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The Armenian Reporter | March 28, 2009 National Washington briefing by Emil Sanamyan Armenian Caucus cochairs make aid, policy proposals The United States should increase engagement with Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh and tighten existing restrictions on ties with Azerbaijan, Reps. Frank Pallone (D.-N.J.) and Mark Kirk (R.-Ill.), cochairs of the Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues recommended in a March 24 letter to colleagues. Rep. Nita Lowey. Photo: AP. The letter, currently open for additional co-signers, is addressed to Reps. Nita Lowey (D.-N.Y.) and Kay Granger (R.-Tex.), respectively chair and ranking member of the House Foreign Appropriations Subcommittee which sets foreignaid levels at the early stages of the annual budget process. Specifically, the Pallone-Kirk letter argued for an increase in U.S. economic aid to Armenia from Fiscal Year 2009 level of $48mln to $70mln; military aid, from $3.5mln to $5mln; and aid to Nagorno-Karabakh from $8mln to $10mln. The letter also recommends report language that would lift any “official or unofficial restrictions” on formal U.S. engagement with Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as support for confidence-building measures to help resolve the Karabakh conflict. Additionally, citing Azerbaijan’s continued war threats, the letter recommends an additional condition on presidential authority to waive existing restrictions on U.S. aid to Azerbaijan. The new language would require the executive branch to certify that “in the last fiscal year, Azerbaijan has not taken hostile action, either through military force or incitement, including but not limited to threatening pronouncements by government officials, toward Armenia or Nagorno-Karabakh.” Should that condition be met, the co-chairs suggest equal levels of military aid to Armenia and Azerbaijan, or the so-called “parity” approach to continue. Last summer, the effort by Mr. Kirk’s predecessor as co-chair, former Rep. Joe Knollenberg (R.- Mich.) to zero out U.S. military aid to Azerbaijan outright failed narrowly in the subcommittee vote. Armenian politician weighs in on Genocide resolution In a rare letter to a congressional colleague, a senior member of the Armenian parliament wrote to express “complete support” for the House Resolution 252 affirming the U.S. record on the Armenian Genocide, introduced earlier this month. Armen Rustamian, chair of the National Assembly’s Foreign Relations Committee and senior member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF)’s leadership, addressed the March 19 letter to his U.S. counterpart, Rep. Howard Berman (D.-Calif.), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which should next consider the resolution. The letter was circulated by the ARF’s press service. Ahmet Davutoglu. Photo: Armenian Reporter. While pursuing universal recognition and condemnation of the Armenian Genocide is Armenia’s official policy, senior Armenian officials have rarely spoken out on specific proposals before the U.S. Congress. On the other hand, Turkish leaders have frequently voiced their opposition to the resolution. Last week, a spokesperson for the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) reiterated her support for genocide recognition but added that congressional action on resolution was not imminent. The spokesperson, Brendan Day, told Reuters on March 19 that “no one’s talking about a vote any time soon.” Senior Turkish official in Washington ahead of Obama’s visit Ahmet Davutoglu, senior foreign policy advisor to Turkish leaders, last week met with U.S. officials to discuss President Barack Obama’s visit to Ankara and Istanbul on April 5–7. After meeting Mr. Obama’s national security advisor Jim Jones on March 19, Mr. Davutoglu told Reuters that he could not say what the Obama administration’s intentions were with regard to the president’s pre-election pledge to recognize the Armenian Genocide, adding only that the two officials “went through all these issues in a very friendly and cooperative manner.” Administration officials have so far refused to address the Armenian Genocide issue directly. Mr. Davutoglu suggested that U.S.–Turkey relations were “in a historic era where our policies are almost identical on all issues,” Associated Press reported him as saying on March 19. He added that the Armenian Genocide issue “could be debated from a historical perspective, but should not hijack the strategic vision of Turkish-American relations or Turkish-Armenian relations.” With regard to Armenia-Turkey talks, Mr. Davutoglu said that “there is a process, and everyone should strengthen this process and not try to weaken it,” the Washington Post cited him as saying. “We hope that the discussions on the Armenian issue [in U.S.] do not affect this process in a negative sense.” During a visit to Washington shortly before the presidential elections, Mr. Davutoglu insisted that Turkey wants “to have best relations with Armenia,” and “good relations” with Armenians in the diaspora. (See this page in the November 1, 2008, Armenian Reporter.) Obama offers goodwill message to Iran President Barack Obama stressed U.S. commitment to diplomacy and dialogue with the Iranian government in a March 20 video message dedicated to Nowruz, the Iranian new year. “I want you, the people and leaders of Iran, to understand the future that we seek,” Mr. Obama said in the message. “It’s a future with greater opportunities for partnership and commerce. It’s a future where the old divisions are overcome, where you and all of your neighbors and the wider world can live in greater security and greater peace.” Mr. Obama’s comments reflected a campaign pledge to reach out to Iran. But the message also referred to “terror” and “arms,” reflecting longstanding U.S. charges that Iran supports terrorist groups and seeks to develop nuclear weapons. A spokesperson for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad welcomed “the wish of the president of the United States to put away past differences.” But in an interview with Reuters, the spokesperson, Ali Akbar Javanfekr, put the blame for tensions on the U.S. “The only source of instability in the region is the American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he claimed. Ross Vartian offers testimony to House subcommittee Rep. Howard Berman chairing committee meeting. Photo: Armenian Reporter. In what is seen as a step toward U.S.-Iranian dialogue, Iranian officials said this week they would attend a United Nations conference on Afghanistan to be held in The Hague on March 31. The conference was proposed by the United States earlier this month, as the Obama administration has made stabilization of Afghanistan its immediate foreign policy priority. European Union leaders agree on “Eastern” policy Member countries of the European Union have formally approved two policy initiatives involving their eastern neighbors. During a March 19–20 summit in Brussels, European leaders agreed to set aside 600 million euros for a multiyear program dubbed “Eastern Partnership,” which will involve Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, RFE/RL reported. The program is viewed as a counterweight to Russia’s increasingly dominant posture in the former Soviet space since the war in Georgia last year. While promising increased cooperation up to free trade agreements and visa-free travel, it makes no mention of potential European Union expansion into the area. In a related development, the European Union agreed to spend 200 million euros to facilitate the Nabucco gas pipeline from the Caspian region to Europe, bypassing Russia. Europeans hope the new route will lessen their dependence on Russia as supplier of natural gas. f Dear Chairwoman Lowey and Ranking Member Granger: On behalf of the U.S.-Armenia Public Affairs Committee (USAPAC), Ross Vartian, Executive Director, is pleased to provide testimony to the Subcommittee for fiscal year 2010 State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations bill. USAPAC requests that not less than $70 million in bilateral aid be provided to the Republic of Armenia under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and the FREEDOM Support Act account, for assistance for the Independent States of the former Soviet Union and for related programs. USAPAC also recommends that the Subcommittee include language urging USAID to allocate not less than $10 million to Nagorno Karabakh with a substantial developmental component under the FREEDOM Support Act account, for assistance for the Independent States of the former Soviet Union and for related programs. Finally, we respectfully urge the Subcommittee to maintain military assistance to Armenia, providing $4 million in Foreign Military Financing funds and $1 million in International Military Education and Training funds, while zeroing out U.S. military aid to Azerbaijan. Recommendations for Fiscal Year (FY) 2008 1. Assistance to Armenia USAPAC urges the Subcommittee to allocate not less than $70 million in U.S. assistance to Armenia in FY 2010. We are grateful to the Subcommittee for providing effective annual levels of humanitarian, reform and development assistance to Armenia. Since its independence in 1991, Congress has allocated some $2.0 billion with remarkable, bi-partisan consensus votes spanning four presidencies and ten U.S. congresses. This assistance reflects U.S. commitment to Armenia’s success as an independent, secure and economically viable state, despite blockades by neighbors in violation of U.S. and international law. Despite the dual blockades by Azerbaijan and Turkey, Armenia’s economic reform progress has been remarkable. The Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation’s “2009 Index of Economic Freedom,” which measured how 179 countries scored on a list of 50 independent variables divided into ten broad factors of economic freedom, rated Armenia 31st. According to the study, Armenia remains the most economically free nation in the region, including all nations in the Commonwealth of Independent States. As a result of these reforms, Armenia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has in 1998-2008 increased by a factor of 10. This remarkable expansion came after a decade of economic decline that followed the devastating earthquake of 1988. Armenia, of course, has not been immune to the global economic downturn. Armenia’s GDP contracted by 2% in January 2009 and the national currency has been devalued by 20% against the U.S. dollar. These realities give U.S. economic support for Armenia added importance. In December 2005, Armenia was competitively awarded $236 million in conditional aid over a five year period through the performancebased Millennium Challenge Account. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration had justified its past requests for lower bilateral aid by counting the MCA grant against Armenia. Armenia has been able to effectively implement economic reforms, in part, because of U.S. assistance. It is counterintuitive at best to reduce such assistance because Armenia has won a MCC compact. These assistance programs serve fundamentally different purposes. US AID assistance has been used effectively in Armenia to secure and sustain broad economic and democratic reform. Armenia’s MCC Compact is targeted toward rural roads and irrigation. 2. Assistance to Nagorno Karabakh USAPAC commends the vision and leadership of the Subcommittee for its continued support for humanitarian aid to the Nagorno Karabakh Republic (NKR). We request that the Subcommittee include language urging USAID to allocate not less than $10 million for Karabakh in FY 2010, while specifically directing that Continued on page 18 m
The Armenian Reporter | March 28, 2009 3 Community Grigoris Balakian’s Armenian Genocide memoir Armenian Golgotha to appear in English April 2 NEW YORK – “Of all the Christian minorities of the East, we Armenians are to blame for our fate. For although we are an alert nation, we believed in the Europeans’ professed struggle for justice and rights, in their false words and deceptions. Our exemplary stupidity was a simplemindedness peculiar to peasants: we did not realize that on the scales of justice, the oil deposits of Mosul would weigh more than the lives of millions of Christians.” On April 24, 1915, the author of these words, Fr. Grigoris Balakian, was arrested along with some 250 other intellectuals and leaders of Constantinople’s Armenian community. During the next four years, he bore witness to the countless deportation caravans of Armenians, tortured, raped, or slaughtered and subsequently mutilated on their way to death in the Syrian deserts; heard the testimony of many survivors, foreign witnesses, and Turkish officials involved in the extermination campaign; and also came Cover of Armenian Golgotha . to know of some brave, righteous Turks and their German allies who resisted secret extermination orders. Miraculously, Balakian managed to escape – through forest and over mountain, disguised as, among other things, a railroad worker and then a German soldier. By September 1918, determined to testify to the “great crime,” he was already at work on a dramatic and comprehensive memoir. “One after another the bloody episodes of the thorny Armenian Golgotha moved across my mind,” he wrote. “We were still living in a time of annihilation and terror.” The first volume of Armenian Golgotha was published in 1922 by the Armenian Mekhitarist press of Vienna; the second, found among his sister’s papers after her death in 1956, was published in Paris three years later with the aid of the Armenian General Benevolent Union. Searing in its detail, Balakian’s analysis of the Turkish government’s organized plan to annihilate the Armenians spurred the young Vahakn Dadrian to devote himself to research on the Armenian Genocide. Armenian Golgotha “shook me to the foundations of my being,” he recalled in a 2005 interview with the Armenian Reporter. “The graphic description of the fiendish atrocities overwhelmed me. That became a turning point in my academic career,” added Prof. Dadrian, now Director of Genocide Research at the Zoryan Institute. Grigoris Balakian, who became bishop of the Armenian Apostolic Church in southern France, died in Marseilles in 1934. His great nephew, the poet and memoirist Peter Balakian, first learned about Armenian Golgotha in 1991 through a chain of circumstances he describes in his prize-winning memoir Black Dog of Fate (now reissued in a 10th anniversary edition). After a ten-year project of translating and editing this memoir with former Armenian Reporter managing editor Aris Sevag, Peter Balakian has brought Armenian Golgotha into an English edition to be published by Knopf on April 2. “It has been a particularly poignant and rich experience for me to bring [Grigoris Balakian’s] book into print in English, eighty-seven years after its initial publication,” Peter Balakian writes in the preface. Elie Wiesel found Armenian Golgotha a “heartbreaking book”; Sir Martin Gilbert calls it “a story that needs to be known.” “The translation and publication of Armenian Golgotha in English is long overdue,” states Deborah E. Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust. “It constitutes a thundering historical proof that those who deny the Armenian Genocide are engaged in a massive deception.” “This book will become a classic,” predicts Robert Jay Lifton, author of The Nazi Doctors,” both for its depiction of a much denied genocide and for its humane and brilliant witness to what human beings can endure and overcome.” connect: randomhouse.com/knopf/catalog/dis- play.pperl?isbn=97803072628821-212- 572-2151 A conversation with Peter Balakian on Armenian Golgotha NEW YORK – Q: Bishop Grigoris Balakian is your great uncle. How did you come to find out about him and his memoir? Peter Balakian: Growing up, I knew he was a Bishop in the Armenian church. He was spoken of occasionally by my father and aunts. Although they mentioned some books he wrote about the Armenian church, no one ever mentioned this great memoir. And what’s odd is that both my aunts were literary critics and my father was also a serious student of history, but they didn’t mention this book. I know the subject of the fate of the Armenians in 1915 traumatized them, and so all was silence when it came to this subject. I wrote about my discovery of my great uncle in a chapter of my own memoir, Black Dog of Fate . So my memoir led to my finding his memoir. It’s become a sort of dialogue both within the family and about this history. Q: How did you find out about Armenian Golgotha? PB: It was coincidental, or fated if you will. In 1991 a friend of mine sent me a French magazine article about a commemorative service for him. He had been the Bishop in Marseilles at the end of his life. And the article mentioned this “extraordinary memoir about the Armenian Genocide.” Immediately I ordered the book from Beirut – it’s still in print in the original Armenian. And by 1999 I was working with a co-translator. The project has taken 10 years. Q: What was the process of translating the memoir like? PB: For me it’s been a moving and complex journey to discover my great uncle’s survivor story, his language and his life. The translation was a collaborative process, and it has been slow and painstaking. Trying to find the right idioms, and words, rhythms, and sounds for this rich Armenian language in contemporary English was an endless challenge. And this is a book of 71 chapters of pretty dark stuff. Q: How has your uncle come to life for you? A: I had no idea my uncle was such a dynamic leader and prominent intellectual of his generation. Armenian Golgotha brings to life the extraordinary creativity, wit, humanity, and compassion this young Armenian clergyman exhibited in the face of overwhelming odds. His ability to negotiate with Turkish perpetrators and still provide sustenance to his emaciated group of fellow deportees is remarkable. And throughout the story he remains humble and focused on helping others. As a clergyman, he’s anguished both by the human suffering he is witnessing and by the destruction of his culture, the culture of which he is a guardian and protector. His witnessing is compound witnessing in this way. Q: What kind of contribution does Armenian Golgotha make to our understanding of the Armenian Genocide? PB: It’s an essential text. There is no text about the Genocide that’s as rich, layered, and complex as this. It brings us closer to the century’s first genocide than any other first-person account that I know of. Balakian was one of the famous 250 Armenian cultural leaders who were arrested on the night of April 14, 1915, at the very start of the genocide. He survived nearly four years on deportation marches and witnessed things that few survivors have described. Q: How did he witness more than others? I wrote about my discovery of my great uncle in a chapter of my own memoir, Black Dog of Fate . So my memoir led to my finding his memoir. It’s become a sort of dialogue both within the family and about this history. PB: He was in a unique position as a priest because Armenian deportees looked to him for help, and for several months he led more than a hundred deportees through horrendous conditions. Along the way, he encountered survivors from other parts of Turkey and they told him stories of the massacres they had witnessed. Also, Turkish perpetrators, thinking he was on his way to death, opened up to him and told him some extraordinary things. And, the German, Swiss, and Austrian railway engineers told him their accounts of witnessing atrocities. He traveled hundreds of miles and witnessed the ruins and remains of many destroyed Armenian villages, towns, and cities. Q: Could you say more about the destruction of Armenian culture and its artifacts and infrastructure? PB: Yes, that’s an important part of the process of genocide. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish legal scholar who created the concept of genocide as an international crime, underscored the fact that genocide involves not only the killing of people but also the destruction of a people’s cultural institutions, language, art and artifacts, religion, and so on. In the case of the Armenian Genocide, the Turkish government destroyed more than 5,000 Armenian churches and schools as well as thousands of other buildings, artifacts, works of art and literature. Balakian also shows us what Peter Balakian. happened to Armenians who were forceably converted to Islam from their Christian faith. It’s astonishing to read how intensely Grigoris Balakian bears witness to this kind of destruction on his deportation and escape. Q: What does Balakian’s memoir show us about this event as an act of genocide? PB: Readers will find that Armenian Golgotha corroborates what most of the scholarship has shown. The deportations and massacres of the Armenians were planned by the central government; he shows us how the Turkish government used surveillance, created blacklists to arrest the cultural leaders, created killing squads, created false provocations in order to arrest Armenians, and so on. Chapter 11 is a blueprint of the genocidal process. Q: Why is the Armenian Genocide important to study today? After all, it happened almost 95 years ago. PB: Well, the Armenian Genocide is the template for all genocide to follow in the modern era. It began what you might call the age of modern genocide. It was the first instance in which a nation state used its military, bureaucracy, and technology to exterminate a target group of people in a concentrated period of time. More than a million people were killed in a year. Hitler was inspired by the Armenian Genocide; he saw you could get rid of a hated ethnic group that way, and he said in August 1939, “Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Secondly, Raphael Lemkin, the man who developed the concept of genocide, did so in large part on the basis of what happened to the Armenians in 1915. The Armenian Genocide is part of the genesis of the very word. Third, the Turkish government’s continuous denial of the genocide is a dangerous example for those who would commit genocide today. Q: Why does the Turkish government deny the Armenian Genocide today? PB: It’s a complex issue and I would point to a few salient factors. Turkey has been socialized since its founding as a modern republic by certain taboos, and one of them concerns the disappearance of the Armenians. Turks have been taught that there were once Armenians in Turkey and that they were a “disloyal people” and whatever happened to them was their own fault. At the same time, any real history of the Armenians has been disallowed in Turkey, and Turkish people have not been free to critique their own society and its history. If you disallow critical inquiry of your country, you end up creating denialist narratives about history. Q: But, why is Turkey so aggressively trying to censor the truth about this history around the world? It seems excessive, and counterproductive for Turkey, especially if it wants to join the European Union. PB: Most informed people would agree that the Turkish denialist campaign sets Turkey back; it casts a shadow over the whole society and it shows Europe, for example, that Turkey is not a truly democratic nation, even though it has a parliament. A society that puts its best intellectuals like its Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk on trial for acknowledging the Armenian Genocide is not yet a democracy.
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