Author: Felekian Ara

Financial Times Deutschland
17. Juni 2005

Bundestag provoziert Krise mit Türkei;
Abgeordnete fordern Aufarbeitung des Völkermords an Armeniern

Türken in Deutschland planen Proteste

Von Marina Zapf, Berlin

Die Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland und der Türkei stehen vor einer
Zerreißprobe. Alle Fraktionen des Bundestags forderten die Türkei
gestern auf, sich einer ehrlichen geschichtlichen Aufarbeitung der
Massaker an fast einer Million Armeniern vor 90 Jahren zu stellen.
Die türkische Regierung wies die Resolution zurück: “Wir nehmen den
Antrag mit Bedauern zur Kenntnis und verurteilen ihn aufs Schärfste”,
teilte das Außenministerium in Ankara mit. Außenminister Abdullah Gül
nannte die Kritik “verantwortungslos, bestürzend und verletzend”.

Der unwirsche Ton der Regierung lässt darauf schließen, dass sich das
Klima zwischen Ankara und Berlin drastisch verschlechtern wird. Das
könnte nicht nur die Bereitschaft von Türken in Deutschland zur
Integration negativ beeinflussen. Auch im Bundestagswahlkampf wäre
das Wasser auf die Mühlen der Opposition, die bereits angekündigt
hat, Stimmung gegen den türkischen EU-Beitritt zu machen.

Ein ähnlicher Beschluss der französischen Nationalversammlung in den
90er Jahren hatte zu jahrelangen Spannungen mit der Türkei geführt.
“Die Stufen der Eskalation sind ungeahnt. Offen ist, wie weit sie
ausgeschöpft werden”, sagte ein Diplomat in Ankara.

Zurückhaltender als das französische oder schweizerische Parlament
beschuldigt der Bundestag die Türkei zwar nicht direkt des
Völkermords. Dennoch reagierte Ankara schon während der Beratungen im
Bundestag äußerst gereizt und warnte vor einer “Vergiftung” der
Beziehungen.

In der Türkei hat mittlerweile eine Debatte über den Tod von rund
einer Million Armenier zwischen 1915 und 1917 begonnen. Offiziell
wird das Ausmaß und die Planmäßigkeit der Massaker aber bestritten,
weil damit das Bild der türkischen Nation beschmutzt würde. Die
meisten Türken haben die offizielle Version von den tragischen Folgen
einer Zwangsumsiedlung, die wegen des Ersten Weltkriegs erforderlich
gewesen sei, nie angezweifelt.

“Zahlreiche unabhängige Historiker, Parlamente und internationale
Organisationen bezeichnen die Vertreibung und Vernichtung der
Armenier als Völkermord”, heißt es nun in dem Bundestagsbeschluss.
Allein dieser Hinweis wird drei Monate vor dem geplanten Beginn von
EU-Beitrittsverhandlungen in Ankara als Affront empfunden.

Der Bundestag stellte nicht die Eignung der Türkei für die EU in
Frage. Aber formuliert wurde die Überzeugung, “dass eine ehrliche
Aufarbeitung der Geschichte notwendig” und Grundlage für Versöhnung
sei. Zu einer Kultur der Erinnerung gehöre “die offene
Auseinandersetzung mit den dunklen Seiten der nationalen Geschichte.”

Mit Unverständnis reagierte die türkische Seite darauf, dass SPD und
Grüne in die von der CDU/CSU initiierte Schelte einstimmten. Die
Regierung von Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schröder hat stets eine
türkeifreundliche Politik betrieben. Doch die reflexartige Leugnung
eines Genozids durch Ankara und Drohungen des türkischen Botschafters
in Berlin lösten auch in den Regierungsparteien Unmut aus.

“Es ist wichtig zu verstehen, dass wir uns einig sind, dass diese
Auseinandersetzung mit der Geschichte ein Teil des Weges nach Europa
ist”, sagte der Sozialdemokrat Markus Meckel, der dabei auch auf die
Absage einer Historikerkonferenz zur Armenierfrage Ende Mai in
Istanbul verwies. Das Treffen international angesehener türkischer
Wissenschaftler wurde durch den türkischen Justizminister kurzfristig
unterbunden. Von der Regierungsmeinung abweichende Positionen wurden
als “Dolchstoß in den Rücken der türkischen Nation” diffamiert.

Meckel sagte, es gehe nicht darum, die Türken an den Pranger zu
stellen. Es gebe auch positive Anzeichen. In Berlin hat sich für
Sonntag allerdings schon eine Protestkundgebung “gegen
Geschichtsverfälschung und einseitige Meinungsmache” angesagt. Die
Türkische Gemeinde zu Berlin (TGB) erwartet Tausende Mitstreiter aus
90 Vereinen. “Es gibt bundesweit Unruhe”, sagte ihr Vorsitzender
Taciddin Yatkin der FTD.

Zitat:

“Wir nehmen den Antrag mit Bedauern zur Kenntnis und verurteilen ihn
aufs Schärfste” – Türkisches Außenministerium

Bild(er):

Wütende Proteste: Armenier verbrannten am Mittwoch in Beirut zum
Staatsbesuch von Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan eine türkische Flagge –
AP/Hussein Malla

GRAFIK: Wütende Proteste: Armenier verbrannten am Mittwoch in Beirut
zum Staatsbesuch von Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan eine türkische
Flagge

–Boundary_(ID_n9tfEiY8dWESQHXQYJoDAg)–

AZG Armenian Daily #111, 17/06/2005

Diaspora

‘UGLY PROTEST RALLY AGAINST PM ERDOGAN IN BEIRUT’

On June 15, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan left for
Beirut on a two-day visit. As an honored guest, he took part in the
Arab Economic Forum. The visit, being fist any prime minister of
Turkey ever paid, stood out for the warmth of Lebanese authorities.

But the Armenian Revolutionary Federation of Lebanon did not display
the same warm feelings towards PM Erdogan and, according to Turkish
press, demanded the Lebanese government to consider the parliament’s
resolution condemning Armenian Genocide while rubbing shoulders with
Turkey. The protest rally followed the next day.

On June 16, Milliyet wrote in an article titled “Armenians of
Lebanon Hold ‘Ugly’ Protest Against Erdogan”, informing that the
rally organized by the ARF was held at Beirut’s Burj Hamud Armenian
borough bringing in 1.500 participants with posters insulting Erdogan
and burning Turkish flag.

The protest is somewhat explicable and the appeal to the Lebanese
government can be acceptable but the protest rally should be rejected
and the organizers have to realize that their deeds could result
in unexpected developments for Lebanon. To make such a demand to
the Lebanese government, is to play down the issue of the Armenian
Genocide. As regards the insults to PM Erdogan, they will simple stir
up anti-Armenian actions in Turkey’s nationalistic circles.

By Hakob Chakrian

DEVELOPMENT OF ARMENIAN -RUSSIAN COOPERATION FOSTERED BY MUTUALLY
ADVANTAGEOUS COOPERATION BETWEEN THE GOVERNMENTS OF THE TWO STATES

YEREVAN, June 16. /ARKA/. Development of Armenian -Russian
cooperation is fostered by mutually advantageous cooperation between
the governments of the two states, as well as the municipalities
of Yerevan and Moscow. According to RA Government’s Press Service
Department, RA Prime Minister Andranik Margaryan told about it during
the meeting with the Vice-Mayor of Moscow Vladimir Resin. According
to him, the cooperation is concordant with the logic of development
of immediate relations between separate administrative subjects and
stimulation of trade-economic relations. The Premier expressed his
gratitude to Resin for his input in further development of mutually
advantageous cooperation between the municipalities of RF and RA.

In his turn Resin noted that 17 years later after the earthquake in
1988 he was impressed by the changes in the country, especially in
the zone of disaster. According to him, being a constructor, he highly
appreciates the quality of the construction in Armenia. Resin attached
importance to the construction of a House of Moscow in Yerevan and
a House of Yerevan in Moscow.

The sides mentioned unutilized potential of bilateral relations, and
exchanged opinions about activation of Moscow business circles in the
economy of Armenia, attraction of additional investments. The sides
noted that Days of Armenia in Russia and Days of Russia in Armenia
facilitate the development of bilateral relations. A.H. -0–

7DAYS, United Arab Emirates
June 13 2005

Manure mission: the dung thing
Written by 7DAYS | Tuesday, 14 June 2005

Zhuzhuna Didebashvili is dreaming about warmth, hot tea, cheap power
and most specifically about cow dung. The 46-year-old farmer from the
tiny mountain village of Akhaldaba thinks cows could be the secure
energy source that will protect Georgians from the whims of the
global gas market.

“Every morning, before I go to work on my farm, I boil tea or milk on
this gas stove, and it all comes from the cows I keep,” she said,
pointing to a pipe connecting her stove to an underground tank where
she dumps her cow dung. By vigorously churning the tank every day,
she helps the noxious mixture rot and produce the methane that heats
her tea.

The gas helps to keep her immune from the energy shortages that have
plagued the small Caucasus nation since the end of the Soviet Union,
when Georgia was left without the capacity to supply itself with
power. Most Georgians cannot afford to supplement their energy supply
with expensive power imports from Russia and Armenia.

Didebashvili’s 62-year-old neighbour Elisabed has only three cows
but, enthused by her neighbour’s example, built herself a stove that
now helps her keep up her supply of jam. Only around 140 Georgian
households use cow-powered stoves. But for those families it has been
a major innovation that makes gas cooking easy in places too remote
for a steady supply.

Nine households in Akhaldaba – a village 25 km (16 miles) from the
capital Tbilisi where the power station was long ago looted in the
post-Soviet chaos – get gas from their cows. The others have to
depend on firewood for cooking and heat. “In the past I needed two
trucks of firewood for heating and cooking, now I need only one
truck,” Elisabed said.

Didebashvili dreams of owning enough cows to power a generator, but
appreciates this might be a long way off. “This is only a dream. In
order to get electricity, perhaps I would need a hundred cows, I
would have to become a true farmer,” she said.

For her gas she can thank Avtandil Bitsadze, an engineer who lost his
job in a factory with the economic collapse that followed the fall of
the Soviet Union and invented the stoves as a way around the
country’s periodic energy crises.

He has even won World Bank support for his plants, which cost about
$2,000 to construct. “I built the first power plants in 1994. Demand
for such plants emerged in Western Georgia, where peasants keep more
cows than in the east,” Bitsadze said, saying he took the idea from
similar plants in Britain and China.

“I didn’t invent this device, I just adapted it for the cooler
Georgian climate,” Bitsadze said. His plants can be extended to allow
farmers to heat their houses, although that would require at least
15-20 cows. “This is very a easy way to get energy. Gas can be
produced from anything that rots, but this gas is much purer than
natural gas, for example, from Azerbaijan,” Bitsadze said.

Georgia’s Ministry of Agriculture plans to finance a mere 65 more
such power plants, which will displace only a tiny fraction of the
1.2 billion cubic metres of natural gas Georgia imports from Russia
each year. But Bitsadze is thinking big. “If 240,000 families in
Georgia decide to build my plants, the country will be able to get an
extra 200 million cubic metres of gas a year,” he said.

Reuters
June 13 2005

1936 book on ‘Cinderella Man’ Braddock scores hit
Mon Jun 13, 2005 11:56 AM ET

By Philip Barbara

CLIFFSIDE PARK, N.J. (Reuters) – Sportswriter Lud Shabazian, who
covered the “Cinderella Man” James J. Braddock’s boxing career from
his first fight in 1923 to his crowning victory over Max Baer in 1935,
told this story years later:

In the steaming, cluttered attic of his New Jersey home, he struggled
to write Braddock’s biography, the words giving him fits. Energy
drained from his body and sweat dripped from his chin, soaking his
clothes until, he said, perspiration puddled to his knees.

A storyteller’s poetic license, for sure. But Shabazian identified
with Braddock’s hard-knock rise to the world heavyweight title. The
stifling attic became Shabazian’s ring, an empty page the blank stare
of an opponent, as he slugged it out toe-to-toe with a typewriter.

When Shabazian’s book “Relief to Royalty” was published in 1936 by
his newspaper, the Hudson Dispatch, it wasn’t formally distributed for
retail sale. Instead, the author and the champ gave it to family and
friends. Often they sat together at charity events co-signing copies,
not asking for the $1.25 cover price in those can’t-spare-a-dime days.

With a forward by famed writer Damon Runyon, the book has been
rediscovered as the foremost original source for anyone wanting
an insider’s glimpse into Braddock’s career and the glory days of
prizefighting. It is also legendary among collectors of rare boxing
books — hard to find and harder to afford at $1,500 a copy.

“I can’t overstate the value of ‘Relief to Royalty.’ I don’t know how
I would have written ‘Cinderella Man’ without it,” Jeremy Schaap,
author of a riveting new biography of that name, told Reuters. “By
reading Lud, I got an excellent sense of the most important moments
in Braddock’s life and career.”

Schaap’s biography and the new eponymous Russell Crowe movie
“Cinderella Man” are part of a burst of interest in the Depression-era
saga, which includes at least three other books and several articles.

PROMISING PRIZEFIGHTER

In 1929, Braddock was a promising New Jersey prizefighter with $20,000
in the bank. But his fortunes spiraled downward when the bank failed
and he suffered a demoralizing loss to light-heavyweight world champ
Tommy Loughran.

With boxing his only trade, Braddock kept fighting despite a
chronically broken right hand, and his defeats mounted.

Married, with three young children to feed, and seen by fight
matchmakers as a has-been, he was forced by 1933 to hustle a living
as a laborer, often walking 16 km a day searching for work along the
New Jersey docks.

When the gas and electricity to his basement apartment were shut off in
the terrible winter of 1934, he turned to the county relief. “I didn’t
mind being hungry, but the kids needed to eat,” he would later say.
Using his left hand to unload cargo allowed his right to heal, and he
was hardened by suffering. After manager Joe Gould got him a fight
with just two days’ notice, in June 1934, he flattened the touted
“Corn” Griffin.

Subsequent victories lifted him into contention for the heavyweight
title, and on June 13, 1935, he took the crown from the enigmatic Baer,
for heavyweight boxing’s greatest upset.

Braddock became an overnight sensation. He was, as Runyon said,
the Cinderella Man.

FOLLOWING HIS CAREER

Shabazian, who at age 20 had become sports editor of the Dispatch,
in Union City, New Jersey, had been following Braddock since his
first amateur fight in 1923.

He saw Braddock soar to amateur boxing heights and smash his way to
contention. When Braddock began slipping, he urged the fighter on
in his columns. When everyone said Baer would annihilate Braddock,
Shabazian, who signed his columns and cartoons simply “Lud,” for
Ludwig, clung to the New Jerseyan.

They became friends, making him a natural choice to write Braddock’s
“authorized” biography.

During the two years Braddock held the title — taken away by Joe
Louis in June 1937 — and in the decades that followed, Lud and
Braddock appeared at countless sports nights and charity events.

They were a contrasting pair: Braddock, the pale, rugged, 6-foot-3
(1.9-metre) Irish-American would bow but say few words as he was
introduced by Lud, a connoisseur at the microphone and 5-foot-6
(1.6-metre) Armenian-American, with dark hair that bristled like an
old brush.

“My granddad and Lud were very tight,” said Jay Braddock, the champ’s
grandson. “We considered Lud part of the family.”

HOLLYWOOD INTEREST

Jay Braddock said Cliff Hollingsworth, who brought the story idea
to Hollywood, relied on family material and did not read “Relief to
Royalty.” Yet during filming in Toronto, director Ron Howard’s staff
called the Jersey City Library repeatedly asking whether Braddock
had a crest on his robe, said Charles Markey, a library staff member.

Markey and others turned to Lud’s book and Dispatch columns. The
answer: Braddock didn’t have a crest on his robe, but did wear a
shamrock on his trunks.

Kevin Johnson, of Royal Books in Baltimore, found a copy of “Relief
to Royalty” this winter after hunting for five years.

With a dust jacket it’s worth $1,500, and $700 without one. With
a jacket and the signatures it would fetch a considerable premium,
Johnson said.

About 2,500 copies were published, hundreds of which were donated
by Lud to the USO during World War Two for soldiers’ recreation,
according to Lud’s son, Bob Shabazian.

Braddock died on Nov. 30, 1974, after which the biography was
serialized in the Dispatch. Lud, by then sports editor for five
decades, spoke about Braddock wistfully to his staff, including this
reporter, and described his struggle to write the book. He died in
July 1990.

“Keep punchin,” was his advice to young writers.

A photo taken just after the Baer fight illustrates Lud’s and
Braddock’s friendship. The fighter is hugging Lud with one arm as a
ring official holds up the other to introduce the new world champion.

Lebanese interior minister announces official third round elections results

Tele-Liban TV, Beirut
13 Jun 05

Lebanese Tele-Liban TV at 1205 gmt on 13 June began to carry live
from the Lebanese Interior Ministry in Beirut a news conference by
Lebanese Interior Minister Hasan al-Sab’a on the “official results”
of the third round of the Lebanese parliamentary elections.

During the news conference, the minister read the official results
of the elections, including names of winners and losers and how many
votes they won.

He spoke first about the first constituency of Mount Lebanon, which
includes Jubayl and Kasrawan and in which the total seats were eight
and the number of candidates was 59.

He said that in Jubayl, one seat for the Shi’is was won by Abbas
Husayn Hashim, who won 62,294 votes.

The two Maronite seats in Jubayl were won by:

Walid Najib al-Khuri, with 56,840 votes; and

Shamil Yusuf Muzaya, 51,678 votes.

In Kasrawan, the winners of the five Maronite seats were:

Michel Na’im Awn, 67,432 votes;

Joseph Hanna Khalil, 61,840 votes;

Ni’matallah Faris Abi-Nasr, 59,738 votes;

Farid Ilyas al-Khazin, 56,719 votes; and

Gilbert Maurice Zuwayn, 52,376 votes.

In Al-Matn, the winners of the four Maronite seats were:

Ibrahim Yusuf Kan’an, with 56,840 votes;

Salim Emile Salhab, 54,776;

Nabil Sab Niqula, 48,872;

Pierre Amin al-Jumayyil, 29,421.

The Greek Catholic seat in Al-Matn went to Edgar Fu’ad Ma’luf, with
55,017 votes.

The two Greek Orthodox seats in Al-Matn were won by Ghassan Emile
Mukhaybir, with 56,906 votes; and Michel Ilyas al-Murr; with 48,662
votes.

The Armenian Orthodox seat in Al-Matn was won by Hagop Radonian,
with 53,272 votes.

The minister also read the results from the other constituencies.

At the beginning of the news conference the minister described how
the elections had proceeded. He said that the third round had been
different from the previous rounds in that there had been numerous
lists for movements, parties and figures active in political life. He
said that the number of contested seats in this round had totalled
58 and noted that there was an atmosphere of “enthusiasm and strong
competition among the candidates, leading to a significant rise in the
voter turnout, compared to previous rounds”. The electoral process,
he said, had proceeded “as planned” and in a “normal and democratic
atmosphere”. He said that had nothing disturbed this process due to
the security measures taken by the Interior Ministry and the Lebanese
army. He noted some “limited problems” that had been tackled by the
security forces. He said that the Complaints Committee had received
several complaints about some people “bribing” voters in various
areas, saying that the Interior Ministry had ordered the security
forces to investigate these complaints immediately and adopt legal
action against the perpetrators.

The minister added that all measures would be taken to ensure the
success of the fourth and last round of the elections in the north.

At 1236 gmt, the minister began to take questions from reporters. The
news conference ended at 1245 gmt.

No need for further evidence

Editorial

Yerkir/arm
10 June 05

The Middle East Studies Union, a research organization, has recently
addressed a letter to the Turkish Prime-Minister Erdogan voicing its
protest against postponing the conference on the Armenian Question
that was planned to be held at Bosporus University of Istanbul.

The letter was signed by 2600 academics who voiced their concern with
the Turkish government’s position against discussion of the Armenian
Genocide. The letter noted that the banning of the conference violates
the rights of the Turkish academics that were supposed to participate
in the conference. The letter further stated that the conference was
organized in accordance with the Turkish laws.

The American academics severely criticized the Turkish Justice Minister
Jemil Cicek for accusing the conference organizers of treason. Noting
that Turkey is a member of the Council of Europe and has signed
the European Convention on Human Rights, they called for Erdogan to
undertake measures to hold the conference on the Armenian Genocide
as soon as possible.

The American academics appealed to Erdogan not to enact article 305
of Turkey’s new criminal code that limits academic liberties. How can
the highly distinguished academics hope that Turkey will eliminate
the criminal code article that limits the academic liberties? In
Turkey, not only the academics but also anyone who dares to express
any opinions on the Armenian Genocide that would diverge from Turkey’s
official position will immediately be arrested.

The European political leaders that were expressing their admiration
and encouragement after the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s letter
addressed to the Armenian President Kocharian should think about
this incident.

They were calling for Armenia to respond constructively to Turkey’s
call for dialog. Meanwhile, the discussions of the Armenian President’s
reply resulted in adoption of the well-known article in the Turkish
criminal code. Turkey’s response was not addressed only to Armenia;
it was addressed to all those, including some Armenians, who believed
Turkey could become a part of the European civilization, those who
believed that Turkey’s membership in the EU is in Armenia’s interests
since Armenia in this way would border the EU.

By adopting this law, Turkey once again reminded everyone, including
the Armenians, what kind of a state it is. It reminded us what kind
of a state we are bordering and hinted us at the main principles that
should underlie our political position. The Turks themselves proved
the veracity of arguments that were raised in our press for months.
Now both the foreigners and some of our fellow-Armenians should accept
this evidence and learn a lesson from it.

OPENING OF TURKISH-ARMENIAN BORDER TO TAKE MUCH TIME

YEREVAN, JUNE 11. ARMINFO. Turkey is not considering the opening of
its border with Armenia for the time being. This is a long time
consuming process, Turkish MP from JUstice and Development Party
Turhan Cemez has told ARMINFO.

Concerning the possibility of Turkey accepting Armenia’s proposal for
setting up an Armenian-Turkish inter-governmental commission Cemez
says that this is an academical rather than political issue. Turkey
wants peace in the Caucasus while its bad relations with Armenia are
having a negative impact on the situation in the region.

Cemez says that the absurd allegations by some Turkish scientists
that the Armenian minority in Turkey has committed a genocide against
Turks are one more evidence that this issue needs thorough
examination by historians.

Asked about Turkey’s pressuring the countries recognizing the
Armenian Genocide Cemez says that Turkey does need to pressure other
countries in their decision making.

Summing up his visit to Armenia Cemez says that his meetings in
Yerevan and particularly in the Armenian Parliament were friendly and
his Armenian colleagues were glad to welcome him on the Armenian
land.

San Francisco Chronicle
June 10 2005

Memoir traces path to communism
Rick DelVecchio, Chronicle Staff Writer

Bob Avakian has devoted his life to the one ideology that he believes
holds the promise of massively releasing human freedom and dignity.
The ideology is communism.

Berkeley-bred Avakian’s new memoir, “From Ike to Mao and Beyond”
($18.95; Insight Press), leaves a breathtaking impression. Having
deepened and purified his convictions over 40 years of personal and
political struggle, Avakian sounds a high, sustained cry for complete
social transformation almost as if he were the trumpet of Lenin
himself.

It’s as if democratic capitalism’s triumph in the 20th century was
history’s biggest mistake, a tragic wrong turn from the revolutionary
road marked out by Lenin in the Russia of 1917 after the writings of
Marx and by Mao in the China of the 1950s and ’60s.

Avakian, 62, a veteran of the Free Speech Movement and other
upheavals of the Bay Area in the 1960s, makes an unqualified case for
Marxism-Leninism as a fertile thought system that’s as alive now as
it was when the two revolutionary masterminds created it to answer
what they saw as capitalism’s fundamental inhumanity.

Although Avakian is a devotee of Marx and Lenin, he’s also respected
in revolutionary circles for his ground-breaking criticism of
communist methods.

“Marxism is not a scripture, it’s not a religious dogma,” Avakian
writes. “It’s a scientific approach to reality.”

New York’s Insight Press premiered Avakian’s paperback in Berkeley
last month. A diverse host committee made up of people who welcome
Avakian as an alternative voice presented the work and will present
it again in San Francisco tonight. Although the author has elected
not to appear, give press interviews or even disclose where he lives,
his representatives say he wants the book to contribute to a renewed
dialogue about Marxism and political theory in general.

“I think that Bob Avakian has taken the whole idea and conception of
communism to another level — he’s revived the communist project, if
you will, going beyond Marx, Lenin and Mao in some really important
ways,” said Lenny Wolff, who wrote the memoir’s introduction.

Avakian’s representatives said the author is eager to have his views
more widely discussed but wants to stay out of sight because he fears
government harassment. He fled America in 1981 amid what he describes
in the book as a suffocating climate of intolerance.

The first half of the book traces Avakian’s four-square upbringing
and swift political development from pre-adolescence. The second half
shows him reclaiming Leninism as he turns aside the conservatism of
the old-line Communist Party, the pragmatism of trade unionism, the
revolutionary exhaustion of the Black Panthers after their prime and
the anti-leadership tendencies of the New Left.

Following what he is convinced is the correct line, he joins with two
fellow Bay Area radicals to form the Revolutionary Union in the late
’60s. He expands the organization nationally in 1970 in a bid to
create a vanguard for a renewed communist movement.

But America in the ’70s goes right instead of left and, in 1980,
Ronald Reagan is elected president. Under surveillance for his
political activities and grieving a fellow revolutionary’s slaying in
Chicago, Avakian goes into exile in France and assumes the
chairmanship of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, a Maoist group
intent on radical social transformation in “the colossus of late
imperial America.”

Today, Avakian remains party chairman and is perhaps best known as a
prolific, uncompromising contributor to the Revolutionary Worker
newspaper. The grandchild of Armenian immigrants who settled in
Fresno to farm, Avakian enjoyed a warm and familial childhood. His
mother taught him compassion and sacrifice. The late Alameda County
Superior Court judge Spurgeon Avakian, who was changed by his
experiences of discrimination as a person of Armenian descent, showed
his son about fighting injustice.

Young Avakian’s religious beliefs and patriotism were deeply felt. He
tells of saying the Pledge of Allegiance as a 9- or 10-year-old and
wanting to fall to his knees in gratitude for “not living in one of
those awful countries that so many people seem to have had the
misfortune of being born in.” Sticking with Eisenhower even though
his parents went over to Adlai Stevenson, he was absorbed in TV
coverage of the 1952 Republican presidential convention.

But devotion to mainstream values gave way to skepticism. A milestone
on the way to Avakian’s transformation to radicalism was discovering
that President Kennedy lied when he used the U.N. Charter to justify
a naval blockade in response to the presence of Soviet missiles in
Cuba in 1962. At first drawn to the Panthers and other radical groups
at the time, Avakian turned to communism under the tutelage of a
disaffected old-line Communist Party member. He took the revolution
to Richmond, organizing workers and poor people — the proletariat —
against the bourgeoisie. He read to them from a popular book about
village life in China before Mao’s revolution.

He went to China in 1971 and was awed by Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
“We saw truly wondrous things,” he writes. He came home convinced
that revolutionary change could take place in American society as a
scientific process.

In the book, Avakian is at his most provocative when he assesses
Stalin and Mao. He applauds Stalin for leading the first historical
experience in building socialism, the Soviet Union, under difficult
circumstances. Although he refers to Stalin’s mistakes, he makes no
mention of the millions who died under the Soviet dictatorship and
insists upon a balanced view.

“If the bourgeoisie and its political representatives can uphold
people like Madison and Jefferson,” he writes, “then the proletariat
and its vanguard forces can and should uphold Stalin, in an overall
sense and with historical perspective.”

—————————————————————-
Book reading
Authors, actors and community leaders will read from Bob Avakian’s
memoir, “From Ike to Mao and Beyond,” on these dates in San
Francisco:

7 p.m. today at Valencia Street Books, 569 Valencia, (415) 552-7200.

7 p.m. June 20 at the Canvas Cafe, 1200 9th Ave. (at Lincoln), (415)
504- 0060.

The book is available at independent bookstores and through the
publisher, Insight Press,

Interfax
June 10 2005

Deputy says Turkey wants normal relations with Armenia

YEREVAN. June 10 (Interfax) – Turkey wants normal relations with
Armenia, Turkish parliamentary deputy Turhan Comez, who had come for
a private visit to Yerevan on an unofficial invitation, said on
Friday.

Comez, who was speaking at a meeting with students and lecturers at
Yerevan State University, insisted that as a first step, the two
countries should stop setting conditions for establishing relations.