FROM SAN REMO TO TSKHINVALI…
By Tatul Sonentz-Papazian

23 sept 08

A time span of almost a century separates two historic events involving
two cities thousands of miles apart geographically, yet connected
historically by that invisible thread spun by secret diplomacy —
an insidious thread that, while defying time and distance, still
defers to the rules of cause and effect, as the present crisis in
Georgia illustrates with all the brutal trappings of war.

World War I, that unprecedented blood bath that was to mark the end of
the decaying Anciens regimes ended not in peace, but in an ‘Armistice’
in 1918, followed by a frenzy of overt and covert diplomatic activity,
with new imperial appetites for hegemony honed by the enticing smell
of crude oil.

Thus, Preceding the peace treaty between the Ottoman Empire and the
Allied Powers, signed in Sèvres, France, the Treaty of Versailles was
signed with Germany to annul the German concessions along with economic
rights and enterprises. After the February Conference of London, in
April, 1920, the Great War Allied Supreme Council held a conference in
San Remo, Italy, attended by the Prime Ministers of Britain, France,
Italy, and the Ambassador of Japan; they determined the allocation of
League of Nations mandates for administration of former Ottoman-ruled
lands of the Middle East – largely based on the May 1916 Anglo-F rench
Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour Declaration of November 1917.

The present mess in that region of the world and its environs can
be directly traced to the predatory appetites of the ‘Great Powers’
initiating and participating in those conferences that created the
arena where the mighty would ‘legally’ dismantle, rearrange and
dominate the weak — setting ‘inviolable’ ‘national’ boundaries
in the process… An effective process of a recycled colonization,
that, soon after, the emerging Soviet Union would apply within its
own whimsical internal boundaries, setting the scene for the endemic
ethnic tensions and sporadic armed clashes we are now witnessing in
Russia’s ‘Near Abroad’.

With such a lusty "Circus Maximus" atmosphere as a background, it
is hardly surprising, that the August 10, 1920 Treaty of Sèvres —
verbally exuding unshakeable faith in Wilsonian idealism and vision
for a new world order — would soon be set aside to make room for
the disgraceful Treaty of Lausanne, particularly, since on the very
same date – August 10, 1920 – Great Britain, France and Italy were
secretly signing a "Tripartite Agreement" confirming Britain’s oil
and commercial concessions and turning the former German enterprises
in the Ottoman Empire over to a Tripartite corporation.

Actually these three major powers, as early as 1915, while the Armenian
Genocide had entered into full swing, had secretly started planning the
partitioning of the Ottoman Empire not along ethno-national borders,
but the hard line economic interests of the ‘Great’ powers. The Russian
revolution and the Kemalist movement disrupted their expectations and
drove them to sign the hastily assembled Lausanne Treaty – without
the ratification of the United States — to keep Turkey’s Eastern
borders intact, as a buffer against a possible Bolshevik incursion
into Anatolia and eventually into an economically and politically
unsteady Europe.

The solemn promises made to the Armenians, who had fought on the
Allied side throughout the entire war were forgotten, along with
promises made to the Kurds, the Pontus Greeks and the Assyrians,
opening the way to a second round of the on-going Turkish genocidal
ethnic cleansing process against the non-Turkic populations of Western
Armenia, Kurdistan and Cilicia. Strangely enough, Georgia, who threw
her lot with Germany and the Central Powers, ended up with Armenian
Javakhq and other non-Georgian territories as part of her mini-empire,
and to this day, insists on masquerading as a nation state – apparently
hoping to achieve that status through her own insidious programs of
various forms of ethnic cleansing with the chauvinistic slogan of
"Georgia for the Georgians" as her credo.

The present debacle in South Ossetia , with its historic background
and recent events cunningly distorted and misrepresented in hackneyed
Cold War rhetoric by a large segment of the Western news media leads
to only one conclusion, that after the stultifying decades of past
brainwashing – both Western and Eastern — it is almost impossible to
hope for a fair and enlightened world public opinion. Against such a
polluted background, aggravated with the present economic and political
anomalies caused by a runaway globalism shirking all known criteria,
certain anachronistic ‘state’ boundaries, considered sacrosanct in
spite of their historically criminal origins, will continue to stand
in the way of realizing true peace and harmony among nations.

It is high time for countries like Georgia and Turkey to realize that
there are other national entities than just Georgians and Turks within
their still imperial boundaries, set by brutal acts of genocide and
ethnic cleansing – covertly conceived and made binding by predatory
forces engaged in secret diplomacy.

–Boundary_(ID_/VLuCvC78PHWLXmqrK5T4w) —