InternationalArmenians and the Armenian Cause
Published: Thursday October 01, 2009
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How not to open minds and borders
The Turkish press reacts to the Armenia protocols
Speaking to the executive editors of Turkish newspapers on September 17, Turkey's Prime Mininster Recep Tayyip Erdogan said "Armenia should be freed from the influence of its diaspora," Milliyet and TRT reported. The diaspora, he said, does not bring any advantage to Armenia; on the contrary it takes advantage of Armenia.
Armenia's foreign minister responded immediately and strongly to that statement. He said, "If the authorities in contemporary Turkey are not ready today to acknowledge the fact of the genocide committed in the Ottoman Empire, then they must at least treat the survivors of the Genocide and their children with respect." Alas, the foreign minister's otherwise timely and welcome riposte could be interpreted as confirmation that Armenia and the diaspora are not equally committed to the universal affirmation of the Armenian Genocide, and that the Turkish prime minister's comment was insulting to only one subset of the Armenian people. That would be unfortunate.
An insidious campaign
Indeed, one of the more insidious aspects of the Turkish state's efforts to weaken the Armenian state and society is its dissemination of the view that Armenian grievances against Turkey are the obsession of the Armenian diaspora, not shared by the people and government of Armenia.
According to this view, Armenians in Armenia don't really care about the Armenian Genocide, and have no particular demands of Turkey; it is to appease the diaspora that Armenia raises the issue of the Armenian Genocide in international forums.
Helping Turkey disseminate this view was the influential International Crisis Group with its April 2009 report, "Turkey and Armenia: Opening minds, opening borders." The report took the point for granted and repeated it a few times.
Like any good bit of misinformation, this one builds upon a grain of truth: individuals and organizations in the Armenian diaspora are very vocal and focused on the affirmation of the Armenian Genocide and issues of historical justice.
A strong sense of history
But that is only part of the story.
In Armenia, as in many places with an ancient history, people tend to have a strong sense of history. You ask a person born and raised in Yerevan, with parents born and raised in Soviet Armenia, where she's from, and the answer, likely as not, will be, "My family comes from Moush" - or some other part of historical Armenia now under Turkish rule.
In the country's second-largest city, Gyumri, where a Western Armenian dialect is spoken, the people identify strongly with their origins in what is now Turkey.
But it is not necessary for a person in Armenia to have a family connection to the death marches of 1915, or the lost patrimony, to see this history as his or her own.
Setting the agenda
It was, in fact, the people of Armenia who set the agenda - in 1965. In April, on the 50th anniversary of the Genocide, they came out in massive numbers, chanting, "Our lands, our lands," and condemning the Turkish campaign to annihilate the Armenian people in their homeland. That moment became a turning point for the diaspora as well.
Even today, while tens of thousands of Armenians demonstrate every year on April 24 in New York, Glendale and Montebello, Calif., Tehran, Paris, and dozens of other places, a million Armenians head for the Armenian Genocide memorial in Yerevan.
What Armenians do about it outside of April 24 varies from place to place depending on the circumstances of the particular country. In the United States, Armenians campaign for the president and the Congress to affirm the U.S. record on the Genocide. In Armenia, it is obviously not necessary to campaign for the president and the National Assembly to affirm the Genocide (support for universal affirmation of the Armenian Genocide has been and remains part of Armenia's formal National Security Strategy); the people of Armenia there must rely on Armenians elsewhere to pursue the worldwide campaign.
Yet there is no question that the Genocide and grievances against Turkey are a major part of the identity of Armenians in Armenia as well as the diaspora. And the grievances include not only the Genocide, but the ongoing blockade, conceived by Turkey as a way to bring Armenia to its knees. For over 16 years, the Armenian government, with the people's support, refused to cave in to Turkish pressure - even as Armenians and Turks found ways around the blockade, doing business by air or over Georgia.
A poll taken September 21 to 25 by the Armenian Sociological Association suggests that a majority of the residents of Yerevan - 52.4 percent of about 1,000 people polled - oppose the signing of the Armenia-Turkey protocols, Mediamax reported. Just under 40 percent of those polled were in favor of signing. The poll is further evidence that concerns about Turkey are shared by Armenia and the diaspora.
Let's not believe or repeat the Turkish propaganda that seeks to create a chasm among the Armenian people.
So according to this article, lets not try to better our lives now....lets keep living in the past and making things worse for ourselves now based on something that happened 100 years ago and nobody today was alive to remember. Lets continue living in the past and not make the world a better place. Put it behind you already....enough is enough!
By rich1234 at October 09, 2009