Kurdish beggar, Elazig, Republic of Turkey © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 1997

It’s always a delight when someone posts a link to an interesting blog in the comments section of one of my posts, but it’s especially welcome when another photographer working on a serious theme does so. I am therefore glad to discover that John Wreford recently drew my attention towards his site that documents life in a Kurdish town that might well be wiped off the map by the South Eastern Anatolian Project.

It was Mustafa Kamal the man known as Ataturk and founder of modern Turkey that coined the term “Mountain Turks” in reference to the Kurdish population of the Southeast of the country, and it is his portrait that hangs in the tea shops of Hasankeyf, there are no pictures of Kurdish heroes such as Salahdin Ayyubi whose 14th century dynasty built the citadel that dominates the cliff top above the town, maybe the reason for that can be answered by the plain clothes policeman sitting in his unmarked car parked at the entrance to the town.

The history of Hasankeyf goes back much further though than the Ayyubids, the guide books will tell you of ten thousand years of civilisation, all of which will now come to end as the town will disappear below the flood waters of the Iisu dam.

The dam is one of 22 being built as part of the GAP regeneration project, the Turkish government can give a sound argument for the ambitious plans, but for the people, mostly Kurdish, of Hasankeyf and almost a hundred other towns and villages they are hollow words.

The Kurdish population has long suffered discrimination and persecution at the hands of the Turkish authorities, Turkey’s human rights record has been one of the main issues of its entry to the European Union, concessions have been made, you can now listen to Kurdish music without fear of arrest, the worst of the fighting between the army and Kurdish separatists has past but many still view the dam building as a form of ethnic cleansing, the population has been falling steadily in Hasankeyf to well below 5000 from 10000.

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After recently writing about how culture — and music in particular — was being used to promote regional integration in the South Caucasus, I today received news that a jazz performance will be staged to tomorrow with the same intended objective. It’s no surprise to learn that the Open Society Institute is sponsoring the event and to realize that it comes less than two weeks since OSI sponsored the Rock Without Borders concert in Yerevan.

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Vazgen Manoukian, Opposition Rally, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia

RFE/RL reports that opposition NDU leader Vazgen Manukian has warned that his party might well boycott the next parliamentary elections scheduled for 2007 if “Armenian politics continues to degenerate into infighting among various government factions.” The former Premier and Defense Minister stood against Armenia’s first President Levon Ter Petrosian in the 1996 presidential elections that failed to meet international standards and were widely considered to be falsified.

“If it is possible to introduce changes in Armenia which would ensure that political struggle makes sense, we will take part [in the 2007 elections], in a bloc or separately,” he said, referring to his National Democratic Union (AZhM). “If such changes do not take place, I will conclude that it is meaningless to contest those elections, regardless of our chances.”

Although Manukian would not say what specifically should change in the political arena, the comments clearly reflect his frustration with a perceived lack of progress in Armenia’s democratization and the opposition’s failure to effect regime change. This reality was highlighted by the AZhM’s and other major opposition groups’ inability to pull large crowds at their mostly recent rallies held in the wake of the November 27 constitutional referendum.

According to the news item, Manukian does not deny that opposition parties in Armenia are now increasingly marginalized and that the main players in the 2007 parliamentary elections will be Gagik Tsarukian’s Prosperous Armenia and other “pro-establishment” parties. However, as democracy generally means having some kind of effective opposition, perhaps a call to arms might have be more appropiate than threatening to throw in the towel so soon.

“[Tsarukian’s] party will compete with the likes of itself, it is not out to fight against the opposition,” he said. “The opposition has already been brushed aside. They will fight among themselves. There are many sharks among them.”

Still, as one Diasporan said to me in the aftermath of the 2003 presidential and parliamentary elections, perhaps Armenia has the [bad] government that it deserves. By the same reckoning, perhaps it also has the [bad] opposition it deserves as well. As Garo over at Notes from Hairenik continues to say, the vochinch syndrome continues.

Last year I met two Dutch girls, Marieke and Sanne, who were volunteering at the Bem Youth Progressive Action Center in Yerevan, and I’ve now discovered that the latter has set up her own blog, Things that keep me busy in life, at http://thingsthatkeepmebusy.blogspot.com. Although it might not be Armenian-related now that Sanne has returned to the Netherlands, I’m sure that she’ll make reference to her experiences at some point, which she already has in a way.

As people in Armenia don’t have so much to spend, there isnt much to waste. Back here I realize how luxurious our live here is: we have running water, a shower (ah hot!), gas to cook on, electricity all day long, so light and working computers 24 hours a day!

Realizing this made me also realizing that so few people in this country seem to appreciate the things they have. Now you might consider this as an innocent ignorance, and yeah it might even be a good sign of this society that everyone sees this as normal to a civil society. I would like to see people openly appreciate it, but this is not my big concern.

This innocent ignorance though is sometimes combined with ignorance of waste.

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Garo (AKA Christian Garbis) over at Notes from Hairenik has posted another entry on the continuing destruction of downtown Yerevan. Unfortunately, as nearly all the construction downtown is being undertaken in contravention of the law by senior government officials and their friends, relatives and business associates, nothing is going to stop this. Corruption triumphs and the rule of law means nothing.

It may not be the most aesthetically pleasing or safe building in Yerevan it seems solid enough nevertheless. Sturdy enough to support a store which occupies a small, narrow portion of the two-floor building’’s ground level. It is situated in between two ugly six story buildings both housing discos and expensive boutiques as well as offering hotel rooms. But the ancient building that remains, until the beginning of March, is a testament to Yerevan’s history, its development from basically village status to a city of about 1,000,000 residents. It is of course another piece of the past that needs to be preserved at all costs and also is part of the city’s disappearing charm, yet greedy developers fail to understand this.

[…]

The store’’s owners and building occupants are taking their case to Strasbourg, as no court in Armenia will defend anyone’s right to live where they wish to remain. The woman said that they will end up in the middle of a field somewhere outside the city, as they won’t be able to afford anything else with the measly compensation the government supposedly will provide.

With Gagik Tsarukian (AKA Dodi Gago) behind this latest example of the law and courts functioning only to protect the interests of the powerful, news that Armenia’s richest man has set his sights on the parliamentary and presidential elections scheduled for 2007-8 is cause for alarm. Unfortunately, and as Garo has mentioned before, apathy still reigns in Armenia. Still, at least Garo made blogging history last week when he posted the first ever video blog from Armenia on the same subject.

This is my first video blog posting and supposedly may be the first from Armenia. It shows the demolishion going on behind my apartment building as discussed in my Back in Yerevan post. I also wrote a short article for Hetq Online, which basically is the description of this video.

Meanwhile, Tim Russo over at Democracy Guy has posted another installment of his memoirs dealing with the time he spent in Armenia working for the National Democratic Institute. This week he deals with the removal of former President Levon Ter Petrosian in a velvet coup. Ter Petrosian was re-elected in 1996 in elections that were (surprise, surprise) not considered to meet international standards. Ter Petrosian eventually lost power in an internal power struggle that was in part connected to what were seen as concessionary moves to resolve the Karabakh conflict.

Ter-Petrossian’s pursuit of a moderate solution to the Karabakh conflict exposed his Achilles heal. As he kept drifting further and further outside the hardline political norm on the Karabakh issue, he was going further and further out on a limb politically. Had he been seen as legitimately elected, his base of support would have been the people, a factor that may have dissuaded the coup plotters.

But it was easy to gamble that support from the electorate for LTP was not there. At least half of the country did not accept his election in 1996. Instead of winning the election legitimately on the back of the people, he had relied not on votes but on the military and internal affairs police to gain power, therefore he relied on the military and internal affairs police to keep it. If the power ministries wanted LTP to go, LTP was gone.

And their position on Karabakh was most hardline of all. LTP’s prime minister, Robert Kocharian, was the former Karabakh president. Opposition leaders were boycotting parliament, were also hardline on Karabakh, and would have been happy to see LTP go in any case. The final irony was that he was probably pursuing a course of action that would have brought the country peace and stability for the first time in more than a decade; an outcome the Armenian people probably supported. But his illegitimacy, and his reliance on the power ministries, resulted in Ter-Petrossian walking out onto a limb that was bound to break, which Vano’s power grab precipitated, resulting in the entire ANM government structure collapsing.

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As an energy crisis looms in the South Caucasus this winter, the BBC reports that the Tbilisi Mayor’s Office has cut off gas supplies to the Russian Embassy in the Georgian capital. Blasts that disrupted supplies of gas to Georgia have been blamed on Russia by the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili who accuses Moscow of attempting to “punish” his pro-western government.

The mayor of the capital, Tbilisi, said it was more urgent to heat homes than buildings used by those taking part in an “energy blockade” on Georgia.

Many Georgians have been without gas or electricity after blasts wrecked a pipeline from Russia.

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The crisis comes during the coldest winter for decades, with temperatures of -20C.

Obviously, the move was not taken so well by the Russian government who issued a statement condeming the decision. According to Civil.ge the Russian Foreign Ministry accused Tbilisi of taking “one more anti-Russian action.” Meanwhile, Armenia has not yet been affected as adversely as its northern neighbor. However, RFE/RL reported yesterday that the country’s gas distributor remained unconvinced by Russian pledges to repair the pipeline this weekend.

Sardarian said on Friday that ARG has yet to decide whether to limit supplies to business consumers such as factories and liquefied gas filling stations. “It depends on the situation on the ground,” she said, underscoring the persisting uncertainty. “If repair work is completed and gas supplies resume by the promised date, there will hopefully be no [supply] limitations. If the situation changes, we will have to look at a timetable for limitations.”

Myrthe posted some concerns about the disruption of gas to Armenia last Sunday on Life as I see it, but on a brighter note, China’s Xinhuanet reports that gas supplies to Georgia and Armenia resumed this morning. I’d expect that the major Armenian news agencies will confirm this tomorrow. Update: Mosnews confirms that gas supplies to Georgia and Armenia have now been resumed.

Armenian-Azerbaijani border © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 1994

RFE/RL’s Liz Fuller has written an analysis on the unprecedented expectations surrounding next month’s meeting between the Armenian and Azerbaijani Presidents. However, she says that the recent talks between the Foreign Ministers of the two countries “failed to shed much light on the likelihood of a major breakthrough in the Karabakh peace process.”

Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian did confirm the day after the London talks that the two sides are seeking to reach agreement on a half-page document that enumerates general principles that could then form the basis for a more detailed peace plan. But Oskanian said that while the two sides’ positions vis-a-vis some of those principles have drawn closer, on others their positions are still far apart, RFE/RL’s Armenian Service reported.

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It therefore remains unclear whether the two countries’ presidents will indeed succeed in reaching a compromise on the contested points, let alone publicly endorse those basic principles, during their upcoming summit near Paris, which Kocharian’s spokesman has said will take place on February 10. Azerbaijani presidential administration official Novruz Mammadov hinted in a January 20 interview with the online daily echo-az.com that it is unlikely the two presidents will sign any agreements during their “first meeting of the year.”

However, according to Fuller, other details that indicate that the negotiations have reached a stage closer to a potential deal have been made public. Indeed, both sides seem to be talking as if a deal is inevitable. The only uncertainty is when. The two sides are apparently even discussing which countries could provide peakekeeping forces in the event of a deal and the OSCE has already visited the region to prepare for such a possibility.

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Church Service, Stepanakert, Republic of Nagorno Karabakh © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 1994

Although I disagree with the assertion that reactivation of the Karabakh Peace Process has been unexpected, especially as Radio Free Europe’s Armenia Service as well as myself have been covering this eventuality since the beginning of 2005, the online publication Armenia Now does at least provide some more information. Amost everyone now considers that 2006 could be the year when a breakthrough in attempts to resolve the conflict over Nagorno Karabakh is possible.

Analysts of authoritative British Company Jane’s Information Group (JIG) came out with a statement that Azerbaijan had finally approved the idea of carrying out a referendum in Nagorno-Karabakh to identify the status of that region, and that Armenia was inclined to agree with the stage-to-stage settlement plan, which foresees the troops withdrawal from the territories around Nagorno-Karabakh, as “Mediamax” agency reported.

According to Jane’s, till recently Baku had opposed the idea of holding a referendum in Karabakh, suggested by international mediators. It announced that international peacemakers are planned to be placed in the conflict zone to ensure security of the civil population there.

After a recent meeting between the Armenian and Azerbaijani Foreign Ministers in London, their two respective Presidents are due to meet in France during the second week of February. Armenia Now quotes the French President Jacques Chirac as saying that a solution is now close at hand.

“Armenia and Azerbaijan are friendly countries for France. And we are sure that at the moment the prospect of achieving a Nagorno-Karabakh Question settlement is not far way”, Shirak told French diplomats.

According to Panarmenian.net, the head of France assured that his country would do its best to make the year of 2006 a year of peace in the Caucasus.

“Working side by side with our colleagues we will do all it takes for peace to be established in 2006 in that region,” Shirack stressed in his speech.

If so, it will be interesting to see whether Azerbaijan will now have to amend its constitution to allow a referendum to be held in the disputed territory 10-15 years down the line. Some already believe that a new clause to allow the Armenian President to change the borders of the Republic with the approval of Parliament, as opposed to the population, is also a key component of any peace deal.

Certainly, there has been significant activity on the part of organizations dealing with conflict resolution and a number of reports detailing the elements of a proposed peace deal that we have known for a year have been published in the past few months. Anyway, Armenia Now’s report can be read online here.

RFE/RL reports that the Armenian Revolutionary Federation — Dashnaktsutiun, one of the three political parties that form the coalition government here, says that it has not relinquished territorial claims on the neighboring Republic of Turkey.

“The current government of which we are a part and the president whom we have supported and will support will not abandon territorial claims,” Giro Manoyan, a spokesman for the nationalist party’s ruling Bureau, said. “Armenia’s official position is that the issue is not on our foreign policy agenda. That means it can be on the agenda tomorrow.”

According to the report, although the Armenian Foreign Ministry says that it recognizes the existing Turkish-Armenian border defined by the 1921 Treaty of Kars, Manoyan says that it would be political suicide for any government to abandon claims on territory cleansed of its Armenian population during the 1915 Genocide.

“No Armenian government can do that because I believe the Armenia people would not allow that government to remain in power,” Manoyan said during a roundtable discussion in Yerevan.

Successive governments, as well as the current President Robert Kocharian and his predecessor Levon Ter Petrosian, have been quick to dismiss Turkish fears that Armenia might one day demand territorial reparations in the event of official acknowldgement of the Genocide by Ankara. Many believe that financial compensation and the return of Church property might be a more likely outcome.

“Genocide recognition by Turkey will not lead to legal consequences for territorial claims,” Kocharian said at the time. “The problem is that those events have taken place in Turkey, and the Republic of Armenia did not exist at that time, and today’s Republic of Armenia is not the heir to those lands,” he added.

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But according to Manoyan, the Armenian leader simply stated that “there is no such issue on the agenda of Armenian foreign policy today.” “The president also said genocide recognition would not automatically result in territorial claims,” he said, denying any disagreements on the issue between Kocharian and Dashnaktsutyun.

Manoyan revealed last summer that the party, which also has chapters in major Armenian communities abroad, plans a major shift in its long-running campaign for international recognition of the Armenian genocide. He said Dashnaktsutyun will strive to force Turkey to pay reparations.

The full news item can be read online here.

Tamar Palandjian over at Armyouth emailed me today saying that she hopes to arrange a meeting next week with local Armenian youth in order to encourage them to start blogging. Hopefully such a move will represent the start of a real Armenian blogosphere within the Republic and not something artificially created from outside. This was what I wanted to do with Indymedia Armenia but nothing was ever arranged by them, so I’m glad that someone else is taking up the idea through the Civil Society Institute.

I generally steer clear of posting items about the Genocide when other sites such as http://www.yessem.blogspot.com/ did it better and in a more comprehensive way although that site has now sadly shut up shop. However, credit where credit is due to The Artyom Reader not only for caring about presentation but also because it also posts good coverage of such issues. This time, Artyom has been involved in the presentation of Atom Egoyan’s film Ararat at the Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University.

Afterwards I had a lot of students coming up and expressing their horror as much at the visiual representation of the horrors of the genocide on film, as the fact that they had been so unaware of the Armenian Genocide and the plight of the victims. Later on we had a nice group and talked about some of the contemporary issues surrounding the genocide, the attitudes of the current Turkish government and ones preceding it; the trial of Orhan Pamuk and the current discourse in Turkish circles, both popular as well as scholarly, and of course the issue of justice, and whether it can be achieved on a physical level for the victims, like reparations and whether they can bring any closure to the victims and their descendants, or whether justice and reconciliation is only going to be on a metaphysical level, through apologies and redemption of memories both personal and historical.

Anyway, kudos to Artyom for taking the message to non-Armenians and particularly those concerned with Jewish issues. I have always believed that Armenians spend too much communicating to themselves and that we should speak in a language the whole world can understand. Moreover, and as Artyom also concerns himself with, we should involve ourselves in similar tragedies elsewhere in the world — Darfur, for example. Besides, I have to respect anyone who includes a link to The Simpsons on their site.