ARMENIA: EX-SOVIET STATE IS FINDING ITS PLACE IN THE WORLD
By Richard Plunkett
Miami Herald, FL
April 9 2006
Lonely Planet
Visiting Armenia
Armenians are rediscovering their traditional enjoyment of life —
they share a passion for culture, food and family not unlike Greeks
and Italians.
For an unfair first impression of a country, try arriving at an
unrenovated Soviet airport in the middle of the night. Armenia’s
Zvartnots airport looked like a space station from the outside and
a disused factory on the inside. Mercifully, this ancient country
revealed its authentic — and attractive — nature very quickly.
Along the stately boulevards of the capital Yerevan, cafes were still
doing business at 3 a.m., and the hosts at my B&B (a modern apartment
decked out with traditional Armenian carpets) were waiting up to
embrace me, literally, and feed me until I dropped. The next few days
were a never-ending feast of fruit, cured ham, lavash (flat bread),
salads, brandy, wine and divinely rich Armenian soorch (coffee).
Mountainous Armenia is a compelling mix of European elegance, Middle
Eastern exuberance, ex-Soviet mundanity and modern economic miracle.
The first country to convert to Christianity, it has countless legacies
from 1,700 years of faith — from ancient churches and monasteries to
the uniquely Armenian khatchkars, literally “crucifix stones,” upright
blocks of basalt deftly carved with crosses and interweaving patterns.
Though 20th century wars almost destroyed the country, the new century
is seeing a gratifying upsurge in fortunes. Armenia has one of the
fastest-growing economies in the world. It still has a long way to go,
but prosperity is beginning to spread. Smart new hotels and guesthouses
are sweeping away the gloomy old Soviet hotels.
The three million or so Armenians are rediscovering their traditional
enjoyment of life — they share a passion for culture, food and family
not unlike Greeks and Italians, even though their landlocked country
is tucked between Turkey, Georgia and Iran.
Armenia is the size of Maryland, and almost every corner of the
country can be reached in a day’s drive from Yerevan. The highlight
for Diasporan Armenians is the Vatican of Armenia, Holy Echmiadzin.
The 1,700-year-old Mayr Tachar (Mother Church) is an exotic mix of
Persian-style murals, monks in black cowls and richly gilded holy
relics. Armenia’s holiest treasure, the lance that pierced Christ’s
side, lies in the treasure room at the rear of the cathedral. The
casing around the spearhead is a riot of finely wrought silver, but
the relic itself is a brutal, crude shard of iron — exactly what a
provincial Roman soldier might have wielded 2,000 years ago.
Echmiadzin is only 30 minutes away from Yerevan through the
vineyard-studded Araks Valley.
North from Yerevan lies the vast blue mirror of Lake Sevan. The
richly forested northern province of Lori has two gorgeous World
Heritage-listed monasteries.
Heading south you skirt past the awesome bulk of Mount Ararat and
wind through jagged ranges and knotted valleys on the way to the
spectacular fortress of Tatev. Numerous tour companies run day trips
and overnight stays to the provinces.
Back in Yerevan the cafes stay open late into the night on warm summer
evenings; the Opera House offers high culture at bargain prices;
and the national museum on Republic Square has a magnificent art
collection, regarded as the third best in the former USSR.
The Museum of the Armenian Genocide at Tsitsernakaberd just outside
the city center commemorates the victims of the Ottoman and Turkish
massacres of 1915-23. There is a solemn procession here every year
on April 24 to honor the fallen.
Best of all, there are the Armenians themselves. The language is
something of a challenge (it has a unique 38-letter alphabet), but
many people, especially the young, speak English.
Armenians are an expressive, cultured, hospitable people who love
barbecues, boxing and homemade liqueurs as much as the latest opera
production. Visit someone’s house, and within minutes a table of food
and drinks is set.
As one host said, it is his duty to keep everyone’s glasses full,
but the next step is up to the guest.

ETHEREAL YET ROOTED IN REALITY
Review By Anu Nathan
Malaysia Star, Malaysia
April 9 2006
SNOW
By: Orhan Pamuk
Publisher: Vintage, 426 pages
(ISBN: 0-3775-70686-0)
THIS is the longest it has taken me to read a book and review – almost
six months. I had to keep putting it down because Snow is not easily
digested. Pamuk is more than a novelist; he is a reporter first and
foremost, and this political novel charts the tumult within modern-day
Turkey. Every time I put down the book because it was threatening
to overwhelm me, I was forced to pick it up again, not just because
Pamuk’s name and face jumped out of newspapers and magazines, but
because I was compelled to read on till the end.
Cliched as it may sound, Pamuk is no stranger to controversy.
Recently, Turkish authorities had charged him with “insulting
Turkishness” for talking about the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and the
massacre of 30,000 Kurds in Anatolia. Much earlier, in 1995, he was
among a group of authors tried for writing essays that criticised
Turkey’s treatment of the Kurdish minority.
Until I visited Turkey last year, I had no idea who Pamuk was, despite
the fact that he is a prolific writer and has been a regular in the
Bosphorus literary scene since the late 1970s. I was strolling in the
Beyoglu district and ventured into a bookstore, hoping to pick up a
book by a Turkish writer. The bookstore owner/manager recommended
Pamuk, who by then had achieved international fame with his book
My Name is Red (about a murderous Ottoman miniaturist), which could
almost be a parallel novel to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.
Two days after coming home, I found Snow on the review shelf. The
next week a colleague passed me My Name is Red, which only succeeded
in derailing the review of Snow. It seemed there was no escaping Pamuk.
As a novelist Pamuk belongs to that special breed of crossover authors
who manage to sell and achieve critical acclaim – think Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, Milan Kundera, Paulo Coelho.
Snow (Kar in Turkish) is a highly-charged political novel that
explores the conflict between Islamism and Westernisation in modern
Turkey and tackles head-on the delicate headscarf issue.
In Kars (the poetic transition of Ka to Kar to Kars is almost a
sublime touch, like the snowflake which the poet clings to), heavy
snow cuts off the Anatolian town from the rest of Turkey just after a
poet called Ka arrives, a pointed reference to the desolate remoteness
of Kars in vivid contrast to forward-looking Istanbul.
Ka, who has for years been living in Frankfurt, futilely trying to
create poetry amid odd jobs to sustain his departure from Turkey, has
been assigned by an Istanbul newspaper to investigate a chain of young
girls committing suicide because, as the local police chief explains,
“they were not allowed to wear headscarves in school.”
Tracing almost lovingly from Dostoevsky (even Kafka comes to mind),
the characters in Snow are all flawed, with some juggling dual
identities. Among them are the Islamist who has no qualms about
keeping a mistress, a former Istanbul socialite who champions the
headscarf cause with idealistic zeal, and the Communist democrat.
Most ruptured is Ka who, in Malaysian parlance would best be described
as a lalang, swaying in whichever direction the wind blows, unsure
of his convictions.
Ka, as we soon find out, is not in Kars to uncover the mystery of the
virgin suicides, but to woo his elusive classmate Ipek, now happily
divorced. Ipek is the only cause he fervently pursues, even as a
flood of poetic inspiration turns on the creative switch which this
washed-out poet had considered dead.
Ka’s footsteps in Kars, Istanbul and Frankfurt are later retraced
by his novelist friend Orhan (Pamuk also includes himself in My
Name is Red), who is determined to detail Ka’s life, understand the
overpowering love he had for Ipek amid troubled times, and his final
days before succumbing to a hail of bullets.
In this didactic treatise, displacement, blind devotion, love and
alienation all jostle to take prime place against a backdrop of the
fleeting, ethereal promise of peace and unity amid differences.
Pamuk is an inveterate storyteller and here, he has woven a magical
tale, sometimes superfluous, but always engaging, about ordinary
Turks affected by decisions beyond their control and how Turkey,
being both blue-eyed blonde and swarthy tries to strike a balance
between Islamism and secularism/modernism.

40 IRANIAN FIRMS BLACKLISTED IN UK
Brian Brady
The Scotsman, UK
April 9 2006
Westminster Editor ([email protected])
THERE are 43 names. The great and the good of Iran’s industrial
and scientific community, the obscure, the famous and, perhaps,
the infamous.
Their titles were quietly released into the public domain for the
first time only days ago by the Department of Trade and Industry
(DTI) in a swift operation claiming to be merely giving British firms
updated guidance on the trading situation with Tehran.
It was, in fact, far more important than that. The British government
is effectively blacklisting dozens of Iranian entities, including
state bodies like Tehran University. In a climate of rising concerns
about the intentions of Iranian leaders and their advancing nuclear
programme – criticised by foreign secretary Jack Straw last month,
who warned Tehran of possible sanctions if it failed to heed UN
Security Council demands to halt its production of enriched uranium –
this was a clear demonstration of how deeply those fears are felt.
Across Europe and much of the western world the fears about Tehran’s
intentions are growing. Two weeks ago, customs investigators marched
into the business premises of the German-Armenian partnership NTV,
in the infamous “millionaires’ neighbourhood” of Bad Homburg, and
began seizing documents about its dealings with Iran.
The swoop was not an isolated case: 40 more German companies
of varying sizes and interests were caught up in the nationwide
operation, carried out by 250 police and customs officials. They
were all suspected of involvement in a German-Russian network that
may have helped the Iranians advance a nuclear programme that the
West now fears only military action can dismantle.
NTV, a nondescript telecommunications firm owned by a colourful
business partnership obsessed with racehorse breeding and gambling,
had reportedly arranged for a cable drum to be dispatched to an
Iranian weapons importer.
The firm, and its owners, attracted the attention of the a public
prosecutor. In turn he realised there was a connection to the
activities of the defunct Berlin firm Vero Handels GmbH, which is now
suspected of having scoured Germany for special parts for construction
of the Iranian Bushehr nuclear reactor.
As their colleagues throughout Germany were stomping into 41 companies
last month, officials at the Department of Trade and Industry in London
were attempting to tighten the net around their own business community.
Britain has had an arms embargo against Iran in place for 13 years.
The policy, amended by Robin Cook as Foreign Secretary in 1998,
purports to prevent all items on the “military list” or “nuclear list”
leaving these shores bound for Tehran.
The sanctions do not, however, prohibit all business between the
two countries. In the final three months of last year, for example,
British firms got DTI approval for £3m-worth of exports, covering a
list of items including biotechnology equipment, civil aircraft and
gas detection equipment.
And here is the problem: a number of items are acknowledged to be
“dual-use” – able to be applied for both fair and foul means –
but licences are often granted as long as exporters can convince
the authorities that they will be used for industrial or research
purposes. The “end-use” monitoring system, which effectively places
firms on trust, has long been the target of condemnation by campaigners
against arms trading.
The DTI’s switch in policy towards Iran last month attempted
to tackle this issue at source. Via an understated announcement
on its website, the DTI offshoot the Export Control Organisation
(ECO) revealed it was extending its guidance to would-be exporters,
“given the current concerns about Iran in particular”. Along with
the amendments, the bureaucrats added “a list of Iranian entities”
intended to help exporters “judge which exports might potentially be
of concern on end use grounds”.
The sense of foreboding is overpowering. Despite the ECO’s determined
attempts to underplay the move, a cursory glance at the list of Iranian
“entities” now effectively blacklisted by the British government
reveals the gravity of the situation.
Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, Esfahan Chemical Industries,
Government of Iran, Department of Defence, Iranian Mineral Processing
Research Centre, Nuclear Research Centre for Agriculture And Medicine,
and Tehran University. Most worryingly, given the DTI’s recently
discovered concerns about these organisations, 12 of the 43 have
already taken delivery of goods from Britain in the past.
“The purpose of a list there is to alert UK exporters to end-users
that we are concerned about in Iran,” trade minister Malcolm Wicks
said when asked about controls over exports to Iran. “That is an
example of how, when there is a concern, we disseminate that concern
to appropriate companies.”
Such concern does not, yet, translate itself into harsh demands for
compliance from British business – nor suggest that the government
itself will be making an enormous effort to tighten the net. “This
information may be factored into your business planning and help
you to make informed decisions on whether to contact the ECO,” the
organisation’s guidance adds. “The list may be amended from time to
time and should be checked regularly if you are planning business
with Iran.”
The approach contrasts sharply with that of the Americans, who maintain
a comprehensive embargo on business with Iran, and come down heavily
upon anyone suspected of helping a key element of the “axis of evil”
augment their offensive powers.
~U IT WAS reported last night that US President George Bush is making
plans for a large scale bombing strike on Iran, targeting sites where
uranium is thought to be enriched.
The use of force is being considered in case diplomatic efforts to
persuade Tehran to stop its nuclear programme fail.
This article: 62006
–Boundary_(ID_BIgyQo423sZYKDlwU7RJVA)–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

EU ENVOY DISCUSSES KARABAKH SETTLEMENT WITH REGION’S PRESIDENT
by: Tigran Liloyan
ITAR-TASS News Agency
April 8, 2006 Saturday 06:03 PM EST
A possible intensification of the EU role in a search for peace
settlement in Azerbaijan’s mostly Armenian-populated enclave of
Karabakh came into spotlight of talks between the EU’s envoy to South
Caucasus, Peter Semneby, and the President of the self-proclaimed
Karabakh Republic, Arkady Gukassian.
Spokespeople for Karabakh’s permanent mission in Armenia told Itar-Tass
Gukassian stressed the importance of maintaining ceasefire between
Karabakh and Azerbaijan.
He also spoke in favor of the breakaway region’s direct participation
in the talks on settling the conflict, the origins of which date back
to late 1980’s.
Foreign Ministry of the Karabakh Republic said in a statement
circulated Saturday encroachments on ceasefire on the line of
disengagement of Azerbaijani and Karabakh armed units became more
frequent recently.
“The incidents leading to a greater number of victims on the
disengagement line can only breed mutual mistrust and trigger an
escalation of violence in the zone of Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict,”
the statement said.

EDUCATION CLASH HOLDS UP EU TALKS
by Anthony Browne in Brussels and Suna Erdem in Istanbul
The Times (London)
April 8, 2006, Saturday
TURKISH hopes of joining the European Union have been thrown into
jeopardy by a stand-off between Britain and France over human rights.
Entry negotiations have been temporarily suspended after Britain
blocked an early phase of the talks on education.
The dispute puts Britain, which has been the main champion of Turkish
entry into the EU, in the awkward position of blocking the membership
talks and playing down concerns over human rights.
As opposition to further enlargement of the EU mounts, the European
Commission has said that the talks -which started last November and
are meant to result in Turkey becoming the first Muslim member of
the EU in about a decade’s time could be heading for a “train crash”.
The dispute flared on Thursday night when Britain accused France of
trying to “move the goalposts” by insisting that the country’s human
rights record be considered at all stages of the membership talks.
During the negotiations on education policy, France, supported by most
other EU member states, said that it wanted issues of sex and race
to be addressed. There is concern over the difficulties that many
Turkish girls face in getting educated, alleged racism in Turkish
textbooks and the treatment of minorities in schools.
A recent study of Turkish textbooks found widespread nationalism
and racism.
Academics highlighted 4,000 instances of “human rights abuses”,
notably negative portrayals of Kurds, Greeks, Jews and Armenians. In
the religiously conservative east of the country, far fewer girls
than boys have access to education.
Despite the concerns, a senior British official made clear that its
negotiators had made a stand to stop countries that are uneasy about
Turkish membership from repeatedly introducing new hurdles.
A French government spokesman denied that Paris was changing the terms
of the talks, but said that they had to reflect public opposition
to Turkey joining. The mood in Brussels is becoming increasingly
pessimistic. Olli Rehn, the Enlargement Commissioner, said: “We
may face a period of political tension in EU-Turkey relations. The
commission is working hard to avoid a train crash.”

TURKEY ACCUSES ARMED GROUPS OF DRUG TRAFFICKING
Agence France Presse — English
April 9, 2006 Sunday 11:29 AM GMT
Kurdish rebels from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and
smaller armed leftist groups in Turkey are deeply involved in drug
trafficking according to a Turkish police report, the Anatolia news
agency said Sunday.
Since 1984, the report contends, the PKK, the Armenian Secret Army
for the Liberation of Armenia, and two extremist communist groups
have been involved in 333 separate drug trafficking incidents.
The two extreme-left groups are the Turkish Communist Party, and the
Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party Front.
A total of 3.7 tons of heroin, four tons of morphine-base, 710 kilos
of cocaine and various quantities of other drugs have been seized
by police, who also shut down two illegal drug-making laboratories,
Anatolia said.
Anatolia did not provide any statistical breakdown of trafficking
by group.
The police report noted that the PKK — classified as a terrorist
organization by Turkey, the European Union and the United States —
is also routinely identified by international experts on narcotics
as being involved in drug trafficking.
The conflict between the PKK, which seeks an independent state in
Turkey’s predominately Kurdish southeast, and Turkish security forces
has claimed an estimated 37,000 lives since 1984.

THE IRAQ MESS: KURDISH SEPARATISTS ARE ADDING TO THE WITCH’S BREW
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)
April 9, 2006 Sunday
Region Edition
Last week another Iraq war-related problem turned up. In southeast
Turkey, near its border with Iraq, ethnic Kurd separatists encouraged
by the growing independence of Kurdistan in northern Iraq battled
with Turkish security forces, leaving 15 dead.
The United States has leaned on Iraq’s Kurds for support since the
beginning of the Iraq war. In the beginning it was because the Kurds
were opposed to Saddam Hussein’s Arab regime. Later, it was because
the Kurds were the only important Iraqi group that appeared to like
the United States.
The Sunnis, who with Saddam Hussein had ruled Iraq for decades, hated
the United States for its invasion and overthrow of their rule. The
Sunnis now form the core of insurgent resistance to U.S. rule. The
Shiites always were lukewarm on the Americans, even though they
advocated the democracy and majority rule that would put them in
power during the occupation.
That left the Kurds. Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani became president.
As Iraq has failed to put together a central government, three years
after the U.S. invasion, nearly four months after the elections,
the Kurdish north of the country has become increasingly autonomous.
Ethnic Kurds in neighboring Turkey, Iran, Syria and Armenia have
remarked on the growing strength and independence of Iraqi Kurdistan,
and have become heartened in their desire for their own country by
developments there.
In U.S. NATO ally Turkey, where an estimated 25 percent of the
population are ethnic Kurds, and where an estimated 30,000 were killed
in previous conflict in the 1980s, the issue blew up recently.
The United States told Turkey in early 2005 that it wouldn’t do
anything about Kurdish separatists acting against Turkey from Iraq.
Given other U.S. preoccupations in Iraq at this time and continued
U.S. reliance on the Kurds, it is unlikely to change that position now.
In the meantime, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made
it clear that he will put up with no nonsense from Kurdish separatists
in Turkey.
This is another very old problem that the Bush administration should
have taken into account before crashing into Iraq, and particularly
before signing up the Kurds as America’s principal ally there.
In the meantime, the snarl in naming an Iraqi government four months
after the elections remains. The Kurds and the Sunnis won’t agree to
the Shiites’ choice of Ibrahim al-Jaafari for prime minister, selected
by the Shiite majority in February. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice and her travelling partner, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw,
visited Baghdad last week and sought to advance the candidacy of Vice
President Adel Abdul Mahdi for the prime minister slot in place of
Mr. al-Jaafari. It doesn’t appear to have worked.
Meanwhile, reconstruction is stalled in Iraq, proceeding in only
four of 18 provinces. Religious conflict between Sunnis and Shiites
proceeds. Another bomb in a Shiite mosque killed 71 on Friday. If the
strife cannot be called civil war — a term the Bush administration
resists despite the growing ethnic cleansing — it is quacking like
that duck.
U.S. deaths in Iraq continue to rise above 2,300. The cost of the war
to the United States is estimated at about $300 billion. President
Bush continues to assure Americans that we are winning.
If we are winning it is hard to imagine how bad it would be if we
were losing. The regional expansion of the trouble in Iraq into Turkey
through the Kurds is one of the worst developments to occur yet.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

MORE THAN 1 MILLION ITALIANS ABROAD CAST BALLOTS IN PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION
By Marta Falconi, Associated Press Writer
Associated Press Worldstream
April 9, 2006 Sunday 12:05 AM GMT
More than 1 million Italians living abroad voted in the country’s
parliamentary election, according to a final tally, and their ballots
could be decisive in a close race.
This election marked the first time expatriates were allowed to vote
in a general election without having to travel back to Italy.
Around 1.1 million Italians abroad, or 42 percent of those eligible,
sent in their ballots by mail in early voting, the Foreign Ministry
said on Saturday.
Official results won’t be released until after the Sunday-Monday
domestic voting to choose between blocs led by Premier Silvio
Berlusconi and his center-left challenger, former European Commission
President Romano Prodi.
About 2.6 million citizens abroad were eligible to vote to elect 18
lawmakers who, for the first time, will be responsible for representing
their interests in the national legislature. Those lawmakers will fill
12 new seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of parliament,
and six in the Senate.
Around 47 million citizens who live in Italy will vote this weekend.
Latin American consulates reported the highest average ballot return
rate, with about 52 percent of Italians voting, the ministry said.
The highest return was in Uruguay, where 63 percent of Italians
voted. Campaigning politicians paid special attention to Latin America
Argentina in particular because it is home to hundreds of thousands
of expatriates. Fifty-six percent of Italians living there voted.
Europe had an average return rate of about 38 percent, with Armenia
topping the list with 95 percent, the ministry reported. About 37
percent of Italians living in North America voted, with the highest
returns in Barbados at 81 percent. Africa, Asia and Oceania reported
an average of 44 percent, with 100 percent or 32 people voting in
Kuwait, the ministry said.
Until now, Italians wishing to vote in their country’s general
elections had to fly back to Italy. A 2001 law, one of the first pieces
of legislation from Berlusconi’s five-year conservative government,
gave citizens who live abroad the right to vote by mail.
The expatriate representatives will have full voting rights in
Italy’s parliament, giving Italians abroad the chance to influence
decisions not just on issues concerning them directly, but also on
those affecting domestic policies in Italy.
In addition to giving overseas voters the right to cast ballots,
the law also created four huge electoral districts to represent
Italians who live overseas in Parliament, which is composed of a
315-seat Senate and 630-seat Chamber of Deputies.
In recent weeks, politicians of all stripes have been crisscrossing
the globe trying to woo voters.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

IMMIGRANTS TODAY LESS LIKELY TO SEVER ROOTS
By Mark Bixler
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
April 4, 2006 Tuesday
Main Edition
Leaving the United States to serve in a foreign government is
nothing new.
In the 1990s, U.S. citizens returned to their native countries
to take such jobs as Yugoslav prime minister, chief of Estonia’s
armed forces, foreign minister of Armenia and foreign minister of
Bosnia-Herzegovina. A retired administrator for the Environmental
Protection Agency left Chicago to become president of his native
Lithuania. A U.S. citizen joined the Cabinet of Mexican President
Vicente Fox.
The trend is growing, along with the number of U.S. citizens who
also hold citizenship in another country. Dual citizenship used to be
illegal in most cases, but the U.S. Supreme Court changed that in 1967.
Immigrants sometimes leave the United States to take government
jobs at home — at least two Afghans joined a new bureaucracy in
Afghanistan after the Taliban fell.
The United States is now home to more foreign-born residents —
34.2 million — than at any time in history. Thanks to the Internet
and telephones, they follow politics in their native countries much
more closely than immigrants who came in the late 1800s and early
1900s, said David Pottie, the Carter Center’s assistant director of
democracy programs.
“Once they left home,” he said of earlier immigrants, “they left.”
Kathleen Newland, director of the Migration Policy Institute in
Washington, said critics liken dual citizenship to bigamy, but she
likens it to a man who loves both his wife and his mother.
“Having multiple allegiances is increasingly common in a globalized
world,” she said.
More than 40 countries, including the United States, allow citizens
who live abroad to vote, typically by mail or in person at an embassy
or consulate. Yet last year, only 10 percent of eligible Iraqi
expatriates voted in Iraqi elections, said Richard W. Soudriette,
president of the International Foundation for Election Systems,
a Washington nonprofit agency.
In a few months, Mexican citizens in the United States will for the
first time help choose Mexico’s president, but only 75,000 met a
deadline to register even though at least 7 million live here, he said.
“The fact is that most people really do not participate,” he said.

ILLIBERAL EUROPE: THE LONG AND GROWING LIST OF THINGS YOU CAN’T LEGALLY SAY
by Gerard Alexander, The Weekly Standard
The Weekly Standard
April 10, 2006 Monday
ON FEBRUARY 20, AN Austrian court sentenced the notorious British
writer David Irving to three years in prison for denying in a 1989
speech that Auschwitz contained gas chambers. Many American observers
had mixed reactions. They saw Irving as a loathsome anti-Semite but
were uncomfortable with the thought of a person serving time behind
bars for something he wrote or said, no matter how noxious.
Journalist Michael Barone probably spoke for more than a few when
he said that he “shuddered” at the news of Irving’s imprisonment,
“yet I can understand why Austria, like Germany, has laws that
criminalize Holocaust denial and glorification of Nazism. History
has its claims–heavy ones, in the cases of Germany and Austria.” In
other words, criminalizing speech might not be the American way of
doing business, but it’s understandably Austria and Germany’s way of
dealing with their unique Nazi past.
The trouble is that Austria’s anti-Nazi legislation is the tip
of an iceberg of political speech laws across Europe. Of course,
all governments restrict some speech. But free expression is so
foundational to democracy that there is usually a strong bias against
restricting speech unless it poses a compelling and even imminent
danger to others. The most pervasive and durable restrictions meet
that test, applying to things like child pornography, false statements
that result in demonstrable harm (defamation), the exposure of national
security information, commercial fraud, and the proverbial shouting of
“Fire!” in a crowded theater.
In addition, European countries have never had America’s strong
free-speech tradition. Nevertheless, three disturbing trends now
underway in Europe together represent the greatest erosion of
democratic practice in the world’s advanced democracies since 1945.
First, anti-Nazi laws are being adopted in places where neo-Nazism
poses no serious threat. Second, speech laws have been dramatically
expanded to sanction speech that “incites hatred” against
groups based on their religion, race, ethnicity, or several other
characteristics. Third, these incitement laws are being interpreted
so loosely that they chill not just extremist views but mainstream
ones too. The result is a serious distortion and impoverishment of
political debate.
After 1945, Germany in particular passed strict anti-Nazi laws, making
it illegal not only to form a neo-Nazi party but also to champion
Nazi ideology, downplay Nazi crimes, print Mein Kampf, or even air
the Nazi musical anthem, the “Horst Wessel” song. At the time, many
believed that these restrictions met the test of averting immediate
danger. Given what had happened between 1933 and 1945, it seemed
airing pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic views was the equivalent of shouting
“Fire!” in the crowded theater of Austria and Germany’s troubled
cultures. As it turned out, neo-Nazis proved too marginal even to
come close to posing a serious danger to Germany or Austria’s new
democracies, with real neo-Nazis never winning even 5 percent of the
vote. So the necessity for these restrictions became less and less
clear with time.
But instead of being pared back, anti-Nazi legislation spread. Laws
criminalizing Holocaust denial or minimization were adopted well into
the 1990s in France, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, and other European
countries (and several countries outside Europe). What these laws could
accomplish was unclear, since they were adopted when neo-Nazism’s
prospects seemed more remote than ever. In all these countries,
including Germany and Austria, governments don’t really have to ban
neo-Nazis; voters do it for them through indifference.
Nonetheless, anti-Nazi laws have proved uncontroversial, maybe because
their sanctions fall on unsavory figures from Europe’s anti-Semitic
fever swamps.
This is unfortunate, because anti-Nazi laws gradually expanded to cover
other historical events. In 1993, Bernard Lewis, the eminent Princeton
historian of the Middle East, was asked in an interview with Le Monde
about the mass murder of Armenians in Turkey during World War I. He
readily acknowledged that terrible massacres took place but questioned
whether the murders were the result of a predetermined–that is,
genocidal–plan. That conclusion brushed up against French laws that
now prohibit denial of more crimes against humanity than just the
Holocaust. Several activist groups in France filed complaints. Two
civil and one criminal suit were dismissed, but Lewis was found guilty
in another civil suit and condemned by the court for having not been
“objective” regarding events that the European Parliament and other
bodies had officially certified as a “genocide.”
The expansion of the speech laws beyond the Holocaust is revealing.
Especially once it became evident that neo-Nazis were politically
marginal, it was unclear exactly what risk Holocaust deniers posed.
An alternative interpretation is that bans on denial were never really
about averting the menace of Nazi revivalism. They were motivated
instead by the fact that good people were offended by Holocaust
denial. That this is really what’s at work is confirmed by laws
prohibiting denial of events like the Armenian murders–cases that
pose no risk of old genocidal agendas’ being revived.
So genocide-denial laws can now be used to sanction professional
historians whose research leads them to findings that these laws
classify as unacceptable. And the anti-Nazi slope has proven more
slippery than that. Denial laws have been supplemented by new laws
that are even more prone to sanctioning reasonable people.
ESPECIALLY SINCE THE 1970s, Western Europeans have been passing bans
on speech that “incites hatred” based on race, religion, ethnicity,
national origin, and other criteria. These were adopted or beefed up in
the 1980s in the face of rising violence against minorities and rising
far-right parties like the French National Front. Such laws are now in
place in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, France, Britain,
and elsewhere. France’s 1972 Holocaust denial law was expanded by the
1990 Gayssot law, which extended sanctions to denial of other crimes
against humanity and points of view deemed racist. France’s Conseil
Superieur de l’Audiovisuel monitors broadcasters for any statements
that might incite racial hatred.
Earlier British legislation against incitement of racial hatred was
expanded in 1986 and was extended again in February 2006, this time
to criminalize intentionally “stirring up hatred against persons on
religious grounds.” This is spreading to the European Union level,
where a stream of rules now prohibits the broadcast, including
online, of any program or ad that incites “hatred based on sex,
racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or
sexual orientation” or–crucially–is “offensive to religious or
political beliefs.”
The highest-profile prosecutions under these laws have been of people
and organizations very vulnerable to the charge of racism. Incitement
charges have repeatedly been brought against the French National
Front’s Jean-Marie Le Pen, who regularly trades in slurs against
blacks and Arabs. Similar charges were leveled against the Vlaams
Blok, a Flemish nationalist party advocating the breakup of the
bilingual Belgian state, which sometimes luridly stereotyped immigrants
from the developing world as predisposed to criminality and welfare
dependency. In November 2004, Belgium’s highest court found the party
guilty of racism, allowing the government to deny it state funding
and access to television, in effect forcing the Blok to dissolve and
re-form under a new name. At the time, the Blok was jockeying for
first place in polls among Belgium’s Flemish voters.
But the anti-incitement laws now regularly target people who are
well within the political mainstream. This is political correctness
backed up with prison time. Britain’s then-home secretary Jack Straw
remarked in 1999 on criminal activity by people many of whom posed
as gypsies or “travelers”–hardly a slur on all gypsies even without
that qualifier. But a Travelers’ group filed a complaint of inciting
racial hatred, prompting a formal investigation and extensive media
coverage asking whether Straw was racist. In 2002, the prominent
French novelist Michel Houellebecq was charged with inciting racial
hatred in a novel and interview in which he referred to Islam as
“the stupidest religion.” Veteran Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci
was motivated by 9/11 to criticize Islam as violent and subversive of
traditional European mores. As a result she faced a French attempt in
2002 to ban her book as racist, and she is scheduled to stand trial
in Italy in June for statements “offensive to Islam.” One of her
accusers, in turn, faces charges for calling the Catholic Church a
“criminal organization.”
In May 2005, Le Monde, France’s premier center-left newspaper, was
found guilty of defaming Jews in a 2002 editorial that criticized
Israeli policies while referring to Israel as “a nation of refugees.”
The appeals court found such juxtapositions made Israelis synonymous
with Jews, so criticism of the former constituted incitement of hatred
against the latter. After it published a series of controversial
cartoons of Muhammad, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten was formally
investigated to determine whether the cartoons constituted prohibited
racist or blasphemous speech.
This swirl of speech-law charges, lawsuits, and investigations is
now sustained by an “antiracism” industry. Dozens of antiracism
groups and self-appointed representatives of religious and other
communities, like France’s Movement Against Racism and for Friendship
Between Peoples (MRAP) and the Muslim Union of Italy, readily file
complaints and suits and sometimes are the direct beneficiaries
when fines are imposed. Their complaints provoke investigations
by an alphabet soup of government agencies, like Belgium’s Center
for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism and Britain’s
Commission for Racial Equality. These in turn feed into the court
system. If America had practices like these, the debate over, say,
the Dubai ports deal would almost certainly have sparked a shower of
civil suits and criminal investigations against elected officials
and columnists charged with “anti-Arab . . . anti-Muslim” bigotry
(to quote the Council on American-Islamic Relations).
Not all cases, of course, result in punishment. Le Pen has been fined
hundreds of thousands of dollars, neo-Nazi groups banned, Holocaust
deniers and anti-Semites jailed in several countries, and the Vlaams
Blok de facto dissolved. Le Monde was found guilty, but sanctioned
with only a symbolic fine; Bernard Lewis with somewhat larger costs.
The investigation of Straw was dropped; Houellebecq was acquitted;
and the Danish prosecutors decided not to press charges against the
Jyllands-Posten. But an increasing number of European intellectuals,
politicians, journalists, and even scholars have had uncomfortable and
expensive brushes with speech laws. In many cases, their reputation
is tarnished; afterward their Wikipedia entry, so to speak, is never
complete without mention of the official investigation for bigotry.
SO THE REAL DANGER posed by Europe’s speech laws is not so much
guilty verdicts as an insidious chilling of political debate, as
people censor themselves in order to avoid legal charges and the
stigma and expense they bring. And the most serious chill is not of
fringe racists but of mainstream moderates and conservatives.
First of all, it turns out that some denials and incitements are
more equal than others in Europe. For all the trials on charges of
Holocaust denial, it is not clear that anyone has been charged with
denial or minimization of crimes committed by Communist regimes. And
the laws banning incitement of hatred on grounds of race, religion,
ethnicity, or national origin do not ban incitement based on political
orientation or economic status. Moreover, these laws protect speech
that incites hatred against Americans and some others.
And while there have been some convictions of Islamist radicals for
inciting hatred against Jews and others, Europeans have been shy to
move against the incitement pervasive in Islamist circles.
In other words, Europe’s speech laws are written and applied in ways
that leave activists on the political left free to whitewash crimes
of leftist regimes, incite hatred against their domestic bogeymen of
the well-to-do, and luridly stereotype their international bogeymen,
often with history-distorting falsehoods such as fictitious claims
of genocide said to be committed by the United States and Israel. It
may be no coincidence that Socialist and extreme-left parties have
played central roles in the design of speech laws. The crafter of
France’s 1990 Gayssot law, for example, was Jean-Claude Gayssot, a
longtime Communist party officeholder. All this matters. It sends an
important signal to the broader culture when Hitler is the symbol of
evil while Stalin and Mao are given a pass, and when, in effect, Pat
Buchanan’s ideas risk indictment while Michael Moore’s are protected.
But the more serious bias comes out when anti-incitement laws are
allowed to degenerate into the sanctioning of speech that causes
“offense.” It’s not clear why avoiding offense should be a top priority
to begin with. But when it is, the most important consequence is
likely to be the chilling not of racist speech but of moderate
and conservative thinking about major social problems. After all,
two views tend to cause offense in our day and age. The first is the
speech of bigots who denigrate members of other groups, calling them,
say, inherently delinquent. The second is speech by modern moderates
and conservatives who believe that problems like poverty, delinquency,
and poor health can often–not always, but often–be traced to bad
choices and mores and dysfunctional subcultures.
Sometimes, problems are disproportionately concentrated within
groups–of whatever class, race, ethnicity, or religion. Identifying
these causes assumes they can be corrected; so identifying them is
a prerequisite to improvement. This is the furthest thing from racism.
It is the non-bigotry of high expectations.
But in our hypersensitive age, this sort of speech is prone to being
construed as prejudice–much more prone than the left’s traditional
language, which attributes people’s problems to discrimination and
other forces beyond their control. Moderate and conservative speech
is even more likely to be tagged as bigoted when that tag is wielded
cynically by political opponents. In the politically tilted world of
Europe’s media, intellectuals, and NGOs, this happens all the time.
We know this is often cynical, because European speech-law advocates
like Jean-Claude Gayssot are perfectly capable of criticizing Israel
while insisting this doesn’t mean they’re anti-Semitic.
Laws against any speech that causes “offense” are biased because they
have the insidious effect of conflating bigoted speech and constructive
criticism, two kinds of speech that should be sharply distinguished
from each other. The result is the stigmatization of certain kinds
of thinking about social problems and public policy that American
conservatives, moderates, and even many liberals recognize as a
legitimate part of serious debate. These speech laws won’t ultimately
silence extremists, whose careers won’t end if they’re called bigots
and who often seek out controversy. But they can silence reasonable
people who don’t want that label and don’t want a scandal.
BETWEEN EUROPE’S SPEECH LAWS, hypersensitivity, and cynical
demagoguery, constructive criticism can become virtually impossible,
and self-censorship the norm. The effects are plain to see. European
politicians, media outlets, and university discussions are routinely
uncomfortable airing information–say, about rates of crime–that
reflects unfavorably on the members of groups such as citizens
of African or Middle Eastern descent, for fear that it will fuel
negative stereotypes of these groups and open the broadcaster to
charges of inciting hatred. Last fall, many French politicians and
commentators carefully avoided characterizing the identities of the
“youths” rioting in dozens of French cities and towns, and did not
aggressively pursue that issue when peace was restored. This leaves
it unclear even now who did what and why in the rioting–knowledge
that is a prerequisite for a serious policy response to what happened.
Consider the case of Alain Finkielkraut, a distinguished French
philosopher. Last November, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper interviewed him
about the French riots. In blunt language, he said that poverty and
discrimination could not explain the rioters’ behavior since most poor
communities in France did not torch cars. He believed public debate
should acknowledge head-on that the rioters were heavily of Arab
and African descent and bore aggressively anti-Western attitudes. He
specifically insisted that neither all “blacks and Arabs” nor Islam
as a religion were implicated in that statement. And he proposed that
it was imperative to signal the rioters that calls for opportunity
within a society had to be matched with a sense of responsibility to
that society.
Given that most French commentators flinched from serious engagement
with the rioters’ thuggish assault on France’s public spaces,
Finkielkraut’s was a point of view that badly needed to be expressed.
But after Le Monde offered the public a biased sample of his words,
MRAP moved immediately to file legal charges against him, withdrawing
the threat only when Finkielkraut appeared to apologize. While
Finkielkraut has not renounced his original words, he and others like
him have since been less outspoken. Public debate on an urgent matter
was deprived of a viewpoint that identified where the real hatred
resided, sought ways to retrieve segments of French youth from its
grip, and exhorted France to expect more of its own people.
The same deprivation can be seen in the initial handling of the recent
kidnapping, 24-day torture, and then murder of Ilan Halimi, a young
French Jew. For days after Halimi’s body was found, authorities
tried to avoid discussing the possibility that the kidnappers
were Muslim and that anti-Semitism partly motivated them, despite
powerful signs pointing in that direction. Officials wanted to combat
anti-Semitism but not to paint Muslims in France as unattractively
anti-Semitic. Many German authorities are similarly unsure what to
do when young Germans of Turkish descent loudly cheer Valley of the
Wolves, the new anti-American and anti-Semitic Turkish hit film.
Criticism might offend Turks, but silence risks offending Jews. The
compromise is prevarication. The side effect is disrespect for
morally flabby authority figures. And the result is impoverishment
of public debate.
The good news is that Europeans are questioning their illiberal speech
laws as never before. For several years, scholars and intellectuals in
France especially have been circulating petitions and counter-petitions
regarding the wisdom particularly of the laws creating official
accounts of history. Such skepticism has received a huge boost from
the events surrounding the Danish cartoons. After their publication,
a concerted campaign to drum up outrage in the Muslim world triggered
demonstrations and riots in numerous places.
With that violence as a backdrop, many Muslims inside and outside
Europe have been insisting that European governments ban the
cartoons. As models for this, they cite not only censorship rules in
Middle Eastern countries but also Europe’s own speech laws. Many are
bewildered that speech offensive to Jews is banned but not speech
offensive to Muslims.
In response, many Europeans have found it difficult to justify these
inconsistencies. Several European governments take the expected and
untenable middle road: They refuse to ban the cartoons but plead with
their media not to publish them either. Other Europeans, though, seem
to be using their discomfort over the idea of banning the cartoons
to ask whether they shouldn’t get out of the business of banning
political speech altogether.
If they try, they won’t have the backing of international law. The
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights–the code the
U.N. Human Rights Committee is charged with enforcing–insists on the
banning of “advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred.” They
also won’t command the support of the world’s best-known human
rights organization. Amnesty International accepts speech laws as
legitimate, so it generally excludes from its list of “prisoners of
conscience”–that is, people “imprisoned solely for the peaceful
expression of their beliefs”–anyone imprisoned for “advocacy of
hatred.”
But reform-minded Europeans would have the example of U.S. practice,
which tolerates even loathsome speech. They would also have the
example of a rival human rights organization. Taking a principled
stand in the face of a great deal of international practice, Human
Rights Watch insists that governments should ban speech only when it
“constitutes imminent incitement” to violence and other unlawful acts
and urges reform of these laws, including repeal of Holocaust denial
laws. Europeans of all political stripes should want to seize this
opportunity to reverse the most dangerously illiberal trend in the
world’s advanced democracies. That would cease to make Europe a role
model for censorship and restore it as a model of core democratic
rights instead, expanding and not contracting its moral authority in
the world.
Gerard Alexander is associate professor of political science at
the University of Virginia and a visiting scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute.