Talking Turkey: Sovereign meltdown on the Bosphorus?
By Matein Khalid
28 May 2006
Khaleej Times, United Arab Emirates –
LIFE imitates art all too often on the ancient shores of the
Bosphorus.
Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who was castigated by the Kemalist
establishment because he dared to question the historical whitewash of
theArmenian genocide, wrote a beautiful novel, Snow, about the
passions and ideological hatreds in a provincial Anatolian town. In
Snow, an Islamist assassinates the principal of a Turkish college
because he enforced the secular state’s ban against girls wearing
headscarves. Istanbul lawyer Alparslan Arslan might well have read
Pamuk’s Snow. Last week, Arslan walked into Turkey’s highest courtroom
and shot five judges, declaring he was a “soldier of Allah” who sought
to punish the judges who ruled against a woman teacher who wore a
headscarf in violation of laws dating back to the establishment of the
secular Turkish Republic by Mustafa Kemal Pasha in 1924.
The killings in the Istanbul courtroom awakened the demons of the
post-Kemalist past, triggering demonstrations against the government
of Prime Minister Recep Erdogan and a public spat with General Hilmi,
the Army chief. The military’s rebuke is ominous because the armed
forces are passionate guardians of the state’s secular Kemalist
legacy. After all, a Turkish militarycourt sentenced Prime Minister
Adnan Menderes to death in 1957 (ignoring a plea for the doomed
leader’s life from a young Pakistani diplomat named Z A Bhutto,
himself destined to face his own tryst with destiny and a Praetorian
dictator’s vengeance twenty years later) and removed Islamist Prime
Minister Nuruddin Erbakan from office in the 1990’s. A confrontation
between the Army and a non-secular civilian government in Turkey can
have only one endgame. A military coup d’etat.
Political risk is rising dangerously fast in Turkey. Three years ago,
Erdogan was hailed as a hero in the Middle East for his moderate
religiousagenda, for refusing to join Blair and Bush in the invasion
of Iraq, for accelerating the EU accession agenda, for epic banking
reforms, agreements with the IMF, for the plunge in inflation and
interest rates, the resurrection of the lira from the 2001 currency
meltdown, for defusing the geopolitical time bombs in Cyprus and
Kurdistan, for triggering a spectacular bull market on the Istanbul
Stock Exchange.
Yet Prime Minister Erdogan now faces a grim summer of
discontent. Despite his parliamentary majority, his Justice and
Development Party (AKP) is assailed by corruption scandals, the
outbreak of secessionist Kurdish violence in Anatolia and a global
emerging markets panic that eviscerated 25 per cent from the market
capitalisation of the ISE. Ankara’s relationship with Washington never
really recovered from Erdogan’s refusal to send Turkish troops into
Iraq and his policy to engage Syria and Iran was derailed by the
assassination of Rafik Hariri and the looming nuclear crisis with
Teheran.
Nato, the EU, IMF, the PKK, the Turkish general staff, London and
Washington are formidable adversaries for any Turkish Prime Minister
to have to confront. In fact, Erdogan’s insistence on an executive
from a Sharia compliant finance house to succeed the incumbent
governor of the Central Bank outraged the offshore money managers who
own Turkish shares and Eurobonds, triggering a panic sell-off on the
ISE even worse than India’s Sensex trauma. When the Turkish President,
a secular stalwart, vetoed Erdogan’s central bank nominee, a
constitutional crisis ensued. Moreover, AKP mayors amplified the
crisis by enforcing alcohol free red zones even in the cosmopolitan,
tourist dependent Istanbul and the sun-drenched playgrounds of the
Aegean coast.
Erdogan is no Khoemini, even if his enemies portray him as a backward
foe of the Kemalist ethos. He is merely trying to mobilise his
constituency in rural Turkey to win the 2007 election in a landslide,
to succeed Ahmed Nezer as President and preempt a military coup
against an Islamist head of state. His effort to promote his Islamist
agenda backfired because it coincided with an embryonic political
economic and financial crisis in Turkey reminiscent ofthe Mexican
meltdown in 1994. Wall Street was horrified by the tequila crisis in
the Latin American financial markets twelve years ago. Is history
setting the stage for the next global emerging market blow up – the
baklava crisis on the Bosphorus?
It is such a pity that a moderate Islamist government in Turkey could
well fall victim to global financial hurricanes, a leveraged daisy
chain of hedge fund hot money that once crippled Southeast Asia in
1998. Erdogan’s election ended a generation of unstable coalition
governments, a cold war with Greece over Cyprus, a secessionist war in
Eastern Anatolia waged by “mountain Turks” (Kemalist doublespeak for
Kurds), hyperinflation and capital markets chaos.
Yet with its current account deficit and colossal Eurobond borrowing
programme, Turkey is hostage to the ebb and flow of hot capital that
literally moves across the world’s financial markets at the speed of
light.
Turkey offered the perfect synthesis between a moderate Islamist ethos
and the democratic ideal. It could so easily have morphed into a
Muslim version of Catholic Ireland or Chile, a parliamentary democracy
where religion and freedom could coexist. If Erdogan falls, it would
mean the loss of the West’s natural strategic ally in the Islamic
world at a time when Iraq has degenerated into civil war and Tomahawk
cruise missiles and Stealth bombers could soon streak across the skies
of Iran. A world on the brink of Armageddon cannot afford yet another
sanguinary “clash of civilisations”.
Matein Khalid is a Dubai-based investment banker

Federation of Armenian Organizations in The Netherlands
24 April Committee
For Recognition and Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide of 1915
Address: Weesperstraat 91 – 2574 VS The Hague, The Netherlands
Phone: +31704490209
Website:
E-mail: [email protected]
Contact: M. Hakhverdian
Press Release
Genocide denial bill introduction by Christian Union faction
In a press conference on 1 June 2006 at 11 am, MP Mrs. Tineke Huizinga
of Christian Union Faction will present the introduction of a bill to
Dutch Parliament that criminalises the denial of genocides and other
crimes against humanity. The explanatory note explicitly mentions the
Armenian Genocide as one of the genocides meant in this law.
The press conference will be given by Christian Union parliamentarians
Mrs. Huizinga and Mr. Rouvoet together with representatives of 24
April Committee of FAON (Federation of Armenian Organisations in the
Netherlands), CIDI (Centre for Information and Documentation Israel)
and LBR (Dutch antiracism organisation).

British National Party, UK
May 28 2006
More news from Corsham Madrassa.
Wiltshire correspondent reports.
Strange logo to use in a school which is 99% white

Earlier this week we presented some snippets from revision notes
prepared for students studying for the GSCE modules of the Religious
Education examination in Islam and Christianity. We explained,
quoting from course material, how Islam was presented in a positive
way, unlike Christianity – which was deliberately associated with
racism, intolerance and slavery.
We have today received the full revision booklets for both modules
and shall make a number of further observations from them,
particularly on that part of the Islam propaganda text entitled “The
Life of Muhammad”.
The Life of Muhammad (Sanitised version).
According to the text Muhammad “had a difficult start to life” his
father dies before he was born, as does his mother when he is just
6-years old. It also tells us that he was trusted, honest, kind,
respected and a good businessman who liked to meditate. Sounds a real
nice regular sort of guy to us!
It also tells us how he, as a young man, married an ageing (wealthy?)
widow – for reasons that are not explained but may be speculated
upon. Apparently he took no other wives until after she had died (on
her insistence?), at which time he was aged 49-years. Then, of
course, he married an 8-year old girl by the name of Aisya, –
something that would earn him quite a few years “inside” if repeated
today! Strangely the revision notes make not the slightest reference
of this well documented historical fact – yet has the effrontery to
ask the questions: “Can Muhammad’s example be followed in the 21st
Century?” and “How is Muhammad a role model?” The mind boggles!
The piece also tells us that Muhammad was opposed to the owning of
slaves – which is peculiar bearing in mind Islam’s thousand year
pivotal role in that sordid industry – dealing in countless millions
of slaves taken from the African interior and the southern shores of
Europe! Again the revision text makes no mention of Islam as a major
player in slavery down the centuries – nor of the centuries of
Islamic slaving off our own Westcountry shores!
We also learn from the text that “there were 2 very important battles
(Badr and Uhud) before Muhammed took control of Makkah” and that he
ensured that “all women and children were protected from the
fighting”. No mention here of the butchering of the prisoners taken
at these battles or of bodies being dumped down local wells! No
mention either of the looting of settlements, raiding of camel
caravans for plunder and all the usual trappings of inter-tribal
Arabian warfare including murder, rape, enslavement and mutilation!
Regular readers may also recall, in our earlier report, how the Dutch
Reform Church was held accountable in the accompanying revision notes
on Christianity, for the evil of Apartheid in 1960’s South Africa. To
provide some balance you may reasonably have expected to find a
condemnatory reference in the Islam revision notes relating to
Islamic mass murder and ethnic cleansing down the centuries. But no –
nothing! So why, we naively ask, is there no mention of the genocide
of an estimated one million Christian Armenians by Turkish Muslims in
the 1920’s, or, perhaps a few lines on the mass murder of some 50,000
Christian Greeks, at around the same time, in the former Greek town
today known as Izmir! And if the compilers of the revision notes wish
to make an historical reference more contemporarily with Christian
Apartheid then perhaps they could use the example of Indian partition
– where an estimated one million Sikhs and Hindus were butchered by
Muslim fanaticc or of the Turkish Muslim invasion of Cyprus. As
regards the latter to this day the Muslim Turkish authorities refuse
to disclose what was done to over a thousand still missing Greek
Christian prisoner taken during their illegal invasion? Once again
none of this is even hinted at in the revision notes!
Media maintains its silence.
You would have thought that the media in Wiltshire would be “all
over” the Corsham School and local education authority asking some
probing questions in relation to what is being taught in that
establishment and who, exactly, is doing the teaching. But no – not a
word has yet appeared in print! Can it be that Wiltshire’s editors
and journalists don’t agree with the premise that parents have a
right to know what their kids are being exposed to?
In addition the moribund Christian Church in Wiltshire has expressed
no obvious interest in defending The Faith. They appear to believe
that attending same-sex “weddings” between senior clergymen is of
more importance! On the national scene can it be that the revelations
of the past decade concerning buggering bishops and paedophile
priests has so cowed all within that organization that they maintain
a low profile for fear of more skeletons emerging from the closet?
And if Christian patriots hold any expectation that the present
“princes of the Church” will rise in defence of The Faith then they
are to be sorely disappointed – nothing short of a new Reformation
will put wrong to right!
contentID=980
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Regnum, Russia
May 28 2006
Amrenian foreign minister: Parties are still too far from signing any
document on Karabakh
A meeting of Armenian and Azerbaijani Presidents Robert Kocharyan and
Ilham Aliyev will most probably be held on June 4 in Bucharest,
Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanyan has announced.
According to him, on the negotiation table there is a document on
some principles of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement, which
will be worked out by the presidents. `If the parties come to an
agreement on those principles, the paper will become a document,’
Oskanyan is quoted as saying. Answering the question by a REGNUM
correspondent whether there will be an opportunity to sign any
document in Bucharest, the Armenian minister is reported as saying
`the situation is too far from it.’ `The parties should agree on some
principles, after that we can speak of a document,’ Vardan Oskanyan
stressed.
As REGNUM earlier reported, the meeting of the presidents is expected
to be held within framework of The Black for Partnership and Dialog
Summit in Bucharest on June 4-6.

Regnum, Russia
May 28 2006
A320 flight recorders delivered to Paris
Flight recorders of the Armenian A320 airbus that crashed off Sochi
coast in the Black Sea were delivered to Paris on May 27, spokeswoman
for the Armenian Civil Aviation Agency Gayane Davtyan has told a
REGNUM correspondent.
According to her, the flight recorders will be subjected to
examination in France, after that they will be unsealed. However,
most probably, the decoding procedure will be held in Moscow. Gayane
Davtyan also reported that the agency’s envoy, flight safety
inspector Gagik Galstyan is in Paris at present moment.
The A320 airbus was flying from Yerevan to Sochi on May 3. In six
kilometers from the strip the plane fell in to the sea. 113 people
were aboard, all of them were killed in the crash.

Detroit Free Press, MI
May 28 2006
TERRY LAWSON: ‘Code’ review touches a nerve
May 28, 2006
Email this Print this BY TERRY LAWSON
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
By Tuesday, I had received 14 letters addressing my review of “The Da
Vinci Code.” Now, before you start forming the words, “Fourteen? Big
deal,” on your coffee-stained lips, read the sentence again: The key
word here is “letters.”
I had dozens more e-mails, some of them composed by people who had
seen the movie. But letters? Journalists these days approach anything
posted by U.S. mail — unless it’s a rebate or a free magazine —
with a grimace. We figure it will fall into one of four categories:
prisoners or institutionalized people who seek our help in correcting
a horrid injustice; readers who play gotcha with writers or our copy
desks on grammatical or spelling errors; anonymous cranks who just
hate us, or elderly people who do not and never will go near a
computer keyboard.
Though not all the readers gave their ages, these 14 paper relics of
ancient times appeared to be the product of the last category.
Although only one said it plainly and uncoded, the message was
simple: I will rot in hell.
This might be the case, but I seriously doubt it will be for jumping
on the Catholic Church, which is what rankled my correspondents.
Like most of my fellow worshipers at the golden calf called the
movies, I thought “Da Vinci” and its so-called historical conclusions
were hooey.
Yet I can certainly understand why people were upset enough to take
to quill and papyrus. If it’s not exactly open season on Catholics,
true believers are seeing the church’s iconography used in some
pretty kinky ways these days.
Madonna may be 47 and a contented cabalist, but that doesn’t mean
she’s forgotten how subverting Catholic symbols translates to
publicity. She’s fastening herself to a big mirrored cross to sing
“Live to Tell” in her current Confessions tour.
She checked in with her own house organ, the New York Daily News,
last week to defend herself: “I don’t think Jesus would be mad at
me,” she said. Of course not, Madge; he’s Jesus. He has to forgive
you, not only for that “Sex” book but for “Shanghai Surprise.” But
why should we be surprised if some of his followers on Earth hold a
grudge?
Meanwhile, on 6-6-06, a remake of the 1976 thriller “The Omen” comes
around, and seeing it last week at a screening, I realized I had
forgotten that secretive Catholics were to blame for covering up the
fact that the Antichrist had been unleashed on the world. I didn’t
recall there being an enormous stink about this at the time; maybe
the Church was too busy explaining why it still occasionally approved
the ancient ritual at the heart of the 1973 smash hit “The Exorcist.”
Yet a little research reveals the original “Omen” did have Catholic
critics complaining that the film was a Protestant attack on
Catholicism. The Anglican hero was played by Gregory Peck, who had
Catholic Armenian roots. In the new film, the character is played by
Liev Schreiber, whose mother was Jewish.
Not that I would want to start anything, but you know, the Jews do
control Hollywood, at least when they’re not going to cabala lectures
or (Hindu) yoga class or mocking evangelicals. The days when
distortion and prejudice could be explained away with “Hey, it’s only
a movie” are gone forever, and while postage stamps may not be far
behind, the Internet seems custom-made — intelligently designed? —
for outrage and activism.
God may work in mysterious ways, but organized religions work the
media. Remember Kevin Smith’s plan to call his “Clerks” sequel “The
Passion of the Clerks”? Put down those pens: It now has the secular
title “Clerks II.”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Boston Globe, MA
May 28 2006
NEW VOICE FOR KIDS: Belmont singer, songwriter, and music teacher
Noune Karapetian has gone back to her Armenian roots to make a CD of
traditional Armenian children’s songs and some of her originals. A
piano and voice teacher for 14 years, Karapetian graduated from
Komitas Conservatory in Armenia, majoring in voice, and then studied
child psychology for two years at the Pedagogical Institute in
Armenia. She was a finalist in the Metropolitan Opera National
Council Auditions in New England. “A lot of what I do comes from a
child’s perspective,” she said. She will perform at the Arsenal
Center for the Arts in Watertown on June 25 at 3 p.m. Visit
for more details.

The Republican, MA
May 28 2006
Survivor reaches teens with words
Sunday, May 28, 2006
By BETSY CALVERT
[email protected]
MONTAGUE – An American soldier handed his rifle to an emaciated
Jewish teenager in tattered striped pajamas in 1945, as if to say the
teenager was entitled to take revenge on his captors – German prison
camp soldiers that the American had just taken prisoner.
That teenager was Joseph Korzenik, now 81, of West Hartford. Korzenik
told a rapt audience of high school students recently that he quickly
threw the gun back at the American soldier whom he encountered in the
woods of Germany. He did not understand, nor feel entitled to take
any revenge on that day – the day of his liberation from six years of
Nazi torture and subjugation. Korzenik told the students that he had
begun to believe the constant barrage of degradation he had heard,
that as a Jew, he was less than human.
“I did not comprehend I was free,” he said.

Korzenik came to America after the war. When he tried to tell people
what happened, they did not believe him. So he stopped talking. He
had no great desire to live anymore. He married an American woman,
however, who gave him direction. Thirty years ago, she told him to
start telling his story of the Holocaust. He has not stopped talking
since, even though his wife died in 2000.
Korzenik was invited to speak at Turners Falls High School by
students in one class who are studying modern day holocausts, from
Armenian to Sudanese. Korzenik is a distant cousin to a science
teacher at the school, Robert Perlman.
Since he began his crusade to tell the world what happened to Jews
during World War II, Korzenik has spoken all over the world. A spry,
animated man, he told the students he only believes he can reach
teenagers. Adults have too much on their minds, he said.
He told his story chronologically, starting in 1939 when he was 14
and one of three children in a farming family in a small town in
Poland. His family was religiously devout, which he said he remains
today despite the images he retains of inhumanity. Korzenik
experienced all of the hallmarks of the war and the Holocaust,
including the occupation of his country by the Germans and the
subjugation of the Jews, first within their own villages, and
eventually, in death camps. As a young healthy male, Korzenik was
kept alive by his captors for his labor, allowing him to witness all
stages of the war, including near starvation.
“What my eyes saw, no human should have to see,” he said.
He described in brief but vivid detail to the utterly silent teens,
the random murders of Jewish infants, of his fellow prisoners, of the
path of starvation and disease, and of the sadistic behavior of the
German soldiers who controlled his life until 1945. He found out
after the war that his entire family had been gassed to death. He
remains haunted today of the image of his devout father asking God,
why such a fate?
His message to the students was to save themselves pain and suffering
by living without hate.
“The next time any one of you decides to hate anybody, you should
look in a mirror and see the person who hates and suffers,” he said.
Many of the students who were not studying genocide said Korzenik’s
story shocked them and moved them.
“It’s not like anything I’ve heard before,” said Kaleigh Shaw, 17, of
Erving.
“It really touched me,” said Lauren Tela, 18. “I never really put it
into perspective, how serious the Holocaust was.”
James Deputy, 17, said he was expecting another boring lecture on
history.
“I had no idea about that march to the farm,” he said, of Korzenik’s
description of the Nazis’ final fleeing of the Allies, marching
prisoners ahead of them through the woods. “You don’t get that in any
history book.”

Azerbaijani president demands Armenians’ unconditional withdrawal from
Nagorno-Karabakh

AP Worldstream; May 27, 2006
President Ilham Aliev marked the national Day of the Republic holiday
by calling for Armenian forces to unconditionally withdraw from the
Nagorno-Karabakh enclave and seven neighboring districts.
“Let Azerbaijanis, our citizens, who have already suffered more than
10 years from the politics of ethnic cleansing, return to their native
hearths,” Aliev said in a speech Friday, which was released the
following day by the Azertac state news agency.
Aliev reiterated that Azerbaijan is committed to a peaceful solution
of the conflict over the enclave. “But on the other hand, if
negotiations remain without result, then what choice do we have?”
Nagorno-Karabakh 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. Sporadic border clashes have grown more
frequent since the breakdown of talks, and the lack of resolution has
hindered development throughout the strategic Caucasus region.
Government officials in Baku and the Armenian capital, Yerevan, both
confirmed Friday that Aliev and Armenian President Robert Kocharian
intend to meet soon in Romania for talks aimed at resolving a nearly
two-decade-old conflict.
The two Caucasus leaders are expected to attend a forum for Black Sea
countries scheduled for June 5 in the Romanian capital, Bucharest.
Talks between the two presidents in France in February ended in
failure, despite international mediators’ efforts to push the leaders
to resolve Nagorno-Karabakh’s status.

Lancaster Newspapers, PA
May 28 2006
The man time forgot
Leon Redbone opens Gretna jazz season
By Michael Long
Sunday News
Published: May 27, 2006 11:12 PM EST
LANCASTER COUNTY, PA – Leon Redbone could manage little more than
weary whispers as he spoke into the telephone, his signature mellow
baritone reduced to barely audible scratches of sound.
Clearly, Redbone was not a well man. `I’m doing so-so,’ he said. `I’m
worn out, I guess.’
But not from touring. Of late, Redbone has taken his sunshine jazz
and throwback blues act on the road just one week a month, and when
he takes the stage June 9 at Mount Gretna, it will be his first
scheduled performance in nearly two months.
No, it wasn’t the rigors of life as an entertainer that had Redbone
seriously ailing for, he claims, the first time. The problem was
something less tangible.
`Perhaps it’s just my general sensation of being overwhelmed by the
complete nonsense that goes on today. It’s beginning to wear on me.’
Onstage, Redbone hearkens back to a different age, with his largely
pre-World War II material and standard uniform of white suit, Panama
hat and dark sunglasses. His offstage persona appears to be
strikingly similar.
Redbone considers himself a `bizarre extension’ of someone who
performed in a musical age sometime between the mid-19th and early
20th centuries, when the roots of blues and jazz were still taking
hold around the campfires and on the porches of America.
What is nostalgia for some is a way of life for Redbone. Talking to
him, you get the sense he sincerely wishes he could go back to a time
far removed from today. The present, it seems, drags him down.
`When I do get connected to the realities of today, it’s
disappointing, depressing and annoying. Every aspect of it,’ Redbone
said.
Get him going, and Redbone can kvetch like an old man, which, by some
estimates, he is.
While speculation and conjecture place Redbone a little past
retirement age, no one knows for sure his exact age because he
obsessively guards the details of his personal life.
He first appeared in Toronto in the mid-1970s as a man of about 30.
He may or may not be Canadian. Popular mythology holds he was born in
Cyprus in 1949 to Armenian parents and given the name Dickran
Gobalian.
Rebone is now believed to live somewhere in Pennsylvania with Beryl
Handler, who has produced some of his albums and is his supposed
wife.
It could all be true, or it could all be a carefully orchestrated
ruse; no one knows because Redbone resists talking about his own past
almost as vehemently as he resists participating in the present.
`I have great difficulties because I have absolutely no liking (for
this time). As much as I like some of the technological advancements,
I really don’t feel any affection for the time and the place.
`So I try not to get too involved with the present, as much as I can.
I try not to get too involved with the mind set of today. In some
ways, I’m living in my own time.’
Redbone does feel comfortable connecting to the here and now for that
short time he’s onstage. Performing, he said, has calmative
properties.
`It’s like taking a pill: You get some relief.’
– – –
All jazz concerts in the 2006 Music at Gretna series will be held at
Mount Gretna Playhouse, off Route 117 in Mount Gretna. Performances
begin at 8 p.m. unless otherwise noted. The following is a schedule
of performers:
June 10 – New Black Eagle Jazz Band
June 11 – Jazz Worship Service featuring New Black Eagle Jazz Band,
11 a.m.
July 22 – Progressive Jazz: An Evening with Patricia Barber
Aug. 12 – Brian Lynch and Eddie Palmieri, trumpet and piano
Sept. 2 – Bill Charlap, piano