IRAQ’S CHRISTIANS IMPERILED
By Charles Tannock
Philadelphia Inquirer, PA
Oct 18 2006
The world is consumed by fears that Iraq is degenerating into a civil
war among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. But in this looming war of all
against all, it is Iraq’s small community of Assyrian Christians that
is at risk of annihilation.
Iraq’s Christian communities are among the world’s most ancient,
having practiced their faith in Mesopotamia almost since the time
of Christ. The Assyrian Apostolic Church has existed since 34 A.D.,
and the Assyrian Church of the East dates to 33 A.D. The Aramaic that
many of Iraq’s Christians still speak is the language of Christ.
When tolerated by their Muslim rulers, Assyrian Christians contributed
much to their societies. Their scholars helped to usher in the “Golden
Age” of the Arab world by translating important works into Arabic
from Greek and Syriac. But in recent times, toleration has scarcely
existed. In the Armenian Genocide of 1914-1918, 750,000 Assyrians –
roughly two-thirds of their number – were massacred by the Ottoman
Turks with the help of the Kurds.
Under the Iraqi Hashemite monarchy, Assyrians faced persecution
for cooperating with the British during World War I. Many fled to
the West. During Saddam Hussein’s wars with the Kurds, hundreds
of Assyrian villages were destroyed, their inhabitants rendered
homeless, and dozens of ancient churches were bombed. The teaching
of the Syriac language was prohibited, and Assyrians were forced to
give their children Arabic names.
In 1987, the Iraqi census listed 1.4 million Christians. Today, only
about 600,000 to 800,000 remain. As many as 60,000, and perhaps even
more, have fled since the beginning of the insurgency that followed the
U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Their exodus accelerated in August 2004,
after the start of the terrorist bombing campaign against Christian
churches by Islamists.
A recent United Nations report states that religious minorities in Iraq
“have become the regular victims of discrimination, harassment and,
at times, persecution, with incidents ranging from intimidation to
murder,” and that “members of the Christian minority appear to be
particularly targeted.”
Indeed, there are widespread reports of Christians fleeing the country
as a result of threats being made to their women for not adhering
to strict Islamic dress codes. Christian women are said to have had
acid thrown in their faces. Some have been killed for wearing jeans
or not wearing the veil.
Over the last two years, 27 Assyrian churches have reportedly been
attacked for the sole reason that they were Christian places of
worship. These attacks go beyond targeting physical manifestations
of the faith. Christian-owned small businesses, particularly those
selling alcohol, have been attacked, and many shopkeepers murdered.
Sadly, the plight of Iraq’s Christians is not an isolated one in the
Middle East. Iran’s population has nearly doubled since the 1979
revolution, but, under a hostile regime, the number of Christians
in the country has fallen from roughly 300,000 to 100,000. In 1948,
Christians accounted for roughly 20 percent of the population of what
was then Palestine; now, they are about 1.6 percent of the Palestinian
population in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
In Egypt, emigration among Coptic Christians is disproportionately
high; many convert to Islam under pressure, and over the last few
years, violence against the Christian community has taken many lives.
Saudi Arabia’s Wahabbi regime prohibits any form of Christian worship.
The persecution of these ancient and unique Christian communities,
in Iraq and in the Middle East as a whole, is deeply disturbing. Last
April, the European Parliament voted virtually unanimously for the
Assyrians to be allowed to establish (on the basis of Section 5 of
the Iraqi constitution) a federal region where they can be free from
outside interference to practice their own way of life. It is high
time now that the West paid more attention, and took forceful action
to secure the future of Iraq’s embattled Christians.
Charles Tannock ([email protected]) is vice president
of the human rights subcommittee of the European Parliament.

CENSORING IDEAS
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist
Boston Globe, MA
Oct 18 2006
DID THE Ottoman Turks commit genocide against the Armenians in 1915?
Careful — in some places you can be arrested if you give the wrong
answer to that question. Under Article 305 of the Turkish Penal Code,
for example, those who promote “recognition of the Armenian genocide”
are subject to prosecution, while Article 301 makes the denigration of
“Turkishness” a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. The
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk , winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for
L iterature , is among those who have been charged under Article
301. His offense was to tell a Swiss interviewer that “30,000 Kurds
and a million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but
me dares to talk about it.”
Yet if acknowledging the Armenian genocide is a crime in Turkey,
gainsaying it could soon be a crime in France. Last week the French
National Assembly voted to approve a bill under which anyone denying
the 1915 genocide could be sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and
a 45,000-euro ($56,000) fine. That matches the penalty under French
law for denying the Nazi Holocaust .
The French legislation is meant to uphold the truth — the Armenian
genocide, like the Holocaust, is a fact of history — while the point
of the Turkish law is to debase it. Both, however, are intolerable
assaults on liberty. Beliefs should not be criminalized, no matter
how repugnant or absurd. As I wrote when David Irving was convicted
of Holocaust denial in Austria earlier this year, free societies do
not throw people in prison for giving offensive speeches or spouting
historical lies.
We Americans should know this better than anyone. The right to speak
one’s mind is supposed to be a core article of our civic faith. Yet
the would-be censors are busy here, too.
THE ‘SHUT UP’ FACTOR: How serious a problem is censorship today? Are
would-be censors smothering debate?
At Columbia University two weeks ago, a forum on immigration was to
feature a speech by Jim Gilchrist of the Minutemen, a group that
monitors the US-Mexico border for illegal immigrants. But moments
after Gilchrist began speaking, protesters led by members of the
International Socialist Organization stormed the stage, overturning
tables, unfurling banners, and yelling insults. After 15 minutes of
pandemonium, campus police shut down the program .
In Seattle, two teachers are suing the affluent Lakeside prep school
for illegal racial discrimination and the creation of a hostile
work environment. “Among the plaintiffs’ complaints,” reports the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “was Lakeside’s invitation to conservative
commentator Dinesh D’Souza to speak as part of a distinguished lecture
series.” But D’Souza, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and
a veteran of the Reagan White House, never gave the lecture: Faculty
members opposed to his views howled when he was invited, and the
school’s headmaster, bowing to the censors, rescinded the invitation.
Asked about the campaign against him, D’Souza had said: “I am coming
to speak on one day. If they think what I am saying is so awful, they
have the rest of the year to refute it.” But that isn’t enough for
the enemies of free speech. They insist not only that speakers with
politically incorrect opinions be shunned, but that anyone offering
them a platform be punished as well.
Then there is “Grist,” an environmental webzine whose staff writer
David Roberts recently proposed that global warming skeptics be put
on trial like Nazi war criminals.
“When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming . . . we
should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of
climate Nuremberg,” Roberts wrote. Negative publicity led him to
recant, but he is far from the only one invoking the Holocaust as a
way to silence global warming heretics.
Environmental writer Mark Lynas, for example, puts dissent on
climate change “in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial —
except that this time the Holocaust is yet to come, and we still have
time to avoid it. Those who try to ensure we don’t will one day have
to answer for their crimes.” This totalitarian view is taking root
everywhere, making skepticism on climate change taboo and subjecting
anyone reckless enough to question the global-warming dogma to mockery
and demonization. Former vice president Al Gore lumps “global warming
deniers,” some of whom are eminent scientists, with the “15 percent of
the population (who) believe the moon landing was actually staged in a
movie lot in Arizona” and those who “still believe the earth is flat.”
The silencers are at work in the marketplace of ideas, using hook
or crook to smother opinions they dislike. The lust to censor is as
powerful as ever. If only liberty’s defenders were equally vigilant.
Jeff Jacoby’s e-mail address is [email protected].
e/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/10/18/censo ring_ideas/
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

KEEPING TURKEY OUT
By Gwynne Dyer
Cyprus Mail, Cyprus
Oct 18 2006
WORDS matter. The Holocaust of the European Jews during the Second
World War was a genocide. The mass deportation of Chechens from their
Caucasian homeland during the same war was a crime but not a genocide,
even though half of them died, because Moscow’s aim was to keep them
from collaborating with German troops who were nearing Chechnya, not
to exterminate them. Which brings us to the far more controversial
case of the Armenians and the Turks.
On October 12, the French parliament passed a law declaring that
anyone who denies that the mass murder of Armenians in eastern
Turkey in 1915-17 was a genocide will face a year in prison. But the
French foreign ministry called the law “unnecessary and untimely”,
and President Jacques Chirac telephoned Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyib Erdogan to apologise.
“Chirac called me and told me he was sorry. He said that he is
listening to our statements and he thinks we are right and he will do
what he can in the upcoming process [of ratifying the legislation[,”
said Erdogan on Saturday. Since Chirac can veto the law, that should be
the end of that, but the point of passing the law was never really to
get it on the books. It was to alienate Turkish public opinion and to
curry favour with the half-million French citizens of Armenian descent.
Why would the conservative majority in the French parliament
deliberately set out to annoy the Turks, knowing that the law would
eventually be vetoed by the president? Because they hope to provoke a
nationalist backlash in Turkey that would further damage that country’s
already difficult relationship with the European Union.
French public opinion is already in a xenophobic mood over the last
expansion of the EU, with folk-tales of “Polish plumbers” working for
peanuts and stealing the jobs of honest French workers causing outrage,
especially among right-wing voters who never much liked foreigners
anyway. The prospect of eighty million Turks – Muslim Turks – joining
the European Union, even if it is at least ten years away, is enough
to make their blood boil.
So a big row with Turkey should attract lots of votes to the right’s
presidential candidate in next May’s election, who is likely to be
none other than current prime minister Nicolas Sarkozy – who announced
last month that Turkey should never be allowed to join the EU: “We
have to say who is European and who isn’t. It’s no longer possible to
leave this question open.” The new law is not really about Armenians
or Turks. It’s about the French election.
Meanwhile, in Turkey, anti-EU nationalists have their own game
under way. While Turkey was busy amending its penal code to make it
conform to EU standards over the past few years, hard-line lawyers and
bureaucrats smuggled in a new law, Article 301, that provides severe
penalties for “insulting Turkishness”. In practice, that mainly means
trying to ban public discussion of the Armenian massacres, and some 70
prosecutions have already been brought by the ultra-right-wing Union of
Lawyers against Turkish authors, journalists and other public figures.
For several generations, the Turkish government flatly denied any
guilt for the Armenian massacres, insisting that they didn’t happen
and if they did, it was the Armenians’ own fault for rebelling against
the Turkish state in wartime. Latterly, a new generation of Turkish
intellectuals has been saying that a million or more Armenians did
die in the mass deportations from eastern Anatolia, and that Turkey
needs to admit its guilt and apologise – though most still refuse to
call it a genocide, as that would put it in the same category as the
Jewish Holocaust.
Israel, too, refuses to use the term “genocide” for the Armenian
massacres, on the grounds that there was some provocation (Armenian
revolutionaries conspired with both Britain and Russia in 1914-15
to launch local uprisings in support of their planned invasions
of Turkey), and that the Turkish state’s actions, though brutal,
illegal and immoral, were not premeditated. Most Armenians, of course,
desperately want the label “genocide” to be applied to their ancestors’
suffering, since they feel that any other term demotes it to a lower
rank of tragedy. But there is room for dialogue and even reconciliation
here, if people can get past the issue of nomenclature.
The prosecutions for “insulting Turkishness” – even against Turkey’s
greatest living novelist, Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk – are not
just an attempt to stifle this dialogue among Turks, or between
Turks and Armenians. The ultra-nationalists also want to derail the
negotiations for EU membership by painting Turkey as an authoritarian
and intolerant state that does not belong in Europe. They are, in
effect, Sarkozy’s objective allies.
But Prime Minister Erdogan will probably repeal Article 301 once next
year’s elections are past. France’s law, which requires people to
discuss the Armenian massacres in precisely the terms that 301 bans,
will probably be vetoed by Chirac. And Turkey’s best-known Armenian
journalist, Hrant Dink, who has already been prosecuted several
times under 301, has just announced that he will go to France “to
protest against this madness and violate the [new] law… And I will
commit the crime to be prosecuted there, so that these two irrational
mentalities can race to put me into jail.”

NOBEL PRIZE WAS VICTORY FOR OUTSPOKEN NOVELIST
By Laura T. Ryan – Staff writer
Syracuse Post Standard, NY
Oct 18 2006
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s prize was a win for intellectual
freedom, says Colgate professor.
The awarding of a Nobel Prize to Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk
constitutes a victory to those who seek the freedom to acknowledge
Turkey’s bloody past, according to a Colgate University professor.
Last year, Pamuk was put on criminal trial for “insulting” Turkey,
by telling a Swiss newspaper his country needed to acknowledge its
role in the deaths of 1 million Armenians in 1915 and the more recent
killing of 30,000 Kurds in the 1980s.
The case eventually was thrown out.
“First andforemost, one gets a Nobel Prize for one’s art, but . . . I
think (Pamuk’s case) became a manifestation of Turkey’s struggle
with intellectual freedom and issues surrounding democracy and human
rights,” said Peter Balakian, director of Colgate’s Center for Ethics
and World Societies and the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor
of the Humanities.
Balakian, a New Jersey native of Armenian descent, also is the author
of “The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response”
(2003) and “Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian
Past” (1997), which won a PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for Memoir.
Pamuk becamea lightning rod for those issues, Balakian said, and
his trial “became a cause celebre because it embodied the issues of
democracy which Turkey is failing to fully embrace, in its refusal
to acknowledge the past and its intimidation and punishment of those
who do, like Pamuk and others.”
Fellow Turkish novelist Elif Shafak faced similar charges for
statements made by a fictional character in her novel “The Bastard
of Istanbul.” She was acquitted last month.
Turkish publisher Zagip Zarakolu, meanwhile, faces up to 13 years in
prison for publishing books that deal with the Armenian genocide. He
published Balakian’s “Burning Tigris” in Turkey last year.
“Pamuk is part of a larger intellectual moment in Turkish culture,
a more forceful challenging of state taboos,” Balakian said. “And
(writers like Pamuk and Shafak) are the hope for the future. So much
of this has been amplified by the Turks’ desire to join the European
Union, and Europe is making it clear, unless there’s intellectual
freedom, joining Europe is not going to be possible.”
Arpena Mesrobian,former director of Syracuse University Press
and author of the 2000 book, “Like One Family: The Armenians of
Syracuse,” said she, too, was pleased the Nobel committee chose to
honor Pamuk’s contributions at a time when his comments had landed
him in controversy.
“I think it’s delightful they reached out and chose something that
most people might not encounter,” Mesrobian said.

BARROSO: EUROPE SHOULD TAKE A TOUGHER STANCE TOWARDS RUSSIA
AZG Armenian Daily
18/10/2006
Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, has urged
European leaders to take a tougher stance towards president Vladimir
Putin of Russia in regard to issues of energetic safety, Georgia’s
blockade and investigation into the assassination of famous journalist
Anna Politkovskaya.
President Putin is slated to meet European leaders in Finland on
October 20. “I do not want to be suspected in clashing with Russia
but I am sure we will achieve no results if he step back from our
principles when it comes to Russians,” Barroso said.

ARMENIAN FM OSKANIAN INSISTS ON ‘TENSION POLICY WITH TURKEY’
Journal of Turkish Weekly, Turkey
Oct 17 2006
* Armenian Foreign Minister Oskanian indicates that Armenia will
continue to increase tension with Turkey
Emboldened by last week’s decision by France to approve a bill
penalizing those who would publicly deny the so-called Armenian
genocide, Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian has come forward
with a new allegation against Turkey: “The fact that Turkey has
not recognized the events of 1915-1917 as it should means that the
genocide is still occuring.”
Oskanian, who asserts that despite that, Yerevan is anxious to
normalize relations with Ankara, went on to say “It is difficult to
say that things are going well just because France and Switerzerland
have accepted bills recognizing the Armenian genocide. Our real
aim is not to have other countries recognize this genocide. Also,
we gain nothing from humiliating Turkey. For Turkey to ask for a
special research commission to be formed while its borders with us
remain closed is not a very honest or genuine action.”
The territorial borders between Turkey and Armenia have been closed
since Armenian forces attacked and occupied Azeri territories.
Armenia does not recognise Turkey’s and Azerbaijan’s national borders.
Oskanian’s comments came in the “NZZ am Sonntag” newspaper on Sunday
in Switzerland. He also said “The fact that Turkey has not accepted
or recognized the Armenian genocide up until now means that it is
still continuing. But, as this country’s foreign minister, my duty is
to look towards the future and to find a way to normalize relations
with Turkey.”
The relations between Turkey and Armenia is not at the worst level in
the history. The surveys show that most of the Turkish people accuse
Armenia for the French bill, and many think that Turkey-Armenia borders
should not be opened, though the Government offers to establish a
joint commission. More than 70.000 Armenia Armenians live and work
in Turkish cities.

“WE WILL ALWAYS LOVE OUR DEAR ARNO”
A1+
[02:19 pm] 18 October, 2006
On October 28-25 a music festival will take place in Yerevan
dedicated to the 85th anniversary of renowned composer Arno
Babajanyan. Scientific conferences and concerts will be organized
during those five days.
“We must always love and respect our dear Arno as long as we live”,
said composer Edward Mirzoyan. Arno’s friends remember him with
love and admiration. Pianist Arthur Papazyan recalls him not only
as a great composer, but also as a good friend and wonderful person,
“It’s a pity I have not yet played any of his works. Maybe after the
conference I will take up one of them”, he said.
Today’s conference was the first event of the celebration. 12 reports
were represented. The reporters referred to the activity of the
composer from different angles. “This year we aim at pouring light on
Arno Babajanyan’s works which are not very famous. It is important
especially for the new generation. They must be well aware of the
musical heritage of Arno”, said doctor-professor Svetlana Sargsyan.
The organizers of the festival are charity fund “Arno Babajanyan”,
RA Ministry of Culture and State Conservatoire after Komitas.

GUL COMPLAINS TO EU TROYKA ABOUT FRANCE
Sabah, Turkey
Oct 17 2006
In the EU-Turkey Troyka meeting, Gul reminded that France has approved
the bill of Armenian genocide denial and said: “EU members retreated
from the fundamental freedoms, which caused distress.”
In the EU-Turkey Troyka meeting held in Luxemburg, the representative
of Turkey, the minister of foreign affairs Abdullah Gul communicated
the disappointment and reactions in the Turkish public caused by the
Armenian genocide denial bill approved by the French parliament. The
minister of foreign affairs said that while Turkey is taking step
forward to the fundamental freedoms, EU members retreated from the
fundamental freedoms, which caused distress.”

“HISTORY CAN NOT BE MADE MATERIAL FOR ELECTIONS”
Sabah, Turkey
Oct 17 2006
Reactions against the “Armenian genocide denial bill” approved in the
French Parliament are coming also from France as well as Turkey. The
most eminent historians of the country objected to the bill and
students also raised a rebel flag. The federation gathering 12 art
and history student associations declared: “the history study of
Turkish people is being despised and this bill will hurt the feelings
of Turkish people very deeply.”

THIEVES OF CABLES WERE CAUGHT
A1+
[02:30 pm] 18 October, 2006
4 days ago the head of the Kapan department of “ArmenTel” turned to
the police informing about the theft of 300 meters of cables from
the idle telephone station of “ArmenTel”.
On October 17 Seyran (b. 1989), Vahe (b. 1991) and Arthur (b. 1993)
B.-s were arrested with the charge of theft. Preliminary investigation
is under way.