Author: Frangulian Shushan

Assa-Irada, Azerbaijan
Jan 28 2005

PACE to mull execution of its resolution on Garabagh

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Political
Committee will mull the mechanism for executing its January 25
resolution on Upper Garabagh on Friday.
The PACE rapporteur on the Garabagh conflict David Atkinson says the
Committee should request Azerbaijan to start negotiating with the
communities of Upper Garabagh. He said that since the PACE resolution
was passed, Baku will now intensify its relations with these
communities and that relevant meetings may be held in Strasbourg.
The rapporteur said he was not aware of any dates of such meetings
but pointed out that the dialogue should begin with no
pre-conditions.*

Assyrian International News Agency
Guest Editorial
Misinformation From a Finnish Immigration Official
Dr. Eden Naby
Posted 01-28-2005, 13:01:32

(AINA) — A member of the Finnish Directorate of Immigration, Antero
Leitzinger published an article called Kurds and the Kurdistans, which
appeared on 1/23/05 at GlobalPolitician.com. The article appeared so
outrageous to a Kurdish supporter that this person called it to the
attention of Dr. Eden Naby, Academic Advisor to the Assyrian Academic
Society. The article below is Dr. Naby’s editorial for AINA
critiquing the misinformation that the author has knowingly or
unwittingly passed into the public domain about Assyrians (ed.).

I am truly appalled at the shallowness of the analysis, lack of
comparative data, and simple (mischievous?) twisting of facts in the
article on Kurds and the Kurdistans, which appeared on 1/23/05 by
Antero Leitzinger at GlobalPolitician.com. In the age of the Internet,
thankfully, one cannot get away with such low quality work. Facts are
easy to check, and propaganda cannot so easily pass for expert
knowledge.

Not only does this author persist on weighing “oranges” against
“apples” and coming up with useless analogies (Scandinavians, divided
into several countries, cannot be equated with Kurds, nor can Turks be
equated with the distant Uighurs of Central Asia, whatever the
language affinities may be), but he treats lightly areas of cultural
history that are very complex

But this is not his most egregious mistake. No, in his references to
Assyrians your editors should not have let pass the absolute
historical and linguistic misinformation being passed along by Kurdish
extremists to unsuspecting western sources: Can Global Politician
maintain its integrity if it presents such appallingly unbalanced
material?

Assyrians have never been “Kurds.” Nor are Jews who lived in northern
Iraq “Kurds.” From reliable Israeli accounts, there are no more than
100 Jews left in all of Iraq, and most of those are in Baghdad and
Basra. The Jewish religious and cultural facilities in places like
Mosul and especially the large village of Alqosh on the Nineveh Plain
have been looked after by the local ChaldoAssyrians once the Jews
finally got permission to flee to Israel after 1949. Assyrians and
Jews in Iraq, because they shared religious status as dhimmis – barely
tolerated non-Muslims – and a common Aramaic speaking heritage,
maintained a close relationship. One of the earliest books published
about Jews in Iraq is by an Assyrian (Ghanima, 1927).

Whatever the new strategic relationship between Iraq’s Kurds and the
Israelis and Americans may be, let us not gloss over the fact that
most Jews living in northern Iraq are today in Israel or somewhere out
of Iraq. Just because they spoke Kurdish does not mean that they were
Kurds. Many minorities speak multiple languages of necessity, even as
a mother language, of necessity. Look at the Uzbek elites or the
Kazakhs who still are more comfortable in Russian than in their own
written languages. Imagine the situation in northern Iraq where Jews
and Assyrians spoke modern forms of Aramaic but of necessity also
communicated in Kurdish, Arabic and in some cases Turkish and
Persian. That is the state of minorities. It is an injustice to parlay
multilingualism into Kurdish ethnicity and deny the existence of
special ethnic minorities who already suffer enough physically and
culturally.

In terms of religion therefore, Kurds do not include many religions.
Absolutely not. They are Muslims of several stripes. Assyrians are
Christians separated into several denominations. The language of
Assyrian church liturgy is Syriac, and sometimes the modern Aramaic
vernacular. If in some churches the knowledge of Aramaic has decreased
due to its suppression in schools, and Arabic, Turkish and even
Kurdish are adopted to carry on the Christian tradition, this does not
make these people Kurds. Aramaic is the oldest continuously written
and spoken language of the Middle East and second only to Chinese in
the entire world. It is on the verge of joining the dead languages of
the world like Latin precisely because of the kinds of persecution
that Christians in parts of the Muslim world have experienced.

In Iraq, northwest Iran and in eastern Turkey, the biggest direct
physical pressure on the Assyrians came from the Kurds, historically
and today. Antero Leitzinger should have reflected a bit more, and
read a great deal more about the First World War in the Middle East
before repeating Kurdish propaganda about who persecuted whom. Written
records alone, of Kurdish attacks on Assyrian villages, go back to the
mid-19th century. They culminated in World War I when Kurds
persistently attacked Urmiyah at a time when the Iranian government
was too weak (caught up in the Constitutional Revolution) to resist
either the Tsarist or Ottoman armies. Kurds took advantage of this
weakness to kill off Assyrians and Armenians in persistent pulses
sweeping down from the Zagros foothills onto the plains of Urmiyah. In
1914, just as the Ottomans joined the Central Powers, their Kurdish
allies launched an attack on Margawar and Targawar, killing all who
could not flee east to relative shelter. In 1915 when the Committee
of Union and Progress (CUP) launched its jihad in earnest against the
Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks, driving who they could not
kill into the Syrian desert, due to the Kurdish Hamidiya paramilitary
units, very few, less than 50,000 Assyrians managed to reach Urmiyah
since the mountain passes were held by Kurds who had taken over
Margawar and Targawar already. The events of WWI culminated in the
assassination of the Kurdish Shakkak tribe’s honored dinner guest, the
Assyrian Patriarch, titled Mar Shim’un at that time, in 1918; about
130 of Mar Shim’un’s bodyguards were also murdered. Some allege the
after dinner assassination took place because the Kurdish chieftain
Isma’el Agha (Simku) coveted this Assyrian leader’s ring. (Anzali,
1999)

Kurds have also coveted Assyrian and Armenian women, and being in a
more religiously powerful position as Muslims, they have taken these
women and girls as household servants or second wives with little that
their Christian neighbors could do to prevent it, although trying to
get the women back periodically occurred and as late as the 1960s got
whole Christian villages destroyed (August Thiery, 2003). The
offspring of such forced unions may be partly Assyrian, but ethnically
and culturally they grew up Kurds. And Muslims. Forget racial purity
in that part of the Middle East: what matters for identity is
language, religion and heritage.

Due to the polygamous marriages so popular among peasant and
non-peasant Kurds, the rate of population increase among Kurds is one
of the highest in the world although population figures are
notoriously unreliable and we only have the sample Soviet censuses to
provide some evidence. One recent New Yorker article (October 2004)
noted that among the Kurds moving into Kirkuk was a man with two wives
and 21 children! He was interviewed at random. The upshot of all this
is that the villages in Iran identified as Assyrian in 1927 were
reduced drastically in number by the time of the official Iranian
census published in the early 1950s (Razmara). And take a guess as to
who had replaced the Assyrian Christians in and around Urmiyah? Mainly
Kurds, not Azaris. Maybe Antero Leitzinger should have read a little
more about why the Mahabad Republic was located where it was in WWII,
instead of simply wondering why it was not in “Kordestan.”

The same displacement process occurred in southeast Turkey, in
northeast Syria and now with help from misinformation like that
provided in Global Politician, on the Nineveh Plains in northern
Iraq. These replacements are genuine Kurds, not of the variety your
author is presenting as “Christian Kurds” and “Jewish Kurds.”

These ethnic and religious matters in the Middle East are not
simple. To try to deal with them from a biased perspective, or to
create untenable analogies, only leads to disastrously tragic policy
decisions. Global political astuteness requires far greater diligence
and care.

Ethnic cleansing is no joking matter. Careless words can wipe out the
Assyrians, one of the oldest surviving communities in the world. The
culture of the Assyrians of the Middle East is precious in all the
senses of that word: it is old, rich, increasingly fragile, and has
made many contributions to world culture from medicine (Le Coz, 2004)
to agriculture (Abdalla 1980s, 1990s articles) and all the fields of
human knowledge between them. To relegate the Assyrians to a branch of
Kurds, who, for whatever reason, have a low prestige culture and
little written history, is a cultural crime. At the least your author
and you [globalpolitician.com] need to make a retraction.

—
Dr. Eden Naby is a cultural historian on the modern Middle East with a
concentration on the area from Iraq to Central Asia. She has published
extensively on Assyrians, as well as the Afghans, Turkmens, Uighurs
and Kurds. Dr. Nab y’s book Afghanistan: Mullah, Marx And Mujahid
(Westview Press, rpt. 2002), co-authored with the Prof. Ralph
H. Magnus, is a seminal source on modern Afghanistan and particularly
useful for its analysis of that country’s ethnic and religious
minorities. Her most recent writing about Assyrians is From Lingua
Franca to Endangered Language: The Legal Aspects of the Preservation
of Aramaic in Iraq, a paper in On The Margins Of Nations: Endangered
Languages And Language Rights (Joan A. Argenter and R. McKenna Brown,
ed., 2004).

Views and opinions expressed in guest editorials do not necessarily
reflect the views and opinions of AINA. Guest Editorial Policy

Copyright (C) 2005, Assyrian International News Agency. All Rights
Reserved.

Agence France Presse
27 janvier 2005 jeudi 6:13 PM GMT

L’Italie aidera l’Arménie à se rapprocher de l’Europe (Ciampi)
ROME

L’Italie appuiera l’Arménie dans son rapprochement de l’Union
européenne, a déclaré jeudi le président italien, Carlo Azeglio
Ciampi, en recevant son homologue arménien, Robert Kotcharian.

M. Ciampi a invité son hôte, en visite officielle pour la première
fois à Rome, à “consolider” les fondements de l’économie de marché et
à poursuivre “avec ténacité” sur la voie des réformes.

Le chef d’Etat italien a souligné que “l’Union européenne tire sa
force du fait qu’elle a surmonté les divisions du passé et de sa
vocation à construire un avenir commun entre des peuples qui
partagent la même histoire, la même culture et qui poursuivent des
intérêts communs”.

M. Kotcharian a répondu que l’aide de l’Italie serait précieuse et
tout en jugeant les rapports bilatéraux très bons, il a espéré encore
un développement des relations économiques.

Boston Globe, MA
Jan 25 2005

Never again
By James Carroll | January 25, 2005

THIS WEEK marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
When news eventually came to America of what the Red Army found at
that death camp in January 1945, the report was remarkably detailed.

The headline of a first New York Times story about Auschwitz, filed
from Moscow on May 8, 1945, read, “Oswiecim Killings Placed at
4,000,000.” This number overstated by a factor of two the total of
those murdered at Auschwitz, yet the account seemed closely observed
in most other respects. The remains of the victims were described —
the charnel pits and piles of ashes, the corpses. The mechanized
death process was explained, with a careful description of the gas
chambers, down, even, to the name of the manufacturer of the
crematoria — Topf and Son. The identities of the victims were given
as “more than 4,000,000 citizens” of a list of European nations —
Poland, Hungary, Netherlands, France. But what is most remarkable
about the Times story — apart from the fact that it was buried on
page 12 — is that in defining the identities of those victims, the
story never used the word “Jew.”

Many non-Jewish Poles were murdered at Auschwitz, but the vast
majority of the dead were Jews — killed for being Jewish. Indeed, of
all the death camps, Auschwitz was most expressly commissioned to
murder of Jews. Yet the New York Times reporter apparently saw
nothing untoward in passing along a Soviet report that made no
mention of Jews at Auschwitz. The murdered were Dutch, or French.
They were men, women and children. They were old. They were Italian.
Nothing about their being Jewish, which for the Nazis was the only
thing that counted. The Times reporter was C. L. Sulzberger.

My attention was drawn to this story by a study of Holocaust news
coverage I conducted at the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center for
Press, Politics and Public Policy. I discovered that after World War
II the broader world was shockingly slow in acknowledging the most
distinctive feature of the Nazi death-camp system — that, whoever
its other victims were, it was created expressly to eliminate the
Jewish people.

Yet in the war’s immediate aftermath, little attention was drawn to
the fate of the millions of Jews who died in those camps. The
desperate people released from those hell holes after liberation,
like those who had already been murdered, were routinely referred to
in governmental and journalistic reports as “resisters,” “prisoners,”
“interned civilians,” “displaced persons,” and so on.

The New York Times index did not cite stories about concentration
camps under the category “Jews” until 1950. It was not until 1975
that the index category “Nazi Policies Toward Jews” appeared.

Western culture came very slowly — and reluctantly — to a full
reckoning with what the Nazis set out to do in the heart of Europe.
The work of writers (Elie Wiesel, of course, but also the likes of
Primo Levi and Cynthia Ozick); teaching by educators (for example,
Facing History and Ourselves); the demands of heirs (challenges to
Swiss banks and art museums); the movement to establish Holocaust
museums and memorials; the recognitions tied to anniversaries,
especially as witnessing survivors aged and began to die — all of
this has helped to lay bare what makes the Nazi crime against the
Jews a matter of acute moral concern for the civilization out of
which it grew.

The Master Race ideology depended on contempt for various racial and
ethnic groups, including Slavs to the east of Germany and
Mediterranean peoples to the south. But Hitler’s anti-Jewish agenda
was unlike the impulses behind his other crimes, or other horrors of
history. To insist on this is not to engage in the competition of
victim groups, or the pointless setting of genocides against each
other, as if Polish, Armenian, or Cambodian suffering weighs less
than Jewish suffering.

What gives the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz its special
gravity is that this crime, while committed by Nazis — and the
particular guilt of the perpetrators must always be insisted upon —
could not have occurred but for the religiously and culturally
justified anti-Semitism that both spawned the crime and then enabled
it nearly to succeed. Therefore, the word “Auschwitz” stands now not
merely as a marker of the evil that gripped Germany for a time, but
also as an ongoing challenge to the conscience of the broader culture
whose, yes, complicity was hinted at in the way it at first deflected
the most important thing about the horror that had unfolded there.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

IRNA, Iran
January 24, 2005 Monday

Iranian, Azeri presidents talk to reporters

Tehran, January 24

Immediately after the formal ceremony to welcome Azeri President
Ilham Aliyev, Iranian and Azeri presidents talked to reporters
calling for expanding Tehran-Baku relations.

President Mohammad Khatami accompanying President Ilham Aliyev told
reporters at Saadabad that Iran is keen on further development of
relations with Azerbaijan Republic.

Responding to an Azeri reporter about what Iran will do to help
resolve Karabakh crisis, President Khatami said that Iran is among
the few countries which supports Azerbaijani national sovereignty and
territorial integrity.

“Iran believes that Karabakh crisis would be resolved through logic
and understanding between the two parties without resorting to
force.”

“I believe that Karabakh conflict will be resolved if the two sides
seriously decided to do so,” President Khatami said.

He said that Iran has friendly relations with both Azerbaijan and
Armenia and is ready to mediate between them to help resolve the
crisis and hoped for immediate settlement of Karabakh conflict.

Another Azeri reporter asked Khatami whether there is similarity
between occupation of the Arab lands by the Zionist regime and
occupation of Karabakh by Armenia, the Iranian president said that
Iran condemns occupation and use of force being exercised by any
country.

“Of course, there is a difference.

I believe Israel has occupied the entire Palestine and has
established illegitimate existence, but, Armenia is a country itself
and at the same time occupation and seizure of an inch of the other`s
territory is condemned and the international community should help
end the occupation,” President Khatami said.

President Aliyev told reporters that his visit to Iran is aimed at
developing relations in all fields including the economy.

He pointed to the accords President Khatami has signed during his
visit to Baku and said Azerbaijan Republic calls for implementation
of these accords.

The Azeri president said that Tehran-Baku relations are developing
rapidly and political and economic cooperation is excellent.

“The exchange of visits by presidents of the two countries indicated
the extent of relations both countries enjoy,” President Aliyev said.

US ASSISTANT STATE SECRETARY REGRETS FOR HER STATEMENT ON KARABAKH:
ARMENIA’S FM

YEREVAN, JANUARY 22. ARMINFO. In a phone talk with Armenia’s Foreign
Minister Vardan Oskanyan US Assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth
Jones expressed regret that her statement received such a response in
Armenia. She said that she was not thinking and could not think of
Karabakh when mentioning criminal, separatist regimes in the territory
of the former Soviet republics.

In an interview to OTA Oskanyan says that this phone call can put an
end to the problem for despite the ambiguity of the statement there
could be not other outcome. The US’ involvement in the Karabakh peace
process, their previous statements, their consistency and awareness,
their annual target aid to Karabakh – all this implied that there was
some mistake. “I am glad and appreciate Ms Jones’ today’s call,” says
Oskanyan.

Oskanyan says that he was amazed by the reaction of the Armenian
public as “such deep charges must not be neglected.” The reaction was
to what was presented by the press. One could not draw other
conclusions from what was written as the statement was equivocal. The
equivocality of the statement and the fact that Karabakh was also
mentioned in such serious charges were enough for such public
response, says Oskanyan.-0

The New York Post
January 16, 2005 Sunday

HERE COMES THE NEW PETROSIAN

by Andy Soltis Chess Grandmaster

DO you believe in reincarnation? Play over this week’s game before
answering.

Yes, Black’s name is really Tigran Petrosian, the same as the ninth
world champion, and yes he is an Armenian grandmaster.

But this Petrosian was born just one month after his great
predecessor died of cancer in August 1984.

Both Tigrans showed remarkable talent before they were 16 – although
there’s a noticeable difference in their playing styles, as this
week’s game shows.

The “Iron Tigran” who became the world’s most cautious elite player
in the 1950s and ’60s would never have sacrificed a piece on the
fourth move, as Black did here. Nor would he have disdained a draw by
repetition at move 12 and chosen to launch a speculative attack with
his king sitting precariously at f6.

Tigran I might have grabbed material as Tigran II did, missing the
superior 20 . . . Ke7!. But he might have improved on the second
Tigran by finding the spectacular mate six moves later – 20 . . .
Bxg3+ 21 Kxg3 Qd3+ 22 Kh4 Qd8+! etc.

We’ll be sure to hear more about Tigran II, who eventually tied for
second in the World Junior, at the same age that Tigran I was making
his debut in the world’s strongest event, the Soviet Championship.

Now do you believe in reincarnation?

Armenian paper says US official’s remarks on Karabakh “ignorant and
offending”

Hayots Ashkarh, Yerevan
19 Jan 05

Text of unattributed report by Armenian newspaper Hayots Ashkarh on 19
January headlined “What has America gained and what has it lost?”

US Assistant State Secretary Elizabeth Jones’ latest statement
followed by groundless accusations against Nagornyy Karabakh and its
authorities cannot but cause bewilderment and even angry in our
society.

What is taking place? The United States, which proclaims itself to be
the fighter for freedom, democracy, human rights and other human
values, deeply insults the Nagornyy Karabakh Republic [NKR] describing
its authorities as unstable, corrupt and criminal separatists.

Undoubtedly, the USA and Russia, which are the ones responsible for
ensuring security in the world and in our region, can and are obliged
to discuss settlement of post-Soviet conflicts. But when a senior
official of the number one superpower of the world, being absolutely
misinformed, is playing with the most sacred purposes of the whole
people, it does not matter who speaks and why.

The allegations levelled against the NKR authorities are a hard blow
to Armenian-American relations for several reasons.

1. Who told Mrs Jones that Nagornyy Karabakh is an unstable country?
Can she point at any foreigner who has recently visited Karabakh and
gained such an impression in Karabakh? The answer is obvious: only
Azerbaijan’s official propaganda has been spreading this slander about
Nagornyy Karabakh. So, is this “the level of information awareness” of
the number one superpower? Or does it simply not care about any
information.

2. Who told the American lady that Karabakh is a corrupt country?
Maybe, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. [Passage omitted] What kind
of corruption is Karabakh accused of if its only large property is its
people’s and authorities’ pride in their liberty gained with blood and
democracy. Moreover, all influential world bodies regard Azerbaijan as
one of the most corrupt states.

3. And finally, according to what international norms the NKR
authorities are regarded as separatists and criminal, when everybody,
including the US authorities, knows that Nagornyy Karabakh has never
been within independent Azerbaijan.

And when has the USA become an advocate of one of dictator Stalin’s
crimes? It is known that unlike the Dniester, Abkhaz and South
Ossetian conflicts, the USA is a key member of the OSCE Minsk Group
set up to settle the Karabakh issue. Its top officials visited the NKR
many times, negotiated with the Karabakh authorities, described as
“criminal separatists” by Elizabeth Jones. Who does the US assistant
state secretary offend but top officials of her own country?

Nevertheless, let us try to understand what America has gained and
what it has lost because of such an ignorant and offending statement
of Elizabeth Jones? The USA has gained the great sympathy of the
dictator of unstable, very corrupt and extremely criminal Azerbaijan
and lost the sympathy of the stable, free and democratic Karabakh
people who love freedom.

The Toronto Star –
Jan. 17, 2005. 06:41 AM

A man of letters – and passion
Edited Armenian paper before moving to Canada
Architect also wrote book about William Saroyan

CATHERINE DUNPHY
OBITUARY WRITER

Two careers, two countries, one passion.

Call it pride, if you will, of place or of history but certainly of a
people. Bedros Zobyan was an architect and crusading newspaper editor
born and raised in the Turkish city of Istanbul who used both of his
careers to nurture and nudge his fellow Armenians closer to their
heritage and culture.

Five years ago, long after he and his wife and daughter had immigrated
in 1967 to live quietly in Don Mills, as well as after retiring from
the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce where he designed everything
from buildings to bank machines, Zobyan once again took up his pen.

He wrote a book about the three-week trip he took in May 1964 with
William Saroyan to find the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and
playwright’s Armenian ancestral home.

Towards Bitlis with William Saroyan was published by an Armenian
publisher in 2003. The cover features a photo of Saroyan sitting on a
rock in the rugged Anatolian countryside alongside a signpost stating:
Bitlis 10.

The pair went from Istanbul via Ankara to Samsun on the Black
Sea. They stopped at Lake of Van (considered to be as sacred a place
as Ararat to Armenians). Venturing into remote villages where
Armenians had lived before the genocide of 1915, they found Armenian
children being raised in primitive conditions by Turkish and Kurdish
families.

In Bitlis, Saroyan located the foundations of his family’s home, with
some help from villagers hoping this rich American was going to lead
them all straight to a hidden cache of gold. (He didn’t.)

Although Zobyan told his family that Saroyan took notes during their
trip, the author never directly wrote about it, although he did write
a play called The Istanbul Trilogy. Zobyan, however, wrote up a series
about the trip for his newspaper called: “60,000 Kilometres in 16 Days
with William Saroyan.”

For years people told him he should write a book based on those
articles. And when he finally did start writing, he became immersed in
the work.

“While he was working on the book, nothing else existed,” said his
wife, Seta.

It took three years. A perfectionist, he typed, copy-edited and
typeset the book, along with choosing and laying out the photos, then
sent it to the publisher in Istanbul. When the publisher sent back the
galleys, Zobyan proofed every comma.

“Every day I came home from school and my grandfather would be
typing. Every day,” said Amara Possian, 15. “My grandma too, both of
them always had red pens.”

American Armenians had arranged a special book launch for October 2003
in California, but Zobyan was too ill to attend. When he died at 82 of
pancreatic cancer this past December, he had received dozens of
letters from Armenians around the world thanking him for writing the
book.

It is considered much more than a travel book.

“It’s part of our history,” says his friend, Arta Yuzbasian, an
Armenian artist living in Toronto. “It was very well received within
the Armenian diaspora, especially in the U.S.”

A dignified and diffident man, Zobyan was well respected within the
Armenian community in Toronto.

“People looked up to him,” said Berc Luleciyan. a deacon at the Holy
Trinity Armenian Church, who attended high school with Zobyan in
Istanbul.

In 1958, Zobyan was commissioned by the patriarch of St. Gregory the
Illuminator Church to build a new church in the old authentic Armenian
style on the site in Istanbul of the old church that had been
expropriated to make way for a highway. He rescued and reincorporated
the ceramic tiles from the original chapel, marble stones, and reused
the carved stone cross belonging to the 500-year-old church.

It was – and continues to be – the only one of Istanbul’s 28 Armenian
churches that displays the austere, powerful lines and massive
stonework that marks Armenian church architecture. The church’s
Catholics wrote him commending his work.

“My father built the most important church in Istanbul,” said his
daughter, Hasmig Possian, 53.

But he was having more fun as a journalist working at the Marmara, a
daily started in 1940 by Seta Zobyan’s father, a well-known foreign
correspondent. The young couple took over the paper in 1950. One of
two Armenian dailies in Istanbul, it had a circulation of 5,000 but a
considerably larger reach in terms of influence.

Zobyan lobbied in its pages to save the church he would go on to
rebuild; his scoop on the guilty verdict of the court martial trials
of the Democratic Party president and its prime minister landed him in
prison for two days. Seta Zobyan pulled every string she had to get
her husband released.

“Without bribery he would have been in jail months and months,” she
said.

They lived a good life for a time, attending balls, receptions for
visiting royalty, the ballet and concerts. “I translated for Petula
Clark when she was getting a leather coat made,” his daughter
recalled. She also danced with Eric Burdon, lead singer of the
Animals, when she was 14 and her father took her on his press pass to
a club.

But after the military coup of 1960, many Armenians left Turkey,
including many of their families. In 1965 they sent their daughter to
Toronto, to St. Clements School, where they believed she would be safe
and get a better education.

Two years later, they immigrated, but it wasn’t until 1970 that they
sold the paper.

“That still hurts,” said Seta Zobyan.

Neither practised journalism in Canada: Bedros Zobyan went to work for
the large architectural firm of Page and Steele building the Commerce
Court towers, and Seta Zobyan found a job in market research. She now
works part-time as a court translator and interpreter.

In the 1970s they visited Saroyan at his home in Fresno, Calif. He had
two houses, one in which he lived and one in which he wrote. After
Saroyan died of cancer in 1981, his homes became the site of a museum
dedicated to his works and his Armenian heritage.

Zobyan made sure the museum received copies of his book; he’d hoped to
translate it into English for Armenians living in California and
Europe.

“I will translate it,” Seta Zobyan said. “That was his wish and I will
try and make it come true.”

[email protected]

Anadolu Agency
Jan 13 2005

Premier Erdogan Arrives In Turkey

ANKARA (AA) – Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan returned to
Turkey from Russia on Wednesday.
Erdogan spoke to reporters at Ankara’s Esenboga Airport.
When asked, ”Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC)
President Rauf Denktas reacted against the supportive statements of
Russian President Vladimir Putin to Turkey about Cyprus issue. What
will be the next steps of Turkey and are there any differences in
approaches of Turkey and Denktas?” Erdogan said, ”After December
17th process, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan congratulated us and
then we phoned him and said we could talk about Cyprus process. While
we were planning to hold this talk, Asian disaster happened. He is
now in the region. We want to talk with him as soon as possible.
There will not be an Annan Plan to be presented. Also, the name of
the plan is not important. The important thing is its content and
this content should include a solution. I do not believe that anybody
will oppose a plan that will include a solution. If the plan protects
interest of Turkish Cypriots and brings a just and permanent solution
to TRNC, I am sure that everybody will exert efforts for such a
plan.”
Erdogan said, ”we are talking about a just plan which will
bring permanent peace and by which both sides will win. We always say
that we support such a plan and we will continue to support. We do
not have any uneasiness about this issue.”
Upon a question about relations with Armenia, Erdogan said, ”we
have taken our positive steps towards Armenia. The most important of
these steps is Turkey’s opening its door in airways. At the moment
Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport is open to Armenian Airways. They have 4
flights a week to Istanbul.”
”However, we have of course some demands. It is 1923 Kars
Agreement. If they say they do not recognize it, we also do not
recognize (them). In spite of this, we say we do not want disgruntled
neighbor. We want to overcome these issues. There are places in
Karabakh which Armenia occupied. We believe that solving these issues
in a friendly way will be beneficial. We want to be hopeful about
this issue. We have always said we are ready to do what is
necessary,” he said.
When asked his evaluations about sincere statements of Putin,
Erdogan said, ”we had a very friendly, positive and sincere meeting.
The figures between Turkey and Russia are probably the results of
that sincere meeting.”
When asked how Putin assessed the process about Turkey’s EU
membership, Erdogan said, ”he is also positive about this issue and
he congratulated us. He said Turkey has passed through that process
successfully.”
While informing about his meetings in Russia, Erdogan said he
met Putin and discussed political developments in the region and took
up energy issues. ”It was a very beneficial meeting. We mainly
discussed Iraq, Middle East, Cyprus and Armenia issues and we took up
what can be done jointly in the Middle East and the region,” he
said.
”We have taken up our bilateral relations in regional and
international aspects and we had some demands in the aspect of the UN
Security Council. He said isolations (on TRNC) are not just and they
will support Annan Plan which will be prepared about the issue. He
clearly said they are ready to exert every type of effort on this
issue,” noted Erdogan.
Erdogan said, ”we aim to increase trade volume between two
countries which is now 11 billion U.S. dollars to 15 billion U.S.
dollars in 2005 and 25 billion U.S. dollars in 2007. Political will
exists in both countries about this issue.”
”Russian officials want to make joint investments. It is in
question to make some investments in third countries and especially
in Iraq. Also Turkish contractors may undertake new and important
roles in public projects in Russia,” he added.
”Russian officials have very positive attitude towards Turkish
entrepreneurs. This will show what kind of developments will occur in
this issue,” he said.