Robert Fisk: Bravery, tears and broken dreams

Mount Ararat, towering symbol of Armenia, is an awful reminder of
wrongs unrighted

The Independent/UK
Published: 04 August 2007

There is nothing so infinitely sad – so pitiful and yet so courageous
– as a people who yearn to return to a land for ever denied them;

the Poles to Brest Litovsk, the Germans to Silesia, the Palestinians
to that part of Palestine that is now Israel. When a people claim to
have settled again in their ancestral lands – the Israelis, for
example, at the cost of "cleansing" 750,000 Arabs who had perfectly
legitimate rights to their homes – the world becomes misty eyed. But
could any nation be more miserably bereft than one which sees, each
day, the towering symbol of its own land in the hands of another?

Mount Ararat will never return to Armenia – not to the rump state
which the Soviets created in 1920 after the Turkish genocide of one
and a half million Armenians – and its presence to the west of the
capital, Yerevan, is a desperate, awful, permanent reminder of wrongs
unrighted, of atrocities unacknowledged, of dreams never to be
fulfilled. I watched it all last week, cloud-shuffled in the morning,
blue-hazed through the afternoon, ominous, oppressive, inspiring,
magnificent, ludicrous in a way – for the freedom which it encourages
can never be used to snatch it back from the Turks – capable of
inspiring the loftiest verse and the most execrable commercialism.

There is a long-established Ararat cognac factory in Yerevan, Ararat
gift shops – largely tatty affairs of ghastly local art and far too
many models of Armenian churches – and even the Marriott Ararat

Hotel, which is more than a rung up from the old Armenia Two Hotel
wherein

Fisk stayed 15 years ago, an ex-Soviet Intourist joint whose chief
properties included the all-night rustling of cockroach armies between
the plaster and the wallpaper beside my pillow.

Back in the Stalinist 1930s, Aleksander Tamanian built an almost
fascistic triumphal arch at one side of Republic Square through which
the heights of Ararat, bathed in eternal snow, would for ever be
framed to remind Armenians of their mountain of tears. But the
individualism of the descendants of Tigran the Great, whose empire
stretched from the Caspian to Beirut, resisted even Stalin’s
oppression. Yeghishe Charents, one of the nation’s favourite poets – a
famous philanderer who apparently sought the Kremlin’s favours –
produced a now famous poem called "The Message". Its praise of Uncle
Joe might grind the average set of teeth down to the gum; it included
the following: "A new light shone on the world./Who brought this
sun?/… It is only this sunlight/Which for centuries will stay
alive." And more of the same.

Undiscovered by the Kremlin’s censors for many months, however,
Charents had used the first letter of each line to frame a quite
different "message", which read: "O Armenian people, your only
salvation is in the power of your unity." Whoops! Like the distant
Mount Ararat, it was a brave, hopeless symbol, as doomed as it was
impressive. Charents was "disappeared" by the NKVD in 1937 after being
denounced by the architect Tamanian – now hard at work building
Yerevan’s new Stalinist opera house – the moment Charents’ schoolboy
prank was spotted. Then Tamanian fell from the roof of his still
unfinished opera house, and even today Armenians – with their
Arab-like desire to believe in "the plot" – ask the obvious
questions. Did the architect throw himself to his death in remorse?

Or was he pushed?

Plots live on in the country that enjoyed only two years of
post-genocide independence until its 1991 "freedom" from the decaying
Soviet Union. Its drearily re-elected prime minister, Serzh Sargsyan,
permits "neutral" opposition but no real political debate – serious
opponents would have their parties and newspapers closed down – and he
recently told the local press that "the economy is more important than
democracy". Not surprising, I suppose, when the corrupt first
president of free Armenia, Petrossyan, is rumoured to be plotting a
comeback. Sargsyan even tried to throw the American Radio Liberty/Free
Europe station out of Armenia – though I suppose that’s not
necessarily an undemocratic gesture.

Nonetheless, interviewed by Vartan Makarian on an Armenian TV show
this week, I found it a bit hard to take when Vartan suggested that my
Turkish publisher’s fear of bringing out my book on the Middle East –
complete with a chapter on the 1915 Armenian genocide – was a symbol
of Turkey’s "lack of democratisation". What about Armenia’s pliant
press, I asked? And why was it that present-day Armenia seemed to
protest much less about the 20th century’s first holocaust than the
millions of Armenians in the diaspora, in the US, Canada, France,
Britain, even Turkish intellectuals in Turkey itself? The TV
production crew burst into laughter behind their glass screen. Guests
on Armenian television are supposed to answer questions, not ask
them. Long live the Soviet Union.

But you have to hand it to the journalists of Yerevan. Each August,
they all go on holiday. At the same time. Yup. Every editor, reporter,
book reviewer, columnist and printer packs up for the month and heads
off to Lake Sevan or Karabakh for what is still called, Soviet-style,
a "rest". "We wish all our readers a happy rest-time and we’ll be back
on August 17th," the newspaper Margin announced this week. And that
was that. No poet may die, no Patriotic War hero expire, no minister
may speak, no man may be imprisoned, lest his passing or his words or
incarceration disappear from written history. I encourage the
management of The Independent to consider this idea; if only we had
operated such a system during the rule of the late Tony Blair… But
no doubt a civil servant would have emailed him that this was a "good
time" to announce bad news.

In any event, a gloomy portrait of the poet-martyr Charents now adorns
Armenia’s 1,000 dram note and Tamanian’s massive arch still dominates
Republic Square. But the dying Soviet Union constructed high-rise
buildings beyond the arch and so today, Ararat – like Charents – has
been "disappeared", obliterated beyond the grey walls of
post-Stalinist construction, the final indignity to such cloud-topped,
vain hopes of return. Better by far to sip an Ararat cognac at the
Marriott Ararat Hotel from which, at least, Noah’s old monster can
still be seen