1- After a Century, Bankrupt Turkey Wasting
Huge Sums to Deny the Armenian Genocide
By Harut Sassounian
Publisher, The California Courier
www.TheCaliforniaCourier.com
2- Irvine mayor’s efforts to repair relations with Armenian community
could lead to memorial, school curriculum
3- Despite threats, Armenian activist won’t stop fight for trans rights
4- Haig Adomian (January 29, 1958 – May 29, 2022)
5- Armenia Continues Fight Against COVID-19
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1- After a Century, Bankrupt Turkey Wasting
Huge Sums to Deny the Armenian Genocide
By Harut Sassounian
Publisher, The California Courier
www.TheCaliforniaCourier.com
The Turkish government’s denial of the Armenian Genocide is as futile
as a man who repeatedly hits his head against a wall, hoping the wall
would give way.
For more than a century, successive Turkish governments have done
everything in their power to cover up the heinous crime of the
Armenian Genocide committed by their predecessors. No Turkish leader
has had the courage and honesty to admit the truth. Instead, Turkey
has wasted huge sums of money to deny the undeniable. It has bribed
questionable scholars and crooked politicians around the world to
distort the historical facts. Ankara has published hundreds of
deceptive books and made several trashy movies to cover up its crimes.
Over several decades, Turkey has spent tens of millions of dollars to
hire American lobbying firms to pressure the U.S. Congress not to
acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. All of these efforts failed
miserably. The U.S. House of Representatives recognized the Armenian
Genocide in 1975, 1984 and 2019. The U.S. Senate unanimously
recognized it in 2019. Moreover, two U.S. Presidents acknowledged it:
Pres. Ronald Reagan in a Presidential Proclamation in 1981 and Pres.
Joe Biden in his commemorative statements on April 24, 2021 and 2022.
The most authoritative American acknowledgment of the Armenian
Genocide took place on May 28, 1951, when the U.S. government
submitted an official report to the World Court, stating that the
Armenian Genocide was one of the “outstanding examples of the crime of
genocide.”
Despite all Turkish pressures, threats and bribes, over 30 countries
have formally acknowledged the Armenian Genocide. This is in addition
to acknowledgments by the United Nations War Crimes Commission in
1948, the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and
Protection of Minorities in 1985 and the European Parliament
repeatedly since 1987.
Most of these acknowledgments took place at a time when the Republic
of Armenia did not exist as an independent state. The Armenian
Diaspora, in a David vs. Goliath battle, was able to counter the
denials of the powerful Turkish government, supported by its NATO
allies and scores of Islamic states.
All of these denialist efforts are based on the simple misconception
that should the Turkish government acknowledge the Armenian Genocide,
it would then be obligated to pay restitution to surviving Armenians.
Regrettably, many Armenians have the same misconception. The fact is
that the Turkish government is liable to pay reparations and return
confiscated Armenian properties and territories, regardless of whether
Turkish leaders acknowledge their guilt or not. Political statements
by government leaders are of no value in a court of law. Courts deal
with facts and documents. No matter how many times Turkey denies the
genocide, the Republic of Armenia has the right to take its demands
for restitution and return of territories to the International Court
of Justice (World Court), where only governments have such
jurisdiction.
After an entire century of denial, the Turkish government announced
last week its latest desperate attempt to counter the facts of the
Armenian Genocide by forming the TEKAR Foundation (Turkish Armenian
Issue Research Foundation). This is a coalition of three Turkish
groups: Educational Friends Foundation, Baskent (Capital City)
Strategic Research Center, and Center for Countering Fanatic Armenian
Lies. The new Foundation held its inaugural assembly on June 25.
TEKAR plans to republish a Turkish denialist book written by Esat Uras
(1882-1957), titled: “The Armenians in history and the Armenian
question.” As a member of the Committee of Union and Progress (Young
Turks), Uras played a key role in planning and executing the Armenian
Genocide. His book is replete with gross misrepresentations.
The Turkish Foundation also stated that it will “print Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk’s views, thoughts and statements on Armenians, Armenian
activities and Armenian relations.” I hope the Foundation will not
forget to quote from Ataturk’s interview published by the Los Angeles
Examiner on August 1, 1926, in which he said: “These leftovers from
the former Young Turk Party, who should have been made to account for
the lives of millions of our Christian subjects, who were ruthlessly
driven en masse from their homes and massacred…. They have hitherto
lived on plunder, robbery and bribery.”
The TEKAR Foundation has 23 members on its board of trustees. The
chairman of the board is Mehmet Arif Demirer, a chemical engineer, not
a historian! Incomprehensibly, the board is composed of six military
officers, three engineers, two economists, one gastronomist, one
student, and several others of miscellaneous backgrounds. It looks
like the real purpose of the TEKAR Foundation is to provide jobs to
Pres. Erdogan’s circle of friends. While it is a good thing that these
Turks want to study the Armenian Genocide, their intention is not
seeking the truth!
Turkish denialists have never understood that the more they deny the
Armenian Genocide and the longer they talk about it, the more the
world becomes aware of the Armenian Genocide. In other words, Turkey
foolishly keeps publicizing the Armenian Genocide to new generations
while trying to deny it.
The second thing that the Turkish leaders never understood is that the
sooner they acknowledge the crimes of their predecessors, the sooner
they will gain the respect of the international public opinion. When a
Turkish leader eventually acknowledges the truth, he will be praised
worldwide and may even be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. By
their denials, Turkish leaders are doing a major disservice to their
own reputations, not to mention the huge sums of money they are
wasting at a time when the Turkish economy is bankrupt!
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2- Irvine mayor’s efforts to repair relations with Armenian community
could lead to memorial, school curriculum
By Tess Sheets
(Orange County Register)—When a video surfaced in March of Irvine
Mayor Farrah Khan joking and laughing during a meeting in 2020 with
representatives of local Turkish groups, it sparked a furor among some
community members who noted among the party a man who has been
outspoken in denying the Armenian Genocide.
Residents penned letters and turned up at City Council meetings to
voice their outrage. An Armenian group denounced the county Democratic
Party for its early endorsement in Khan’s 2022 mayoral race.
In demand letters penned to the public and Khan, an immediate apology
from the mayor was requested, along with a pledge to distance herself
from anyone who has denied the genocide and for her support for
teaching public school students about the history of the carnage.
Khan and Armenian community members have since met and it could mean
an Armenian Genocide memorial is constructed in Irvine – Khan said she
will support finding a place in the city. She’s also agreed to
approach the Irvine Unified school board about coordinating training
for educators on teaching about the genocide. And, at an April City
Council meeting, she said she donated $1,500 to the Genocide Education
Project.
Khan was quick to post recorded statements to social media
apologizing, but has also said the video wasn’t an accurate
representation of what was discussed during that meeting – she’s
having a company look into its editing.
The video’s captions had an “incorrect translation” of the
conversation between her and Turkish community members, she said,
suspecting its out-of-context release now was “politically intended,”
timed for two weeks before the Democratic Party of Orange County
planned to announced its early endorsements.
The mayor remains steadfast that discussions at the meeting, which she
said was one of many held with community members after her 2020
mayoral win, did not touch on the Armenian Genocide, as some have
said.
She promised to cut ties with anyone critical that the genocide occurred.
“I think it’s a little disheartening,” Khan said of the response to
the video. “I think I’ve been in the middle of conflicts before—from
India and Pakistan, from Palestine and Israel—and I’ve never had the
community react this way to me. I have never had this type of
experience. It’s always been like, ‘We’re upset, let’s have a meeting.
Let’s talk. Let’s have an understanding.’”
In the released video, Khan is accepting congratulations for her
mayoral win, she said. When she is presented a box of Turkish
Delights, captions appear depicting the conversation between Khan and
a community member identified later as Ergun Kirlikovali. They read
that he says on “Armenians’ occasions,” Khan could eat the candies and
they would “disappear.” Khan responds, “I’ll make sure I eat it in
front of them.”
Some said they believe Khan and Kirlikovali were referring to
Armenians disappearing. But the mayor said there was “no mention of
Armenian Genocide.”
“As a person of faith, as a person who has worked in interfaith for so
many years, has 17 years of community building behind me, I would
never make fun of anybody,” Khan said in an interview. “That’s not who
I am. That’s not what I would do.”
She said she has a company looking into the authenticity of the video
with captions, and “preliminary findings from them is that this is a
chopped up, kind-of sliced up video. It’s not what I said. It’s not
what I was discussing at the time.”
Khan said the company, which she declined to name or provide further
details on, is preparing a final report on its review, which she will
present publicly when it’s completed.
“I’m really hoping for that professional report to come out to kind of
put to rest the idea that people are calling me a racist and that I’m
denying the genocide or saying that Armenians should disappear,” Khan
said.
Violet Bulujian, chair of the Orange County chapter of the Armenian
National Committee of America, said seeing the video was a gut-punch.
“To say that we were outraged is an understatement,” said Bulujian.
“If you imagine the Democratic mayor attending a meeting that was
hosted by Holocaust deniers, and that mayor says, ‘I pledged to stand
with you no matter what,’ and then laughs along with them, that would
not be tolerated, under no circumstances,” Bulujian said.
Led by UCI professor of Physics and Astronomy Kev Abazajian, the
Southern California Armenian Democrats wrote that Khan’s response to
the community “has been as reprehensible as the original hate speech,”
and the Democratic Party’s endorsement should be taken back “until
which point she properly acknowledges the extent of the harm of her
actions and takes concrete steps to reconcile with the Armenian
community.”
The Democrats of Greater Irvine, a group also chaired by Abazajian, a
2018 City Council contender who lost out to Khan and Councilman
Anthony Kuo, voted to censure the mayor at a meeting in April for “her
participation in hate speech, supporting and promoting Armenian
Genocide denialists and continued denial of the years-long
relationship with Armenian Genocide denialists.”
Abazajian said the issue is “way bigger than Irvine,” recalling that
he and others were outraged in 2021 when Khan lauded the country of
Azerbaijan as a “secular democracy” during an Azerbaijani Consulate
event celebrating its Republic Day. The ANCA Western Region, which
represents all of California, in a letter to the Central Committee
asking the group not to award Khan its annual “Truth Award,” calling
Azerbaijan “one of the most authoritarian regimes on earth, ranking
amongst the worst offenders when it comes to democratic rights, press
freedom and fundamental human rights.”
Khan said at the time she “did not realize there is a conflict going
on,” between Azerbaijan and Armenia and she later sat down with the
ANCA group to apologize, but she felt singled out because the
criticism came as she was being considered for the Central Committee
award. Other elected officials who were part of that Azerbaijani event
didn’t receive the same pushback, she said.
Bulujian’s organization, the ANCA, has also noted that Kirlikovali was
among a group that Khan announced in 2021 as her mayoral advisory
committee. Khan said the residents weren’t appointed as part of an
official committee, instead the group was formed out of an “open call
to community members that I should be interacting with, to come on and
share with me what they’d like to see more of in the city,” she said.
Kirlikovali also said the conversation during the meeting with Khan in
2020 was about Turkish desserts and not about Armenians disappearing.
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3- Despite threats, Armenian activist won’t stop fight for trans rights
There has been no legislation passed for LGBTIQ rights in Armenia
since leading trans activist Lilit Martirosyan’s historic speech to
the National Assembly in 2019—but, she argues, at least she has
brought some visibility to the country’s transgender and gay
communities.
“After my speech, Nikol Pashinyan’s government started to speak more
about LGBTIQ issues,” said Martirosyan. “[Former] governments never
spoke about LGBTIQ people.”
Martirosyan is the founder of the Right Side, a non-governmental
transgender and sex workers’ rights group in Yerevan. On April 5,
2019, she became the first out trans woman to speak in the Armenian
parliament, calling for for an end to violence and discrimination
towards trans people.
In response, she was met with online death threats, doxxing, and calls
by parliamentarians to have her burned alive. When Martirosyan tried
to report the threats to the police, they laughed at her, she said.
Most health centers also turned her away when she sought treatment for
the panic attacks she’d developed.
“After my speech at the National Assembly, everybody started
recognizing my face,” Martirosyan told openDemocracy in a video call
from her apartment in Yerevan. “I started receiving hate messages not
only on my social media platforms, but on the streets, in shops, and
other places.”
Nowadays, to avoid public harassment, she wears a mask whenever she
steps foot outside her home, even though COVID-19 restrictions have
been lifted in Yerevan.
Though awareness about transgender people in Armenia has increased
thanks to her speech, living openly as a trans activist remains
extremely hard in this conservative country. Nevertheless, Martirosyan
refuses to leave.
“Of course, I can take my passport and go to different European
countries or to the US, but my community is here,” she said.
“Transgender people, especially transgender women, are in a bad
situation here.”
Martirosyan stresses the urgent need for a hate crime law, legal
gender recognition and access to trans health care in Armenia.
There is no legal definition of ‘hate crime’ in Armenian law. As a
result, law enforcement agencies don’t collect data about such crimes.
Out of 113 incidents of harassment against LGBTIQ people in the last
two years, only 27 cases were reported to the police, but none of them
was considered a hate crime, according to a survey by the Right Side.
Acknowledging the potential for human rights violations, the Council
of Europe’s Committee of Equality and Non-Discrimination last year
recommended that Armenia adopt effective legislation and “policies to
strengthen action against discrimination based on sexual orientation,
gender identity, gender _expression_ and sexual characteristics”.
The lack of protection against discrimination and harassment in the
workplace makes earning a living difficult for transgender people in
the country. Many, Martirosyan included, get into sex work to provide
an income.
Martirosyan is also taking a case to the European Court of Human
Rights in which an Armenian trans man’s application to correct his
gender marker on his birth certificate from ‘female’ to ‘male’ was
denied by Armenian courts. Currently, the Ministry of Justice requires
paperwork proving a trans person’s sex-reassignment surgery—a medical
intervention that’s outlawed in Armenia and costly to do abroad, and
which not everyone wants to go through.
“It’s a big problem, because there are transgender people who don’t
want sex reassignment surgery,” Martirosyan explained. She was the
first trans woman in Armenia to legally change her name on her
passport in 2015. She changed the gender marker to ‘F’ in 2021.
For Martirosyan, the hardest part of her job as an activist is raising
awareness and changing societal attitudes about trans people in
Armenia.
Her activism was rewarded in The Netherlands last year by the Red
Umbrella Fund, a global fund for sex workers, and by the Human Rights
Tulip, with a prize of 100,000 euros. Martirosyan says she used the
money to buy bigger office space for the Right Side in Yerevan.
“Maybe after ten or more years things will change,” she said. “We will
continue to work even though it’s dangerous for us.”
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4- Haig Adomian (January 29, 1958 – May 29, 2022)
Haig Antranig Adomian was born in Los Angeles, California to George
and Corinne Adomian.
An inspiring and beloved personality, Haig was an adventurer, world
traveler, athlete, visionary dealmaker and businessman, real estate
agent, writer, researcher, and print and broadcast journalist, always
as a lifelong supporter of Armenian causes. He served as a news anchor
at Horizon TV, worked as a writer/producer/director, and wrote and
worked for Armenian newspapers including Asbarez as well as
co-publishing at Armenian Life.
After attending the University of Georgia from age 11, he graduated in
1978 with a degree in History from Princeton University, where he
played rugby and rowed crew. He was an Eagle Scout and a black belt in
karate.
Haig loved learning and teaching, hiking, music and songwriting,
scriptwriting, film and broadcasting, acting and directing, family
history and collecting and telling stories, among many passions. His
limitless creativity, and his talent for deal-making, benefited many,
and promised great things to come from projects he was endlessly
envisioning. For Haig, survival of the people was a priority and
bringing happiness was his nature. His remarkable brilliance, humor,
energy and integrity warmed many hearts and will live there forever.
Haig is survived by his mother Corinne, his sisters Diane and Laura,
his four sons James, David, Daniel, and Garrison, and godfather and
uncle Dr. Gerald (Jerry) Adomian, along with his beloved companion
Sara Medina and family, and his worldwide network of family and
friends. His untimely passing followed a sudden illness while
overseas.
Haig will be remembered at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills (6300 Forest
Lawn Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90068), with a visitation on Thursday, July 7
from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The funeral service will be held Friday, July 8 at 2:30 p.m. in the
Old North Church, Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills, with a graveside burial
immediately following. Memorial dinner will be held after the funeral
services at a location to be announced at the church.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to The American Armenian
National Security Institute – AANSI. Checks may be made out to AANSI
and mailed to: 330 N. Brand Blvd., Ste. 1250, Glendale, CA 91203.
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5- Armenia Continues Fight Against COVID-19
More than 2.2 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine have been
administered in Armenia since commencing the vaccination program a
year ago, authorities said on Monday, June 27. For the third week, no
new deaths were reported. Armenia has recorded 423,243 coronavirus
cases. Armenia has recorded 8,629 deaths; 412,661 have recovered.
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