Author: Jagharian Tania

Armenian Couple Find Healing After the Killings

THEATER REVIEW | ‘BEAST ON THE MOON’

The New York Times
April 28, 2005

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

all it meeting cute, the old-school way. Aram Tomasian, a new American
living in Milwaukee in 1921, orders his bride from the old-country
catalog after taking a shine to her photograph. The girl arrives, but
hold on: she doesn’t quite match the picture. Sure enough, they
shipped the wrong merchandise.

Love will ultimately prevail in “Beast on the Moon,” the sincere but
musty romantic drama by Richard Kalinoski that opened last night at
the Century Center for the Performing Arts. But the path to marital
contentment runs through some rough emotional terrain, even after Aram
has made his peace with the bait-and-switch trick.

Both Aram (Omar Metwally) and his 15-year-old wife, Seta (Lena
Georgas), are Armenians, survivors of the killings and mass
deportations that took place in the Ottoman Empire while World War I
raged in Europe. They bear scars that must be healed, or at least
acknowledged, before true union can be achieved. Indeed, it’s the
unhappy confluence of Aram’s psychic wounds and Seta’s physical trauma
that causes the conflict at the heart of the play.

Minutes after Seta has set down her worn tapestry bag and taken an
awed, grateful look around her strange new habitat, Aram tries to drag
her off to the bedroom. He is on a desperate mission to replace the
family he lost in the killings, and wants to begin procreating,
pronto. Sadly, Seta’s years of malnourishment make this difficult, and
as Aram’s frustration grows, he expends his anger on his increasingly
despondent and isolated bride.

“Beast on the Moon” was produced at the Humana Festival at the Actors
Theater of Louisville in 1995, and has racked up a lot of
frequent-flier miles in the ensuing years. Its prize-winning career on
international stages includes productions in 17 countries and 12
languages, according to the show’s publicist. In 2001, the play won
five Molière awards. (That’s French for Tony.)

The reasons for its popularity are not hard to discern. The play is
forthright in performing tasks that clearly have wide international
applications: consciousness-raising and the promotion of tear-duct
health.

A narrator, played by the nicely avuncular Louis Zorich, is on hand to
provide history lessons about the plight of the Armenians that do not
fit neatly into the framework of the play. And with the help of a
third character, a surrogate son named Vincent (Matthew Borish), a few
life lessons will be learned, too, when the cowed Seta and the stern
Aram clash at last in the cathartic confrontation that provides the
play with its emotional climax.

The production at the Century Center, the play’s New York premiere, is
respectable and effectively acted. A little too effectively,
actually. It’s easy enough to guess the secondary career of the
production’s director, Larry Moss. Only a dedicated acting coach could
elicit performances this relentless.

Mr. Metwally, seen on Broadway in last season’s short-lived “Sixteen
Wounded,” brings a dark intensity to the domineering Aram, and
Ms. Georgas’s bright, timorous smile can be affecting. But one of
Mr. Moss’s mottoes, at least on the evidence of this production, seems
to be that to stop moving is to stop acting. Both performances are
exhaustingly busy, plastered in surface filigree that is more
distracting than illuminating.

The virus also infects the work of young Mr. Borish, a precociously
professional 13-year-old. His performance as the prickly but
good-hearted young tough is so polished and persuasive that it seems
churlish to note that it is also mechanical. He, too, seems to have
matriculated at the Energizer Bunny Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Beast on the Moon

By Richard Kalinoski; directed by Larry Moss; sets by Neil Patel;
costumes by Anita Yavich; lighting by David Lander; sound by Peter
Fitzgerald; production stage manager, Fredric H. Orner; production
management, Showman Fabricators Inc.; fight consultant, Rick Sordelet;
general manager, Roy Gabay; associate producers, Stephanie Bast,
Anahid Shahrik and Linda Shirvanian.

Presented by David Grillo and Matt Salinger.

At Century Center for the Performing Arts, 115 East 15th Street,
Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes.

WITH: Louis Zorich (Gentleman), Omar Metwally (Aram), Lena Georgas
(Seta) and Matthew Borish (Vincent).

OSCE monitors Azeri-Armenian contact line

Arminfo
27 Apr 05

YEREVAN

The OSCE held regular monitoring on the contact line between the
Armenian and Azerbaijani armed forces in the Tavush (Armenia)-Qazax
(Azerbaijan) sector yesterday, the press secretary of the Armenian
Defence Ministry, Col Seyran Shakhsuvaryan, has told Arminfo new
agency.

The field assistants to the personal representative of the OSCE
chairman-in-office, Imre Palatinus (Hungary), Olexandr Samarski
(Ukraine) and Piter Key (Britain), took part in the monitoring on the
Armenian side.

According to the source, radio monitoring, during which OSCE means of
communications were used to establish contact with OSCE
representatives taking part in the monitoring on the Azerbaijani side,
was held at the beginning. As a result of this, the commanders of the
two sides’ military units gave security guarantees to the participants
in the monitoring.

The monitoring was preceded by a short briefing in which the governor
of Tavush Region, Armen Gularyan, noted frequent attacks on the
Idzhevan-Noyemberyan road from the Azerbaijani side.

Asked by Palatinus about the reasons for this, the governor said that
either the Azerbaijani side is not capable of controlling its own
armed forces or this is the result of belligerent statements made by
the Azerbaijani authorities.

Ottawa Citizen
April 26, 2005 Tuesday
Final Edition

The sorry state of world affairs

The cleansing, restorative words of a heartfelt apology come easier
to some than others.

Turkey, accused of massacring 1.5 million Armenians 90 years ago,
can’t bring itself to cop to the charge, even when a simple “sorry”
would grease the nation’s longed-for inclusion in the European Union.

Japan recently apologized to China for the slaughter of 300,000
Nanjing residents in 1937 — though the mea culpa scored poorly on
the heartfelt-ness meter, extracted as it was under duress. Germany
long ago apologized to European Jewry for the Holocaust; the Kremlin
has yet to beg pardon for starving as many as 20 million Ukrainians
to death in the 1930s.

No word yet on whether Pope Benedict XVI will apologize for the
Catholic church’s occasionally spotty track record: his predecessor,
John Paul II, was big on atonement, asking forgiveness for the
Inquisition and the Crusades, but leaving sexual abuse cases for
future consideration.

Canada has apologized for mistreating aboriginal peoples, especially
the grievously wrong-headed residential school system. Paul Martin
has apologized for the sponsorship scandal; Jean Chretien has not.

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman apologized for cancelling last year’s
hockey season, though saying “sorry I’m doing what I’m doing,” isn’t
the same as saying “sorry I did what I did.”

We’ve all done things we’re not proud of, things we wish we could
take back or do over. And yet the words come hard. Perhaps what the
world needs is an international day of apology. As Judaism discovered
with Yom Kippur, the “day of atonement,” it’s easier if we all do it
together.

Here then, in the interest of world peace and getting the ball
rolling, is one from the heart: If this editorial has offended Turks,
Armenians, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Germans, Catholics, Jews,
Natives, Liberals or hockey fans, we’re sorry.

April 25, 2005

The Tufts Daily

U.S. Diplomat’s account of Armenian Genocide easily forgotten

by Harout Semerdjian

Some of the worst crimes in history have taken place under the guise
of war. During the Second World War, much of the Jewish population of
Europe fell victim to Nazi genocide. Several decades preceding the
Holocaust, as World War I was unfolding, another genocide was taking
place that effectively removed an entire population from their
historical homeland of three millennia. Now, Turkey needs to
acknowledge the Armenian genocide in order to gain better world
standing.

Leslie A. Davis, the U.S. Consul posted to the remote town of Harput,
Turkey in 1915, wrote in a diplomatic dispatch dated July 24 of that
year, “I do not believe there has ever been a massacre in the history
of the world so general and thorough as that which is now being
perpetrated in this region.”

Consul Davis was referring to the Armenians, a vulnerable minority
population in the collapsing Turkish Ottoman Empire. When in 1944,
Holocaust survivor Dr. Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide, he
clearly cited the Turkish massacre of Armenians as a prime example of
such a crime. Except for the first post-WWI Turkish government under
Damad Ferid Pasha, successive leaders of Turkey, the legal heir to the
Ottoman Empire, have vehemently denied the veracity of the
genocide. Among other reasons, this stance can be attributed to the
probability of legal consequences that may include reparations and
territorial concessions in its eastern provinces that the Armenians
inhabited prior to their annihilation and deportation.

With global developments after WWI and with Cold War political
affairs, Turkey’s importance to the West became crucial in light of
Soviet ideological and expansionist policies. As a result, consecutive
U.S. governments have been careful not to label the 1915 killings as
genocide in accordance with their strategic interests in Turkey.

Ironically, American diplomats and missionaries posted in Turkey in
those years like Davis were among the most vocal decriers of the
Armenian massacres. While the word “genocide” was not in existence at
that time, American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau labeled the events
“murder of a nation,” and Consul Davis called it a “general massacre”
upon personally visiting massacre grounds.

In one of his diplomatic dispatches, Davis declared: “the plan was to
destroy the Armenian race as a race, but the methods used have been
more cold-blooded and barbarous, if not more effective, than I had
first supposed.”

While the political war over terminology ensues, the extent and
suffering of the Armenians in 1915 remains clouded by political
posturing. Yet for those who seek it, the evidence speaks for
itself. Out of somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million Armenians living in
Ottoman Turkey prior to 1915, virtually none remained in the
countryside by the time the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923.

The plan to deport and massacre the Armenians was highly systematic
and organized: all Armenian intellectuals were rounded up and
executed, as were all able-bodied Armenian men, including those in the
Ottoman army. This was followed by a well-organized and executed plan
to remove the remainder of the Armenian population – the women,
children and elderly – village by village, town by town, by marching
them off into the deserts. In some regions such as Bitlis and Mush,
deportation was not an option. Armenians were outright massacred or
burned alive in their villages, while others were drowned en masse in
the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and in the Black Sea.

Upon visiting Lake Golcuk (modern Lake Hazar) and witnessing the
thousands of massacred Armenians along its shores, Davis labeled this
part of Turkey “the Slaughterhouse Province.” He wrote, “The order
[to] officially and nominally exile the Armenians from these Vilayets
[Provinces] may mislead the outside world for a time, but the measure
is nothing but a massacre of the most atrocious nature. The shooting
and killing of people a few hours after their departure from here is
barbarous and shows that the real intention of the government is not
to exile them but to kill them.”

It is reprehensible to dismiss such powerful evidence of the Armenian
Genocide put forth by our own American diplomats, including Consul
Leslie Davis. Today the Cold War era is over and new global
developments have changed the world order. France, Belgium and
Switzerland became firsts to recognize the Armenian Genocide as a
result of a revision of their Cold War strategies.

Recognition by the U.S. government will pave the way for Turkey’s
eventual admittance of this great crime, which will help bring about
lasting peace and security in the Caucasus. It is important that the
Republic of Turkey take serious and bold measures to come to terms
with its Ottoman past concerning the immense human and material loss
of its Armenian population during the final years of the empire.

Such a step would embolden Turkey’s EU efforts and place the country
one step closer to the European family of nations as well as to the
modern values they uphold. The country will hence set a serious
foundation for reconciliation, peace and cooperation with its Armenian
neighbor and with the Armenian diaspora, a product and permanent
reminder of the Armenian Genocide.

Harout Semerdjian is a MALD Candidate at the Fletcher School of Law &
Diplomacy.

Assa-Irada, Azerbaijan
April 23 2005

Azerbaijan to appeal to int’l organizations over prisoners

Azerbaijan will send direct appeals to the International Committee of
the Red Cross, OSCE, the Council of Europe and rights groups over
three Azeri prisoners withheld in Armenia, says Azay Guliyev, member
of the working group of the State Committee on Prisoners, Hostages
and Missing Persons.

Guliyev termed as utterly unfair the fact that the Azeri captives
have been withheld in captivity for about 70 days, accusing Armenia,
which occupies Azeri lands, of openly and blatantly violating legal
norms.

`The entire civil society should struggle against this unbearable
situation.’

Guliyev called on those defending Armenia to at least show plain
humanism. The Armenian soldiers taken captive over by Azerbaijan are
always released within a week of 10 days, he added.

EU-hopeful Turkey pressured by its past

Agence France Presse — English
April 20, 2005 Wednesday 4:42 AM GMT

ANKARA April 20 — Amid international pressure to recognise the 1915
Armenian massacres as genocide, Turkey finds itself struggling between
growing calls at home for the country to face the past and unease at
giving in over a delicate issue it fears may cloud its bid to join
the European Union.

In an unprecedented move, Turkish historians and intellectuals have
increasingly started to question the official line on the once-taboo
subject as Armenians prepare to mark the 90th anniversary of the
killings.

“Turkey is going through a very important phase,” Etyen Mahcupyan, a
Turkish columnist of Armenian descent, told AFP. “Despite the state’s
resistance, the people and the intellectual elite want officialdom
to face the past and come up with a prudent policy.”

Armenians say up to 1.5 million Armenians perished in orchestrated
killings between 1915 and 1917 as the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor
of modern Turkey, was falling apart.

Ankara argues that 300,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks died
in what was civil strife during World War I when the Armenians rose
against their Ottoman rulers and sided with invading Russian troops,
resulting in an order to deport them en masse from their homelands.

But, in a challenge to the official line, award-winning Turkish
novelist Orhan Pamuk told a Swiss newspaper in February that “one
million Armenians were killed in Turkey”, which caused an uproar and
resulted in a controversial order by the sub-governor of a small town
for the author’s books to be destroyed.

Shortly afterwards, historian Halil Berktay openly told a leading
Turkish newspaper that the Ottoman treatment of its Armenian subjects
during World War I amounted to genocide, triggering angry letters
from the paper’s readership.

In a bid to counter domestic and international pressure, state
institutions have rushed out with documents they claim prove there
was no genocide; the state archive over the weekend issued a list of
more than 500,000 Turks it said were killed in systematic massacres
by the Armenians.

“This is an attack by the state on its own society. The state fears
society and imposes its view on them,” Hrant Dink, editor of the
Armenian-language weekly Agos, told AFP.

“But Turks are now saying the time has come to face the issue and if
we want a solution, it can come only through internal dynamics and
not through foreign pressure,” Dink said.

Much to Ankara’s anger, the killings have already been acknowledged
as genocide by a number of countries, including France, Canada and
Switzerland.

Turkey now faces pressure from within the EU to address the genocide
claims in what Ankara sees as a politically motivated campaign to
hurt its membership bid as it prepares to begin accession talks with
the bloc on October 3.

In a bid to blunt the Armenian campaign, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan last week suggested to Armenian President Robert Kocharian
the creation of a joint commission to study the genocide allegations,
saying Turkey has nothing to fear from its past.

But according to Mahcupyan, the real damage will come if Ankara
insists on its refusal to re-evaluate the past.

“Every threat is an opportunity,” he said. “If Turkey can catch up
with and pursue what has already begun in society, it would increase
its prestige and ensure good relations with the EU.”

Reconciliation with the past could also help Turkey patch up ties
with neighbouring Armenia, with whom it refuses to etablish diplomatic
ties and open its borders, mainly because of the genocide claims.

Turkey also fears that acknowledging the massacres as genocide will
lead to compensation claims from Armenians and some politicians have
suggested that Yerevan may even claim territory from Ankara.

“Turkey would likely face compensation claims if it acknowledged the
genocide because Armenian properties were seized by the Ottomans, but
to even consider the possibility of territorial claims is paranoid,”
Mahcupyan said.

WCC Stresses Need for Public Recognition of Armenian Genocide

Christian Post, CA
April 20 2005

Wednesday, Apr. 20, 2005 Posted: 6:21:19PM EST

The World Council of Churches will join millions around the world
in remembering the victims of the Armenian Genocide on Sunday, April
24, 2005.

“I am personally in communion with you in prayers and in solidarity
with the cause of your people,” wrote the WCC general secretary Rev.
Dr Samuel Kobia in an 11 April letter addressed to the Catholicos of
All Armenians, Supreme Patriarch Karekin II.

The Armenian Genocide has largely been recognized as the first genocide
of the 20th century. According to numerous historians, some 1.5 million
mostly Christian Armenians perished through a policy of deportation,
torture, starvation, and massacre led by the Ottoman Empire.

Turkey, however, denies that there was a planned campaign to eliminate
Armenians but says both Turks and Armenians lost their lives. Turkey
also says no more than 300,000 Armenians lost their lives through
the clashes.

In recent years, the French, Swiss and Danish government as well
as the Italian Parliament and the Vatican acknowledged the Armenian
genocide as a historical fact.

According to the WCC, there is a growing “need for public recognition
of the Armenian genocide and the necessity of Turkey to deal with
this dark part of its history.”

For more information on the Armenian Genocide, visit:

Salt Lake Tribune, Utah
April 17 2005

Author assailed for acknowledging Armenian massacre

Lifting the veil: Fellow Turks criticize him for bringing up dark
history

By Louis Meixler

Photo: Turkish author Orhan Pamuk caused a controversy when he said
1 million Armenians were murdered in Turkey during World War I. Many
Turks dispute the charge. (Associated Press file photo)

ANKARA, Turkey – When a leading Turkish novelist said earlier this
year that 1 million Armenians were murdered in his country during
World War I, he broke a deep taboo.
Three lawsuits were filed against Orhan Pamuk, accusing him of
damaging the state. ”He shouldn’t be allowed to breathe,” roared
one nationalist group. In Istanbul, a school collected his books from
students to return to him. On a news Web site, the vote ran 4-1
against him.
Turkey’s mass expulsion of Armenians during World War I – which
Armenians say was part of a genocide that claimed 1.5 million lives –
is a dark chapter rarely discussed in Turkey or taught in its
schools.
But slowly the veil is being lifted. One reason is that Turkey is
more open and democratic today, another is its ambition of joining
the European Union; French President Jacques Chirac has said Turkey
must first acknowledge the killings.
Turkey is also eager to counter Armenian diaspora groups that are
pushing European governments and the United States to declare the
killings genocide. And the approach of April 24, the 90th anniversary
of the date Armenians mark as the start of the killings, is focusing
attention on the issue.
”We are mutually deaf to each other,” said Yasar Yakis, head of
parliament’s European Union Affairs Committee, who invited two ethnic
Armenians in Istanbul to address his committee.
”Perhaps if we can create a climate in which we listen to what
the other side has to say, we might meet in the middle,” Yakis said.

Turkey has long denied the genocide claim, saying the death toll
of 1.5 million is wildly inflated and that both Armenians and Turks
were killed in fighting during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
Turks who describe it as genocide have on occasion been prosecuted,
and Turkey often gets into diplomatic tussles with governments it
suspects of taking the Armenian side. It’s one of the reasons Turkey
and neighboring Armenia don’t have diplomatic relations.
Turkey also fears that if the genocide claim is recognized,
Armenians will use it to demand compensation – either money or lost
land.
Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul insists that to call it genocide is
”pure slander,” and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said
that all countries should open their archives to scholars to examine
whether the event was genocide.
A Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Committee, partly funded by the
U.S. State Department, first met in 2001, bringing together leading
Turks and Armenians, while intellectuals such as Pamuk, whose novels
have won critical acclaim in the United States, are playing a key
role in opening up the debate.
For Turkey, the issue goes beyond the killings of Armenians to the
whole trauma of losing its once mighty Ottoman Empire.
As the Muslim empire faltered, minority Armenian Christians began
asserting their identity. During World War I, amid fears of Armenian
collusion with the enemy army of Christian Czarist Russia, Armenians
were forced out of towns and villages throughout the Turkish
heartland of Anatolia and many died.
”The Armenians were relocated because they cooperated with the
enemy, the Russians, and they . . . killed Ottoman soldiers from
behind the lines,” Yakis, the lawmaker, said.
Armenians, however, say the killings were part of a planned
genocide.
Volkan, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of
Virginia, said that after the war, the new Turkish republic ”wanted
to look forward and not backward.”
Pamuk dropped his bombshell in February in an interview with the
Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger, talking of Armenians as well as
Turkey’s modern-day Kurdish minority.
He said that ”30,000 Kurds have been murdered here and 1 million
Armenians and nobody dares to mention that. So I do it. And that’s
why they hate me.”
The reaction to Pamuk was largely hostile, but a few newspaper
columnists defended his freedom of speech.

Pan Armenian News

ARMENIAN AMBASSADOR HANDED CREDENTIALS TO IRANIAN PRESIDENT

16.04.2005 03:40

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Armenian Ambassador to the Islamic Republic of Iran Karen
Nazarian has handed his credentials to Iranian President Mohammad Khatami,
the Press Service of the Armenian Foreign Ministry reported. On behalf of
Armenian President Robert Kocharian the Armenian diplomat thanked Mohammad
Khatami for the attention being constantly paid to the Armenian-Iranian
relations. The Ambassador noted that the visit of the Iranian leader to
Armenia was a historical one both in the political and economic respects. In
his turn, Mohammad Khatami emphasized the importance of the Armenian-Iranian
cooperation, and having underscored the special respect of Armenians in
Iran, said he was sure that the basic programs available between the two
countries will be implemented by joint efforts. At the conclusion of the
meeting the Iranian President asked Karen Nazarian to convey his best
regards to Robert Kocharian.

Financial Times (London, England)
April 14, 2005 Thursday
London Edition 1

Carving up the Middle East’s resources

By JAMES DRUMMOND

If the birth and tortured early history of Iraq’s oil industry are
any guide, the omens for foreign investment in the country’s
hydrocarbon sector are not great.

The full scale of the country’s potential became apparent in 1927
when the Baba Gurgur 1 well outside Kirkuk in northern Iraq flowed at
95,000 barrels of oil a day.

By then, the country had become the scene of operations of the
infamous Calouste Gulbenkian, an Armenian trader born in Istanbul who
founded the Turkish Petroleum Company and became known as Mr Five Per
Cent because that was his share of TPC.

In its first incarnation, the other shareholders in the TPC were
Anglo-Persian – better known today as British Petroleum – Royal
Dutch/Shell and Deutsche Bank. After the First World War, Deutsche
lost its stake.

Subsequently, the CFP, the French state-owned oil company, and the
Near East Development Company, consisting of Standard Oil of New York
and Standard Oil of New Jersey, joined the consortium.

The Turkish Petroleum Company then morphed into the Iraq Petroleum
Company but not before Gulbenkian had committed his partners in the
TPC to the famous Red Line agreement in 1928.

Under the accord, none of the TPC partners was allowed to invest
inside a specified area without the agreement of the others.

The area was massive, covering most of the area of the old Ottoman
empire. It included Turkey in the north but excluded Kuwait and Iran.
Gulbenkian thus had an effective veto on investment by many of the
world’s leading oil companies in what became the most lucrative oil
play in the world.

The veto earned him a fortune and obstructed the US attempts to
exploit Middle East oil.

In its first incarnation, the Turkish Petroleum Company had secured a
concession in Iraq until 2000 in which the company paid royalties to
the Iraq government of just 15 cents a barrel. The concession was
unilaterally revoked in the early 1960s by the radical government of
Abdel Karim Qassim that ousted the monarchy.