PanArmenian News Network
Jan 27 2005

ISSUE OF “OCCUPIED REGIONS” SHOULD BE SETTLED BY KARABAKH AND
AZERBAIJAN, ARMENIAN FM CONSIDERS

27.01.2005 14:44

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ An incorrect notion about the relations between
Nagorno Karabakh, Azerbaijan and Armenia is available in Turkey,
Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanian stated in an interview with
Zaman Turkish newspaper. “The most important thing in this issue is
that the Armenians of Karabakh struggle for their independence. They
do not wish to be citizens of Azerbaijan and be its part,” he said.
Touching upon the issue of Turkey’s mediation, V. Oskanian reported
that Armenia cannot agree to it, as being Azerbaijan’s ally official
Ankara supports that country everywhere and in anything. He reminded
that Nagorno Karabakh has always been an Armenian territory. “As of
the “occupied regions”, the issue should be settled by Karabakh and
Azerbaijan,” the head of the Armenian Foreign Ministry said.

PanArmenian News Network
Jan 27 2005

PACE RESOLUTION ON NAGORNO KARABAKH POSITIVE FOR ARMENIA, TIGRAN
TOROSIAN CONSIDERS

26.01.2005 15:29

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ “We have got a good resolution”, head of the
Armenian delegation to PACE, Vice Speaker of the Armenian National
Assembly Tigran Torosian stated in his interview with the Armenian
Public Television. In his words, PACE views Nagorno Karabakh as a
negotiating party and the proposal of the Armenian delegation to
consider Karabakh the party to conflict was fixed in the resolution.
Another proposal on replacing the word “separatists” by “the forces
struggling for independence” was also approved by the Political
Committee but was not included in the document only due to a trick of
Turkey’s representative, who misled the PACE deputies, while a second
voting is banned by the regulations. The proposals submitted by the
Azeri party were turned down during the preliminary reading in the
Political Committee. Head of the Armenian delegation to PACE also
noted that the necessity of the creation of atmosphere of trust and
the inadmissibility of solving the problems by force were discussed
at the session.

ArmenPress
Jan 27 2005

ARMENIAN LEADING CARRIER POSTS 2004 ACHIEVEMENTS

YEREVAN, JANUARY 27, ARMENPRESS: Armenia’s largest commercial
carrier, Armavia, said today it operated in 2004 375 flights, having
transported 430.9 thousand passengers and secured a 42% growth over
the previous year.
The company transported also 1.5 thousand tons of cargoes and
mail, reporting a 40% growth. The majority of passengers, 82.6
percent, were transported throughout the CIS. The share of “Armavia”
in the total passenger turnover throughout Armenia in 2004 increased
11% making 41%. The seats occupancy was 66.7% and the commercial load
was 59.7%.
The number of flights in the regular timetable of “Armavia”
reached 20. New flights to Ashkhabad and Tehran were added. Besides,
Armavia started flights from “Gyumri” airport to Russian
Rostov-on-Don, Anapa, Mineralniye Vodi and Stavropol on May 21.
General director of “Armavia” Air Company Andrey Nikitin was
quoted as saying that the year 2004 was a year of development of new
and already existing directions and establishment of cooperation with
leading air carriers in the world. Basing on these achievements, in
2005 “Armavia” intends to take a leading position in the market of
transit air transportation from Armenia to Europe, America and Far
East, as well as to increase transit flow from Siberia and Far East
through Zvartnots airport to the countries of Middle East, Europe and
CIS.
Besides, last year a special attention was paid to development of
transfers. The frequency of flights to Moscow and Novosibirsk was
considerably increased. Such a schedule allows an effective link of
the remote networks of “Armavia” and its strategic partner, “Siberia”
Airline, as well as their use for transit flights both from Armenia
to the towns in Siberia and Far East and from Siberia and Far East to
the countries of Middle East, Europe and CIS.
In February and May, 2004, another two modern middle distance
liners A320-211 produced by the company Airbus Industrie arrived in
Yerevan and started their flights. At present, “Armavia”‘s air fleet
consists of four West European airbuses A320, besides by one TU-134
and An-24 are leased and exploited.
In May 2004 “Armavia” Air Company officially became the full
member of the International Air Transport Association (IATA).

Las Vegas Sun
Jan 27 2005

Sisters facing deportation to remain in custody

Judge denies request to release Vegas teens while immigration case is
decided
By Timothy Pratt
<[email protected]>
LAS VEGAS SUN

U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Johnston ruled this morning that he
could not order that two Las Vegas teens be released from an
immigration cell in Los Angeles.

“It’s a heartbreak for me,” Las Vegas resident Rouben Sarkisian said
at the George Federal Building after learning that his daughters,
Emma and Mariam, would not be released into his custody.

Johnston told lawyers for the Sarkisians this morning that he could
find no legal basis to return the girls to their family in Las Vegas
while their deportation case is decided.

“I have to have the law, have to have some authority” to issue such
an order, Johnston said. “As I read the law I don’t have any
authority.”

Johnston did order immigration officials to allow Rouben to visit his
daughters in Los Angeles. He also said that Mariam must be kept
separate from adult detainees because she is a minor, but added that
he didn’t want the sisters split up.

Johnston will allow the family’s lawyers to file additional briefs by
Feb. 2 and will then schedule a hearing to determine if the girls
will be deported.

In the meantime, the family is hoping for possible intervention from
the top levels of the federal government. On Wednesday, Senate
Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called Homeland Security
Secretary Tom Ridge and asked for “personal attention” in the
Sarkisian case.

David Thronson, one of two directors at the Boyd School of Law’s
Immigration Law Clinic at UNLV, said Reid’s phone call was an unusual
move.

“It is not unprecedented, but it is really rare to get a senator’s
direct attention” in an immigration case of this sort, he said.

“We have a large, bureaucratic, unresponsive system, and there are
cases where some kind of dramatic intervention is needed to get the
attention of that system,” Thronson said.

Tessa Hafen, spokeswoman for Reid, said the senator “is fairly
confident this will reach resolution,” with the girls being allowed
to stay in the country while their father, Rouben, who is a legal
resident of the United States, takes the next step and becomes a
citizen.

If he becomes a citizen, he can petition for his daughters to gain
legal status.

Hafen said the case caught Reid’s attention because “the girls are
being punished for something that is not their fault.”

The developments in the nearly 2-week-old case came as the girls
spoke to the Sun from their Los Angeles cell and said their morale
was flagging.

Emma, who is 18, said she had been told Wednesday by a supervisor at
the cell that a stay ordered by Johnston on Jan. 19 had been lifted,
and that they would soon be deported to Armenia — the birthplace of
the girls, but a country now unknown to them after growing up in the
United States.

But no decision has been reached on the stay. Immigration officials
did not return a call seeking comment on the alleged announcement
made to the girls.

“I just hope the senator will help us out, because if I’m in here
another week, I’ll go crazy,” Emma said.

This morning’s ruling means she will remain in custody for at least
another week.

She said her younger sister, Mariam, who is 17, “is starting to
break.” Then Emma began crying.

The girls are able to call family, friends and members of the media
by using calling cards they buy at the immigration holding cell.

Mariam said she “stares at the wall” all day, and that she misses her
2-month-old pit bull, Titi. She said she doesn’t speak to her three
younger sisters — all of whom were born in the United States — when
she and Emma call Las Vegas.

“If I do, I’m going to cry,” she said.

The case turns on a series of events stretching back more than a
decade.

Rouben and Anoush Sarkisian — the parents of the girls — arrived in
the United States in 1991 with Emma and Mariam. They had three more
daughters. They were divorced and Rouben gained his legal status
after marrying a U.S. citizen. That marriage later broke apart.

Anoush never gained legal status, according to immigration officials.

In 1993, a deportation order was issued for the two girls.

During the 1990s each parent attempted to gain legal status for their
two oldest daughters, but both attempts failed when the earlier order
was discovered. An appeal dragged the process out, according to
Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for the federal agency, Immigration and
Customs Enforcement.

But Rouben has said in recent days that he thought otherwise and
attempted to obtain proof of the girls’ status in July, only to be
told of the deportation order. It took until some time shortly before
Jan. 14 for immigration authorities to obtain travel permits for the
girls from the Armenian Consulate in Los Angeles, at which point the
girls were detained.

But the family’s lawyers won a stay against their departure and are
seeking humanitarian consideration in allowing the girls to stay in
the country while their father obtains citizenship.

For Kice, the case, though complex, has an obvious conclusion, since
the girls “had their day in court … and failed to obtain any
(legal) benefit.”

She said the sympathy these girls have apparently gained not only in
Congress — Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Las Vegas, has also shown
support, writing a letter to immigration authorities earlier this
week — but also in the public, is not the issue.

“I understand that there are people being deported every day that are
good people. But this is not a popularity contest … We are a nation
of laws and we have to obey the laws,” she said.

Immigration officials have argued against releasing the teens
because, in light of the fact that their mother is an illegal
immmigrant who has disappeared into the United States, the girls
could do the same.

But Thronson said the case “should shine a light on a broken system.”

He said there were more than 6,000 minors detained by immigration
authorities last year, many of whom were deported.

“These are children being separated from their families — families
that are separated as a result of the system even though family unity
is ostensibly its goal,” he said.

“If it’s true they’ve exhausted all their legal rights then we have
to think — should our system somehow be able to accommodate the
facts of a case like this … the fact of family?”

BBC News, UK
Jan 27 2005

Rwanda remembers the Holocaust
By Robert Walker
BBC correspondent in Kigali

As the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz is being
remembered across the world, one place where this is particularly
poignant is in Rwanda – a country still coming to terms with its own
trauma.

Mass graves at the memorial contain up to 250,000 people
After World War II, when the full horror of the Jewish Holocaust was
revealed, the world said: “Never again”.

But in 1994 an extremist Hutu government in Rwanda began the
systematic slaughter of the minority Tutsis.

It is estimated some 800,000 people were killed in 100 days as the
rest of the world stood by.

On a hill in the Rwandan capital Kigali a memorial stands to those
killed in the genocide.

Mass graves contain anywhere up to 250,000 people and inside a
specially constructed building there are displays teaching a new
generation of Rwandans about what happened in 1994.

Systematically eliminated

But it is not only the Rwandan genocide which is remembered here.

They measured the nose. They were measuring the eyes, heights and
it is very similar

Rwandan student Teddy Mugabo

There are exhibitions about other mass killings during the past
century, of the Namibian Herero people, the Armenians and of the Jews
during the Holocaust.

Teddy Mugabo lost her grandparents and many other relatives in 1994.
Like other Rwandan students visiting the memorial, she is now also
learning about the Holocaust.

“It shows how the Nazis started segregating people and it shows the
way they measured the nose and eyes to show that they are different
people.

“In Rwanda when they were killing Tutsis they did the same thing.
They measured the nose. They were measuring the eyes, heights and it
is very similar.”

Like the Jews during the Holocaust, Tutsis in Rwanda were
systematically eliminated because of their identity.

Blaming ethnic strife

In the aftermath of both genocides, the world said: “Never again”.

1994: RWANDA’S GENOCIDE

6 April: Rwandan Hutu President Habyarimana killed when plane shot
down
April -July: An estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus killed
July: Tutsi-led rebel movement RPF captures Rwanda’s capital Kigali
July: Two million Hutus flee to Zaire, now the DRC

Genocide planning revealed

But many Rwandans who saw UN troops stand aside in 1994 are sceptical
that the world would act differently today.

Tom Ndahiro of the Rwandan Human Rights Commission says western
countries are still not ready to prevent genocide in African
countries – unless their national interests are at stake.

“What Nato did in former Yugoslavia was different from what it did on
Darfur or in Rwanda.

“When it happens to Rwanda – [there’s a] sense of saying: ‘Well it’s
the Rwandans – savages, tribal warfare, ethnic strife.’ And it’s
nonsense.”

But the organisers of Kigali’s memorial hope that by teaching new
generations the painful history of the Rwandan genocide and the
Holocaust the promises of “Never again” really will be kept next
time.

Washington post
Jan 27 2005

New holocausts echo Nazi horrors

by SAMUEL PISAR

Sixty years ago the Russians liberated Auschwitz, as the Americans
approached Dachau. The Allied advance revealed to a stunned world the
horrors of the greatest catastrophe ever to befall our civilization.
To a survivor of both death factories, where Hitler’s gruesome
reality eclipsed Dante’s imaginary inferno, being alive and well so
many years later feels unreal.

We the survivors are now disappearing one by one. Soon history will
speak of Auschwitz at best with the impersonal voice of researchers
and novelists, at worst with the malevolence of demagogues and
falsifiers.

This week the last of us, with a multitude of heads of state and
other dignitaries, are gathering at that cursed site to remind the
world that past can be prologue, that the mountains of human ashes
dispersed there are a warning to humanity of what may still lie
ahead.

The genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda and the
recent massacres of innocents in the United States, Spain, Israel,
Indonesia and so many other countries have demonstrated our inability
to learn from the blood-soaked past. Auschwitz, the symbol of
absolute evil, is not only about that past, it is about the present
and the future of our newly enflamed world, where a coupling of
murderous ideologues and means of mass destruction can trigger new
catastrophes.

When the ghetto liquidation in Bialystok, Poland, began, only three
members of our family were still alive: my mother, my little sister
and I, age 13. Father had already been executed by the Gestapo.
Mother told me to put on long pants, hoping I would look more like a
man, capable of slave labour. “And you and Frieda?” I asked. She
didn’t answer. She knew that their fate was sealed. As they were
chased, with the other women, the children, the old and the sick,
toward the waiting cattle cars, I could not take my eyes off them.
Little Frieda held my mother with one hand, and with the other, her
favourite doll. They looked at me too, before disappearing from my
life forever.

Their train went directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau, mine to the
extermination camp of Majdanek. Months later, I also landed in
Auschwitz, still hoping naively to find their trace. When the SS
guards, with their dogs and whips, unsealed my cattle car, many of my
comrades were already dead from hunger, thirst and lack of air.

At the central ramp, surrounded by electrically charged barbed wire,
we were ordered to strip naked and file past the infamous Dr. Josef
Mengele. The “angel of death” performed on us his ritual “selection”
— those who were to die immediately to the right, those destined to
live a little longer and undergo other atrocious medical experiments,
to the left.

In the background there was music. At the main gate, with its
sinister slogan “Work Brings Freedom,” sat, dressed in striped prison
rags like mine, one of the most remarkable orchestras ever assembled.
It was made up of virtuosos from Warsaw and Paris, Kiev and
Amsterdam, Rome and Budapest. To accompany the selections, hangings
and shootings while the gas chambers and crematoria belched smoke and
fire, these gentle musicians were forced to play Bach, Schubert and
Mozart, interspersed with marches to the glory of the Fuehrer.

In the summer of 1944, the Third Reich was on the verge of collapse,
yet Berlin’s most urgent priority was to accelerate the “final
solution.”

The death toll in the gas chambers on D-Day, as on any other day, far
surpassed the enormous Allied losses suffered on the beaches of
Normandy.

My labour commando was assigned to remove garbage from a ramp near
the crematoria. From there I observed the peak of human extermination
and heard the blood-curdling cries of innocents as they were herded
into the gas chambers. Once the doors were locked, they had only
three minutes to live, yet they found enough strength to dig their
fingernails into the walls and scratch in the words “Never Forget.”

Have we already forgotten?

I also witnessed an extraordinary act of heroism. The Sonderkommando
— inmates coerced to dispose of bodies — attacked their SS guards,
threw them into the furnaces, set fire to buildings and escaped. They
were rapidly captured and executed, but their courage boosted our
morale.

As the Russians advanced, those of us still able to work were
evacuated deep into Germany. My misery continued at Dachau. During a
final death march, while our column was being strafed by Allied
planes that mistook us for Wehrmacht troops, I escaped with a few
others. An armoured battalion of GIs brought me life and freedom. I
had just turned 16 — a skeletal “subhuman” with shaved head and
sunken eyes who had been trying so long to hold on to a flicker of
hope. “God bless America,” I shouted uncontrollably .

In the autumn of their lives, the survivors of Auschwitz feel a
visceral need to transmit what we have endured, to warn younger
generations that today’s intolerance, fanaticism and hatred can
destroy their world as they once destroyed ours, that powerful alert
systems must be built not only against the fury of nature — a
tsunami or storm or eruption — but above all against the folly of
man.

Because we know from bitter experience that the human animal is
capable of the worst, as well as the best — of madness as of genius
— and that the unthinkable remains possible.

In the wake of so many recent tragedies, a wave of compassion and
solidarity for the victims, a fragile yearning for peace, democracy
and liberty, seem to be spreading around the planet.

It is far too early to evaluate their potential. Mankind, divided and
confused, still hesitates and vacillates. But the irrevocable has not
yet happened; our chances are still intact. Pray that we learn how to
seize them.

Samuel Pisar is an international lawyer and the author of Of Blood
and Hope.

Summary – “The ‘angel of death’ performed on us his ritual
‘selection’ — those of us who were to die immediately to the right,
those destined to live a little longer and undergo other atrocious
medical experiments, to the left.”

The Hindu, India
January 27, 2005

AN UNCERTAIN WAIT

by Vaiju Naravane

CAN TURKEY be considered a European country? The answer to that
question was given at the 25-member European Union summit in Brussels
on December 17, 2004, when heads of state and government agreed to
formally open talks on Turkey’s accession to the select European club
at whose door Ankara has been knocking with singular persistence
since 1963.

But the answer, when it came, was a conditional one. While EU leaders
gave a date – October 3, 2005 – for the opening of accession talks,
they also warned that the negotiations could drag on for up to 20
years, with no firm promises of membership at the end. This sets
Turkey apart from all other candidate countries for which accession
talks have been close-ended.

By responding with a conditional yes, EU leaders were in fact turning
the proposition around. Implicit in their response is the question:
is Turkey fit to be in Europe? With the onus of proof lying with
Ankara. For the past decade, Europe has been dragging its feet over
opening formal membership talks with Turkey, shifting the goalposts
each time the Turks pressed for a firm answer.

The objections to Turkey joining Europe are numerous: Turkey is large
with a growing population of 70 million people. Despite its secular
Constitution, it is not considered fully democratic because of the
preponderant role the army has played in its recent history. Its
treatment of the minorities and its human rights record do not in any
way match European standards. Turkey is poor and undereducated and it
will cost billions of Euros in development aid to allow the Turks to
catch up with everyone else.

But the overriding principal argument against Turkey’s adhesion to
the EU is that of religion, culture, history and geography.
Straddling East and West, sharing its frontiers as much with Europe –
Greece, Bulgaria – as with the Middle East – Syria, Iraq, Iran –
Turkey falls between two cultural stools.

Like many other European thinkers and commentators both from Europe’s
Right and Left, Jean-Louis Bourlanges, a French member of the
European Parliament, questions Turkey’s suitability to join the
European club on civilisational grounds. “Turkey is not part Europe
and it is foolish to persist in building a multi-civilisational EU
with unlimited, ever-extending borders. Turkey’s adhesion must
involve, first and foremost, a redefinition of the European project
with citizens deciding whether they want an EU devoid of specific
civilisational underpinnings or whether they wish to limit it to
borders inherited from history and geography,” he says.

These geographic, cultural, religious and political borders, he says,
are clear and set in the Bosporous Straits. While the contributions
of Turkey to Western institutions such as NATO, the OSCE
(Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe), the European
Council and the United Nations have been valuable, and must not be
underestimated, they do not make Turkey European. Does Europe really
wish to share its borders with Syria, Iran or Iraq? Does it wish to
import the endemic instability of the Middle East? Can Europe allow
itself to be undermined from within, he asks.

Those opposed to extending Europe’s borders up to Syria and Iran feel
such an Europe would have little consistence. It would be
overstretched and dysfunctional in budgetary, judicial and
institutional terms. Turkey’s adhesion would make Europe borderless,
powerless, ill-defined and irrelevant as an international player.
Opponents of Turkey view Washington’s continued pressure on the EU to
accept Turkey’s membership bid as proof of America’s Machiavellian
intention to further weaken its main rival in the international arena
by saddling it with a time bomb, both in terms of retarded and costly
economic development, and the Trojan Horse of a large and growing
Muslim population.

Supporters say the absorption of Turkey should pose no problem since
Europe is no longer a solid unified bloc of developed economies but
rather a mosaic of nations big and small with variable geometry,
moving in concentric circles at differing speeds. An excluded Turkey
could not be an effective firewall against Islamic fundamentalism and
Middle Eastern instability. Anchoring Turkey in the EU would reassure
Europe’s growing population of Muslims (an estimated 9 million
scattered mainly across France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Spain).
Turing away Turkey would send a negative signal to the fastest
growing segment of Europe’s population.

Writer Guy Sorman, a passionate supporter of Turkey’s EU bid, says:
“If Europe is to build a new and constructive rapport with the
Islamic world, one opposed to what the Americans have done in the
Middle East, it is imperative that Turkey is allowed into the EU.
Turkey is a living example of a compromise between secularism and
Islam, a reminder that choices other than purely confrontational ones
are both possible and available. Rejecting Turkey means closing our
horizons, refusing a global role, accepting American hegemony.”

In the past three years, there has been a significant shift in
European public opinion over the Turkish question. This is closely
related to the aftermath of 9/11 and an increase in Islamophobia
across Europe. A recent pan-European poll shows that public opinion
in several countries, including France, Germany, Austria, Poland and
Greece, is opposed to Turkey’s accession. In France, for example, 67
per cent of the population would vote no’ if a referendum were to be
held today. French President Jacques Chirac came in for some severe
criticism when he announced he was in favour of allowing in the
Turks, even though his cautious approbation was punctuated by an
impressive series of ifs and buts.

Critics of full membership for Turkey have proposed a special
partnership regime whereby Turkey would be granted special privileges
but would be formally kept out of the Union. Turkish Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan has already rejected such an offer saying Turkey
would settle for all or nothing.

A significant stumbling block in the negotiations process could be
the status of Cyprus and Turkey’s stubborn refusal to recognise the
island state’s pro-Greek Government. A row over Cyprus, which joined
the EU in May 2004, almost derailed the talks until a last minute
solution was found, with Turkey agreeing to sign a protocol extending
its 1963 association agreement with the EU to cover all
member-states, including Cyprus. Ankara insists this does not amount
to a formal recognition of the Mediterranean island state. However,
over the next two decades that the talks are expected to last, Turkey
will have to work out some acceptable solution. Ankara now says it
will turn again to the United Nations and the good offices of Kofi
Annan whose peace plan was accepted by Turkish Cypriots in Northern
Cyprus but rejected by Greek Cypriots.

It is difficult at this stage to evaluate the economic impact of an
eventual integration of Turkey. Clearly, because of its size, its
potential but also its economic weakness, Turkey will pose an
enormous challenge to the EU. With its 70 million people, the
adhesion of Turkey alone, with its mainly agricultural economy and
accompanying poverty, will be equivalent to the addition of 10 new
members last May.

Figures published by the European Union appear staggering.
Simulations based on Turkish integration in 2015 suggest Turkey would
receive 28 billion euros in “catching up” aid by 2025 – a third of
the EU’s current budget.

France and Germany, who would like to limit their EU payments to 1
per cent of GDP would have to contribute significantly more. If they
refuse, other beneficiary countries, such as the new entrants from
Eastern Europe, would receive less. With Turkish per capita income at
28 per cent of the EU average, every region of Turkey would be
eligible for extra development funding, a fact that makes weaker EU
economies baulk.

So is Turkey fit to be part of Europe? The true answer to this
question will come in the next decade. The EU has said Turkey is “not
a candidate like the others.” Which is a diplomatic way of pointing
to the religious question while underlining several difficulties:
that Turkey will be the most populous nation of Europe in 20 years
with tremendous regional disparities within its borders. Turkey has a
long, long way to go before qualifying. Its human rights record has
to improve. It has to bring itself in line with the democratic and
institutional principles that govern European nations. Healthcare,
education, treatment of minorities, the status of women, freedom of
expression – all need looking at. But Turkey must also work on and
reconcile itself to its own past by recognising the Armenian genocide
of 1915.

As the French daily, Le Monde , said in an editorial: “One of the
major virtues of the European Union is to encourage applicants to
reform, to modernise themselves, to respect the rights of minorities,
to break with hegemonist temptations. There is no reason why this
educational virtue should not work with the Turks. For them the
choice is clear: if they meet the conditions set by the European
Union, they could become a full member in 10 to 15 years. It is now
for the Turks to seize this opportunity.”

The Irish Times
January 27, 2005

The Final Solution

History is littered with genocide but none compares to the diabolism
of the Third Reich, writes Kevin Myers

Die Endlosung, the final solution, the extermination of Europe’s
Jews, was administratively agreed upon at the Wannsee conference in
Berlin in January 1942. Hitler had probably made up his mind to
exterminate world Jewry after he had declared war against the US the
month before. But before the 15 pencils and pads were laid neatly
around the large mahogany table in the lakeside Wannsee mansion, the
momentum towards genocide had been gathering from deep within
European history.

Widespread anti-Semitism was but one factor in the creation of the
necessary psychology for mass murder. After all, it had long existed
in Europe. The Jews had been chased out of England and Spain in the
middle ages and had sought refuge in the vast and relatively
unpopulated tracts around the Vistula. Subsequently, anti-Semitism
had remained a feature of most societies – but without it being
expressed in terms of organised mass murder.

The arrival of Leninist totalitarianism brought with it the great
enabling idea that the state – not law, nor monarch nor pontiff – was
the supreme authority. And this was not some uniquely Christian
perversion. The notion that the population of the state could be
murderously engineered was first enunciated by the Jewish Bolshevist
Gregory Zinoviev in September 1918.

“To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism.
We must win over to our side 90 million out of the hundred millions
of the inhabitants of Russia under the Soviets. As for the rest of
them, we have nothing to say to them: they must be exterminated.”

The annihilation of class enemies became a commonplace under the
Soviet Union: but though mass murder became a feature of the purges,
the primary purpose of the infamous Gulag was to supply the state
with free labour. The idea of a death camp, where the state used
industrial principles to maximise the output of not economic products
but dead humans, was the singular achievement of the Third Reich.

Of course, killing one’s tribal enemy is as old as mankind. Dead
Philistines and Egyptians brought a sombre joy to the authors of the
Old Testament. Even the term genocide applies to earlier events. The
Mongols are said to have killed 35 million Chinese peasants in the
14th century, and though modern Turkey hotly disputes the word to
describe the Armenian massacres in 1915 – largely, as it happens, by
Kurds – many historians feel the term fits. But nothing in history
quite compares with the Third Reich’s diabolism.

The Final Solution actually began with a euthanasia programme in
German hospitals. Eight thousand children were killed with the
barbiturate luminol.

Other experiments revealed the efficacy of gassing. The gun also
proved useful: the final programme to rid the Reich of the mentally
ill involved shooting 50,000 patients.

When in January 1939, Hitler publicly promised the extermination of
the Jewry of Europe in the event of war, he had probably still not
decided on the wholesale murder of the entire population of Jews.
More likely, what he had in mind was the elimination of the Jews of
the east and the deportation to Madagascar of the “civilised” Jews of
Germany.

That option was ruled out by the continued maritime dominion of the
Royal Navy: hence, as his “Jewish problem” mounted with his victories
in the East, the Final Solution.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this programme was its
irrationality – though to be sure, it was not entirely irrational.
Jews who could work experienced an even worse fate than those who
were killed outright: they were worked to death.

But there was nonetheless something bizarrely dysfunctional about
reducing doctors, physicists and engineers to manual slave labour. To
have used their intellect would, of course, have undermined the
underlying thesis of the “untermensch”.

Contrary to popular mythology, Nazi Germany was not a single
monolith, remorselessly and ruthlessly obeying orders from the apex.
The general tone was set by Hitler, but his will was imposed through
a myriad of competing agencies. Even the implementation of the Final
Solution involved many organisations, orchestrated by the formal host
of the Wannsee conference, Adolf Eichmann. Even individuals involved
varied startlingly. The elimination of Jews could be executed by the
exquisitely-mannered, Mozart-loving Catholic intellectual Artur
Seyss-Inqart, the butcher of the Netherlands, or by his fellow
Austrian, Odilo Globocnik, a violent and personally disgusting brute
whom his fellow Nazis loathed.

It is this mix, where the mannered and outwardly cultivated consorted
with the truly barbaric, which made the Third Reich so utterly evil.
Thus the unspeakable was fastidiously recorded: Idi Amin meets
bureaucracy. On December 29th, 1942, Hitler received a report from
Himmler written using a special large typeface because of the
Fuhrer’s failing eyesight. It declared that in the Ukraine alone,
special units had executed 363,211 Jews; and in all that murderous
filth, someone was counting. But it was the fate of the Jews of
Salonika which underlines the military insanity of the Final
Solution. Using scarce railway resources at the height of the war,
45,000 were sent the 1,600 km to the muddy horrors of Auschwitz. Just
three survived.

>From the opening days of the war, anti-Semitism had been its keynote,
as the Volkdeutsche Selbschultz – auxiliary units of ethnic Germans
in Poland – fell on their Jewish neighbours, and murdered them simply
because they were Jews.

They were the pioneers for all that followed. Two million Soviet Jews
shot or gassed in situ. Half a million Polish Jews killed in their
ghettoes. Up to two million Jews killed in Treblinka. Nor was it a
German affliction alone. Ukrainians and Balts in particular were
enthusiastic Jew-killers, and Romanian fascists murdered a quarter of
a million Jews.

So Auschwitz stands as a useful concrete symbol of the greatest crime
in Europe’s history: but the Final Solution could anyway have
occurred without it. Moreover, it had been foreshadowed by Stalin’s
camps, and its liberation did not spell the end of murderous racism
on the continent.

Incredibly, the first post-war anti-Semitic pogrom occurred in Poland
a few months later, and the glories of Bosnia lay half a century ahead.

KLAS-TV, NV
Jan 27 2005

Homeland Security to Review Deportation Case

(Jan. 27) — Since the sisters were detained by immigration officials
nearly two weeks ago, family lawyers, relatives, even complete
strangers have lobbied politicians to get involved.

The girls are currently in custody in Los Angeles. Immigration
officials want to send them to Armenia because they’re not United
States citizens. But the girls grew up here and know nothing but
America.

A massive effort has been brewing to keep the girls in the United
States and on Wednesday, Senator Harry Reid is joining the fight.

Inside Tropicana Pizza at Wigwam and Pecos, it’s anything but
business as usual. The Sarkisian family restaurant must stay open
even though immigration officials have taken two of their own.

“It’s been very different. It’s not the same,” said Michelle
Sarkisian, who is the sister of the two girls facing deportation.
Thirteen-year-old Michelle is helping out and filling the gap left
behind by her older sisters, 18-year-old Emma and 17-year-old Mariam.

The two girls typically work the front counter. Now, their pictures
are all that’s left. Emma and Mariam are locked up in Los Angeles
facing deportation to Armenia.

“Well, this is an example of what’s wrong with our immigration
policy,” said Senator Harry Reid, (D) Nevada. After widespread
publicity about this case, Nevada Senator Harry Reid is stepping in.

“This is a situation where these two young girls, through no fault of
their own, have been thrown into a situation that’s really
untenable.” In a satellite interview from Washington, D.C., Reid
tells Eyewitness News that he has called the Department of Homeland
Security Secretary Tom Ridge on Wednesday. Reid talked about the
Sarkisian girls.

“And he interrupted me and said, ‘don’t tell me we’re deporting
them.’ I said, ‘yes.’ He said, ‘oh no.'” Reid is optimistic Secretary
Ridge will step in. After 9-11, Homeland Security took over control
of immigration enforcement.

Ridge is the top person and has the power to keep the girls here. “I
know Tom Ridge pretty well. I don’t think this is something he wants
to happen in the last few days of his administration,” Reid said.

The last few days for the Sarkisian family have been a complete
nightmare. Rouben, the father is hopeful Reid’s effort will close the
lid on this dark chapter in their lives.

Secretary Ridge is not serving a second term under the Bush
administration. So his last day will be Tuesday. Reid believes this
will all be resolved by then and the girls will be back home in Las
Vegas.

ITAR-TASS, Russia
Jan 27 2005

Azeri soldier is reportedly killed in Nagorno-Karabakh

BAKU, January 27 (Itar-Tass) – The Defence Ministry of Azerbaijan has
confirmed the death of an Azeri soldier in a fire exchange near the
Shurabad village in a district adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh. The fire
came from the Armenian side’s territory, the Ministry went on to say.

The Defence Ministry refuted some local media reports that military
hostilities were under way in that direction. It said that the Azeri
soldier was killed by a single shot on Thursday.

In the meantime, a spokesman for the Defence Ministry of
Nagorno-Karabakh has denied reports of a shootout on the borders of
the unrecognised republic.

Colonel Senor Asratyan, the press service chief of the Defence
Ministry of Nagorno-Karabakh, told Itar-Tass by telephone that the
situation in Nagorno-Karabakh was calm.

The authorities in Stepanakert have described reports about the Azeri
soldier’s death as `misinformation’, which Baku is disseminating
intentionally on the eve of the arrival of an OSCE monitoring group.