘undesirables’. An
estimated 12 million people were killed during the Holocaust,
about half of them Jews. Israelis prefer to use the term Shoah,
‘calamity’ in Hebrew, to refer to the Nazi genocide because
‘holocaust’, with its suggestion of a sacrifice or offering to
the gods, seems offensive.
‘Never again’ – Israelis can say that, and make it stick, in part
because we have a word for the calamity that occurred in mid-20th
century Europe (Holocaust or Shoah), and a definable term in
international law to describe such crimes (genocide).
What recourse did persecuted peoples have before we got such
words? Consider what happened in Turkey between 1914 and 1918,
when 1.2 million to 1.5 million Christian Armenians died,
according to the estimates of most international scholars. (The
Turkish authorities cite a lower figure – 600,000 – and claim
most of the deaths were due not to state-sponsored killings, but
to disease and famine.)
H.G. Wells does not mention the event in his Outline Of History,
published just two years after the worst of the killings were
over in 1918. Nor does J.M. Roberts in his History Of The World,
first published in 1976.
Amazingly, Wells’ last mention of the Armenians in his History is
a reference to their role in transmitting the Black Death to
Europe. ‘It passed by Armenia to Asia Minor,’ he tells us of the
pestilence. ‘It reached England in 1348. Two-thirds of the
students at Oxford died.’ Oh my! The death of half the Armenians
in the Ottoman Empire certainly pales by comparison.
Roberts simply reports: ‘With Bolshevik help (Mustafa Kemal)
crushed the Armenians.’
It was not till recently that historians took to describing what
happened to the Armenians as ‘genocide’. Before, it was at best
the ‘Armenian Massacre’ or the ‘Great Calamity’. Never again –
somehow ‘massacre’ or ‘calamity’ isn’t as efficacious in making
that stick as ‘genocide’ or ‘Holocaust’.
What words do Palestinians have to describe the disasters that
have befallen them? Nothing like the Holocaust visited them, no
genocide, but they were afflicted by terrible disasters
nevertheless.
In 1917, there were 690,000 Palestinians in Palestine, compared
to 85,000 Jews. When Israel was established in 1948, about
700,000 Palestinians became refugees. Palestinians refer to 1948
as al-nakba, Arabic for ‘catastrophe’.
Every American and European, including US President George W.
Bush, would have heard of the ‘Holocaust’. How many, including Mr
Bush, would have heard of al-nakba? And if they have heard of the
term – which continues to resonate powerfully in the Arab mind –
how many would be moved by it?
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote yesterday: ‘There
will be no new Middle East – not as long as the New Middle
Easterners, like Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime
minister, get gunned down; not as long as Old Middle Easterners,
like (Hizbollah leader) Nasrallah, use all their wits and
resources to start a new Arab-Israeli war rather than build a new
Arab university; and not as long as Arab media and intellectuals
refuse to speak out clearly against those who encourage their
youth to embrace martyrdom with religious zeal rather than meld
modernity with Arab culture. Without that, we are wasting our
time and the Arab world is wasting its future.’
All that is profoundly true. But it is also profoundly true that
we are wasting their time if we do not acknowledge their
memories. Al-nakba – the catastrophe will continue to lay waste
the Middle East till there is an independent Palestine next to
Israel. Neither Jews nor Palestinians can have a future by
refusing to acknowledge the past of the other.
‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ A Jew, Shakespeare’s Shylock,
asked that.