How The Ottomans Ruined The 20th Century

HOW THE OTTOMANS RUINED THE 20TH CENTURY

The Daily Beast
April 14 2015

World War I was only a global conflict when the Ottoman Empire joined
the fray. Those consequences–from genocide to new borders–are still
felt today.

After reading the fascinating initial chapter of Eugene Rogan’s new
history of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, The Fall of
the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, I was struck with
a recurring thought: The wonder is not so much that this sprawling
600-year-old Muslim empire fell victim to the convulsions of world
conflict in 1918, but that it somehow managed to survive at all as a
world power up to the war’s opening salvos. Founded by Central Asian
Muslim tribes in 1299, at its height in the late 17th century the
empire spanned three continents, taking in the Balkans in southern
Europe, Arab lands from Mesopotamia to Morocco, and much of Asia
Minor. Since the beginning of the 18th century Istanbul found itself
almost continually at war with Europe’s imperial powers. Invariably,
it came out on the losing end. Egypt and most of North Africa were
lost to Britain and France by 1882, while Russia gobbled up one
province of eastern Anatolia after another.

Nor were the predations of the Great Powers the only serious problem.

The Ottomans were mired in internal conflicts between the dominant
Turks and the many other peoples who paid allegiance to the Sultan
in Istanbul, including Serbs, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, and Arabs.

These groups had begun to absorb Western ideas of nationalism and
self-determination–ideas that sparked numerous rebellions and
crackdowns on suspected subversives within the Empire. The most
notorious of the latter would ultimately fester into the 1915-1916
deportation-mass murder campaign against the Christian Armenians from
their Anatolian homelands. As many as a million defenseless Armenians
lost their lives.

It was not a foregone conclusion that the Turks would fight in
World War I at all. Many leading political figures in Istanbul
favored neutrality as the surest road to bringing about long-overdue
administrative and economic modernization with the aid of investments
from all the European powers. In the end, however, the triumvirate
of pashas who ruled the Empire came to believe an alliance with an
ascendant Germany, in which Berlin would pay for much of the war effort
and military training, would be the surest path to re-conquest of lost
provinces, the shoring up its faltering influence in the Middle East,
and internal modernization. It was the Ottoman entrance into the war
on the side of the Central Powers that transformed a European war
into a truly global conflict.

For their part, the Germans gained the use of a large Ottoman army that
could take the pressure off their inevitable battle against Russia
in the East by launching a campaign in the Caucasus. More important,
Germany hoped to exploit the Ottoman sultan’s role as caliph over the
entire world community of Muslims. Of course, the British, Russian,
and French empires contained millions of Muslims.

The Germans wanted the Caliph to declare a jihad against their
adversaries, hoping to bring about mass uprisings that would cripple
the war efforts of the Triple Entente, and the Caliph was happy
to oblige.

The initial Ottoman campaigns did not go well. Enver Pasha, the Ottoman
minister of war, hoped to duplicate the Germans’ masterful envelopment
at Tannenberg against the Russians, prompting the destruction of an
entire Russian army. Geography, poor weather, and inadequate logistics,
however, led to a crushing Ottoman defeat and the loss of 80,000
troops. Several divisions of Armenian Christians fought on the Russian
side in the campaign, and in the wake of the loss, the large Armenian
population within the Ottoman Empire found themselves victims of the
20th century’s first genocide. Rogan unpacks the complicated tragedy
of the Armenian persecution deftly and sensitively, concluding that
“the bitter irony is that the annihilation of the Armenians and other
Christian communities in no way improved the security of the Ottoman
Empire,” though that was its primary object.

Rogan unpacks the complicated tragedy of the Armenian persecution
deftly and sensitively, concluding that “the bitter irony is that
the annihilation of the Armenians and other Christian communities in
no way improved the security of the Ottoman Empire,” though that was
its primary object.

Next, the Ottoman 4th Army attacked the British defending the
Suez Canal across the Sinai Desert, but the thrust was detected by
aerial scouts and repulsed handily. The first two Ottoman campaigns,
observes Rogan, “revealed Ottoman commanders to be unrealistic in
their expectations and the average Ottoman soldier to be incredibly
tenacious and disciplined even under the most extreme conditions.”

These early Allied victories lulled the Allies into a “false
complacency about the limits of Ottoman effectiveness.” Prompted by
a Russian plea to mount a diversionary campaign, Britain and France
decided in spring 1915 to go for a knockout punch. They launched an
ambitious amphibious attack through the heavily mined Dardanelles
straits on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Such an attack would threaten
Istanbul itself–if successful. Now it was the ordinary Allied
soldiers’ turn, particularly the Australians and New Zealanders,
to suffer at the hands of their commanders’ incompetence.

For eight months, the agony in the trenches at Gallipoli continued,
with little substantial Allied progress. Here Colonel Mustafa
Kemal–later called Ataturk, leader of Turkey in its successful war
of independence of 1919-1923–first distinguished himself, as did the
entire Ottoman army in their heroic defense of the Peninsula. Suffice
it to say that in the years between the two world wars, the Gallipoli
campaign was held up as proof by leading military strategists
that the amphibious assault against a well-defended beach would
never again succeed. The U.S. Marines, however, weren’t buying the
message. They conducted an extensive study of Gallipoli, determining
that the British and French had made a complete hash of the operation,
and that, with proper training, specialized doctrine and equipment,
heavily fortified beaches could indeed be taken. (In this they were
correct, as World War II proved.)

Impending defeat at Gallipoli prompted London to order a British-Indian
army to march on Baghdad to rekindle support for the war at home, and
assuage suspected Muslim restiveness within their Empire. Once again,
the tough Turks managed to repulse the British drive, capturing 13,000
Indians and Britons at the Siege of Kut.

After Kut, the war generally went quite badly for the Ottomans. A
crucial factor in their misfortunes was Istanbul’s failure to win
over the Arab tribes, loosely united under Sharif Husayn of Mecca,
the great-great grandfather of Jordan’s current head of state, King
Abdullah II, to fight for the Empire rather than against it. The Turks
were badly outmaneuvered on the diplomatic front by the British,
who concluded an alliance with Husayn in March 1916 in which false
promises of postwar independence for the Arabs played no small role.

The Arab Revolt was born. For the rest of the war, Husayn and his
trusted adviser, T.E. Lawrence, effectively tied down Ottoman forces
with guerrilla operations against (already thin) supply lines in
Palestine, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula.

Meanwhile, the Ottoman Sultan’s call to jihad utterly failed to
strike a chord among the Muslims within the Allied empires, mainly
because their clerics saw cynical German aspirations behind the
call. In addition, as scholar Bernard Lewis has written, “The moral
significance of an Arab army fighting the Turks, and still more, of
the ruler of the holy places [Sharif Husayn] denouncing the Ottoman
Sultan and his so-called jihad, was immense, and was of particular
value to the British and incidentally to the French empires in
maintaining their authority over their Muslim subjects.”

In fall 1917, a bold and very smart British general, Edmund Allenby,
assumed command in the Middle East. He broke the main Ottoman defensive
line in Palestine, centered on Gaza. The Turks retreated, surrendering
Jerusalem without a shot. By this point, as Rogan points out, the
Ottomans’ ambitions “had been narrowed from victory to survival.”

Setbacks on the Western front forestalled Allied operations in the
Middle East until fall 1918. The Turks, badly in need of reinforcements
and resupply that would never come, grimly held on. In a three-day
operation in September around Megiddo in Palestine, Allenby used his
cavalry to sweep around Ottoman forces, capturing tens of thousands
before going on to completing his conquest of demoralized Ottoman
forces in Syria.

With the final defeat of the Ottomans and Germany in 1918, European
imperialism replaced Turkish rule throughout the Middle East. After
four centuries united in a multinational empire under Ottoman Muslim
rule, the Arabs found themselves divided into new states under the
control of Britain and France. The 200-year retreat of Islamic power
before the West had run its course. New boundaries were established
to suit the expansionist designs of the conquerors, and, as Rogan
points out in his excellent Conclusion:

The borders of the post-war settlement have proven remarkably
resilient–as have the conflicts the post-war boundaries have
engendered. The Kurdish people, divided between Turkey, Iran, Iraq,
and Syria, have been embroiled in conflict with each of their host
governments over the past century in pursuit of their cultural
and political rights. Lebanon, created by France in 1920 as a
Christian state, succumbed to a string of civil wars as its political
institutions failed to keep pace with its demographic shifts and
Muslims came to outnumber Christians. Syria, unreconciled to the
creation of Lebanon from what many Syrian nationalists believed
to be an integral part of their country, sent in its military to
occupy Lebanon in 1976–and remained in occupation of that country
for nearly thirty years. Despite its natural and human resources,
Iraq has never known enduring peace and stability within its post-war
boundaries, experiencing a coup and conflict with Britain in World
War II, revolution in 1958, war with Iran between 1980 and 1988,
and a seemingly unending cycle of war since Saddam Hussein’s 1991
invasion of Kuwait and the 2003 American invasion… to topple Hussein.

The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East is a
remarkably lucid and accessible work of history, involving a large
cast of contradictory and complex characters. Rogan, who teaches
the history of the modern Middle East at Oxford, seems equally at
home explaining the parameters of Ottoman grand strategy and the
tensions of the British-Arab alliance as he is at conjuring up the
unique challenges of maneuver warfare in the Sinai and Palestine, or
the brutal stalemate in the Gallipoli trenches. Telling quotations
from diplomats, field commanders, and ordinary soldiers of all the
combatants lend the narrative a powerful sense of immediacy.

Rogan wrote the book in part to challenge the conventional view that
the Turkish campaigns against Britain and France in the Middle East
and against the Russians in the Caucuses were strictly sideshows to
the main events on the Western and Eastern fronts, and to convey to
English speakers a flavor of the Muslim experiences of an event that
did more than any other to give birth to the modern Middle East. Rogan
certainly succeeds in demonstrating that “the sick man of Europe”
proved to be a far more important player in the Great War than its
opponents believed possible, in ways they never imagined.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/14/how-the-ottomans-ruined-the-20th-century.html

La Ville De Cognac Est Desormais Jumelee Avec Tovuz, En Azerbaidjan

LA VILLE DE COGNAC EST DESORMAIS JUMELEE AVEC TOVUZ, EN AZERBAIDJAN

REVUE DE PRESSE

Ce vendredi matin, a Cognac (Charente), Michel Gourinchas, le maire, et
Tofig Zeynalov, maire de Tovuz (Azerbaïdjan), ont très officiellement
signe une charte de jumelage entre leurs deux cites. La ceremonie,
très protocolaire, s’est deroulee dans la salle des mariages de l’hôtel
de ville, en presence d’Elchin Amirbayov, l’ambassadeur d’Azerbaïdjan
en France, et d’Olivier Maurel, sous-prefet de Cognac.

Le rapprochement des deux villee s’inscrit dans une politique de
cooperation economique importante. Il n’a rien d’anodin.

En effet, le maire de Cognac a noue de precieux contacts dans cet
ancien pays d’Union sovietique, sis entre l’Armenie, la Turquie, la
Georgie, la Russie et l’Iran. Au printemps dernier, Michel Gourinchas
et son premier adjoint Patrick Sedlacek s’etaient rendus a Tovuz,
au nord-ouest du pays, et a Bakou, la capitale. La-bas, les deux
elus cognacais avaient d’ailleurs croise le president Hollande, lui
aussi en voyage officiel dans le Caucase. En Azerbaïdjan, où l’on
produit beaucoup de brandy, le maire a oeuvre pour la reconnaissance
officielle de l’appellation “cognac”.

Ce vendredi après-midi, MM. Zeynalov et Amirbayov ont d’ailleurs
rendez-vous au Bureau national interprofessionnel du cognac (BNIC),
pour etudier les modalites d’une aide technique de la filière francaise
a la filière viticole azerie.

“Tovuz est une ville de 22.000 habitants dans une region de 1.900 km2,
où la tradition viticole est ancienne. Notre vignoble s’etend sur
15.000 hectares. A l’epoque sovietiques, 14 usines produisaient du vin
et du brandy pour toutes les autres republiques socialistes. Notre
brandy etait injustement appele cognac. Aujourd’hui, je sais et
j’ai compris qu’il n’y a de cognac qu’a Cognac. Vous avez mon soutien
total”, a declare M. Zeynalov, qui a plaide pour une “amitie renforcee”
entre les deux peuples et les deux villes.

A l’issue de la ceremonie, les maires ont echange des presents : une
statuette representant la salamandre, emblème royal de Francois Ier,
ne a Cognac en 1494 ; une carafe de cognac XO ; des tapis precieux
et des livres d’art.

En France, seule une dizaine de villes ont d’ores et deja noue des
jumelages avec l’Azerbaïdjan : notamment Bordeaux avec Bakou et
Chablis avec Goygol.

vendredi 17 avril 2015, Stephane (c)armenews.com

http://www.sudouest.fr/2015/04/10/la-ville-de-cognac-est-desormais-jumelee-avec-tovuz-en-azerbaidjan-1887708-882.php

Le Mouvement Antiraciste Europeen EGAM S’inquiete De L’eviction D’Et

LE MOUVEMENT ANTIRACISTE EUROPEEN EGAM S’INQUETE DE L’EVICTION D’ETYEN MAHCUPYAN

TURQUIE

Etyen Mahcupyan etait depuis 2014 le premier Armenien de Turquie a
occuper un poste aussi eleve dans l’administrative gouvernemental
turque.

Malgre les denegations du pouvoir turc qui parle de brusque >, c’est d’une veritable eviction qu’il s’agit. La raison
veritable est evidente : il ne faisait pas sien le negationnisme
d’Etat de la Turquie.

C’est un signal conforme a la traditionnelle position negationniste de
l’Etat turque mais qui n’en reste pas moins inquietante a la veille des
commemorations du 100eanniversaire du genocide, notamment en Turquie.

L’Etat turc combine donc des mesures d’intimidation comme cette
eviction avec une strategie de contre-feux avec les commemorations
de Gallipoli.

Pour Benjamin Abtan, president du Mouvement antiraciste europeen EGAM
:

Will Rejigged Agency Dent Corruption In Armenia?

WILL REJIGGED AGENCY DENT CORRUPTION IN ARMENIA?

Institute for War and Peace Reporting, UK
IWPR Caucasus Reporting 773
April 16 2015

Reforms mean Anti-Corruption Council will include opposition and
NGO representatives for the first time, but will still be led by the
prime minister.

“The war on corruption must become more effective, and it must be
waged more actively,” Armenian justice minister Hovhannes Manukyan
said after it was announced that the national anti-corruption watchdog
was being reshaped to make it more inclusive.

But experts doubt this overhaul of the institution will give it the
teeth to tackle the corruption that pervades the system.

The revised version of the Anti-Corruption Council was announced at
a cabinet meeting on February 19.

“We have changed the council’s format so that non-government structures
will have a dominant role on it,” Deputy Justice Minister Suren
Krmoyan told IWPR. “The opposition will be able to present its views
and participate both in designing the strategy and in approving and
monitoring its implementation. That’s one of the guarantees that it
will be effective.”

Non-government representatives will not in fact be the majority. Five
of the 14 seats on the council will go to parliamentary opposition
parties, and two more to NGOs.

As before, the council will be led by Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan.

Plans for the council have been sent to opposition parties, and once
they agree to take part in it, the selection of members will begin,
probably in May.

Like its predecessor, the new council will have a “monitoring
committee” to supervise it and recommend improvements.

Whatever the hopes invested in the new body, past experience suggests
that tackling corruption is well-nigh impossible.

The current Anti-Corruption council, staffed entirely with government
representatives, was set up in 2004 as part of the first of three
successive strategies designed to combat graft.

Marat Atovmyan heads the non-government Yerevan Anti-Corruption Centre
and is critical of the reforms to the Anti-Corruption Council. For a
start, the council is tiny compared with many foreign counterparts,
and two seats for NGOs are too few to be meaningful.

“Latvia’s anti-corruption institution has a staff of 130, while Hong
Kong’s has 65 just in its outreach department,” he said. “Our team
of experts is going to come to four or five.”

Atovmyan points out that as a signatory to the United Nations
convention on tackling corruption, it should have an institution that
is “independent by virtue of its status and financing”.

“We still don’t have an institution of that kind,” he said.

Avtomyan said his centre had put forward proposals for a truly
independent agency analogous to the ombudsman’s office and equipped
with legal power. “However, the answer we got was in the negative,”
he said.

Ordinary Armenians are most likely to encounter corruption in their
dealings with civil servants, the court system and the health service,
according to the watchdog group Transparency International. Further
up the system, business and politics are closely interconnected,
and insider deals and nepotism at this level are rarely uncovered.

In Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index,
Armenian was ranked 94thon a worsening scale of 175 countries.

“There has been no change and no progress in either numerical or
qualitative terms,” the head of Transparency International’s Armenia
branch, Varujan Hoktanyan, told IWPR.

Hoktanyan said Armenia’s score on the corruption index was a sure
sign of a country where corruption was “serious and systemic”.

Opposition parties say the reformed Anti-Corruption Council is no
more than a sham designed to show the government is doing something
about the problem.

According to Aram Manukyan, a member of parliament from the Armenian
National Congress, “They are doing this to deceive the international
community and get more funding by showing that they are implementing
an anti-corruption programme.”

Manukyan pointed out that each new anti-corruption drive attracted
funding from sympathetic donors.

It is hard to find overall figures for foreign assistance for
anti-corruption and related programmes in Armenia.

The United States government’s development agency USAID provided
9.8 million dollars between 2007 and 2011 for an anti-corruption
programme, and another 6.7 million for tax reforms running from 2012
to 2016 and designed to make the system less prone to abuse.

The European Union supplied 1.5 million euro for two anti-corruption
projects in 2011-14, and plans to spend over 20 million by 2017 to
help clean up the judiciary and public administration.

Critics say the rot starts from the top, and little progress will be
made until that changes.

“We’re going backwards to join the ranks of corrupt countries,”
Manukyan said. “There is just one fundamental reason for this – the
upper echelons of power give their unspoken assent to corruption. If
the upper echelons are corrupt, those lower down cannot be anything
other than that.

Manukyan speaks of a “pyramid” of corruption within the political
system which must be eliminated from the top down.

Hovhannes Sahakyan is a member of the ruling Republican Party and
sits on the parliamentary committee for state and legal affairs. He
defends Armenia’s recent record.

“The state administration [government departments] has begun hiring
a better calibre of person, and dismissing those who got in through
contacts or relatives and can’t cope with the job. In recent years,
there’s been significant progress in the prosecution service, in the
penal institutions and in education.”

Lilit Arakelyan is a freelance journalist in Armenia.

https://iwpr.net/global-voices/will-rejigged-agency-dent-corruption-armenia

Economist: Gunning For The G-Word

THE ECONOMIST GUNNING FOR THE G-WORD

April 16 2015

The complexities of calling mass killing genocide

Apr 18th 2015 |

Add this article to your reading list by clicking this button

Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide. By
Thomas de Waal. Oxford University Press; 298 pages; £18.99.

ON APRIL 24th millions of Armenians around the world will commemorate
the centenary of the mass killing of their forebears by Ottoman
forces. A growing number of historians say it was genocide.

“The central facts of the story are straightforward,” says Thomas de
Waal, a Russophile scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, an American think-tank, in the introduction to his objective
and meticulously researched account of the Armenian tragedy and how it
has played out in modern times. “The Armenians were an ancient people,
whose homeland was centred in what is now eastern Turkey.” In 1913,
there were up to 2m of them in the Ottoman empire. At the start
of the first world war, the Ottoman government ordered their mass
deportation. A few years later, Mr de Waal writes, there was barely
one-tenth of that number in Turkey. The rest had been exiled or killed.

A plethora of academic tomes, memoirs and novels about the genocide
exist, including Turkish government-sponsored propaganda purporting
to prove that most of the Armenians died of hunger and disease
during their forced march to the Syrian desert in 1915. Mr de Waal
navigates through some of these. Yet, unlike many, he does not set
about legislating history. Rather he offers the wider context in which
what Armenians call Meds Yeghern, or the “great crime”, unfolded. (He
uses the term “great catastrophe”, which has riled many.)

Abdul Hamid II, who became the Ottoman sultan in 1876, was consumed
with paranoia as he watched his empire shrink. He accused his Armenian
subjects of plotting with the great powers to truncate it further and
unleashed a first wave of pogroms, which claimed nearly 100,000 lives.

Armenian revolutionaries retaliated by killing Ottoman officials and
siding with “Uncle Christian” (Russia) as it gobbled up chunks of
eastern Anatolia. (The Armenian relationship with Russia is a constant
thread.) Decades later a different group of Armenian “revolutionaries”
embarked on a revenge killing spree of Turkish diplomats from Vienna
to Sydney.

Mr de Waal’s biggest contribution is his overview of the interlocking
phases of Turkish and Armenian history after 1915. Trenchant and
colourful anecdotes abound, along with some surprising facts. The
Ottomans were the earliest to recognise the first and short-lived
Republic of Armenia in June 1918 (it collapsed two years later
under Soviet pressure). Three months afterwards the Ottoman military
commander, Halil Pasha, who personally directed massacres of Armenians
and Assyrian Christians in the eastern provinces, met the Armenian
interior minister in the capital, Yerevan. “The two men had fought
a battle to the death in Van in 1915”, yet they “kissed each other
warmly like friends.”

Turkey was again among the first to recognise the fledgling Republic
of Armenia when it broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991. But
before diplomatic ties were formally established Armenia went to
war against Turkey’s ally, Azerbaijan, over Nagorno-Karabakh, a
mainly Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. (Mr de Waal’s book about that
conflict, “Black Garden”, is an important complement to this one.)
Turkey sealed its border with Armenia and so it has remained, leaving
the tiny landlocked nation ever more dependent on Russia.

Swiss-brokered interventions collapsed when Turkey, buckling under
Azerbaijani pressure, shelved an agreement from 2009 that would have
established diplomatic ties and reopened the border. The author’s vivid
description of the backroom dealings that went on helps explain why.

Mr de Waal reluctantly concludes that the killings do come under
the United Nations Convention on Genocide. He believes the “G-word”
(this last term was coined by a Turkish diplomat) has become “both
legalistic and over-emotional”. It obstructs “the understanding of the
historical rights and wrongs…as much as it illuminates them”. But
according to Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor killed in
2007 by a young ultranationalist, Turkey’s main problem is not whether
it should deny or acknowledge that what happened amounted to genocide,
but what its people comprehend. That is true, but only up to a point.

Turkey has recently begun making conciliatory gestures to the
Armenians. That would never have happened had the world, and especially
America’s Congress, not held the possible charge of “genocide” over it.

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21648615-complexities-calling-mass-killing-genocide-gunning-g-word

Economist: Was It Genocide?

THE ECONOMIST WAS IT GENOCIDE?

April 16 2015

As the centenary of the Ottoman empire’s slaughter of the Armenians
approaches, the truth is still contested

Apr 18th 2015 | ISTANBUL

“ON ALL the roads we traversed between Yozgat and Kayseri, about
80 per cent of the Muslims we encountered (there were no Christians
left in these parts) were wearing European clothes, bearing on their
persons proof of the crimes that they had committed. Barefoot peasant
boys wore formal clothes; men sported gold chains and watches.” Thus
wrote Grigoris Balakian, an Armenian Orthodox priest who witnessed
the aftermath of the mass slaughter of his ethnic brethren by Ottoman
forces in 1915-16. On April 24th 1915, scores of Armenian intellectuals
were rounded up in Istanbul and most were later murdered. But as the
centenary approaches, what followed is still bitterly contested.

Turkey claims that around 500,000 Armenians died of hunger and disease
en route to the Syrian desert. They were being deported, it says,
because Armenian revolutionaries were siding with Russia against the
Ottomans during the first world war. Survivors and their scattered
descendants put the toll as high as 1.5m, insist the deaths were
largely intentional rather than a regrettable side-effect, and want
the events recognised as genocide. A growing number of academics and
governments agree and use the term. But Turkey is mounting a vigorous
counter-campaign. “I refuse to let my forefathers be equated with
Hitler,” fumes a Turkish diplomat.

Disagreeing with the official version can be interpreted as a crime
in Turkey, and brings other risks, too. Hrant Dink, an intrepid
Turkish newspaper editor of Armenian extraction, was shot dead by
a nationalist teenager in 2007 after revealing that Sabiha Gokcen,
the adopted daughter of Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founder, was an
Armenian who had been orphaned during the genocide. There is mounting
evidence that rogue security officials orchestrated his killing.

The particular power in labelling an atrocity “genocide”

The crime proved a surprising turning point. Over 100,000 people,
many of whom had probably never heard of Mr Dink before, attended
his funeral. The wall of denial began to collapse. Books cataloguing
the horrors endured by the Armenians, such as “Black Dog of Fate”
by Peter Balakian, Grigoris Balakian’s great-nephew, are now
available in Turkish. The government has begun, albeit slowly, to
hand back confiscated Armenian church properties. A year ago Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, the president, became the first Turkish leader to
acknowledge Armenian suffering under the Ottoman empire when he offered
condolences. Three big political parties, including Mr Erdogan’s own
Justice and Development party (AK), are fielding Armenian candidates
for winnable seats in the election on June 7th, a first.

Turkey’s Kurdish leaders have formally apologised for their people’s
role in the massacres. In the Kurdish-dominated province of Diyarbakir,
where Armenians once made up almost half the population, the district
of Sur is offering free Armenian lessons. In the neighbouring province
of Sirnak, some “hidden Armenians”, whose ancestors converted to Islam
to avoid being killed, celebrated Easter this year with other locals,
both Christians and Muslims.

Both in Armenia, where nearly half the population is descended from
Ottoman Armenians, and in the diaspora, long-nursed grievances are
beginning to give way to curiosity about the “old country”. Hundreds
are coming to Istanbul and Diyarbakir for commemorative events around
the centenary. Khatchig Mouradian, an ethnic Armenian born in Lebanon
who now lives in America, organises “pilgrimages” for far-flung
Armenians to “Western Armenia” (their name for eastern Turkey). Armed
with long-guarded hand-drawn maps, they seek out their ancestors’
homes and pray at ruined monasteries for their souls.

Not even past

But the thaw goes only so far. In previous years Turkey has
commemorated the allied landings at Gallipoli in 1915 on April 25th.

This year it is shifting events to April 24th, some say to distract
from the centenary of the Armenian massacres. An art installation
planned in Geneva to mark the Armenian centenary has been blocked by
the Swiss government–because of Turkish pressure, insiders say.

In Syria, Turkey is accused of standing by or even helping Islamist
rebels to take cities including Kobane and the mainly Armenian border
town of Kassab, which fell last March. Kassab has since come back
under the control of Bashar Assad’s regime, allowing residents to
return. But the episode revived bitter memories of the final spasm
of violence in 1916, when tens of thousands of Armenians camped in
the desert province of Deir ez-Zor were slaughtered. It will take
more than condolences to heal such deep wounds.

http://www.economist.com/news/international/21648667-centenary-ottoman-empires-slaughter-armenians-approaches-truth

Speaking The Truth On Genocide

SPEAKING THE TRUTH ON GENOCIDE

Denver Post, Ohio
April 14, 2015 Tuesday

The Ottoman Turks did indeed engage in what amounts to attempted
genocide of its Armenian population between 1915 and 1923, slaughtering
an estimated 1.5 million, and Pope Francis is hardly the first to
say so. But the boldness of his declaration Sunday was refreshing
nonetheless, even if it did anger Turkey.

“Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding
without bandaging it,” the pope said.

In recent months, Pope Francis has appeared increasingly animated by
the persecution of Christians and other minorities in the Middle East
and not without reason, given the depredations of the Islamic State.

So it is not surprising that he would be moved by a horrific tragedy
in that region from a century ago.

And if the pope isn’t qualified to speak out on behalf of beleaguered
Christians, or in memory of them, then who would be?

Assad Says Turkish Support ‘Main Factor’ In Idlib Takeover

ASSAD SAYS TURKISH SUPPORT ‘MAIN FACTOR’ IN IDLIB TAKEOVER

15:15 17/04/2015 ” IN THE WORLD

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said Turkish military and logistical
support was the main factor that helped insurgents to seize the
northwestern city of Idlib from government control last month,
Reuters reported.

Idlib, a short drive from the Turkish border, is only the second
provincial capital to fall to insurgents in the four-year-long civil
war. It was captured by an alliance of Islamist groups including al
Qaeda’s Syrian arm, the Nusra Front.

“Any war weakens any army, no matter how strong, no matter how modern,”
Assad said in an interview with Swedish newspaper Expressen, published
on Friday.

In the fall of Idlib, “the main factor was the huge support that came
through Turkey; logistic support, and military support, and of course
financial support that came through Saudi Arabia and Qatar.”

Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Tanju Bilgic, asked to comment
by Reuters, said: “Claims that armed forces coming from Turkey have
participated in the Idlib offensive do not reflect the truth. This
is out of the question. These are baseless allegations orginated by
the Syrian regime which should not be taken seriously.”

http://www.panorama.am/en/politics/2015/04/17/asad/

Iranian FM In List Of 100 Most Influential People In World Of Americ

IRANIAN FM IN LIST OF 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE IN WORLD OF AMERICAN NEWSPAPER TIME

12:36 17/04/2015 ” IN THE WORLD

The American newspaper Time included the Foreign Minister of Iran,
Mohammad Javad Zarif, in the list of the 100 most influential people
in the world, Iranian information agency FARS reports.

Last year the American outlet Foreign Policy published the names of
100 Leading Global Thinkers which included the IRI President Hassan
Rouhani, among others.

Source: Panorama.am

Chinese Ambassador Says Armenian-Chinese Economic Relations Are Grow

CHINESE AMBASSADOR SAYS ARMENIAN-CHINESE ECONOMIC RELATIONS ARE GROWING DYNAMICALLY

16:08, 17 April, 2015

YEREVAN, 17 APRIL, ARMENPRESS. China and Armenia are taking all the
possible steps to enhance their economic relations. This is what
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of China to Armenia Tian
Erlun said as he talked about Armenian-Chinese relations during a
meeting with students of Yerevan State University.

“China is Armenia’s second partner in trade. Last year, it had 13
percent of shares in Armenia’s foreign trade, which goes to show the
dynamic growth of the economic relations,” the Ambassador said,
Armenpress reports.

http://armenpress.am/eng/news/802227/chinese-ambassador-says-armenian-chinese-economic-relations-are-growing-dynamically.html