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ARMENIAN REPORTER
PO Box 129
Paramus, New Jersey 07652
Tel: 1-201-226-1995
Fax: 1-201-226-1660
Web: http://www.armenianreporteronline.com
Email: [email protected]
December 23, 2006
1. President Kocharian rules out early Karabakh deal
2. Diasporan Karabakh vet detained on sedition charge (by Tatul Hakobyan)
3. Rocky's Next Battle: Making "Musa Dagh"? (by Chris Zakian)
4. Stanford Jay Shaw, 1930-2006: An academic who denied the Armenian
Genocide (Obituary by Aram Arkun)
5. Armentel sale signals end to telecom monopoly (News analysis by
David Joulfaian)
6. Editorial: From condemning denial to stopping genocide in Darfur
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1. President Kocharian rules out early Karabakh deal
Yerevan--In a televised interview on December 15, President Robert
Kocharian said "there will be no active negotiating process" for a
Nagorno-Karabakh settlement while elections are pending in Armenia.
The president said he did not want "the Karabakh settlement to become
hostage to the election campaign, as it is impossible to expect
impartiality." Parliamentary elections are slated for the spring and
presidential elections are due in Armenia and Azerbaijan alike in
2008.
Nonetheless, the next round of negotiations will take place in late
January, Foreign Minister Oskanian announced on December 19. "The
process will continue at the level of foreign ministers," he said.
"Perhaps there will be fewer meetings with less publicity. But I think
negotiations on the content [of peace proposals] will continue."
"There are people in Armenia who are impatiently hoping that the
negotiating process will enable them to exploit the Karabakh problem,"
the president said. "They will try to discredit even the best peace
proposal made during the pre-election period."
CLEAN ELECTIONS
In the same interview, the president said, "it has become a tradition
in Armenia to use election fraud." Decrying the practice, he discussed
reforms that could address the problem.
The president noted that the Central Electoral Commission and regional
and district commissions are responsible for organizing the elections.
"If the elections are rigged, they are rigged in these electoral
commissions when votes are counted and the first results are made
public." Mr. Kocharian observed that under a new law, the president
appoints only one member of the Central Electoral Commission. The
remaining members of the commission are appointed by parliamentary
factions and groups. The president called on these groups to be
especially vigilant.
In response to a question about foreign influence on the elections,
the president drew attention to grant programs and "the affiliation of
certain media outlets. This causes certain problems for the national
security of Armenia." He said, "Our people should understand that the
political forces that come to power with foreign funding or support
from external forces are dangerous for the state."
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2. Diasporan Karabakh vet detained on sedition charge
by Tatul Hakobyan (special to the "Armenian Reporter")
Yerevan--On the evening of December 9, operatives of Armenia's
National Security Service arrested the wartime commander of
Nagorno-Karabakh's Shushi battalion, Zhirair Sefilyan, in a Chinese
restaurant on Tumanyan Avenue in central Yerevan. According to Yerevan
newspapers, the operatives detained Mr. Sefilyan and his dining
companion Ralph C. Yirikian, general manager of the mobile-phone
operator Vivacell. Mr. Yirikian was released shortly thereafter.
At the time of his arrest, Mr. Sefilyan had on his person a loaded
Makarov pistol, which was a present from the onetime commander of
Karabakh's defense forces, Samvel Babayan.
The National Security Service issued a news release on Monday,
December 11, according to which Mr. Sefilyan was charged with
sedition; specifically, he was charged under article 301 of the
criminal code, which makes it a crime to call publicly for the use of
force in order to change the constitutional order. Vardan Malkhasyan
of the Fatherland and Honor party was arrested on the same charges.
According to the daily "Haykakan Zhamanak," on the evening of Mr.
Sefilyan's arrest, about 30 members of the Armenian Volunteers'
Association were detained and released after questioning.
"The so-called 'Armenian Volunteers' Association' initiated by Zhirair
Sefilyan, a citizen of Lebanon, and some of his supporters, lacking
the registration required by Armenian law, pursued the goal of
intervening illegally and violently in the upcoming political
processes in Armenia, specifically taking extremist actions during the
elections which are to take place in 2007," the National Security
Service news release said, referring to the National Assembly
elections slated for the spring.
In a closed meeting of the Armenian Volunteers' Association, held at
the Yerevan Dance Academy on December 2, the official news release
states, "certain leaders of the organization issued public calls for
specific actions aimed at usurping Armenia's state apparatus by force,
by violent pressure, and by any means, without discrimination. They
announced that it is necessary to be rid of the existing authorities
through armed struggle only, through revolt. They presented programs
of action to that end. The majority of the people involved in the
process of organizing the Armenian Volunteers' Association were almost
unaware of the true purposes of the de facto leader of the
organization, which receives funding from suspicious sources."
According to the news release, the true purpose of "foreign citizen
Selifyan and his immediate circle" was "to destabilize Armenia's
internal political situation."
On December 19, some Yerevan newspapers published minutes of the
speeches of Mr. Malkhasyan and Mr. Sefilyan at the meeting in
question.
According to these published accounts, Mr. Malkhasyan said that
Armenia was ruled by its enemies; "Being liberated of them is a matter
of the salvation of the Armenian people. When the goal is virtuous,
clean, patriotic, there should be no discrimination in the means;
without delay, with weapons, by armed struggle, by rebellion, with
everything, by all means, we must be liberated of these veiled Turks,
who are only Armenian in their last names. . . . We are dealing with a
group of bandits, criminals, bandits, skinheads, the scum of the
criminal world. It is necessary to fight them in their way, blood,
fire on the enemy, in every way, by every means."
Mr. Sefilyan, in the sharpest passages of his speech, is reported to
have said nothing will happen until "we organize." He repeated,
"Kocharian, Serge, get out," referring to the president and Defense
Minister Serge Sargsyan. "These people will not get out through
peaceful demonstrations; they are not going to get out by external
pressure. If we can organize and create a serious force with quality,
they will get out. . . . Referring to the admonition of our comrades:
'let us not stint in our means; let us not discriminate among means,'
I agree, but first let us get organized. . . . We have a most
important issue, to be freed of these rulers, which means we must
become so organized in these few months that we are able to stop these
people from reproducing."
Mr. Sefilyan and Mr. Malkhasyan have been ordered detained for two
months pending a trial.
Most opposition parties in Armenia have signed onto a statement
condemning the arrest as a throwback to the 1937 Stalinist purges.
About twenty members of the National Assembly have called for the
immediate release of Mr. Sefilyan, as well as Mr. Malkhasyan.
Defense committees for Mr. Sefilyan have been established in some
Armenian diaspora communities. In response to a reporter's question,
Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian said on December 19 that he did not
expect the affair to have any negative impact on Armenia-diaspora
relations.
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3. Rocky's Next Battle: Making "Musa Dagh"?
by Chris Zakian (special to the "Armenian Reporter")
PARAMUS, N.J.--With the theatrical release this week of "Rocky
Balboa," the sixth installment in the inspiring series about the
perpetual-underdog Philadelphia boxer, it was hardly surprising to see
filmmaker Sylvester Stallone spotlighted in newspapers across the
country.
What WAS surprising was an announcement elicited from Stallone by
"Denver Post" writer Michael Booth, regarding the star's dream
project.
Acknowledging that his action-hero days are likely behind him, the
60-year-old Stallone said that he would like to devote more of his
career to writing and directing: "less in the public eye, but
providing something for the public," is the way he put it.
Then Booth writes: "So what is the Stallone Surprise, the project he's
always wanted to write or direct?"
Here's the answer he got--which is certain to set Armenian hearts aflutter.
"For years Stallone's wanted to create an epic, and the book that
intrigues him is Franz Werfel's 'The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,'
detailing the Turkish genocide of its Armenian community in 1915.
(After futile attempts to turn the novel into a movie, filmmakers
finally succeeded in 1982, but it was a low-profile production.)
"French ships eventually rescued some Armenians, and Stallone has his
favorite scene memorized: 'The French ships come, and they've dropped
the ladders and everybody has climbed up the side. The ships sail. The
hero, the one who set up the rescue, has fallen asleep, exhausted,
behind a rock on the slope above. The camera pulls back, and the ships
and the sea are on one side, and there's one lonely figure at the top
of the mountain, and the Turks are coming up the mountain by the
thousands on the far side.'"
Fittingly for Rocky Balboa, the interview ends with a punch.
"The movie would be 'an epic about the complete destruction of a
civilization,' Stallone said. Then he laughed at the ambition. 'Talk
about a political hot potato. The Turks have been killing that subject
for 85 years.'"
It's a small irony, appreciated only by Armenians, that this news has
come to light in the same week that newspapers ran obituaries for
music impresario Ahmet Ertegun, whose father, Turkey's ambassador to
the U.S. in the 1930s, is credited with using his influence to have
the plug pulled on an earlier motion picture treatment of "Musa Dagh."
Of course, there's a long road separating a filmmaker's quip about a
dream project, on the one hand, from an actual theatrical release, on
the other. Who knows whether Stallone's ambition will ever see the
light of day?
But Armenians--like Rocky--are used to the underdog role. They suffer
setbacks, but always come back swinging. If not Stallone, then surely
someone else will fulfill the long-held Armenian dream of putting
"Musa Dagh" on film in the way it deserves.
Regrettably, there will be no "Hollywood ending" to lift our spirits
at the story's conclusion.
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4. Stanford Jay Shaw, 1930-2006: An academic who denied the Armenian Genocide
by Aram Arkun (special to the "Armenian Reporter")
NEW YORK--At first sight, Stanford Jay Shaw appeared to be an
ordinary, innocuous, friendly, and garrulous grandfather. At UCLA, he
typically wore sneakers, and dressed informally.
He was, however, no ordinary man.
A prominent Ottoman historian, Shaw was perhaps the most prominent of
a scholarly school of American deniers of the Armenian Genocide. In
his best known work, a two-volume survey titled "History of the
Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey" (Cambridge University Press,
1976-77), Shaw and his co-author (and wife) Ezel Kural Shaw attempted
to present the Ottomans and Turks in the most positive light possible,
at times from an anachronistic Turkish nationalist perspective. In the
process, alongside many other consequential errors, they minimized the
size and significance of the Hamidian and Cilician massacres, while
placing much of the responsibility for these events on Armenians.
They went on to argue that the Armenians revolted and consequently
suffered losses during World War I, contrary to the wishes of their
Young Turk rulers who worked to safeguard them during deportations
from war zones. Two hundred thousand Armenians were killed due to
famine, disease, and inadvertent violence during the turmoil of the
war, which, they emphasized, killed some 10 times as many Muslims.
This denial of the Armenian Genocide, similar to what many Turkish
government officials were contemporaneously stating, aroused Armenian
ire. In addition to a deplorable firebombing of Stanford Shaw's house
by unknown assailants, damage to Shaw's office, and threats made to
Shaw and the publishers of the book, many legitimate Armenian
demonstrations and protests took place at UCLA. As a consequence, Dr.
Shaw was able to present himself as a persecuted victim of Armenian
infringements on freedom of speech, and the academics who were going
to participate in a major public critique of his book changed their
minds for fear of the charged political atmosphere. Nonetheless, both
volumes were criticized by scholars in print for many flaws of
chronology, factuality, and bias on topics that went far beyond
Armenian matters, and even for issues of plagiarism.
Dr. Shaw produced a number of students who themselves became
university professors and published authors on topics of Ottoman
history. Some of them, such as Heath Lowry or Justin McCarthy, also
became prominent deniers of the Armenian Genocide. Many graduate
students in modern Armenian history at UCLA, incidentally, took
Ottoman history and language courses with Shaw.
Born in Minnesota on May 5, 1930 to Jewish immigrants from England and
Russia, Shaw is said to have changed his name to its present version
early in his career, primarily due to anti-Semitism, and, apparently,
in honor of Stanford University, where he did his undergraduate work
and received a master's degree in British history. He completed the
work for another master's degree, this time in Turkish and Islamic
history, from Princeton University in 1955, and went on to study with
Bernard Lewis at the University of London, and Hamilton Gibb at
Oxford. He also studied in Egypt and Istanbul, preparing for his
Princeton doctoral dissertation titled "The Financial and
Administrative Organization and Development of Ottoman Egypt,
1517-1798" (published in 1962 by Princeton University Press). Along
the way, he learned to read Ottoman Turkish and Arabic.
Shaw went to Harvard University, where he became an assistant and then
associate professor of Turkish language and history in the Department
of Near Eastern Languages and the Department of History from 1958 to
1968. Here, in addition to his dissertation mentioned above, he
published four more works on Ottoman Egypt, thus securing his position
as a specialist on this topic: "Between Old and New: The Ottoman
Empire under Sultan Selim III" (1971), and the edited translations
"Ottoman Egypt in the Eighteenth Century" (1962) and "Ottoman Egypt in
the Age of the French Revolution" (1964), all with Harvard University
Press; and "The Budget of Ottoman Egypt 1005-1006/1596-1597" (1968)
with Mouton (The Hague). He also co-edited a work of Sir Hamilton
Gibb's, "Studies on the Civilization of Islam" (1962).
Shaw became friends at Harvard with two other young professors, Avedis
Sanjian, a specialist in Armenian literature, and Speros Vryonis, Jr.,
a specialist in Byzantine, Seljuk, and early Ottoman histories. Often,
Shaw would come to dinner at Sanjian's house and play with his young
son Gregory. When Shaw fell sick, a Turkish graduate student nursed
him back to health, and he soon married that student, who became Ezel
Kural Shaw. Gradually, his positions on Armenians and Greeks in the
Ottoman Empire began to change in a negative fashion.
Shaw moved to Los Angeles, where he became professor of Turkish
history at the University of California from 1968 to 1992. Sanjian and
Vryonis moved to the same university, where Richard Hovannisian became
professor of Armenian history. It was at UCLA that his conflict with
the Armenian community at large, as well as with many of his faculty
friends at UCLA, became intense after the publication of his
above-mentioned second volume on Ottoman history. In the 1980s, Shaw
also lobbied the state of California's Department of Education, and
state legislators, against accepting the Armenian Genocide as a
planned attempt at annihilation, and was a signatory of various
petitions and paid political advertisements denying the Genocide.
Meanwhile, UCLA Armenians continued to protest against Shaw's position
on the Armenian Genocide. Shaw's presence at UCLA raised questions
about the limits of academic freedom. Towards the end of his stay at
UCLA, in 1988, Shaw claimed that the Armenians were persecuting him
because of their anti-Semitism, not because of his published writings
on Ottoman-Armenian relations--but this was refuted by statements from
the UCLA Jewish Student Union, the rabbi who was then director of
Hillel, and emeritus sociology professor Leo Kuper, a specialist in
the field of genocide studies. In two books Shaw published several
years later tendentiously praising Ottoman tolerance towards Jews, he
portrayed the Armenians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey as
anti-Semites ("The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish
Republic," 1991; "Turkey and the Holocaust," 1992).
After retiring in 1992 from UCLA with various benefits, Shaw took
advantage of the "golden parachute" arrangement offered to many senior
faculty there to continue teaching courses for another five years. He
then moved with his wife to Turkey, and became professor of Ottoman
and Turkish history in Ankara's Bilkent University from 1999 until his
death. There, he published "Studies in Ottoman and Turkish History:
Life with the Ottomans" (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2000); a five-volume
work titled "From Empire to Republic: The Turkish War of National
Liberation 1918-1923. A Documentary Study" (Ankara: Turkish
Historical Society, 2000); and "Bir Dusuncenin Gerçeklesmesi: Osmanli
Tarihi Çalismalarima" (Ankara: Türkiye Bilimler Akademisi Forumu,
2003), on his work on Ottoman history.
In his multivolume work on the Turkish war for independence, Shaw
highlighted the "misdeeds" of Armenians and others, while failing to
note or extremely minimizing massacres of Armenians committed by
Ottomans or Muslims in this period.
Shaw continued periodically to issue statements on the Armenian
Genocide while living in Turkey. For example, according to a Turkish
news agency, last year he called Switzerland "uncivilized" for
beginning a legal procedure against Turkish History Society president
Yusuf Halaçoglu for statements denying the Armenian Genocide.
Shaw's biases fit in well with those of his colleagues in Middle
Eastern studies. Turkey's generally anti-Soviet stand in the Cold War,
and American economic interests led to American promotion of positive
views of Turkey, while the Turkish historical establishment, dominated
by official state views, naturally also appreciated such
historiographical revisionism, thus allowing Shaw wide access to
Ottoman archives.
Stanford Shaw consequently was able to play an influential role in the
broader field of Middle Eastern studies. He helped found the
"International Journal of Middle East Studies" for the Middle Eastern
Studies Association, which is the major organization of scholars
specializing on this area in the United States. He edited this
journal, published by Cambridge University Press, from 1970 to 1980.
Shaw received medals from the president of Turkey, the
Turkish-American Association, and the Research Center for Islamic
History, Art, and Culture at the Yildiz Palace, Istanbul, as well as
honorary degrees from Harvard University and Bogazici University in
Istanbul. He was made an honorary member of the Turkish Academy of
Science at the end of 2005. Major foundations provided him with
research awards and fellowships, including the United States National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford
Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Social Science Research
Council, the Fulbright-Hayes Committee, and the Royal Institute of
International Affairs in London.
Shaw obviously possessed great energy and considerable ability. It is
a shame that in the latter half of his career he often pursued
tendentious goals at the expense of a reasoned historiographical
methodology. This, along with sloppy writing, damaged the value of his
own work, harmed the field of Ottoman studies, and caused
Armenians--and the descendants of the other former Ottoman subject
nationalities who received short shrift in his works--great upset.
* * *
Historian Aram Arkun was a graduate student at UCLA during the 1980s.
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5. Armentel sale signals end to telecom monopoly
News analysis by David Joulfaian (Special to the "Armenian Reporter")
WASHINGTON--The recent takeover of Armentel by VimpelCom promises to
open a new and exciting chapter in Armenia's telecom prospects.
VimpelCom, with its presence in Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, and
more recently in Georgia, is perhaps better suited to serve the
Armenian market than the Hellenic Telecom OTE, the current owner, with
operations throughout the Balkans.
VimpelCom is a publicly traded company (New York Stock Exchange [NYSE]
symbol VIP), with the Russian Alfa Group controlling 32 percent and
the Norwegian telecom Telenor controlling 27 percent of its voting
stock. The Alfa Group also owns 13.2 percent of Turkcell, a leading
provider in Turkey.
(According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Turkcell through
its subsidiary Fintur owns a majority share in Azercell, which is the
largest cellular provider in Azerbaijan).
As for OTE, which is also publicly traded (NYSE symbol OTE), the Greek
government controls about 39 percent of it, but is planning to sell
its stake by June 2007. On a pro-forma basis, both VIP and OTE have
been profitable in recent years, and each has a market capitalization
of about $16 billion.
This $491 million ($440 million net of debts) acquisition is bound to
touch every segment of the Armenian economy, with significant
implications for commerce and consumer welfare, among others.
Unfortunately, such analysis is not reported in the press, with most
of the commentaries focusing almost exclusively on the geopolitical
aspects of the takeover, pointing to growing Russian economic-- and by
extension political--influence in Armenia.
The present article is intended to direct the discussion to the
ECONOMIC aspects of this transaction.
Fixed telephony, with about 600,000 subscribers, accounts for 34
percent of Armentel's earnings. According to OTE, this represented the
largest source of revenues in 2005, which have more than doubled over
the past five years.
About 26 percent of revenue is derived from international calls.
Surely VimpelCom would benefit from this stream of revenues, but one
wonders how the recent acquisition of another Armenian communications
company, Callnet, by yet another Russian firm Comstar-UTS would affect
the market.
Comstar-UTS (London Stock Exchange symbol CMST; see their website at
www.comstar-uts.com) had earlier tried but did not succeed in securing
a cellular license in Armenia. The company is controlled by AFK
Sistema, which also controls 53 percent of MTS, Russia's largest
mobile company that lost the bid for Armentel to VimpelCom. Callnet
earned $4.3 million in revenues in 2005, so it is relatively small.
But given that it holds a license for international long-distance
calls, there are good prospects of real competition with this
takeover. Additionally, Callnet's subsidiary Cornet is a sole provider
of WiMax services in Armenia.
Mobile telephony accounts for a third of the revenues of Armentel,
which has grown in importance over the years OTE reported the number
of subscribers to be 441,716 at the end of September of this year. The
entry of VimpelCom, with its presence in neighboring Georgia, Ukraine,
Russia, and Central Asia, may strengthen competition in this rapidly
expanding market. The Lebanese-owned VivaCell controlled approximately
45 percent of the market in 2005.
With the entry of VIP and CMST into the market, Armentel's telecom
monopoly is severed for all practical purposes. Indeed, the CMST and
Callnet combined form the second largest alternative telecom in
Armenia. The competition between the two Russian giants, not to
mention the Lebanese VivaCell, will most likely lead to a reduction in
tariffs and a dramatic expansion in Internet services.
In addition to the competitive pressures, this acquisition may also
have significant fiscal implications. OTE paid only 10 percent of its
profits in taxes, down from the statutory tax rate of 20 percent on
profits due to tax incentives. The question remains as to how much
would VIP pay, and whether it would be able to take advantage of the
existing tax incentives.
OTE expects the sale of Armentel to generate a pretax gain of 292.9
millions Euros ($380 million). Much of this will be taxable, depending
on Armenia's tax accounting conventions.
One hopes that the tax authorities will not repeat their earlier
practices at the time of Armentel's sale to OTE. In 1998, OTE bought a
90-percent stake in the Armentel monopoly, which was then jointly
owned by Trans-World Telecom (TWT), registered in the offshore zone of
Guernsey, and the Armenian government (with a 51 percent stake). In
2000, the government imposed taxes and penalties of about $12 million
(U.S.) on OTE for gains accrued by TWT.
The treatment of OTE at the time was both inept and unprofessional.
One would only hope that this time around the entity taxed is the one
that actually accrued the gain--that is, OTE and NOT VimpelCom.
This is not the first merger and acquisition to take place in Armenia;
nor will it be the last. In the future, similar transactions should be
studied for their economic consequences, and not exclusively through
the prism of geopolitics.
* * *
David Joulfaian, Ph.D., is a Washington-based economist. The opinions
expressed here are his personal views.
For tables, visit www.armenianreporteronline.com
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6. Editorial: From condemning denial to stopping genocide in Darfur
"Imagine the reaction if they said that about the Holocaust".
These are the words Armenians often utter when confronted with denial
of the Armenian Genocide.
"Would the president even think to nominate as ambassador to Israel
someone who did not condemn and deplore the Holocaust?" This is the
question many ask when they contemplate the nomination of Richard
Hoagland as United States ambassador to Armenia.
"Would they think to call the annihilation of six million innocents
the 'alleged Holocaust'?" Newspapers that try to play it safe get that
reaction.
And when, in November 2005, Ankara hosted a conference to deny the
Armenian Genocide, the question arose: "What if this conference were
dedicated to questioning the veracity of the Holocaust?"
We need no longer wonder.
A conference held in Tehran last week has rightly provoked outrage and
indignation everywhere--Iran itself included. Political leaders from
the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan to British Prime
Minister Tony Blair have condemned it, as well they should have.
President Bush said the conference promoted "a really backward view of
the history of the world."
The organizers of the conference speak grandly of freedom of scholarly
inquiry unfettered by taboos--just as deniers of the Armenian Genocide
do. They say they are not denying the Holocaust but simply trying to
figure out whether it in fact happened--just as deniers of the
Armenian Genocide do.
Obviously, we expect our political leaders--and specifically the Bush
administration--to condemn the denial of the Armenian Genocide as they
do that of the Holocaust. Reporting on December 16 in London's "The
Independent" on the reaction of political leaders to the Iranian
conference, Robert Fisk put it aptly: "Strangely, no one recalled that
the holocaust deniers of recent years--deniers of the Turkish genocide
of 1.5 million Armenian Christians in 1915, that is--include [Tony]
Blair, who originally tried to prevent Armenians from participating in
Britain's Holocaust Day and the then Israeli foreign minister Shimon
Peres, who told the Turks that their massacre of the victims of the
20th century's first Holocaust did not constitute a genocide."
Yes, political leaders must condemn Holocaust denial. They must
condemn denial of the Armenian Genocide. But they must do more.
Armenia's foreign minister, Vartan Oskanian, put it eloquently at the
United Nations 28th Special Session, on the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of the Nazi concentration camps:
"After Auschwitz one would expect that no one any longer has a right
to turn a blind eye or a deaf ear. As an Armenian, I know that a
blind eye, a deaf ear and a muted tongue perpetuate the wounds. It is
a memory of suffering unrelieved by strong condemnation and
unequivocal recognition. The catharsis that the victims deserve,
which societies require in order to heal and move forward together,
obligates us here at the UN, and in the international community, to be
witnesses, to call things by their name, to remove the veil of
obfuscation, of double standards, of political expediency.
"Following the Tsunami-provoked disaster, we have become painfully
aware of a paradox. On the one hand, multilateral assistance efforts
were massive, swift, generous and without discrimination. But, when
compared and contrasted with today's other major tragedy, in Africa,
it is plain that for Darfur, formal and ritual condemnation has not
been followed by any dissuasive action against the perpetrators.
"The difference with the Tsunami, of course, was that there were no
perpetrators. No one wielded the sword, pulled the trigger or pushed
the button that released the gas."
We must call on political leaders to move from "formal and ritual
condemnation" to "dissuasive action against the perpetrators" in
Darfur.
We are gratified that Armenian organizations in Washington--the
Armenian Assembly, the ANCA, and USAPAC alike--have joined the Save
Darfur Coalition. Given our history as genocide's prototypical
victims, Armenians must always be in the forefront of ending this
crime against humanity.
Failing to condemn genocide and facilitating denial, as has often been
noted, gives a sense of impunity to those who may contemplate genocide
in the future. But when genocide is taking place in the present, we
cannot stop at words of condemnation. We must take action. Go to the
Save Darfur Coalition website, http://www.savedarfur.org/content learn
more about what you can do to end the carnage. Donate, advocate,
educate and organize. As Armenians, it is the very least we can do.
********************************************* ******************************
Direct your inquiries to [email protected]
(c) 2006 CS Media Enterprises LLC. All Rights Reserved
PO Box 129
Paramus, New Jersey 07652
Tel: 1-201-226-1995
Fax: 1-201-226-1660
Web: http://www.armenianreporteronline.com
Email: [email protected]
December 23, 2006
1. President Kocharian rules out early Karabakh deal
2. Diasporan Karabakh vet detained on sedition charge (by Tatul Hakobyan)
3. Rocky's Next Battle: Making "Musa Dagh"? (by Chris Zakian)
4. Stanford Jay Shaw, 1930-2006: An academic who denied the Armenian
Genocide (Obituary by Aram Arkun)
5. Armentel sale signals end to telecom monopoly (News analysis by
David Joulfaian)
6. Editorial: From condemning denial to stopping genocide in Darfur
****************************************** *********************************
1. President Kocharian rules out early Karabakh deal
Yerevan--In a televised interview on December 15, President Robert
Kocharian said "there will be no active negotiating process" for a
Nagorno-Karabakh settlement while elections are pending in Armenia.
The president said he did not want "the Karabakh settlement to become
hostage to the election campaign, as it is impossible to expect
impartiality." Parliamentary elections are slated for the spring and
presidential elections are due in Armenia and Azerbaijan alike in
2008.
Nonetheless, the next round of negotiations will take place in late
January, Foreign Minister Oskanian announced on December 19. "The
process will continue at the level of foreign ministers," he said.
"Perhaps there will be fewer meetings with less publicity. But I think
negotiations on the content [of peace proposals] will continue."
"There are people in Armenia who are impatiently hoping that the
negotiating process will enable them to exploit the Karabakh problem,"
the president said. "They will try to discredit even the best peace
proposal made during the pre-election period."
CLEAN ELECTIONS
In the same interview, the president said, "it has become a tradition
in Armenia to use election fraud." Decrying the practice, he discussed
reforms that could address the problem.
The president noted that the Central Electoral Commission and regional
and district commissions are responsible for organizing the elections.
"If the elections are rigged, they are rigged in these electoral
commissions when votes are counted and the first results are made
public." Mr. Kocharian observed that under a new law, the president
appoints only one member of the Central Electoral Commission. The
remaining members of the commission are appointed by parliamentary
factions and groups. The president called on these groups to be
especially vigilant.
In response to a question about foreign influence on the elections,
the president drew attention to grant programs and "the affiliation of
certain media outlets. This causes certain problems for the national
security of Armenia." He said, "Our people should understand that the
political forces that come to power with foreign funding or support
from external forces are dangerous for the state."
************************************ ***************************************
2. Diasporan Karabakh vet detained on sedition charge
by Tatul Hakobyan (special to the "Armenian Reporter")
Yerevan--On the evening of December 9, operatives of Armenia's
National Security Service arrested the wartime commander of
Nagorno-Karabakh's Shushi battalion, Zhirair Sefilyan, in a Chinese
restaurant on Tumanyan Avenue in central Yerevan. According to Yerevan
newspapers, the operatives detained Mr. Sefilyan and his dining
companion Ralph C. Yirikian, general manager of the mobile-phone
operator Vivacell. Mr. Yirikian was released shortly thereafter.
At the time of his arrest, Mr. Sefilyan had on his person a loaded
Makarov pistol, which was a present from the onetime commander of
Karabakh's defense forces, Samvel Babayan.
The National Security Service issued a news release on Monday,
December 11, according to which Mr. Sefilyan was charged with
sedition; specifically, he was charged under article 301 of the
criminal code, which makes it a crime to call publicly for the use of
force in order to change the constitutional order. Vardan Malkhasyan
of the Fatherland and Honor party was arrested on the same charges.
According to the daily "Haykakan Zhamanak," on the evening of Mr.
Sefilyan's arrest, about 30 members of the Armenian Volunteers'
Association were detained and released after questioning.
"The so-called 'Armenian Volunteers' Association' initiated by Zhirair
Sefilyan, a citizen of Lebanon, and some of his supporters, lacking
the registration required by Armenian law, pursued the goal of
intervening illegally and violently in the upcoming political
processes in Armenia, specifically taking extremist actions during the
elections which are to take place in 2007," the National Security
Service news release said, referring to the National Assembly
elections slated for the spring.
In a closed meeting of the Armenian Volunteers' Association, held at
the Yerevan Dance Academy on December 2, the official news release
states, "certain leaders of the organization issued public calls for
specific actions aimed at usurping Armenia's state apparatus by force,
by violent pressure, and by any means, without discrimination. They
announced that it is necessary to be rid of the existing authorities
through armed struggle only, through revolt. They presented programs
of action to that end. The majority of the people involved in the
process of organizing the Armenian Volunteers' Association were almost
unaware of the true purposes of the de facto leader of the
organization, which receives funding from suspicious sources."
According to the news release, the true purpose of "foreign citizen
Selifyan and his immediate circle" was "to destabilize Armenia's
internal political situation."
On December 19, some Yerevan newspapers published minutes of the
speeches of Mr. Malkhasyan and Mr. Sefilyan at the meeting in
question.
According to these published accounts, Mr. Malkhasyan said that
Armenia was ruled by its enemies; "Being liberated of them is a matter
of the salvation of the Armenian people. When the goal is virtuous,
clean, patriotic, there should be no discrimination in the means;
without delay, with weapons, by armed struggle, by rebellion, with
everything, by all means, we must be liberated of these veiled Turks,
who are only Armenian in their last names. . . . We are dealing with a
group of bandits, criminals, bandits, skinheads, the scum of the
criminal world. It is necessary to fight them in their way, blood,
fire on the enemy, in every way, by every means."
Mr. Sefilyan, in the sharpest passages of his speech, is reported to
have said nothing will happen until "we organize." He repeated,
"Kocharian, Serge, get out," referring to the president and Defense
Minister Serge Sargsyan. "These people will not get out through
peaceful demonstrations; they are not going to get out by external
pressure. If we can organize and create a serious force with quality,
they will get out. . . . Referring to the admonition of our comrades:
'let us not stint in our means; let us not discriminate among means,'
I agree, but first let us get organized. . . . We have a most
important issue, to be freed of these rulers, which means we must
become so organized in these few months that we are able to stop these
people from reproducing."
Mr. Sefilyan and Mr. Malkhasyan have been ordered detained for two
months pending a trial.
Most opposition parties in Armenia have signed onto a statement
condemning the arrest as a throwback to the 1937 Stalinist purges.
About twenty members of the National Assembly have called for the
immediate release of Mr. Sefilyan, as well as Mr. Malkhasyan.
Defense committees for Mr. Sefilyan have been established in some
Armenian diaspora communities. In response to a reporter's question,
Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian said on December 19 that he did not
expect the affair to have any negative impact on Armenia-diaspora
relations.
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3. Rocky's Next Battle: Making "Musa Dagh"?
by Chris Zakian (special to the "Armenian Reporter")
PARAMUS, N.J.--With the theatrical release this week of "Rocky
Balboa," the sixth installment in the inspiring series about the
perpetual-underdog Philadelphia boxer, it was hardly surprising to see
filmmaker Sylvester Stallone spotlighted in newspapers across the
country.
What WAS surprising was an announcement elicited from Stallone by
"Denver Post" writer Michael Booth, regarding the star's dream
project.
Acknowledging that his action-hero days are likely behind him, the
60-year-old Stallone said that he would like to devote more of his
career to writing and directing: "less in the public eye, but
providing something for the public," is the way he put it.
Then Booth writes: "So what is the Stallone Surprise, the project he's
always wanted to write or direct?"
Here's the answer he got--which is certain to set Armenian hearts aflutter.
"For years Stallone's wanted to create an epic, and the book that
intrigues him is Franz Werfel's 'The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,'
detailing the Turkish genocide of its Armenian community in 1915.
(After futile attempts to turn the novel into a movie, filmmakers
finally succeeded in 1982, but it was a low-profile production.)
"French ships eventually rescued some Armenians, and Stallone has his
favorite scene memorized: 'The French ships come, and they've dropped
the ladders and everybody has climbed up the side. The ships sail. The
hero, the one who set up the rescue, has fallen asleep, exhausted,
behind a rock on the slope above. The camera pulls back, and the ships
and the sea are on one side, and there's one lonely figure at the top
of the mountain, and the Turks are coming up the mountain by the
thousands on the far side.'"
Fittingly for Rocky Balboa, the interview ends with a punch.
"The movie would be 'an epic about the complete destruction of a
civilization,' Stallone said. Then he laughed at the ambition. 'Talk
about a political hot potato. The Turks have been killing that subject
for 85 years.'"
It's a small irony, appreciated only by Armenians, that this news has
come to light in the same week that newspapers ran obituaries for
music impresario Ahmet Ertegun, whose father, Turkey's ambassador to
the U.S. in the 1930s, is credited with using his influence to have
the plug pulled on an earlier motion picture treatment of "Musa Dagh."
Of course, there's a long road separating a filmmaker's quip about a
dream project, on the one hand, from an actual theatrical release, on
the other. Who knows whether Stallone's ambition will ever see the
light of day?
But Armenians--like Rocky--are used to the underdog role. They suffer
setbacks, but always come back swinging. If not Stallone, then surely
someone else will fulfill the long-held Armenian dream of putting
"Musa Dagh" on film in the way it deserves.
Regrettably, there will be no "Hollywood ending" to lift our spirits
at the story's conclusion.
************************************* **************************************
4. Stanford Jay Shaw, 1930-2006: An academic who denied the Armenian Genocide
by Aram Arkun (special to the "Armenian Reporter")
NEW YORK--At first sight, Stanford Jay Shaw appeared to be an
ordinary, innocuous, friendly, and garrulous grandfather. At UCLA, he
typically wore sneakers, and dressed informally.
He was, however, no ordinary man.
A prominent Ottoman historian, Shaw was perhaps the most prominent of
a scholarly school of American deniers of the Armenian Genocide. In
his best known work, a two-volume survey titled "History of the
Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey" (Cambridge University Press,
1976-77), Shaw and his co-author (and wife) Ezel Kural Shaw attempted
to present the Ottomans and Turks in the most positive light possible,
at times from an anachronistic Turkish nationalist perspective. In the
process, alongside many other consequential errors, they minimized the
size and significance of the Hamidian and Cilician massacres, while
placing much of the responsibility for these events on Armenians.
They went on to argue that the Armenians revolted and consequently
suffered losses during World War I, contrary to the wishes of their
Young Turk rulers who worked to safeguard them during deportations
from war zones. Two hundred thousand Armenians were killed due to
famine, disease, and inadvertent violence during the turmoil of the
war, which, they emphasized, killed some 10 times as many Muslims.
This denial of the Armenian Genocide, similar to what many Turkish
government officials were contemporaneously stating, aroused Armenian
ire. In addition to a deplorable firebombing of Stanford Shaw's house
by unknown assailants, damage to Shaw's office, and threats made to
Shaw and the publishers of the book, many legitimate Armenian
demonstrations and protests took place at UCLA. As a consequence, Dr.
Shaw was able to present himself as a persecuted victim of Armenian
infringements on freedom of speech, and the academics who were going
to participate in a major public critique of his book changed their
minds for fear of the charged political atmosphere. Nonetheless, both
volumes were criticized by scholars in print for many flaws of
chronology, factuality, and bias on topics that went far beyond
Armenian matters, and even for issues of plagiarism.
Dr. Shaw produced a number of students who themselves became
university professors and published authors on topics of Ottoman
history. Some of them, such as Heath Lowry or Justin McCarthy, also
became prominent deniers of the Armenian Genocide. Many graduate
students in modern Armenian history at UCLA, incidentally, took
Ottoman history and language courses with Shaw.
Born in Minnesota on May 5, 1930 to Jewish immigrants from England and
Russia, Shaw is said to have changed his name to its present version
early in his career, primarily due to anti-Semitism, and, apparently,
in honor of Stanford University, where he did his undergraduate work
and received a master's degree in British history. He completed the
work for another master's degree, this time in Turkish and Islamic
history, from Princeton University in 1955, and went on to study with
Bernard Lewis at the University of London, and Hamilton Gibb at
Oxford. He also studied in Egypt and Istanbul, preparing for his
Princeton doctoral dissertation titled "The Financial and
Administrative Organization and Development of Ottoman Egypt,
1517-1798" (published in 1962 by Princeton University Press). Along
the way, he learned to read Ottoman Turkish and Arabic.
Shaw went to Harvard University, where he became an assistant and then
associate professor of Turkish language and history in the Department
of Near Eastern Languages and the Department of History from 1958 to
1968. Here, in addition to his dissertation mentioned above, he
published four more works on Ottoman Egypt, thus securing his position
as a specialist on this topic: "Between Old and New: The Ottoman
Empire under Sultan Selim III" (1971), and the edited translations
"Ottoman Egypt in the Eighteenth Century" (1962) and "Ottoman Egypt in
the Age of the French Revolution" (1964), all with Harvard University
Press; and "The Budget of Ottoman Egypt 1005-1006/1596-1597" (1968)
with Mouton (The Hague). He also co-edited a work of Sir Hamilton
Gibb's, "Studies on the Civilization of Islam" (1962).
Shaw became friends at Harvard with two other young professors, Avedis
Sanjian, a specialist in Armenian literature, and Speros Vryonis, Jr.,
a specialist in Byzantine, Seljuk, and early Ottoman histories. Often,
Shaw would come to dinner at Sanjian's house and play with his young
son Gregory. When Shaw fell sick, a Turkish graduate student nursed
him back to health, and he soon married that student, who became Ezel
Kural Shaw. Gradually, his positions on Armenians and Greeks in the
Ottoman Empire began to change in a negative fashion.
Shaw moved to Los Angeles, where he became professor of Turkish
history at the University of California from 1968 to 1992. Sanjian and
Vryonis moved to the same university, where Richard Hovannisian became
professor of Armenian history. It was at UCLA that his conflict with
the Armenian community at large, as well as with many of his faculty
friends at UCLA, became intense after the publication of his
above-mentioned second volume on Ottoman history. In the 1980s, Shaw
also lobbied the state of California's Department of Education, and
state legislators, against accepting the Armenian Genocide as a
planned attempt at annihilation, and was a signatory of various
petitions and paid political advertisements denying the Genocide.
Meanwhile, UCLA Armenians continued to protest against Shaw's position
on the Armenian Genocide. Shaw's presence at UCLA raised questions
about the limits of academic freedom. Towards the end of his stay at
UCLA, in 1988, Shaw claimed that the Armenians were persecuting him
because of their anti-Semitism, not because of his published writings
on Ottoman-Armenian relations--but this was refuted by statements from
the UCLA Jewish Student Union, the rabbi who was then director of
Hillel, and emeritus sociology professor Leo Kuper, a specialist in
the field of genocide studies. In two books Shaw published several
years later tendentiously praising Ottoman tolerance towards Jews, he
portrayed the Armenians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey as
anti-Semites ("The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish
Republic," 1991; "Turkey and the Holocaust," 1992).
After retiring in 1992 from UCLA with various benefits, Shaw took
advantage of the "golden parachute" arrangement offered to many senior
faculty there to continue teaching courses for another five years. He
then moved with his wife to Turkey, and became professor of Ottoman
and Turkish history in Ankara's Bilkent University from 1999 until his
death. There, he published "Studies in Ottoman and Turkish History:
Life with the Ottomans" (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2000); a five-volume
work titled "From Empire to Republic: The Turkish War of National
Liberation 1918-1923. A Documentary Study" (Ankara: Turkish
Historical Society, 2000); and "Bir Dusuncenin Gerçeklesmesi: Osmanli
Tarihi Çalismalarima" (Ankara: Türkiye Bilimler Akademisi Forumu,
2003), on his work on Ottoman history.
In his multivolume work on the Turkish war for independence, Shaw
highlighted the "misdeeds" of Armenians and others, while failing to
note or extremely minimizing massacres of Armenians committed by
Ottomans or Muslims in this period.
Shaw continued periodically to issue statements on the Armenian
Genocide while living in Turkey. For example, according to a Turkish
news agency, last year he called Switzerland "uncivilized" for
beginning a legal procedure against Turkish History Society president
Yusuf Halaçoglu for statements denying the Armenian Genocide.
Shaw's biases fit in well with those of his colleagues in Middle
Eastern studies. Turkey's generally anti-Soviet stand in the Cold War,
and American economic interests led to American promotion of positive
views of Turkey, while the Turkish historical establishment, dominated
by official state views, naturally also appreciated such
historiographical revisionism, thus allowing Shaw wide access to
Ottoman archives.
Stanford Shaw consequently was able to play an influential role in the
broader field of Middle Eastern studies. He helped found the
"International Journal of Middle East Studies" for the Middle Eastern
Studies Association, which is the major organization of scholars
specializing on this area in the United States. He edited this
journal, published by Cambridge University Press, from 1970 to 1980.
Shaw received medals from the president of Turkey, the
Turkish-American Association, and the Research Center for Islamic
History, Art, and Culture at the Yildiz Palace, Istanbul, as well as
honorary degrees from Harvard University and Bogazici University in
Istanbul. He was made an honorary member of the Turkish Academy of
Science at the end of 2005. Major foundations provided him with
research awards and fellowships, including the United States National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford
Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Social Science Research
Council, the Fulbright-Hayes Committee, and the Royal Institute of
International Affairs in London.
Shaw obviously possessed great energy and considerable ability. It is
a shame that in the latter half of his career he often pursued
tendentious goals at the expense of a reasoned historiographical
methodology. This, along with sloppy writing, damaged the value of his
own work, harmed the field of Ottoman studies, and caused
Armenians--and the descendants of the other former Ottoman subject
nationalities who received short shrift in his works--great upset.
* * *
Historian Aram Arkun was a graduate student at UCLA during the 1980s.
****************************************** *********************************
5. Armentel sale signals end to telecom monopoly
News analysis by David Joulfaian (Special to the "Armenian Reporter")
WASHINGTON--The recent takeover of Armentel by VimpelCom promises to
open a new and exciting chapter in Armenia's telecom prospects.
VimpelCom, with its presence in Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, and
more recently in Georgia, is perhaps better suited to serve the
Armenian market than the Hellenic Telecom OTE, the current owner, with
operations throughout the Balkans.
VimpelCom is a publicly traded company (New York Stock Exchange [NYSE]
symbol VIP), with the Russian Alfa Group controlling 32 percent and
the Norwegian telecom Telenor controlling 27 percent of its voting
stock. The Alfa Group also owns 13.2 percent of Turkcell, a leading
provider in Turkey.
(According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Turkcell through
its subsidiary Fintur owns a majority share in Azercell, which is the
largest cellular provider in Azerbaijan).
As for OTE, which is also publicly traded (NYSE symbol OTE), the Greek
government controls about 39 percent of it, but is planning to sell
its stake by June 2007. On a pro-forma basis, both VIP and OTE have
been profitable in recent years, and each has a market capitalization
of about $16 billion.
This $491 million ($440 million net of debts) acquisition is bound to
touch every segment of the Armenian economy, with significant
implications for commerce and consumer welfare, among others.
Unfortunately, such analysis is not reported in the press, with most
of the commentaries focusing almost exclusively on the geopolitical
aspects of the takeover, pointing to growing Russian economic-- and by
extension political--influence in Armenia.
The present article is intended to direct the discussion to the
ECONOMIC aspects of this transaction.
Fixed telephony, with about 600,000 subscribers, accounts for 34
percent of Armentel's earnings. According to OTE, this represented the
largest source of revenues in 2005, which have more than doubled over
the past five years.
About 26 percent of revenue is derived from international calls.
Surely VimpelCom would benefit from this stream of revenues, but one
wonders how the recent acquisition of another Armenian communications
company, Callnet, by yet another Russian firm Comstar-UTS would affect
the market.
Comstar-UTS (London Stock Exchange symbol CMST; see their website at
www.comstar-uts.com) had earlier tried but did not succeed in securing
a cellular license in Armenia. The company is controlled by AFK
Sistema, which also controls 53 percent of MTS, Russia's largest
mobile company that lost the bid for Armentel to VimpelCom. Callnet
earned $4.3 million in revenues in 2005, so it is relatively small.
But given that it holds a license for international long-distance
calls, there are good prospects of real competition with this
takeover. Additionally, Callnet's subsidiary Cornet is a sole provider
of WiMax services in Armenia.
Mobile telephony accounts for a third of the revenues of Armentel,
which has grown in importance over the years OTE reported the number
of subscribers to be 441,716 at the end of September of this year. The
entry of VimpelCom, with its presence in neighboring Georgia, Ukraine,
Russia, and Central Asia, may strengthen competition in this rapidly
expanding market. The Lebanese-owned VivaCell controlled approximately
45 percent of the market in 2005.
With the entry of VIP and CMST into the market, Armentel's telecom
monopoly is severed for all practical purposes. Indeed, the CMST and
Callnet combined form the second largest alternative telecom in
Armenia. The competition between the two Russian giants, not to
mention the Lebanese VivaCell, will most likely lead to a reduction in
tariffs and a dramatic expansion in Internet services.
In addition to the competitive pressures, this acquisition may also
have significant fiscal implications. OTE paid only 10 percent of its
profits in taxes, down from the statutory tax rate of 20 percent on
profits due to tax incentives. The question remains as to how much
would VIP pay, and whether it would be able to take advantage of the
existing tax incentives.
OTE expects the sale of Armentel to generate a pretax gain of 292.9
millions Euros ($380 million). Much of this will be taxable, depending
on Armenia's tax accounting conventions.
One hopes that the tax authorities will not repeat their earlier
practices at the time of Armentel's sale to OTE. In 1998, OTE bought a
90-percent stake in the Armentel monopoly, which was then jointly
owned by Trans-World Telecom (TWT), registered in the offshore zone of
Guernsey, and the Armenian government (with a 51 percent stake). In
2000, the government imposed taxes and penalties of about $12 million
(U.S.) on OTE for gains accrued by TWT.
The treatment of OTE at the time was both inept and unprofessional.
One would only hope that this time around the entity taxed is the one
that actually accrued the gain--that is, OTE and NOT VimpelCom.
This is not the first merger and acquisition to take place in Armenia;
nor will it be the last. In the future, similar transactions should be
studied for their economic consequences, and not exclusively through
the prism of geopolitics.
* * *
David Joulfaian, Ph.D., is a Washington-based economist. The opinions
expressed here are his personal views.
For tables, visit www.armenianreporteronline.com
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6. Editorial: From condemning denial to stopping genocide in Darfur
"Imagine the reaction if they said that about the Holocaust".
These are the words Armenians often utter when confronted with denial
of the Armenian Genocide.
"Would the president even think to nominate as ambassador to Israel
someone who did not condemn and deplore the Holocaust?" This is the
question many ask when they contemplate the nomination of Richard
Hoagland as United States ambassador to Armenia.
"Would they think to call the annihilation of six million innocents
the 'alleged Holocaust'?" Newspapers that try to play it safe get that
reaction.
And when, in November 2005, Ankara hosted a conference to deny the
Armenian Genocide, the question arose: "What if this conference were
dedicated to questioning the veracity of the Holocaust?"
We need no longer wonder.
A conference held in Tehran last week has rightly provoked outrage and
indignation everywhere--Iran itself included. Political leaders from
the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan to British Prime
Minister Tony Blair have condemned it, as well they should have.
President Bush said the conference promoted "a really backward view of
the history of the world."
The organizers of the conference speak grandly of freedom of scholarly
inquiry unfettered by taboos--just as deniers of the Armenian Genocide
do. They say they are not denying the Holocaust but simply trying to
figure out whether it in fact happened--just as deniers of the
Armenian Genocide do.
Obviously, we expect our political leaders--and specifically the Bush
administration--to condemn the denial of the Armenian Genocide as they
do that of the Holocaust. Reporting on December 16 in London's "The
Independent" on the reaction of political leaders to the Iranian
conference, Robert Fisk put it aptly: "Strangely, no one recalled that
the holocaust deniers of recent years--deniers of the Turkish genocide
of 1.5 million Armenian Christians in 1915, that is--include [Tony]
Blair, who originally tried to prevent Armenians from participating in
Britain's Holocaust Day and the then Israeli foreign minister Shimon
Peres, who told the Turks that their massacre of the victims of the
20th century's first Holocaust did not constitute a genocide."
Yes, political leaders must condemn Holocaust denial. They must
condemn denial of the Armenian Genocide. But they must do more.
Armenia's foreign minister, Vartan Oskanian, put it eloquently at the
United Nations 28th Special Session, on the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of the Nazi concentration camps:
"After Auschwitz one would expect that no one any longer has a right
to turn a blind eye or a deaf ear. As an Armenian, I know that a
blind eye, a deaf ear and a muted tongue perpetuate the wounds. It is
a memory of suffering unrelieved by strong condemnation and
unequivocal recognition. The catharsis that the victims deserve,
which societies require in order to heal and move forward together,
obligates us here at the UN, and in the international community, to be
witnesses, to call things by their name, to remove the veil of
obfuscation, of double standards, of political expediency.
"Following the Tsunami-provoked disaster, we have become painfully
aware of a paradox. On the one hand, multilateral assistance efforts
were massive, swift, generous and without discrimination. But, when
compared and contrasted with today's other major tragedy, in Africa,
it is plain that for Darfur, formal and ritual condemnation has not
been followed by any dissuasive action against the perpetrators.
"The difference with the Tsunami, of course, was that there were no
perpetrators. No one wielded the sword, pulled the trigger or pushed
the button that released the gas."
We must call on political leaders to move from "formal and ritual
condemnation" to "dissuasive action against the perpetrators" in
Darfur.
We are gratified that Armenian organizations in Washington--the
Armenian Assembly, the ANCA, and USAPAC alike--have joined the Save
Darfur Coalition. Given our history as genocide's prototypical
victims, Armenians must always be in the forefront of ending this
crime against humanity.
Failing to condemn genocide and facilitating denial, as has often been
noted, gives a sense of impunity to those who may contemplate genocide
in the future. But when genocide is taking place in the present, we
cannot stop at words of condemnation. We must take action. Go to the
Save Darfur Coalition website, http://www.savedarfur.org/content learn
more about what you can do to end the carnage. Donate, advocate,
educate and organize. As Armenians, it is the very least we can do.
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