Larry Wilson: Matchup Uneven in Treaty
Posted on 02 October 2009.

BY LARRY WILSON
Public Editor, Pasadena Star-News

In diplomacy, formal accord is good, right? It’s what diplomats are
after ` harmony, down on paper.

But Raffi Hamparian of the Armenian National Committee notes that in
geopolitics, the players are of uneven size, and the little guys can
end up getting squished.

When it comes to big Turkey ` 75 million people, massive Eurasian
territories ` and little Armenia ` 3 million people, landlocked, small
` it’s easy to lay odds on the situation.

When you throw in powers such as the United States and Russia, who are
behind much of the diplomatic jockeying in that part of the world, the
odds get ¦ odder.

So in the matter of a treaty ` this one is termed the protocols ` being
fast-tracked through the legislatures of Turkey and Armenia with some
arm-twisting from our own State Department, Hamparian sees the
wrestling match this way: `It’s like Hulk Hogan coming after my
daughter.’

While the fledgling Armenian government is prepared to sign off on the
protocols with its neighbor, members of the large Armenian Diaspora
throughout the world are not at all sure about it.

As with other nations afflicted with historical tragedy, there are
many more people of Armenian descent elsewhere ` something in the
order of 8 million ` than there are in the homeland.

That tragedy was, of course, the genocide of about 1.5 million
Armenians in 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turkish empire.

Because of the generations of Armenian families who have long called
the Pasadena area home, we know all about that genocide. And it’s not
just passed-down anecdotes from the old country ` it’s straight
history. The nonpartisan International Association of Genocide Scholars
recognizes this fact. In a letter to President Obama, the group’s
president quotes Adolf Hitler in 1939 in a talk to his military
advisers as he was planning his own genocide: `Who today, after all,
remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?’

This weekend the president of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan, will be in the
Southland as part of a U.S. tour aimed at building support for the
protocol with Turkey. Much as they’re glad to have an independent
nation in their homeland, most local Armenian Americans are not pleased
with the prospects of the treaty. Thousands have rallied in Glendale
against it ` Hamparian says about 1,500 people from Pasadena took part
` and thousands more will demonstrate at the Beverly Hills Hotel on
Sunday.

They say the protocols are not all bad ` the treaty aims to establish
a peace, or at least a detente, between the neighbors, along with
normalized trade relations. But its only reference to the genocide are
with weasel words such as calling for `a dialogue on the historical
dimension’ and `an impartial and scientific examination.’ I agree with
Hamparian: It’s like bringing the flat-Earthers to a global conference
on roundness, as if there were a question.

In Turkey, Article 301 of the penal code makes it illegal to even
acknowledge the genocide. Where’s the justice in protocols with a
nation such as that?

Public Editor Larry Wilson’s blog is

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress