ARMENIA’S STAND: JUSTICE AT HOME, JUSTICE ABROAD
Raffi K. Hovannisian

Hurriyet
March 31 2010
Turkey

Yerevan – We are at the brink of a pair of wars, civil and regional,
and it is better to speak now. Armenia, that ancient civilization
deprived by the tragedies of yore of its capacity for contemporary
statecraft, needs immediately to put its house in democratic order.

Finally responsible for its own record, it also has legitimate
expectations of the international partnership.

In this global and so contracted century of ours, where resources and
rights often compete for precedence, domestic demeanor and foreign
affairs form part of one and the same policy agenda. Nuclear or not,
all pieces count.

Armenia has to finally empower its citizenry, ensure due process and
accountable government, and hold true elections. The corruption of
the state and its ill-disguised feudalesque hierarchy of post-Soviet
power must give way to basic liberties and equal opportunities for all.

Political prisoners should be released forthwith, and those
responsible for the deaths of ten citizens on March 1, 2008 brought to
account. Justice must begin from within or else civil strife is sure
to ensue. Modern independent statehood is an immeasurable gift that
must not be squandered or ceded to anybody, friend or foe. Armenia’s
security and armed forces are functions of its sovereignty, and no
one, neither the Collective Security Treaty Organization, nor NATO
should be called upon to guard its borders and its interests. Sound
mutual relations with Russia, the United States, Europe and China
are pivotally important, but Armenia must from now on be in sovereign
command of its own frontiers and strategic assets.

This choice should be universally respected. The resetting of regional
imperatives requires correlation with Armenia’s vital concerns.

Armenia and its people the world over shall never forget the great
genocide and the dispossession of their homeland. They cannot be
expected, through protocols or other avenues of persuasion, to ratify
their loss or to legitimize the fruits of genocide.These include an
illegal de facto boundary negotiated by the Bolsheviks and Turkish
nationalists, the destruction of a thousand years worth of cultural
heritage and architectural treasures, the mass expropriation of homes,
schools, academies and other properties, and an abiding official
escape from responsibility in the annals of schizophrenic denialism.

There is a growing current in Turkish society that seeks to look their
history in the eye and thus recast the exclusivist foundations of their
state. They should be embraced and supported in their long-overdue
self-discovery, just as the Turkish family who in 1915 saved my
grandmother’s life by risking their own should find their due in
the textbooks of tomorrow. As with the Holocaust and the liberating
leadership of postwar Germany, acknowledgment must beget atonement,
which, if anchored in truth, will lead to redemption, restitution,
a right of return to a national home and ultimate reconciliation
between the Armenian and Turkish nations.

Armenia expects the world community to uphold and attach the rule of
law, both internally and internationally, without seeking refuge in
intellectually and legally false distinctions such as sui generis.

Mountainous Karabagh’s case for post-Stalinist decolonization and
independence is juridically at least as strong as, if not more than,
Kosovo’s, Abkhazia’s, Eritrea’s or East Timor’s. It must formally
be recognized – and within its existing constitutional borders – by
Armenia and the very same countries that have extended recognition
to the aforementioned.

Supported by Turkey, Azerbaijan today is trying to breathe bellicose
fire into its failed war of aggression, 1988-1994, against mountainous
Karabagh, by which it lost any claim it rhetorically might ever have
had. Contrary to Baku’s familiar projection of blame upon others,
it alone holds in occupation the ancestral Armenian heartlands of
Gardmank, Shahumian, Getashen, Artsvashen, and Nakhichevan. Let the
refugees of all nationalities, including the local Azeris and the
nearly one million Armenians displaced from these territories as well
as from Azerbaijan proper, return to their places of origin. That
is comme il faut, but there can be no further territorial adjustment
without resolving the occupation above.

Georgia would do itself and its firm future relationship with Armenia
a favor by defending in full the linguistic, cultural, civil, political
and religious rights of its large Armenian community. The historically
Armenian region of Javakhk must be given special consideration in terms
of its identity, representative self-government and connection with the
Armenian republic. This is fundamental to both Armenia’s and Georgia’s
national security, as is the requirement to release all ethnic Armenian
prisoners from the injustice of their politically-driven incarceration.

Iran, too, shall change – at its pace and in its way. A long-standing
bilateral rapport with Armenia as its basis, the Islamic Republic
ought to work to improve its domestic performance and, among other
things, to recognize the Holocaust. So too should Israel, as bearer
of the Shoah, no longer rest complicit in the denial of the Armenian
genocide. Washington, Moscow and the capitals of Europe have a lot
of critical rethinking to do in this connection. The time perhaps has
come for all past paradigms to shift their script. Whether classically
geopolitical or energy-sourced, the curtain must soon fall on the
east-west and north-south axes of yesterday’s cliché. For the sake
of little old Armenia and the grand New World.

* Raffi Hovannisian, the Republic’s first foreign minister, is founding
director of the Armenian Center for National and International Studies

*** The views expressed by Mr. Hovannisian solely represent the views
of the writer and are not representative of the views of the Daily
News or the members of its editorial board.