Agence France Presse
4 juin 2006 dimanche 2:16 PM GMT
Olympiades d’échecs à Turin : l’Arménie décroche la médaille d’or
ROME 4 juin 2006
L’Arménie a décroché la médaille d’or dimanche aux Olympiades
d’échecs de Turin (nord de l’Italie), un championnat du monde où se
sont affrontés 1.400 joueurs, ont annoncé les organisateurs dans un
communiqué.
Dans le tournoi général, ouvert aux hommes et aux femmes, l’équipe
d’Arménie, menée par Levon Aronian, 23 ans, troisième au classement
mondial de la Fédération internationale des échecs (FIDE), s’est
adjugé la victoire en battant la Chine, médaille d’argent, et les
Etats-Unis, médaille de bronze.
Les Russes, pourtant grands favoris, n’ont pas réussi à monter sur le
podium et ont vécu “une sortie fracassante”, a souligné le comité
organisateur.
Dans le tournoi réservé aux femmes, et où 108 équipes étaient en
lice, c’est l’Ukraine, menée par Natalia Zhukova, qui a remporté le
tournoi, devançant la Russie et la Chine.
Il y a deux ans, lors de la 36e édition des Olympiades qui s’était
déroulée aux Baléares, l’Ukraine avait remporté le titre dans le
tournoi général et la Chine avait fini première dans la catégorie
femmes.

Russia may relocate Black Sea Fleet to Syrian port – paper
02/06/2006 12:31
MOSCOW, June 2 (RIA Novosti) – Russia has started dredging at a Syrian
port where it maintains a logistical supply point with a possible eye
to turning it into a full-fledged naval base, a respected Russian
business daily said Friday.
Tartus, the second most important Syrian port on the Mediterranean,
could be transformed into a base for Black Sea Fleet warships when
they are redeployed from the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol, Kommersant
daily said, quoting sources in Russia’s diplomatic service and the
Defense Ministry.
Vladimir Zimin, a senior economic advisor at the Russian Embassy to
Syria, said Russia had simultaneously launched a modernization project
at the port of Latakia, 90 km to the north of Tartus.
The paper quoted an anonymous source at the Defense Ministry as saying
that Moscow was planning to form a squadron led by the Moskva missile
cruiser within the next three years to operate in the Mediterranean
Sea on a permanent basis, in particular for joint antiterrorist
exercises with NATO forces.
Russia’s Black Sea Fleet currently uses a range of naval facilities in
the Crimea under a 1997 agreement that allowed Russia to continue its
presence in its neighboring former Soviet republic for rent of $93
million per year.
The fleet is scheduled to withdraw in 2017, but Ukraine has recently
voiced concerns that Russia is not paying enough for the facilities
and also demanded that a new agreement be signed on inventorizing the
bases. Russia has said it will make no concessions over rent or
withdrawing the fleet and talks have stalled.
The Defense Ministry source told Kommersant that a Russian naval base
in the Mediterranean would not only help Moscow strengthen its
position in the Middle East – where it is currently also involved in
negotiations on the Iranian nuclear crisis and the Israel/Palestinian
issue – but also ensure Syria’s security.
Moscow plans to deploy an S-300PMU-2 Favorit air-defense system to
protect the base, the paper said, adding that the system will be
operated by Russian servicemen and not be handed over to Syria.
At the same time, sources close to the matter said Moscow and Damascus
had reached an agreement to modernize Syria’s antiaircraft system
using medium-range S-125 missile complexes that were deployed in the
1980s.

Tibetan Genocide Victim to Testify before Spain’s National Court
Phayul[Saturday, June 03, 2006 10:02]
PRESS RELEASE:
CAT: Comité de Apoyo al Tà – bet, Madrid
Fundación Casa del Tà – bet, Barcelona
On Monday 5th June 2006, the Nº 2 Central Court of the National Court of
Spain will begin to investigate the claims of genocide in Tibet almost a
year after the lawsuit for genocide in Tibet was first lodged, and
nearly six months after the case was accepted.
This is a historic date for the advance of justice in Tibet, and is the
first opportunity for a Tibetan victim to testify on their experiences
under the Chinese occupation.
Judge Ismael Moreno, of Court Nº 2, has called Thubten Wangchen, a
Spanish citizen of Tibetan origin, to declare as private prosecutor at
9:30 a.m. In addition to this preliminary proceeding, the judge has also
begun an international investigative commission in the United Kingdom
and Canada in order to question two of the numerous witnesses and
victims of the international crimes denounced in the lawsuit.
Thubten Wangchen, director of the Fundación Casa del Tà – bet of Barcelona,
is a Tibetan victim with Spanish nationality. He will recount his
personal experience of the international crimes denounced at the very
start of the occupation. As a child in Kyirong (Tibet), his pregnant
mother was kidnapped by the Chinese occupying forces and was
disappeared, together with other women from the village. None of them
were ever seen again. As the lives of all his family were in danger,
Wangchen was forced to flee into exile, first to Nepal where he survived
by begging, and then to India , where he became a Tibetan monk. In the
early 80s he moved to Spain, working as a translator and tourist guide,
which led him back to Tibet. On one such visit, he was arrested and
threatened with death for having a photograph of the Dalai Lama in his
possession, although he managed to escape. (See below for the full
story).
The Court has asked the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs for
information on all the United Nations documents and resolutions
regarding the case of Tibet , the posts held by the accused, and any
information it may have on Tibetan victims, as requested by the counsel
for the prosecution,
Lastly, once the evidence of witnesses has been examined, the judge will
decide on the questioning of the accused.
BIOGRAPHY OF THE CO-PLAINTIFF THUBTEN WANGCHEN WHO TESTIFIES IN COURT AS
PRIVATE PROSECUTION:
THUBTEN WANGCHEN SHERPA SHERPA is one of the many victims and witnesses
of these acts. Of Spanish nationality, Wangchen was born in 1954 in the
Tibetan region of Kyirong to Tibetan parents, Dawa and Dolma. When he
was three his village was occupied by Chinese military forces whose
leaders began to use the locals, including his pregnant mother, for
forced labour. Despite being eight months pregnant, she was forced like
other pregnant villagers to perform hard labour in a deliberate attempt
to induce miscarriages. One day, feeling unwell after a hard day’s work,
she was taken away by Chinese soldiers to their camp outside the
village, under the pretext of providing her with medical treatment, but
she never returned, nor did the child she was carrying in her womb. The
same fate befell other pregnant women, and any men in the village who
protested or simply spoke out against the occupation were arrested and
tortured.
In March 1959 when news spread that the Dalai Lama had fled Lhasa,
Tibet’s capital, panic broke out in every village throughout Tibet,
including Kyirong, and thousands of Tibetans began the flight into exile
through the high mountain passes of the Himalayas. These exiles included
Thubten Wanchen, his father and two brothers. People fled in groups of
about twenty, walking at night to avoid detection by the Chinese border
guards. The journey lasted roughly two weeks and many Tibetans lost
their lives: some, captured by Chinese patrols, others, falling to their
deaths at night over the cliffs of the steep mountains gorges.
In April 1959 they finally reached Kathmandu, the capital of the
independent kingdom of Nepal, which was swamped by the flood of Tibetan
refugees and where for two years many families, like that of Thubten
Wangchen, were forced to beg from tourists in order to survive. Hearing
that the Dalai Lama was living in India, they moved there without papers
or passports, riding the trains in secret. Once there, an agreement of
cooperation was reached between the Government of India under Nehru and
the Tibetan Government in Exile, to employ all the Tibetan exiles in the
construction of India’s mountain roads, as being accustomed to high
altitudes and the cold, they could withstand the working conditions that
most Indian workers found unbearable.
When he was seven, Wangchen began with his father and brothers to work
and live on the high mountain roads in India. In view of the terrible
situation of the children of the Tibetan exiles, who either had to work
hard or beg on the streets, a further agreement between both Governments
led to the creation of schools for them.
In 1963 Thubten Wanchen started school in Dalhousie, India, where he
studied for seven years before entering the Namgyal Monastry, seat of
the Dalai Lama, in 1970 to begin his monastic life.
In late 1981 he came to Spain for the first time, as translator for a
Tibetan lama at the invitation of a centre of Buddhist studies. Once
here, he stayed and acquired Spanish nationality.
In July 1987 Wangchen began working for a travel agency in Barcelona as
a tourist guide for Tibet. On this trip, when the group reached the
Tibetan town of Shigatse, seat of the Panchen Lama (the second most
important spiritual authority in Tibet after the Dalai Lama), at the
entrance to his monastery Wangchen asked permission for the Spanish
group of tourists to visit his quarters and talk to him. While awaiting
the reply from the Chinese authorities who control the monasteries, and
at the insistence of passing Tibetans who beseeched him and the Spanish
tourists for pictures of the Dalai Lama, Wangchen started to hand out
some of these photos, so treasured by Tibetans but forbidden by Chinese
law. Suddenly, a Tibetan who had been sweeping the entrance to the
monastery hurried off to the nearest police station, and within minutes
security police arrested Wangchen and took him inside the monastery,
where he was forced to sit down in the centre of a room, surrounded by
over ten security police. They began questioning him and on searching
him and finding more photos of the Dalai Lama they accused him of having
committed a serious counterrevolutionary crime. They questioned him
about his nationality, as he denied being Tibetan, his passport in exile
being Nepalese. His captors insisted he was a Tibetan criminal and
threatened to imprison him for having committed that crime. As he was
being dragged from police quarters to the vehicle that would take him to
prison and whose siren he could hear, his group of tourists gathered
around him and he was able to explain to them quickly in Spanish that he
was being taken to prison and begged them to help him by reporting what
had happened once they left Tibet. The police hurriedly pushed him
inside the vehicle.
At the prison he was subjected to long sessions of questioning in an
attempt to discover where he had been born, what his nationality was and
whether he had any connections with the Dalai Lama’s Government in
Exile. Wangchen stuck to his story that he had been born in Nepal to a
family of Sherpa origin, as their features are very similar to those of
the Tibetans, and that he had been living and working in Europe for many
years. They made him sign a written confession saying that he had
committed that crime, and they advised him to admit to his mistakes, as
otherwise he would be condemned to death. Wangchen complied in a
document in English. He was then questioned all over again, this time by
different security police, and was again made to write a confession.
After hours in police quarters he was taken to his hotel where the
security police searched his room and his belongings in his presence,
and where they found further `counterrevolutionary material’.
After these findings he was taken back to the prison for further
questioning and written confessions. His belongings were confiscated,
including his Nepalese passport, and he was told that he would no longer
need it, as a few days later he would die for having committed a crime
against the unity of the Motherland. In his confession, Wangchen
admitted to having made mistakes that would not be repeated, and he
asked them to release him, using the following ruse. He told them that
the group of Spanish tourists included some very important government
officials and that if he, being a foreigner, were arrested and
sentenced, it would lead to a very serious diplomatic scandal.
Faced with these threats, the security officials spent all night arguing
in the next-door room until finally deciding in the early hours of the
morning to return him to his hotel, and forcing him and the entire group
of tourists to leave the country. In September of that year, 1987, the
Tibetan people erupted in a series of demonstrations in Tibet’s most
important cities. The TV news coverage accused four Tibetans of being
the ringleaders of the separatist and conterrevolutionary uprisings and
the photographs shown of the wanted criminals included that of Thubten
Wangchen, who had left the country in time.
For more information:
José Elias Esteve: Lawyer who researched and drew up the lawsuit, and
vice president of the CAT : [email protected]
Alán Cantos: Director of the CAT and coordinator of the international
campaign on the lawsuit: Tel. 91 350 24 14 [email protected]
Fundacion Casa del Tibet: Tel. 93 2075966 [email protected]

ROLAND GARROS 2006
PARIS, FRANCE
June 4, 2006
Nalbandian is Paris Dangerman
Top seed Roger Federer is now three victories away from becoming just the
third man in history to win four consecutive Grand Slam titles after
brushing aside Tomas Berdych 6-3, 6-2, 6-3 in 1 hr. 47 mins. to reach the
Roland Garros quarterfinals for the second consecutive year.
Today’s victory marked Federer’s 25th consecutive Grand Slam match win,
tying him for second place (w/Sampras, Connors) on the Open Era list behind
Laver with 29 in 1969-70.
Berdych, who defeated Federer at the 2004 Olympics, led 3-1 in the third set
before Federer rallied to win the last five games of the match.
Federer, 24, is attempting to reach his eighth consecutive Grand Slam
semifinal and win his sixth major title from his past eight Grand Slam
appearances. Federer reached the Roland Garros semifinals for the first time
last year, losing to Rafael Nadal. The No. 1 and No. 2 seeds remain on track
to meet in this year’s final.
Only Don Budge and Rod Laver (twice) have held all four Grand Slam titles at
the same time. Both men completed the Grand Slam – tennis’s holy grail of
winning all four majors in the same calendar year – Budge in 1938 and Laver
in 1962 and ’69. Three other men have won all four Grand Slam titles during
their careers – Andre Agassi, Roy Emerson and Fred Perry – but they did not
win four consecutive Grand Slam titles as Federer now has the chance to do.
Federer next meets in-form Croatian 12th seed Mario Ancic, who upset seventh
seed Tommy Robredo 7-5 in the fifth set.
Federer holds a 2-1 career edge over Ancic, winning their two most recent
meetings in 2005 in Miami and Rotterdam on hard court. Ancic claimed his
only win over Federer in the first round of Wimbledon in 2002. That result
was a surprise because it followed Federer’s quarterfinal appearance in 2001
(when he defeated four-time reigning champion Pete Sampras) and preceded the
Swiss’s first Wimbledon title run in 2003.
Third seed David Nalbandian defeated fellow Argentine Martin Vassallo
Arguello 6-4, 6-4, 6-4 to reach the quarterfinals for the second time in
three years. Nalbandian, who reached the semifinals in 2004, clipped 47
winners to 28 and broke his countryman six times.
Russian Nikolay Davydenko is now one win away from a second consecutive
Roland Garros semifinal appearance after defeating 2004 champion Gaston
Gaudio 6-3, 6-4, 3-6, 6-3.
WHAT THE PLAYERS SAID
Federer: “I already felt much more comfortable going into this match today.
I felt very calm when I was warming up. When I started serve, right away I
hit an ace. I already had a good feeling about today. I think that’s just by
being here for so long now, playing some good matches early on. I feel like
I’m really into the tournament.
“So I believe from here on, my form is only going to get better. Yeah, I’m
obviously looking forward. As usual now, it really gets interesting.”

An interview with Ara Sarafian – Turkish review VIRGUL- Issue 95 – May 2006
23050)
dimanche 4 juin 2006, Stéphane/armenews
AN INTERVIEW WITH ARA SARAFIAN

published in the monthly book review Virgul, Issue 95, May 2006

OSMAN KOKER : If I remember right your name was first heard in Turkey
in the year 1995 when your research at the Ottoman Archives was
interrupted by the officials there. In the past few years your name is
mentioned in connection with the `Treatment of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire 1915-1916′, known as the “Blue Book”.

At the conference in the Istanbul University on 15-17 March you made a
presentation about the Blue Book. Why did you choose the Blue Book as
your topic ?

ARA SARAFIAN : I chose this subject because it is topical in Turkey,
and because the Blue Book issue reflects the disturbing face of the
official Turkish thesis on the Armenian Genocide. The whole case
against the Blue Book, according to the official Turkish thesis,
relies on deliberate misinformation about the subject. This is why I
call many of my antagonists `denier’ of the Armenian Genocide rather
than people I disagree with.

O.K. : How was the Blue Book prepared ?

A.S. : The Blue Book was originally compiled as a report. We do not
know how the decision was taken to request such a report, but
certainly we do know that its compilers, Arnold Toynbee and James
Bryce, acted in good faith when putting it together. We can make this
assertions because we have Toynbee’s working papers from this period
(including his correspondence with Bryce), as well as his later
published works where he talks about the Blue Book and the Armenian
Genocide.

O.K. : What are the criteria employed in deciding to include a witness
account in the book ? Do you think these criteria are reliable ?

A.S. : The key criteria for the inclusion of reports in the Blue Book
was that sources had to be authentic primary records (eye-witness
accounts). Most of these reports were from a neutral United States,
which had its consulates in the interior of the Ottoman Empire until
April 1917. These consuls reported what they saw around them, and they
also forwarded other reports written by Americans and non-Americans in
these regions, such as the letters of American, German, or Swiss
missionaries.

Given these source of information, Toynbee and Bryce did not doubt the
originality of these accounts from the Ottoman Empire, and they judged
their value as primary sources on a record by record basis.

I think the criteria used by Toynbee and Bryce to gather and assess
their materials were creditworthy under the circumstances. They even
made provisions for possible errors creeping in by basing their case
on the weight of all the evidence without relying on one or two
documents. They also, for example, made sure that, the core narrative
of events rested on the evidence of Americans, Germans and other
foreigners, in case the `native evidence’ (those from Armenian or
Assyrian sources) may have overstated what they saw.

In fact, when they did so, they realised that the strongest reports
were provided by non-Armenians, and that the `native evidence’ merely
provided additional information.

According to the available evidence, the report that was compiled by
Bryce and Toynbee was accepted as a Parliamentary Blue Book in the
summer of 1916 because of the strong case it represented. Certainly
Toynbee had no idea that the report he compiled would become a
Parliamentary report.

The strength of the Blue Book today lies in the fact that we have a
complete record of how it was put together. We also know where (most
of) the original documentation came from, as well as how these
documents were selected from a wider body of archival records in the
United States. This is why we can still find the original records
today (and can not simply speculate about their real or fictitious
origins).

I used these archival and published sources to carefully annotate my
critical edition of the 1916 work.

O.K. : Do you think we can refer to the Blue Book as a propaganda
tool? What were the means/methods used by the British in their
propaganda efforts at that time ?

A.S. : The British used propaganda as part of their war effort. Some
of this was crude, and some of it not so crude. The British government
was careful such propaganda did not backfire. That is why they did not
publish anything on Ottoman Turkey early in the war (for example when
they were landing at Gallipoli), because they did not have reliable
information. They were concerned that, if they made a poor case
against the Ottoman Empire, it would offend the Muslim population of
the British Empire. The first pamphlet they printed, not under an
official title, was after October 1915-when they first began receiving
reliable information about the destruction of Armenians. In fact, the
basis of that booklet was a speech Bryce made in Parliament, based on
the new evidence from the USA. Toynbee was asked to create a
publication from Bryce’s speech, which is what he did, and it was
published under his own name.

As more evidence of atrocities against Armenians was revealed, Toynbee
and Bryce continued to collect such records in a more formal way in
February 1916, for a more critical and systematic report. Once the
decision was taken to publish the Blue Book, it was used for effective
propaganda purposes. However, the work itself was not compromised by
crude propaganda considerations, nor fabricated as some deniers of the
Armenian Genocide like to suggest. The Blue Book was compiled to a
high academic standard, and the archival records we have today support
this point out.

O.K. : As you know, Ottoman Empire too published a book, `Ermeni
Komitelerinin Amal ve Harekat-i Ihtilaliyesi’, for propaganda purposes
about the Armenian issue during the WWI. What can you say on this book?

A.S. : Regarding Ottoman wartime propaganda against Armenians, it
cannot be compared with the Blue Book. Turkish nationalists have
republished the Ottoman government’s anti-Armenian propaganda without
serious examination where the records came from, who compiled and
edited them, who forwarded them to the compilers, where the original
materials are today, how records were included or excluded from the
Ottoman publication, etc. It would be an interesting exercise for the
TTK (Turkish History Association) to undertake and publish such an
annotated republication, as the Gomidas Institute has done for the
Blue Book.

O.K. : You are the editor of the 2000 “uncensored” edition of the Blue
Book ? What does “uncensored” mean ?

A.S. : I am the editor of the 2000 and the 2005 `uncensored’ editions!
The latter one came out last year with minor additions in the
introduction.

I decided to call my annotated republication the `uncensored edition’
because I included information that was left out of the original
publication. In 1916, many of the witnesses whose reports appeared in
the Blue Book, were still in the Ottoman Empire (for example, the US
consuls in Trabzon, Harput, Aleppo, Mersin). The British could not
reveal the identities of these people for obvious reasons. In other
cases, the eyewitness accounts were so specific, that the identities
of the sources inside the Ottoman Empire could be revealed by the
witness statements, so some place names also had to be obscured as
well. When Toynbee censured such information he also placed it into a
confidential key, which was not made generally available-except to
trusted individuals.
Toynbee also explained all of this in his introduction to the main
volume.

The confidential key was made public after WWI and has been in print
for the past 50 years. So, when we reproduced the Blue Book at the
Gomidas Institute, we also put all of this information back into the
main work. This is why we called it the `uncensored edition,’ because
we put all of the missing information that was taken out in 1916 was
put back into the main text.

Deniers of the Blue Book today do not acknowledge these facts and
argue that the Blue Book hid its sources because the report used by
the British were fictitious ! Recently, at the Istanbul University
Symposium, Sukru Elekdag claimed that Justin McCarthy had just
`discovered’ a copy of the key in the British National Archives at
Kew, and that the key showed that the reports comprising the Blue Book
were not creditworthy. Of course, Elekdag’s assertions remain absurd :
as mentioned before, the key to the Blue Book has been available for
many decades. Furthermore, if one looked at McCarthy’s work over the
last 20 years, one can see in his bibliographies that he has been
consulting archival collections that have included the confidential
key (most notably the Toynbee Papers, Record Group of the State
Department). In fact the same is also true for other deniers, such as
Mim Kemal Ã-ke, Salahi Sonyel, Kamuran Gurun and others. The
publication of the `uncensored edition’ of the Blue Book has forced
McCarthy to change his position, but it is not enough to save him. He
has acknowledged the key only to claim (again wrongly) that the
content of the Blue Book is inadequate.

Other than collapsing the confidential key back into the main Blue
Book, I also used the Toynbee Papers in the British National Archives
to trace the original records that were sent to him. Having traced the
bulk of these records to the United States National Archives, I
checked if the reports sent to the British were selective (i.e. were
there any reports which did not support the Armenian Genocide thesis
?), and if the accounts that were sent were changed by communicants in
the USA or by Bryce and Toynbee themselves. I then annotated the blue
book with this additional information, including full citations where
the original records could be found, and I gave my analysis in a new
introduction to the `uncensored’ Blue Book.

What were the results ? The Blue Book was exactly what it claimed it
was in its original introduction. It was carefully put together with
the authenticity of each document examined. I can also say that the
U.S. reports appearing in the Blue Book were not selective nor
distorted. In fact, if we added all of the missing records from the
State Department files (i.e.including those which were not sent to the
British in 1916), the Blue Book thesis would actually be
strengthened. Some of the worst accounts about the Armenian Genocide
were not made public by the Americans-but we can certainly read them
today.

I have also published these sources in another book called `United
States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide 1915-17′ and these
records (and more) will soon appear on the internet on
_www.gomidas.org_ () .

O.K. : Turkish retired ambassador and member of parliament Sukru
Elekdag said, in the conference at the Istanbul University, that the
Blue Book was the “last fortress of the Armenian genocide
allegations”. Is this true ? Aren’t there any other publications or
archival records on Armenian genocide.

A.S. : Sukru Elekdag is like the captain of a sinking ship who
continues telling his passengers that he knows what he is doing. The
Blue Book issue is a personal debacle for him, as well as others who
have worked for him on this issue. The choice of staking Turkey’s
reputation on the denial of the Blue Book was a political blunder
which will only bring shame to the Turkish republic.
I say the Turkish republic because Elekdag managed to get the whole
TGNA behind him on this issue. I do not feel sorry for Elekdag, but I
feel sorry for those well meaning Turks who trusted his judgement.

Furthermore, at the Istanbul University symposium, Elekdag claimed
that his Blue Book campaign was part of the Turkish government’s peace
initiative last year to resolve the Turkish-Armenian issue and to hand
down a peaceful legacy to future generations of Armenians,Turks (and
presumably Kurds). If his Blue Book campaign is a measure of that
initiative, then we have to questions the actual peaceful intentions
of the Turkish authorities.

Elekdag and his supporters seem to be mocking us when addressing the
Armenian issue. They seem to believe that they are in a position of
power, and that they think they can get away with anything they
want. They are part of the problem in Turkish-Armenian relations
today, not part of the solution.

I suggest Turkish intellectuals consider carefully the case I am
making here. The Blue Book issue is very instructive how Turkey looks
in the outside world-especially as the TGNA has made it into an
international issue.

I believe the most important sources that are available on the
Armenian Genocide are the memoirs of Armenian survivors. Many of these
sources are incredibly detailed and provide the perspective of
victims. Then there are the diplomatic records of the United States,
Germany, Italy and other countries. Of course Ottoman records have
their own significance, though I cannot comment on them. I was only
recently readmitted back into Ottoman archives and I hope to have the
opportunity to return to Turkey and work with such materials as well.

The Gomidas Institute has published the memoirs and diaries of foreign
diplomats and missionaries, such as the diaries of Ambassador
Morgenthau. The latter manuscript was published in its entirety,
because it is a crucial primary source. It also supports Morgenthau’s
stance on the Armenian issue. Most people in Turkey know about
Morgenthau because of Heath Lowry’s booklet which misrepresents
Morgenthau’s reports and diaries and castigating the American
ambassador as some sort of an Armenian puppet. Heath Lowry’s
assessment of Morgenthau is wrong and part of Elekdag’s denialist
campaign from the 1980s. Lowry and Elekdag have worked together
closely to deny the Armenian Genocide. In fact, there was a big
scandal about this very subject not so long ago, following a clerical
error at the Turkish embassy, when Lowry’s correspondence with
Elekdag, where they discussed the denial of the Armenian Genocide, was
sent to an American scholar. That scholar exposed this correspondence
and there is plenty of information about that scandal on the internet.

The Gomidas Institute is currently fund-raising so that it can
continue its research and publishing work, in English, Armenian and
hopefully Turkish. Right now we have a number of key books to
publish, including translations in our new Turkish language series.

However, as an independent academic institution, the Gomidas Institute
has no government or other institutional backing. We are also not a
lobbying organisation. We have to raise funds for each project we
undertake and each book we publish. Sometimes we have to refuse
funding because potential sponsors try to twist our work for partisan
purposes. Like many other institutions, we have to remain vigilant to
maintaining our academic integrity. There is no question where we
stand in such matters. I hope we will continue our work and start
cooperating with similar institutions in Turkey.

O.K. : Have you come across reference to a specific incident mentioned
in the Blue Book in some other records/archival documents or books ?

A.S. : Yes. For example, the events in Harpout, including the mass
murder of Armenian community leaders are corroborated in the diaries
of Maria Jacobsen and Tacy Atkinson, as well as the memoirs of Henry
Riggs. Similarly, the appalling condition of Armenian deportees in
Osmaniye are corroborated by many sources, including the diaries of an
Armenian schoolboy from Corum, Vahram Dadrian. There are many such
examples.

O.K. : What do you think is the significance of the Istanbul
University symposium on the future of Turkish Armenian relations ? And
what are your expectations to follow ?

A.S. : By holding this conference, the participants at the Istanbul
University symposium demonstrated a fundamental point : the treatment
of Armenians in 1915, including the Armenian Genocide thesis, is a
legitimate topic of discussion in Turkey today. This is a radical
departure from the past, when the subject was both a taboo and
proscribed by law. This does not mean that the official Turkish
thesis, which does not recognize the Armenian Genocide, has
changed. But it does mean that the subject is open to scrutiny and
discussion.

I expect that there will be many participants in future discussions,
where Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian and other historians will agree and
disagree on concrete historical issues regarding their common
history. I hope it will be a fruitful endeavour.

Even now, many ethnic Turks do not agree with the official Turkish
thesis, just as many Armenian historians do not agree with the
established Armenian one. The important thing is that the Armenian
Genocide (and the genocide of Assyrians) can now be addressed within
the boundaries of sensible academic debates.

O.K. : It was a big surprise for us that Yusuf Halacoglu, head of the
TTK (Turkish History Association), offered you to make researches
together and you accepted it. Doesn’t the Gomidas Institute and the
TTK stand in opposition to each other on the events of 1915 ?

A.S. : Despite all our differences in the past, I accepted
Dr. Halacoglu’s offer in good faith. I will try to work with him and
the TTK as well as I can. The TTK and the Gomidas Institute stands in
opposition to each other on the events of 1915. But I hope we can show
by our example that it is still possible to agree and disagree with
each other in a scholarly manner, in the interest of truth, as well as
peace. Besides, the TTK is not the only body that discusses the
Armenian issue in Turkey. There are many other official and unofficial
organisations, as well as private individuals, who already take part
in such work and discussions. The Gomidas Institute is only one party
in this debate.

O.K. : Don’t you see any pitfalls and difficulties ahead ?

A.S. : Yes, there is always the possibility of failure for all sorts
of reasons. But that is not a reason not to try. Peace is a great
prize we can all share together.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

No Russian Officials At Black Sea Summit
BUCHAREST, Jun 4
The summit to launch the Black Sea Forum for Dialog and Partnership
Monday will be attended by the presidents of Romania, Ukraine,
Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Republic of Moldova and officials from
Lithuania, Turkey, Bulgaria and international organizations, but no
Russian officials.
The Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a press release Sunday
containing a complete list of Summit participants. The list includes
no Russian officials.
Invited by Romanian president Traian Basescu, presidents of countries
from the Black Sea area or their representatives will attend the
summit: Robert Kocharian, president of Armenia; Ilham Aliyev,
president of Azerbaijan; Mikhail Saakashvili, president of Georgia;
Vladimir Voronin, president of the Republic of Moldova, and Viktor
Yushchenko, president of Ukraine.
The list also includes Ivailo Kalfin – deputy prime minister and
foreign affairs minister in Bulgaria, Dr. Besir Atalay – state
minister inTurkey, and Vironas Polydoras – public order minister in
Greece.
Among members of European and Euro-Atlantic communities and
international organizations to be present at the summit: Sergei
Ordzhonikidze, director-general of the UN Office in Geneva; Terry
Davis, secretary general of the Council of Europe; Marc Perrin de
Brichambaut, secretary general with OSCE; Brunson McKinley,
director-general of the International Organization for Migration;
Erhard Busek, Special Coordinator of the Stability Pact for South
Eastern Europe; Marek Belka, Executive Secretary of the United Nations
Economic Commission for Europe; Robert Simmons, Special Representative
for the Caucasus and Central Asia; Peter Semneby, EU Special
Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia.
This reunion is the first in a series of events meant to consolidate
the profile of the Black Sea area, to draw the international
community=80=99s attention to the importance of this region which
encompasses opportunities as well as challenges.
President Traian Basescu said on April 26, at the Forum of the
Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation, or BSEC, marking
the end of the Romanian presidency of the organization, which is to be
taken over by the Russian Federation, that discussions among Black Sea
area states related to sensitive issues such as security, the fight
against organized crime and terrorism, could take place outside of an
institutional framework.
He added at the time that Romania would be an active partner in
solving problems in the Black Sea area.
At the beginning of June, official sources said Russia should attend
the summit, at least on a diplomatic level.
© Mediafax 2004. Toate drepturile rezervate.

Azeri, Armenian leaders discuss Karabakh settlement in Bucharest
ANS TV, Baku
4 Jun 06

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev is holding a tete-a-tete meeting
with his Armenian counterpart Robert Kocharyan to discuss the Nagornyy
Karabakh conflict in the Romanian capital Bucharest at the moment, the
Azerbaijani commercial TV channel ANS reported on the evening of 4
June.
The meeting is being held at the Polish embassy in Bucharest, ANS
Vice-President Mirsahin Agayev reported by phone from Bucharest.
Agayev said the venue was chosen at the request of Russian mediator
Yuriy Merzlyakov. There is still no information regarding the results
of the meeting, ANS said.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

President questions fruit and vegetable prices at Georgian markets
Rustavi-2 TV, Tbilisi
4 Jun 06

[Presenter] Why are Armenian tomatoes cheaper than Georgian tomatoes
in Georgia? The president of Georgia put this question to the members
of the government’s economic team at a cabinet meeting under way at
the State Chancellery.
[Passage omitted]
[Saakashvili, addressing a cabinet meeting] Meat costs about 8 lari [4
dollars per kilo] at Tbilisi markets. Pork also costs 8 lari,
sometimes more, while poultry costs about 7 lari. In our fraternal,
neighbouring Armenia, which has far less favourable climate, far less
fertile soil, overall, a much smaller territory, far less favourable
geographic location and a much smaller population than Georgia, meat
costs less than 6 lari, sometimes 5 lari, at the Yerevan market, while
pork costs 2-3 lari less and poultry costs 2 lari less than in
Georgia.
There is no shortage of apples in Georgia because the [Russian] market
has been closed to us. Yet apple is cheaper in Armenia than in Georgia
and various other fruits and vegetables are also cheaper than in
Georgia. [Passage omitted]

Bucharest Daily News, Romania
June 4 2006
Foreign affairs minister: No taboo themes at the Black Sea Forum
Andreea Pocotila

Basescu is seen with his Azeri conterpart, Ilham Aliyev, at te
presidential palace in Bucharest.

The Black Sea region is among Romania’s top concerns on matters of
foreign affairs, as today it holds a forum aimed at tackling the main
issues of the region.
The Black Sea Forum held today in Bucharest will include debates on
multilateral issues and there will be no taboo themes during the
presidential discussions, yesterday said Foreign Affairs Minister
Mihai Razvan Ungureanu in an interview with the Mediafax news agency.
“Unfortunately, the Black Sea region has a pretty bad image – that of
an area burdened by conflicts, an area where policies seem unclear or
subversive, not open and orientated towards cooperation,” was one of
the reasons Ungureanu gave for the organization of the Black Sea
Forum.
The Black Sea Forum is aimed to help build mutual trust in the
region, facilitate synergy between regional initiatives, identify and
initiate ideas, promote pragmatic regional projects that meet the
actual needs of the region and generate a mutual awareness dialogue
and share lesson learned by the region with the extra regional
partners, says the event’s presentation. The forum will be based on
active and open dialogue between institutions and civil society
within the Black Sea region, as well as with European and
Euro-Atlantic partners.
The event’s purpose is to create a platform for cooperation and
commitment to development of a regional strategy and a common vision,
as manifestation of a new political vision, and to identify
coordination opportunities based on this vision.
Ungureanu said the Romanian initiative of organizing a Black Sea
Forum drew the attention of European leaders, as many representatives
of foreign affairs ministries announced their participation at the
event. He pointed out that these officials will transform the
summit’s message into a political guideline of the European Union.
“Romania is now a NATO member, it is getting ready to become a member
of the EU, it will be country on the cusp of the two clubs, the
European and the Euro-Atlantic,” Ungureanu said, adding that it is
time for the Black Sea region to be included on the agenda of serious
problems of both NATO and the EU.
The minister underlined that cooperation is rare in the Black Sea
region and there are no institutions that can guarantee or activate
collaboration.
“Indeed, the Organization of Black Sea Economic Cooperation (OCEMN)
has several successful projects that have functioned and are
functioning, but they are insufficient for the energies invested in
this format of cooperation,” said Ungureanu.
The Black Sea forum is intended to create a reflex of dialogue, and
dialogue means trust, while the latter generates cooperation,
explained Ungureanu.
“It is a Romanian idea, organized by Romania, but for a general
benefit,” said the official.
Ungureanu said there is not an incompatibility between the regional
dialogue on the Black Sea area and the internationalization of this
issue.
“International policy stopped isolating parts of the globe, it does
not hide them anymore behind tall fences, for them to be solved
through the minimum contribution of two or three actors;
globalization means drawing everybody’s attention to complicated
themes,” Ungureanu explained. The minister said globalization implies
the involvement of world players such as the Russian Federation, the
United States and China.
“The Black Sea has a global destiny, it can become not only a
European or continental sea, but a sea of the world,” Ungureanu said,
adding that it is a place where several civilizations converge and it
can either be an energetic bridge, a political one or an amalgamation
of economic factors.
“Everybody needs the Black Sea,” Ungureanu added.
Asked what gives him the guarantee that the forum will manage to ease
dialogue between regional leaders, Ungureanu’s main argument was that
nothing like this has ever been initiated: “It is the first bold step
forward.” However, he added the journey will not end until dozens of
similar steps have been taken, using the Romanian initiative as a
model.
Asked if instead of an active and cooperative dialogue the forum
might witness quarrels and arguments, Ungureanu said such things will
not happen because the region is mature enough and it only needs for
this maturity to be recognized.
Representatives from Armenia, the Republic of Moldova, Azerbaijan,
Turkey, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Georgia, Romania, Greece, and Russia were
invited to the forum. Officials form European and international
organizations will also attend the event.
By yesterday no representative of Russia had confirmed his or her
presence at the forum, according to the list of participants released
yesterday by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Russia has always been
reticent about attending and consenting to agreements regarding the
Black Sea. President Traian Basescu last year said it is time for the
Black Sea to cease being a Russian lake.
The list of participants at the Black Sea Forum includes Armenian
President Robert Kocharian and his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham
Aliev.
Kocharian and Aliev are slated to meet on the sidelines of the summit
in Romania, for talks over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh,
which is inside Azerbaijan but populated mostly by ethnic Armenians,
who have run it since an uneasy 1994 cease-fire ended six years of
full-scale fighting.
Kocharian on Saturday dampened expectations for today’s meeting with
his Azerbaijani counterpart, again accusing Azerbaijan of being
belligerent and insincere about peacefully resolving the nearly
two-decade conflict over the disputed area.
Talks held between the two leaders in France in February ended in
failure, despite international mediators’ involvement, and the lack
of resolution has hindered development throughout the strategic
Caucasus region.
Sporadic border clashes have grown more frequent.
“We are discussing a variation that, by my reckoning, allows a
long-term and peaceful resolution. But I have modest expectations for
this meeting,” Kocharian told reporters.
“The impression is forming that the Azerbaijani side is not fully
devoted to peaceful resolution of the conflict, which the
militaristic statements heard in Baku demonstrate,” he said.
Aliev’s spokesman, Novruz Mammadov, meanwhile accused Armenia of
stoking tensions on the eve of the meeting of the two presidents in
Romania and said Yerevan was not prepared for serious dialogue.
“On the one hand, (Kocharian) agreed to such a meeting, but on the
other, he is already anticipating no results. I think that Kocharian
wants to just protect himself,” Mammadov said.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

American Thinker, AZ
June 4 2006
Dhimmitude and The Doyen
June 4th, 2006
Recently, multiple deserving tributes to Bernard Lewis’ career as a
scholar, and public intellectual, have been written in celebration of
this remarkable nonagenarian (see here for example ) – the latest by
Reuel Gerecht appearing in the Wednesday May 31, 2006 online edition
of The Weekly Standard, coincided exactly with his 90th birthday.
Gerecht, in his lavish praise, maintains that Lewis,
…has attained a stature in the field and with the general reading
public unrivaled by any historian, living or dead, of the Middle East
and Islam. His range of writings – from the pre-Islamic period, through
Islam’s classical and medieval ages and its premodern `gunpowder’
empires, to today’s Muslim nation-states – is simply unparalleled by
any other scholar, even from the golden age of Islamic studies in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the field’s terrifyingly
erudite, multilingual European founding fathers – the much despised
`orientalists’ – bestrode the earth. Lewis is the last and greatest of
the orientalists…
Whether or not one accepts all of Gerecht’s assertions, there can be
little debate regarding Lewis’ `unrivaled’ current stature,
particularly as a public intellectual. And in discussing how Lewis’
views have evolved over his enduring and illustrious career, Gerecht
highlights a striking example:
In 1945, for example, Lewis was not in favor of a Jewish state in
Palestine; today, he is, seeing Israel as one of the things that has
gone more right than wrong in the region.
Gerecht might have also cited the evolution of Lewis’ thought on the
Muslim conception of freedom, or `hurriyya’. At present, Lewis
worries,
The war against terror and the quest for freedom are inextricably
linked, and neither can succeed without the other. The struggle is no
longer limited to one or two countries, as some Westerners still
manage to believe. It has acquired first a regional then a global
dimension, with profound consequences for all of us. . . . If freedom
fails and terror triumphs, the peoples of Islam will be the first and
greatest victims. They will not be alone, and many others will suffer
with them.
Previously, analyzing hurriyya/freedom for the venerable Encyclopedia
of Islam, Lewis discussed this concept in the latter phases of the
Ottoman Empire, through the contemporary era. After highlighting a
few `cautious’ or `conservative’ (Lewis’ characterization) reformers
and their writings, Lewis maintains,
…there is still no idea that the subjects have any right to share in
the formation or conduct of government – to political freedom, or
citizenship, in the sense which underlies the development of
political thought in the West. While conservative reformers talked of
freedom under law, and some Muslim rulers even experimented with
councils and assemblies government was in fact becoming more and not
less arbitrary…
Lewis also makes the important point that Western colonialism
ameliorated this chronic situation:
During the period of British and French domination, individual
freedom was never much of an issue. Though often limited and
sometimes suspended, it was on the whole more extensive and better
protected than either before or after. [emphasis added]
And Lewis concludes with a stunning observation, when viewed in light
of the present travails in Iraq and throughout the Muslim world, as
well as his own evolved views:
In the final revulsion against the West, Western democracy too was
rejected as a fraud and a delusion, of no value to Muslims.
In stark contrast, Lewis’ views have remained unchanged on the
subject of the plight of those non-Muslims living under Islamic
rule – what Bat Ye’or’s own remarkable scholarship has characterized
with painstaking elegance as the civilization of dhimmitude (here,
and here). Writing in 1974 ( vol. 2, p.217) Lewis maintained,
The dhimma on the whole worked well. The non-Muslims managed to
thrive under Muslim rule, and even to make significant contributions
to Islamic civilization. The restrictions were not onerous, and were
usually less severe in practice than in theory. As long as the
non-Muslim communities accepted and conformed to the status of
tolerated subordination assigned to them, they were not troubled. The
rare outbreaks of repression or violence directed against them are
almost always the consequence of a feeling that they have failed to
keep their place and honor their part of the covenant. The usual
cause was the undue success of Christians or Jews in penetrating to
positions of power and influence which Muslims regarded as rightly
theirs. The position of the non-Muslims deteriorated during and after
the Crusades and the Mongol invasions, partly because of the general
heightening of religious loyalties and rivalries, partly because of
the well-grounded suspicion that they were collaborating with the
enemies of Islam.
More recently, Lewis in a rather flippant pronouncement,
characterized the conception of `dhimmi-tude’ (derisively hyphenated,
as he wrote it), `…subservience and persecution and ill treatment’ of
Jews, specifically, under Islamic rule, as a `myth’.
The late S.D. Goitein (d. 1985), was a Professor Emeritus of the
Hebrew University, scholar at The Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, and a contemporary of Lewis. The New York Times obituary
for Professor Goitein (published on February 10, 1985) noted,
appositely, that his seminal (and prolific) writings on Islamic
culture, and Muslim-Jewish relations, were `…standard works for
scholars in both fields’. Here is what Goitein wrote (from, S.D.
Goitein. `Minority Self-rule and Government Control in Islam’ Studia
Islamica, No. 31, 1970, pp. 101, 104-106) on the subject of
non-Muslim dhimmis under Muslim rule, i.e., dhimmitude, circa 1970:
…a great humanist and contemporary of the French Revolution,
Wilhelm von Humboldt, defined as the best state one which is least
felt and restricts itself to one task only: protection, protection
against attack from outside and oppression from within…in general,
taxation [by the Muslim government] was merciless, and a very large
section of the population must have lived permanently at the
starvation level. From many Geniza letters one gets the impression
that the poor were concerned more with getting money for the payment
of their taxes than for food and clothing, for failure of payment
usually induced cruel punishment… the Muslim state was quite the
opposite of the ideals propagated by Wilhelm von Humboldt or the
principles embedded in the constitution of the United States. An
Islamic state was part of or coincided with dar al-Islam, the House
of Islam. Its treasury was mal al-muslumin, the money of the Muslims.
Christians and Jews were not citizens of the state, not even second
class citizens. They were outsiders under the protection of the
Muslim state, a status characterized by the term dhimma, for which
protection they had to pay a poll tax specific to them. They were
also exposed to a great number of discriminatory and humiliating
laws…As it lies in the very nature of such restrictions, soon
additional humiliations were added, and before the second century of
Islam was out, a complete body of legislation in this matter was in
existence…In times and places in which they became too oppressive
they lead to the dwindling or even complete extinction of the
minorities.
Bat Ye’or’s own extensive analyses of the dhimmi condition for both
Jews and Christians published (in English) in 1985 and 1996, are
summarized here:
..These examples are intended to indicate the general character of a
system of oppression, sanctioned by contempt and justified by the
principle of inequality between Muslims and dhimmis…Singled out as
objects of hatred and contempt by visible signs of discrimination,
they were progressively decimated during periods of massacres, forced
conversions, and banishments. Sometimes it was the prosperity they
had achieved through their labor or ability that aroused jealousy;
oppressed and stripped of all their goods, the dhimmi often
emigrated.’
…in many places and at many periods [through] the nineteenth century,
observers have described the wearing of discriminatory clothing, the
rejection of dhimmi testimony, the prohibitions concerning places of
worship and the riding of animals, as well as fiscal charges-
particularly the protection charges levied by nomad chiefs- and the
payment of the jizya…Not only was the dhimma imposed almost
continuously, for one finds it being applied in the nineteenth
century Ottoman Empire…and in Persia, the Maghreb, and Yemen in the
early twentieth century, but other additional abuses, not written
into the laws, became absorbed into custom, such as the devshirme,
the degrading corvees (as hangmen or gravediggers), the abduction of
Jewish orphans (Yemen), the compulsory removal of footware (Morocco,
Yemen), and other humiliations…The recording in multiple sources of
eye-witness accounts, concerning unvarying regulations affecting the
Peoples of the Book, perpetuated over the centuries from one end of
the dar al-Islam to the other…proves sufficiently their entrenchment
in customs.
Thus it is not surprising that in a letter (personal communication)
dated April 7, 1977 hand written to Bat Ye’or and her historian
husband, referring to their earliest (French and English) writings
(see for examples, Les Juifs en Egypte Geneva: Editions de l’Avenir,
1971, and this; this; this; and this), Goitein wrote,
I do not think our opinions on the history of the dhimmi differ
widely. It is merely a difference of emphasis
Another seminal modern scholar of Islamic civilization, Speros
Vryonis Jr. , endorses Bat Ye’or’s (see this, p. 115) negative view
of the Ottoman devshirme-janissary system which, from the mid to
late 14th, through early 18th centuries, enslaved and forcibly
converted to Islam an estimated 500,000 to one million non-Muslim
(primarily Balkan Christian) adolescent males. Lewis’ divergent
characterization portrays this institution as a benign form of
social advancement, jealously pined for by `ineligible’ Ottoman
Muslim families:
The role played by the Balkan Christian boys recruited into the
Ottoman service through the devshirme is well known. Great numbers of
them entered the Ottoman military and bureaucratic apparatus, which
for a while came to be dominated by these new recruits to the Ottoman
state and the Muslim faith. This ascendancy of Balkan Europeans into
the Ottoman power structure did not pass unnoticed, and there are
many complaints from other elements, sometimes from the Caucasian
slaves who were their main competitors, and more vocally from the old
and free Muslims, who felt slighted by the preference given to the
newly converted slaves
Vryonis rejects categorically Lewis’s celebratory assessment with
these deliberately understated, but cogent observations :
…in discussing the devshirme we are dealing with the large numbers of
Christians who, in spite of the material advantages offered by
conversion to Islam, chose to remain members of a religious society
which was denied first class citizenship. Therefore the proposition
advanced by some historians, that the Christians welcomed the
devshirme as it opened up wonderful opportunities for their children,
is inconsistent with the fact that these Christians had not chosen to
become Muslims in the first instance but had remained
Christians…there is abundant testimony to the very active dislike
with which they viewed the taking of their children. One would expect
such sentiments given the strong nature of the family bond and given
also the strong attachment to Christianity of those who had not
apostacized to Islam…First of all the Ottomans capitalized on the
general Christian fear of losing their children and used offers of
devshirme exemption in negotiations for surrender of Christian lands.
Such exemptions were included in the surrender terms granted to
Jannina, Galata, the Morea, Chios, etc…Christians who engaged in
specialized activities which were important to the Ottoman state were
likewise exempt from the tax on their children by way of recognition
of the importance of their labors for the empire…Exemption from this
tribute was considered a privilege and not a penalty…
…there are other documents wherein their [i.e., the Christians]
dislike is much more explicitly apparent. These include a series of
Ottoman documents dealing with the specific situations wherein the
devshirmes themselves have escaped from the officials responsible for
collecting them…A firman…in 1601 [regarding the devshirme] provided
the [Ottoman] officials with stern measures of enforcement, a fact
which would seem to suggest that parents were not always disposed to
part with their sons.
`..to enforce the command of the known and holy fetva [fatwa] of
Seyhul [Shaikh]- Islam. In accordance with this whenever some one of
the infidel parents or some other should oppose the giving up of his
son for the Janissaries, he is immediately hanged from his door-sill,
his blood being deemed unworthy.’
Perhaps most concerning in the realm of dhimmitude have been Lewis’
inexplicably evolved views on the jihad genocide of the Armenians.
His renowned The Emergence of Modern Turkey, originally published in
1962 (reissued in 1968 and 2002), includes these characterizations of
the mass killings of the Armenians by the Turks in 1894-96, 1909, and
1915:
(1894-96, p. 202) The Armenian participants mindful of the massacres
of 1894-96, were anxious to seek the intervention of the European
powers as a guarantee of effective reforms in the Ottoman Empire [in
the 20th century].
(1909, p. 216) With suspicious simultaneity a wave of outbreaks
spread across Anatolia. Particularly bad were the events of the Adana
district, which culminated in the massacre of thousands of
Armenians…While Europe was appalled by Turkish brutality, Muslim
opinion was shocked by what seemed to them the insolence of the
Armenians and the hypocrisy of Christian Europe. The Turks were,
however, well aware of the painful effects produced by these
massacres in Europe, which had not yet forgotten the horrors of the
Hamidian repression [i.e, the 1894-96 massacres]
(1915, p. 356) Now a desperate struggle between them [i.e., the Turks
and Armenians] began, a struggle between two nations for the
possession of a single homeland, that ended with the terrible
holocaust of 1915, when a million and a half Armenians perished.
Thus when Lewis wrote his authoritative history of modern Turkey, he
understood, and made explicit, that the Armenians had been massacred
under successive Ottoman governments in 1894-96, and 1909. Moreover,
he maintains that the Armenians were subjected in 1915 to a
`holocaust’, during which 1.5 million `perished’. By 1985, however,
Lewis was the most prominent signatory on a petition to the US
Congress protesting the effort to make April 24 – the date the
Armenians commemorate the victims of the genocide – a nationwide
Armenian-American memorial day, which would include the mention of
man’s inhumanity to man. Both this petition drive and a simultaneous
high profile media advertisement campaign were financed by the
Committee of the Turkish Association. Vryonis has raised,
unabashedly, the appropriate questions and accompanying concerns
regarding Lewis’ actions:
When was Professor Lewis expressing an objective opinion: when he
wrote the book [i.e., The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 1962/68
versions], or when he signed the political ad? To phrase it more
bluntly, what shall we believe? Certainly, the data available to him
in the writing of the book were sufficiently clear and convincing for
him to proceed to these three clear and unequivocal statements [i.e.,
describing the 1894-96, and 1909 events as massacres of the Armenians
by the Turks, and the 1915 slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians by the
Turks as a holocaust]. What had changed? The subject had entered the
sphere of politics, and Prof. Lewis, along with so many other signers
of the ad, had decided to take sides where their economic,
professional, personal, and emotional interests lay: with the Turkish
government, and not with history.*
Furthermore, during the past decade, as Yair Auron has observed, when
Lewis was requested,
…to make available the academic research published in recent years,
which, in his professional opinion, constitute the basis for the
change from his original position to his new position that there was
no state-planned or administered genocide/mass murder of the
Armenians…Lewis did not respond to this demand, even though he noted
that letters to him and his reply would be published.
Auron’s final assessment is apt:
Lewis’ stature [has] provided a lofty cover for the Turkish national
agenda of obfuscating academic research on the Armenian Genocide.
Lewis’ wildly fluctuating opinions aside, a consensus among bona fide
genocide scholars has emerged which is consistent with Richard
Rubenstein’s conclusion from 1975, that the 1915 Turkish massacre of
the Armenians was,
…the first full-fledged attempt by a modern state to practice
disciplined, methodically organized genocide
And Bat Ye’or reminds us why the Armenian genocide was a jihad
genocide committed against a non-Muslim people `violating’ the
ancient dhimma, a `…breach…[which] restored to the umma [the Muslim
community] its initial right to kill the subjugated minority [the
dhimmis], [and] seize their property…’. Moreover, the massacres,
were perpetrated solely by Muslims and they alone profited from the
booty: the victims’ property, houses, and lands granted to the
muhajirun, and the allocation to them of women, and child slaves. The
elimination of male children over the age of twelve was in accordance
with the commandments of the jihad and conformed to the age fixed for
the payment of the jizya. The four stages of the liquidation –
deportation, enslavement, forced conversion, and massacre –
reproduced the historic conditions of the jihad carried out in the
dar-al-harb from the seventh century on. Chronicles from a variety of
sources, by Muslim authors in particular, give detailed descriptions
of the organized massacres or deportation of captives, whose
sufferings in forced marches behind the armies paralleled the
Armenian experience in the twentieth century.
Bernard Lewis possesses an enormous fund of knowledge regarding
Islamic civilization accrued over a distinguished career of more than
six decades of serious scholarship. A gifted linguist, non-fiction
prose writer, and teacher, Lewis shares his understanding of Muslim
societies in both written and oral presentations, with singular
economy and eloquence. These are extraordinary attributes for which
Lewis richly deserves the accolades lavished upon him in the recent
spate of 90th birthday homages. And even Lewis’ detractors cannot
deny his deep seated affection and genuine concern for the Muslim
world. For example, Ian Buruma sees Lewis’ cheerleading role in
relation to the war in Iraq as a manifestation of this phenomenon:
…perhaps he loves it too much. It is a common phenomenon among
Western students of the Orient to fall in love with a civilization….
His beloved civilization is sick. And what would be more heartwarming
to an old Orientalist than to see the greatest Western democracy cure
the benighted Muslim?
But Lewis’ remarkable contributions are diminished by a yawning gap
in his understanding of dhimmitude, including an apparent
unwillingness to even acknowledge this uniquely Islamic institution.
His myriad works and addresses are largely devoid of the concerns for
the dhimmis – past (here, and here) present (here), and ominously,
future (here) – Lewis freely expresses for their Muslim overlords. This
critical limitation and its implications must also be recognized by
all those for whom Lewis remains an iconic source of information, and
advice.
* Note: The 2002 edition of The Emergence of Modern Turkey, p. 356,
reads:
Now a desperate struggle between them [i.e., the Turks and Armenians]
began, a struggle between two nations for the possession of a single
homeland, that ended with the terrible slaughter of 1915, when,
according to estimates, more than a million Armenians perished, as
well as an unknown number of Turks.
In this revised text, `slaughter’ replaces `holocaust’, the estimate
of the Armenians who `perished’ is changed from 1.5 million to
`according to estimates, more than a million’, and a concluding
remark is added referring to the `unknown number of Turks’ who also
perished in the putative struggle for possession of a single
homeland. Peter Balakian makes these germane observations (from, The
Burning Tigris, New York, 2003, p. 432, note 25):
…without any substantiation, Lewis dispense of the Armenian Genocide
in a couple of sentences, calling it a `a struggle between two
nations for the possession of a single homeland’. Lewis never
explains how an unarmed, Christian ethnic minority in the Ottoman
Empire could be fairly called a `nation’, that could engage in a
`struggle’ with a world power (the Ottoman Empire) for a single
homeland. In a recent interview, There Was No Genocide: Interview
with Prof. Bernard Lewis, by Dalia Karpel, Ha’aretz (Jerusalem,
January 23, 1998), Lewis asserts that the massacres of the Armenians
were not the result `of a deliberate preconceived decision of the
Turkish government’. These evasions are aimed at trivializing the
Armenian Genocide.
Andrew Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad.
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