Turkish Press
April 28 2005

Press Scan

ANKARA ANGRY WITH YEREVAN

RADIKAL- Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reacted to Armenian
President Kocharian’s reply to his letter asking for ”setting up
initial political dialogue between the two countries.” Erdogan said
that ”What we say is that we have a problem (which comes from the
past) and it needs to be solved with Armenia. And we open all our
archives and ask Armenia to do the same thing. We are not a country
which denies its past, but we don’t understand why Armenia does not
want to show its archives.”

Turkish Press
April 28 2005

Press Scan

15,000 ARMENIANS VISITED TURKEY IN 2004

ZAMAN- The number of Armenian tourists is expected to increase in
2005. 15,000 Armenians visited Turkey last year. Turkish-Armenian
Business Development Committee official Nazmi Gul said that at first
Armenian tourists were uneasy about their safety but when they
started dialogue with Turks, their uneasiness was removed.

Turkish Press
April 28 2005

Prof. McCarthy: I Will Do My Best In Fight Against Lies About Turks

ANKARA – “I will do my best in fight against the lies about Turks,
and please rely on me for anything that may be helpful to the Turkish
parliament,“ prominent historian Prof. Justin McCarthy from the
Louisville University told a letter he sent to Turkish Parliament
Speaker Bulent Arinc.

Justin McCarthy thanked Arinc for giving him the opportunity of
addressing the Turkish parliamentarians.

McCarthy had taken the floor and delivered a speech on “Truth about
Armenian Issue“ in the Turkish parliament.

Salt Lake Tribune, UT
April 29 2005

Dyer: Hitler cannot be allowed to fade into the past
Gwynne Dyer

Adolf Hitler has now been dead slightly longer than he was alive, and
he is about to stop being real. So long as the generation whose lives
he terrorized is still with us, he remains a live issue, but the 60th
anniversary of his death on April 30 is the last big one that will be
celebrated by those who survived his evil and knew his victims. By
the time the 75th anniversary comes around, they will almost all be
gone. And then Hitler will slip away into history.
It’s a process that is almost impossible to avert, because basic
human psychology is at work here. Once enough time has passed that
all the people involved in a given set of events would be dead by now
anyway, we stop treating them as real people whose triumphs and
tragedies matter, and only the loving attention of a filmmaker,
dramatist or a novelist can bring them to life again for us even
briefly.
Federico Fellini made the point once and for all in his 1969 film
“Satyricon,” a story set in the ancient Mediterranean world that
really makes its characters emerge from the classical myths and live.
For about a hundred minutes you really care about them, in a strange
way. The last shot shows the hero emerging from the labyrinth into
the fresh air and the sunlight – and then, with no warning, in the
middle of a sentence, the frame freezes and morphs into a time-worn
fresco of the same scene. Fade to black.
It’s shocking because Fellini makes you understand the true
nature of your relationship with the past. Its people have been dust
for hundreds or thousands of years, and for all that we try to give
them the respect and the weight that we give to living and recently
dead people, the fact is that we can’t. The point when historical
characters, good or bad, make the transition from flesh-and-blood
heroes and villains to mere frescoes on a wall is the point where
living people no longer remember them with love or hate. With Hitler,
we are nearing that point.
You don’t think that could happen? Consider the way we now treat
the “Corsican ogre,” Napoleon Bonaparte. He has become a veritable
industry for military historians, and is revered by half the
population of France because he ruled the country at the height of
its power and led the French to several dozen great military
victories before his boundless ambition finally plunged them into
total defeat. Nobody seems particularly perturbed by the fact that
his wars caused the deaths of about 4 million people.
That is a far smaller number than the 30 million or so deaths
that Hitler was responsible for, but Europe’s population was a great
deal smaller in Napoleon’s heyday. Europeans
actually stood about the same chance of dying as a result of
Napoleon’s actions at the height of his power in 1808 as they did
from Hitler’s actions in 1943 – and Napoleon has been forgiven by
history. So if all of those who died in Hitler’s war are soon to
enter the same weightless category of the long-dead, what is to keep
history from forgiving him, too?
There is one profound difference between Napoleon and Hitler.
Both were tyrants and conquerors, but only Hitler committed a
deliberate genocide. Most of the people who fought and died in the
war didn’t even know about the Nazi death camps at the time, but in
retrospect it is the Holocaust, the 6 million Jews who died not in
the war but in the camps, that has come to define our attitudes
toward Hitler, and has transformed him into an icon of absolute evil.

So he should remain, but history is mostly about forgetting,
and not very much survives the winnowing of the generations. Jews are
right to want this piece of history not to be forgotten, and the rest
of us need it too, because remembering the astonishing amount of pain
and loss that a man like Hitler could cause by manipulating hatreds
is an essential part of our defences against a recurrence. But the
bitter truth is that from now on it will be increasingly uphill work.

I would not raise this question at Passover if the anniversary of
Hitler’s suicide did not make it the one right time to do so. I also
understand why most Jews have zealously defended the unique status of
the calamity that befell their people and resisted any link with
other, smaller but not utterly dissimilar tragedies that have
befallen other peoples: the Armenian massacres, the Cambodian
genocide, Rwanda and the rest.
We cannot afford to let Hitler fade into the past because we
need him to remind us of our duty to the present and the future. If
the memory of the Holocaust is to stay alive – not just for Jews but
for the whole world – it may be time to start rethinking how to
present it to 21st-century audiences for whom the Second World War
and the Second Punic War seem equally lost in the unremembered past.
Was it only about the Jews, or should we see it as a warning to us
all?
—
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose
articles are published in 45 countries.

Opinion Editorials, VA
April 29 2005

Calling a Crime by its Name; America and the Armenian Genocide
Sean Gannon

Regrettably, the United States has once again allowed the April 24th
commemorations of the Armenian Genocide to pass without calling the
crime by its name. On that date in 1915, 250 Armenian leaders and
intellectuals were
deported from Constantinople and subsequently tortured and killed,
the beginning of a campaign which resulted in up to one and a half
million Armenian Ottoman subjects dead and a further one million in
exile. While Turkish threats to cancel lucrative defence contracts
and curb use of military airbases kept Bill Clinton onside, it was
rumoured that President Bush would use this year’s 90th
anniversary to end U.S. appeasement of Ankara by recognizing these
deaths as genocide. Sadly, such speculation appears to have been
unfounded.

Turkey, of course, strenuously rejects the genocide charge and
accuses Armenia, and in particular America’s sizeable Armenian
community, of wilfully disseminating an inaccurate picture of what
happened in the World War I period and why. And to be fair, there is
an element of truth in Ankara’s claim that the situation in Anatolia
in 1915 was not as clear cut as is generally presented today.
For instance, it is rarely acknowledged that the rise of Armenian
nationalism in the 19th century led to enormous tensions between
Armenians and their Ottoman overlords with the result that many took
sides against the Empire in 1828, 1854 and 1877. It is also
infrequently admitted that although 250,000 Armenians were
conscripted into the Ottoman armies during World War I, another
150,000, out of
a sense of religious affinity with the Orthodox Slavs and in the hope
that a Russian victory would lead to an independent Armenian state,
volunteered to serve in the Czarist forces while a further 50,000
joined various guerrilla groups such as the Dashnaks and the Huchnaks
who openly sided with Nicholas II against the Central Powers. And
seldom spoken of is the fact that about 200,000
Moslems, Greeks and Jews died directly at their hands.

But while it is then perhaps understandable that the Ottomans came to
view the Armenians as a fifth column within the Empire, there was no
justification for their
response to this perceived problem. Aside from the fact that the
treasonable tendencies of a substantial minority can never be used to
justify the wholesale slaughter of the substantial majority, it is
clear from non-partisan sources that the massacres and deportations
of Armenian civilians began before the rampages by Armenian regular
and irregular forces through Anatolia. As David Fromkin,
who studied German sources for his acclaimed book on the period
writes; “There are historians today who continue to support the claim
of Enver and Talaat that the Ottoman rulers acted only after Armenia
had risen against them. But observers at the time who were by no
means anti-Turk reported that such was not the case. German officers
stationed there agreed that the area was quiet until the deportations
began.”

In any case, Ankara continues to deny that a substantial majority of
Armenians were actually murdered during the War. While some Turkish
historians go so far
as to allow that up to 600,000 Armenians died during the period in
question, the semi-official Turkish Historical Society maintains that
the figure is closer to 300,000 and that, of these, only 10,000 were
massacred, the remainder dying of the starvation and disease which is
the inevitable accompaniment of war. It further claims that these
10,000 were killed, not as the result of any master plan to rid the
Empire of a turbulent minority, but in the heat of battle and more
often than not by non-Turkish Kurds.

But it is a matter of historical record that there existed the
“Special Organization,” an official department of the Central
Government which oversaw the activities of Einsatzgruppen-style
killing squads which, in the words of one American diplomat,
travelled around Anatolia “massacring men, women and children and
burning their homes. Babies were shot in their mothers’ arms, small
children were horribly mutilated, women were stripped and beaten.”

Furthermore, Turkey’s claim that the Kurds were primarily responsible
for the killing is disingenuous in the extreme. For a start, the mass
murder of Armenians
by Ottoman Turks was not unprecedented, having occurred between 1894
and 1896 and again in 1909. Certainly Kurds were involved in the
events of 1915-1923 but they were consciously co-opted by Enver Pasha
for the purpose of
massacring Armenians in the knowledge that their historic blood
enemies would lose no opportunity to avenge ancient and
not-so-ancient grudges. Therefore, the army command in Constantinople
was fully culpable for the anti-Armenian
activities of its Kurdish battalions.

In addition, Turkey’s drawing of a distinction between those who died
directly at the hands of the Ottomans and indirectly from starvation,
exposure and disease
is entirely unsustainable. With no provisions made for clothing, food
or shelter, the anticipated outcome of the forced deportations of
Armenians into the Syrian deserts was obviously death. Indeed, Talaat
Pasha termed them “marches to eternity” and his meaning was
manifestly clear to his appalled Austrian and German allies who went
to great lengths to distance themselves from the policy.
To say that the Armenians who died during the deportations were not
deliberately killed by the Ottomans is akin to claiming that no
intentional Jewish deaths occurred during ‘relocation to the East’
during the Second World War or on the ‘death marches’ to the West
which followed the Russian advances in 1944 and
1945.

So, by any international standard, the events of 1915-1923
constituted genocide, the Ottoman campaign against the Armenians in
this period conforming to the accepted 1948 U.N. definition in having
being “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” An American
acknowledgement of this fact is long overdue and, with U.S./Turkish
relations in the doldrums since the invasion of Iraq, President Bush
has for once little to lose by extending it.

Persian Journal, Iran
April 28 2005

FIRST IRANIAN WOMEN WHO ESTABLISHED THE GIRL SCHOOLS IN IRAN
Manouchehr Saadat Noury
Apr 27, 2005

Introduction: Women’s challenge for an improved lifestyle in general
and to obtain a better education in particular has a long history.
The Industrial Revolution (IR) of the 18th and 19th Centuries and the
materialization of machinery to the work force sparked the women’s
movement in Britain. In the 19th Century the IR spread throughout
Western Europe and North America, and it eventually impacted the rest
of the world. In fact the excuse of the physical difference between
male and female was no longer legitimate and women could easily enter
the work force. This was a turning point for women’s socio-political,
educational, and cultural roles. The financial independence resulted
by this development led women to gain more confidence in society and
created a condition for breaking the barriers towards freedom and
more advanced lifestyle. Those social changes of the IR together with
the Bolshevism Revolution in Russia in October 1905, and the
Constitutional Revolution in Iran during 1905-1911 had a great
influence on history of the women?s movement for a better status in
Iran.

Early Efforts: In1848, American Presbyterian missionaries opened one
of the first girls school in Orumieh, the capital city of West
Azarbaijan (a northwestern province of present-day Iran), and the
religious minorities, mainly Christians, attended the school. Similar
schools had opened in Tehran, Esfahan, Tabriz, Mashhad, Rasht, Hamden
and other cities of the country. Muslim girls, however, were not
allowed to attend the missionary schools by the religious authorities
and public pressure. Coincidentally, these girls schools established
in Iran almost on the same time of the Declaration of Sentiment (DS)
in the USA. (The DS is a document signed in 1848 by sixty-eight women
and thirty-two men, delegates to the first women’s rights convention,
in Seneca Falls, New York, now known to historians as the 1848
Women’s Rights Convention. The Sentiments followed the form of the
United States Declaration of Independence. The principal author of
the Declaration of Sentiments was Elizabeth Cady Stanton).

Girls and boys at Maktab-Khaaneh during Qajar period. Source

Apart from those schools opened by the missionaries, there was not
any systematic schooling in Iran until Mirza Taghi Khan-e-Amir Kabir;
the premier of Iran during Nasser-e-Din Shah (the fourth Shah of
Qajar dynasty) founded the educational institution of House of
Sciences (in Persian: Darolfonoon) in 1851. On those days until the
establishment of relatively modern primary-school (in Persian:
Dabesstaan or Madresseh), Iranian girls and boys used to attend the
Learning Traditional Centers (in Persian: Maktab Khaaneh) where
pupils between 4 to 14 years old could sit next to each other on the
floor (sometimes covered by rug or mat) and listen to the teacher.
There was not any age limitation for boys. Girls were only allowed to
attend these centers till age 7. They had then to stay home to help
the family or get a private female mentor to continue their
educations. In the course of Constitutional Revolution some Iranian
reformists started to open separate schools for girls and boys in
different cities of Iran. These reforms were led by a couple, Tooba
and her husband Hassan Roshdieh, with the first Dabestans, using
blackboards, instruction books and maps, opening in Tabriz (in 1887)
and in Tehran (in 1898). Some documents also reveal that in 1902
Tooba Roshdieh opened a girl school in her own house in Tehran and
named it as Training School (in Persian: Madresseh-e-Parvaresh). This
school lasted only for four days and it was closed upon the order of
some clergies. Similar schools in other cities were also closed.

The radical fraction of clergies considered these schools as
undermining Islam and the schools were routinely attacked by thugs
dispatched by the clergies burning and destroying the books and
supplies and shutting down the schools. It is documented that in 1902
Zainel-Aabedin Taghizadeh, an Iranian businessman in Tabriz and Baku
and possibly a friend of Roshdieh family, send one of his employees
to Najaf (in Iraq) to ask if Iranian Muslim girls could enroll at the
newly established schools. High spiritual authorities there, after a
long four days discussion issued a positive religious verdict (in
Persian: Fetwaa). Upon this positive verdict, the establishment of
the new schools became popular among a certain segment of urban
households, notably the middle classes. A group of radical clergies
who were against Constitutional movement were also against the new
schools establishments. Shaikh Fazlullah Noorie issued a Fetwaa
saying that girl schools were against Religious Laws and Regulations
(in Persian: Shar-e-Yat). Another clergy, Shaikh Shushtari organized
protests, which included women from the least privileged classes
against women’s education and distributed a leaflet entitled “Shame
on a country in which girl schools are founded”!

New Girls Schools: Disappointed with the outcome of the Constitution
(since it did not support the right of women to vote and also to
facilitate the establishment of girl schools), Iranian women decided
to organize by themselves and the issue of education became the
priority. On January 20, 1907, a women’s meeting was held in Tehran
where ten resolutions were adopted, including one that called for
establishing girl schools and another that sought the abolition of
dowries so that the money could be spent on educating the girls
instead. Dowry (in Persian: Jahaaz) is an amount of money or property
which the woman’s parents give to the man she marries, and it is a
tradition in many countries. In 1907, Tooba Roshdieh opened a girl
school in Tehran and named it as Chastity School (in Persian: Efaaf).
Also in 1907, Bibi Khanom-e-Vazir Zadeh, who was one of the
intellectual women of the time, opened a girl school and named it as
Mademoiselle School (in Persian: Madresseh-e-Dooshizegan). At the
same time Tooba Azmoodeh opened a girl school in her own house
located in Hassan-Aabad Square of Tehran, and named it as Chastity
School ( in Persian: Madresseh-e-Namoos). Despite threats and abuse
by the mobs and some clergies the efforts continued. The opening of
another girl school named Chastity and Modesty School (in Persian:
Madresseh-e-Effatieh) by Safieh Yazdi, the wife of the
pro-constitution clergy, Mohammed Yazdi in 1910 encouraged other
women and more schools were opened. In 1911 Maahrukh Gohar Shenass
started Progress School (in Persian: Madresseh-e-Taraghi). In the
same year Maah Sultan Amir Sehei opened Training School (in Persian:
Madresseh-e-Tarbiyat).

In 1912 Banoo Attaaey and Mozayanol Saltaneh opened Sun School (in
Prsian: Shamssol-Madaaress) and Adorned School (in Persian:
Madresseh-e-Mozayanieh) respectively. (Mozayanol Saltaneh was the
daughter of Dr Razi Khan Tabatabaa-e-Semnani Raissol Atteba, and she
was also possibly the first woman who published the first illustrated
daily publication dedicated to women in 1915.

Her publication was called as Blossom (in Persian: Shokufeh). By 1915
there were 9 Women’s Associations and 63 girl schools in the city of
Tehran and about 2500 students were enrolled. The curriculum of these
schools consisted of Persian Literatures, Foreign Language, Sport and
Physical Education, Music, Painting, Calligraphy, Sewing, Knitting,
Cooking, History, Geography, Mathematics, Holly Book of Koran,
Jurisprudence (in Persian: Fegh?h) and Religious Laws and
Regulations. Among interesting things about these schools were the
speeches delivered by students and teachers during the examination
periods and other occasions. In the text of the speeches, the role of
GS to educate those mothers of future who will bring up and train
zealous and patriotic female and male Iranians was highly emphasized.

Two Special Schools: During Reza Shah (reigned 1925-1941) several
girl schools were also founded by some Iranian-Christians, and among
them two should be recalled:

1. Yelena Avedisian, an Iranian citizen known as Madame Yelena,
opened a School of Dance first in Tabriz and then in Tehran in 1927.
She was actually born in Istanbul, Turkey, on January 25, 1910. She
then emigrated from Turkey to Armenia and after her marriage, in
1927, she moved to Iran to settle in the city of Tabriz, and she
established her own school of dance where many girls attended. She
then moved to Tehran in 1945, and started her new school of dance,
which was officially recognized by the country’s Ministry of Culture
and Fine Arts. A large number of graduates of Madam Yelena’s School
of Dance followed in her footsteps by teaching dance at various
schools. At the same time, several other graduates established their
own dance schools in Tehran. In 1979 shortly after the Islamic
Republic took over, Madame Yelena emigrated from Iran to the USA and
resided in California. (She passed away on July 2, 2000 in Glendale,
Los Angeles). It should be noted that Madame Yelena was one of the
eminent dance teachers in Iran and trained more than thirty thousand
dancers during her 65 years of teaching career. Here are a few lines
that one of the students wrote about her: “I remember a lady who was
simply called Madame Yelena?She affected our lives by her natural
grace and encouraging attention, which prepared us for our future
artistic careers.”

2. Bersabeh Huspian, a Christian lady born in
Chahar-Mahaal-e-Bakhtiari (a southern province of Iran), established
Bersabeh Kindergarten (in Persian: Koodakestan-e-Bersabeh) in 1930 in
Tehran. Later, the Kindergarten was expanded to a complex including
primary- and high-schools where all Iranian girls regardless of their
faiths could be admitted. The official language of Bersabeh complex
was Persian and its curriculum was similar to the schools already
mentioned. Bersabeh Huspian closed her educational premises and
emigrated from Iran to the USA when the Islamic Republic took over in
1979. (She died in the USA in 2000). Shireen Bakhtiar who attended
the Kindergarten described online how she was doing in that play
school: “I walked to my kindergarten, Bersabeh, in the early morning
sunlight?.Bersabeh was an old walled palace that now was my
kindergarten across from the iron grill-gated Parliament (in Persian:
Majlis)…Bersabeh would stand on the second floor balcony and look
down on us. Always dressed in black like a black bird watching over
her flock? In the sewing class we embroidered handkerchiefs with
colored silk thread pulling the needle into shapes of rose?s violets
and knots of blue bells.”

In contemporary Iran governed by a system that legally permits sexual
apartheid and misogyny, women are still seeking their human rights
for equality and respect. Many women in Iran now get caught,
regrettably, in a web of conflicting forces as their looks,
activities, and behavior become closely monitored. The momentum of
the demographic changes that are taking place in the country,
however, strongly suggests that the situation may alter in the days
to come. After all, approximately two-thirds of the population is
under 30, and more than half the country’s university students are
now females. If and when they become politically active, these
educated women could whole-heartedly struggle to affect the
substantial reforms.

AND IT SHOULD BE REMEMBERED THAT ANY PROGRESS AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
IN IRAN IS DIRECTLY LINKED TO THE WOMEN’S RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE FREELY
IN ALL SOCIO-ECONOMICAL, CULTURAL, AND POLITICAL ACTIVITIES.

Manouchehr Saadat Noury

UEFA.com
April 29 2005

Football Europe: Pyunik resume control

FC Pyunik’s quest for a fifth straight Armenian Premier League title
got off to the best possible start – but their Armenian Cup dream
ended at the quarter-final stage.

Champions soar
Pyunik top the table after two wins from two matches, thanks in part
to forward Edgar Manucharyan, who joins AFC Ajax on 1 July on a
three-year contract. The 18-year-old was on target in the 3-0 victory
at FC Ararat Yerevan II which followed a 1-0 opening-day triumph at
home to FC MIKA.

Cup drama
However, Pyunik did not have the same success in the Armenian Cup,
losing 1-0 on aggregate to FC Kilikia, courtesy of a Sargis Movsisian
goal. Samvel Darbinyan’s team of homegrown youngsters are in good
form and won the first leg of their semi-final with FC Banants.
Kilikia are also third in the league after a 5-0 win against Ararat
and 2-2 draw at FC Kotayk.

Supporter unrest
Banants, by contrast, have eight foreigners in their squad, but
despite taking maximum points from their opening two games to join
Pyunik at the top, fans have been unhappy with the number of goals
scored after a 1-0 victory against Kotayk and 3-2 triumph at
newly-promoted FC Lernayin Artsakh.

Debut goal
Lernayin have started their first top-flight season well, sitting
fourth with three points after defeating FC Shirak 4-1. They are
level on points with MIKA, who reinforced in pre-season by recruiting
striker Sergiy Shevchenko from FC Avangard Kursk. Shevchenko marked
his debut with a goal in a 2-1 success against FC Dinamo-Zenit
Yerevan.

Big losses
At the bottom, three sides are still to get off the mark, though
Dinamo-Zenit and last year’s bottom club Shirak have played just
once. More worringly, Ararat are pointless after two matches,
conceding eight goals in the process, and have not been helped by the
loss of key players to Lernayin.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Zaman, Turkey
April 29 2005

Political News Make Public Disinclined to EU
By Bahtiyar Kucuk
Published: Friday 29, 2005
zaman.com

Turkish General Secretary for the European Union (EU) Ambassador
Murat Sungar has directed allegations to the media making the public
disinclined towards the EU by keeping “political” issues like Cyprus
and Armenia constantly on the agenda.

Calling attention to the first issues that come to mind are those of
political issues such as the Cypriot and Armenian conflicts,
minorities and Heybeliada Seminary, Sungar said: “Before all else,
Turkish society should be told about the economic and financial aid
the EU will provide Turkey. This should not be like ignoring the
entire forest by sticking in a few trees.” Speaking at the
“International Jean Monnet Conference” organized with the
collaboration of the Turkish Quality Association and the Foreign
Politics Forum, Sungar called attention to the economic and financial
advantages that will be gained during the negotiation process.
Ambassador complained: “Unfortunately, the economic issues are far
from the topics being discussion about us and rural development, the
removal of interregional differences; economic and social accords
fall well behind the political issues.”

Detroit Free Press, MI
April 29 2005

LOCAL COMMENT: Genocide against Armenians can’t be ignored or
forgotten

April 29, 2005

BY DAVID BONIOR

Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz — we recognize these names, these
locations, because they are synonymous with murder, atrocity, and,
yes, genocide. They stand as universal symbols of crimes against
humanity, acknowledged and remembered, so that they will never be
repeated.

Not so recognizable, however, are Kharpert, Shabin Karahisar, and Der
Zor. The first two locations housed once-thriving Armenian
communities that were ethnically cleansed. The third is a desert in
which thousands upon thousands of Armenians perished on death
marches. These are places where the world also witnessed similar
crimes against humanity — yes, genocide.

Before Nazi death camps of World War II brought the horrors of
genocide to international consciousness, the world experienced its
first modern introduction to the crime decades earlier. It was at the
time of World War I, when Ottoman Turkey carried out one of the
largest genocides in world history, murdering and deporting vast
numbers of its minority Armenian population in its stated aim to
eradicate the Armenian presence. This spring marks the 90th
anniversary of that campaign of death.

About 1.5 million Armenians were systematically killed. That number
does not include the hundreds of thousands more who died in
subsequent campaigns in 1918, 1920 and 1923 as the Turkish government
extended the genocide beyond the Ottoman Empire into neighboring
territories.

In some respects, that campaign may have set the stage for similar
programs of genocide in the next war. It’s no secret that Adolf
Hitler felt quite comfortable about pursuing his agenda, recognizing
that the international community had done nothing in terms of direct
action concerning Armenia. Whether it was based on hatred and twisted
ideology, or the greed of a concerted land grab, the result and the
act are one and the same. What happened in Armenia 90 years ago was
genocide.

Despite international outrage and condemnation at the time —
including widespread reports on the massacres by the New York Times
and other top media — Turkey never took responsibility, nor even
acknowledged the true nature of the mass slayings. To this day, the
Turkish government still refuses to recognize and accept its role in
the genocide of the Armenian people.

Adding insult to injury, nation-states such as the United States
today refer to the genocide as merely “alleged.” Falling victim to
alliances and politics — first during the Cold War and now during
the War on Terror — the United States has gone soft on Turkey, and
the truth has become an acceptable casualty of necessity.

But there are those who will not forget or overlook — especially
among Armenians. Remembrance helps to heal the wounds of genocide
because, despite the systematic attempt to erase their culture and
very existence, the Armenian people have survived. In addition to the
Armenian republic established since the fall of the Soviet Union,
Armenian culture and enclaves flourish throughout the world — most
notably, in America.

During the past 90 years, Armenians from throughout the world have
continued to tell their story, in hopes that their pain, suffering
and losses may be recognized, acknowledged and accounted for.

This is why thousands of Armenian-Americans congregated Sunday in New
York City, in an international day of remembrance. Only in this
context can the survival and flourishing of this proud people be
truly understood and appreciated. Only then can those who perpetrate
such heinous crimes realize that there will be a day of reckoning.

>From Ottoman Turkey to Nazi Germany, from Rwanda to Darfur, the
international community must recognize and address genocide at every
corner of this earth — and those responsible must account for their
actions. Official acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide is
important, because acknowledgement and remembrance are the first true
steps towards prevention.

DAVID BONIOR, who was a Michigan congressman for 26 years, serves as
executive director of American Rights at Work, a Washington,
D.C.-based human rights organization. Write to him in care of the
Free Press Editorial Page, 600 W. Fort St., Detroit, MI 48226.

Civil Georgia
April 29 2005

Tbilisi Hints it may Soften Stance over Abkhaz Railway

The Georgian daily Rezonansi (Resonance) quotes Georgian
Parliamentary Chairperson Nino Burjanadze as saying after talks with
her Armenian counterpart Artur Bagdasarian, which was held on April
28, that Tbilisi `has changed its position over restoration of a
railway link via Abkhazia and is ready to discuss this issue if a
concrete progress is made in resolving of the [Abkhaz] conflict.’

`This [restoration of a railway via Abkhazia] is very complicated
issue and of course in case of a political will of all the sides
involved, it can be positively solved; hence it will also be a
positive contribution to a resolution of the Abkhaz problem,’ Nino
Burjanadze added.

She also said that, unlike previous years, now Georgia is ready to
consider restoration of a railway link in parallel to resolving of
problems related to the political issues as well as to return of
internally displaced persons in Abkhazia.

Nino Burjanadze’s this statement was perceived as softening of stance
by Tbilisi over the issue of restoration of a railway communication
between Georgia and Russia via breakaway Abkhazia, which has been
halted decade ago as a result of conflict in Abkhazia.

The Georgian authorities were pushing forward return of displaced
Georgians to Abkhazia as a pre-condition to restoration of the
railway.

Restoration of railway via Abkhazia is of vital importance for
Armenia, which can get a rail access to its strategic partner –
Russia if Georgia agrees to rehabilitate this railway connection.