Demonstration in support of Zhirayr Sefilyan and Vardan Malkhasyan, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2007

I suppose I could have included this post in with the previous roundup of the Armenian and Turkish Blogosphere on the murder of Hrant Dink and a new Genocide Resolution before the U.S. Congress, but it was interesting enough to deserve a whole post on its own. Over at One Armenian World, N posts a fascinating entry that includes her impressions of Tbilisi. As she’s Armenian-American, it’s kind of refreshing to read such such an opinion.

Most locals would agree with her observations albeit sometimes reluctantly, but many Diasporans have a inherent dislike of Georgians just because. Therefore, this post is surprisingly open and very honest, touching upon many issues that few of the vocal minority that actually constitutes the Diaspora have the guts or inclination to admit or acknowledge. Of course, I’m probably biased because I like Tbilisi too, but anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, Georgia faces some very serious problems at this stage of its transition, just as Armenia does, but Tbilisi has some very postive sides that many of us enjoy when compared to Yerevan.

It was about an hour from the border to Tibilisi, where we found the metro, which looked remarkably like the Yerevan metro, only with more people, and the people were all speaking a different language, and the signs were in a different language, and the people and the language kind of looked Armenian but definitely weren’t. Even the fruit on the sidewalk looked similar, little mandarin oranges and wrinkled, roughed-up yellow apples. Borjomi bottled water came from a spring in a village, a tourist site in Georgia, the same way that Jermuk bottled came from a spring in a village, a tourist site in Armenia.

But over the next twenty four hours or so, I would decide that Tbilisi was much bigger, diverse and cosmopolitan than Yerevan. The people didn’t wear all the same clothes, the buildings weren’t made of all the same stone. There was no smog, fog, and you could see beautiful views across the river, over bridges, sheer rock walls and more ancient churches (and mosques and temples) than you could count. Old homes had been maintained, latticework balconies sprawling at streetlamp level, homemade layer cakes.

[…] Tbilisi has the feel of a big city, the influence and influx of various people and cultures. We wandered the streets the five days we were there, and encountered Chinese stores everywhere, which Arman was obsessed with. There were items in the grocery store from all over Europe, much cheaper and much more selection than in Yerevan, there was a street with an international array of restaurants — Irish pubs, Sushi joints, Indian, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Turkish — and the satellite tv at the bed and breakfast showed channels from all over Europe and Russia.

I also noticed that unlike Yerevan, Tbilisi signs and posters are mostly only in the native language, hardly any in English and absolutely nothing printed in Russian. […]

It’s probably not worth going into this debate about the use of Russian in Georgia because we’ve had this many times before, and most recently on a post by Zarchka over at Life Around Me who said she felt discriminated against because she didn’t know Georgian and had to speak Russian. However, N makes an interesting point — Georgian is the official language of the Republic of Georgia — not English or Russian.

So, which country actually appears more at ease and comfortable with its identity — Russified Armenia, or a Western leaning Georgia that is nonetheless Georgian first? Of course, the issue of minorities comes into the equation, but that’s another subject in itself. Still, N does at least delve a little into both issues — language, identity and minorities.

At times, I spoke in English to people, but this led to less discussion than if Arman spoke Russian. People picked up something in his accent and asked where he was from. The lady at the overpriced hotel in Old Town, the women at the funny mirror house at the decrepit amusement park, the man selling sneakers at the market near the train station: they all turned out to be Armenian. I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised. About half a million Armenians live in Georgia, around 100,000 of them in Tbilisi. I had read that during the 19th century, more Russians and Armenians lived in Tbilisi than Georgians. There are at least two beautiful ancient churches there, and we came across a couple of Armenian neighborhoods during our stay.

But the most surprising response to Arman’s accent came from the guy at the Russian sulphur baths. Arman had just lain down, stomach first, butt up, on a ceramic table type of thing, and the guy, a large man with dark hair and olive skin in bathing trunks, dumped a bucket of water over him and asked if he were Azeri. Arman told him no, that he was Armenian, and the man told him in Armenian that he was Azeri, then proceeded to have a conversation with him in Armenian. (Naturally, he spoke better Armenian than me.) He told Arman that he learned the language from his Armenian friends in the neighborhood. We were in a place in Tbilisi, he told Arman, where Armenians, Azeris, Turks and even Kurds historically lived together. And they were all friends with each other.

[…] What mattered was that they all got along now, in the present. Perhaps in a city where they were all outsiders, where the Georgian/Russian troubles affected their daily lives more than land and history disputes across other borders, they could be friends.

[…]

It’s hard to reconcile this point of view with nationalists who want to prove Karabakh has always been Armenian or has always been Azeri. The fact of the matter is the two peoples were both living on that land and having trouble sharing it in their present, and they tried to solve the problems by murder and force, by war and massacre.

Back in Yerevan, N walked straight into the news of Dink’s murder and a few small processions and memorials staged in his honour in Yerevan. Again, she says it as it was, and not as nationalists or some propagandists would have us believe. The largest rally, as I posted about here, was only a little larger than the 3,000 or so that gathered at Liberty Square a day before because the Government forced schoolchildren and local government employees to attend.

Dink’s message of peace and reconciliation was ignored, and the whole event was exploited for internal as well as external political purposes.

Ironically, even then, protests and memorials still failed to materialize into anything other than minor gatherings and were hardly newsworthy. Rather than capitalize on the media exposure that Dink’s death brought to the Armenian Question, low attendances just highlighted how apathetic society here actually is — and how amateurish and sloppy the Armenian Government is when it comes to propaganda.

Hrant Dink considered himself both Turkish and Armenian. He was against both Turkish nationalism and Armenian nationalism, especially the kind he saw in the rest of the diaspora. He personally felt that he had gotten over the Armenian rage against Turks and wanted to keep dialogue open between the two peoples, his newspaper a mouthpiece.

[…]

Which leads me to the Armenian mourning of his death. As I read on about the demonstrations in Armenia, I noticed the use of the slogan. Although its chanting can be seen as an act of solidarity with the protesters in Istanbul, who were Armenian, Turkish and Kurdish,”We are all Armenian, we are all Hrant” has quite a different meaning here. Because obviously, we’re all Armenian in Armenia. Almost stiflingly so. And to all be Hrant? What does it mean? We’re all victims of a crazed killer? We’re all being targeted for being Armenian and speaking up about the genocide?

Another sign read “1,500,000 + 1″, referring to the number of Armenians killed in the genocide, plus Hrant. Was such a statement identifying that the same kind of hatred that caused the genocide also motivated his death? It seemed so.

[…]

I wondered some more about that “1,500,000 + 1″ sign, though. Was it also being used for the genocide recognition cause, a fundamentally political campaign? Or was Dink’s death an event that called up the pain of the genocide, necessary to be mourned again?

Lara, one of the directors of Batz Drner (Open Doors, the Women’s Center), who had organized a couple of smaller, grass roots demonstrations on the days before the huge government-supported rally on Tuesday, told me that on Wednesday, marchers went up to the genocide memorial at Tsitsernakaberd and placed flowers at the wall where the word Malatya was etched. It seemed both an act of politics and mourning, the two conflated. Yes, Dink was born in Malatya, but he claimed Istanbul as his home. Again he was being equated with a victim of the genocide, a term that he recognized as being political as well as historical.

[…]

But when I asked one of my students about the demonstration and march, she said it was a waste of time. That the Armenian government was just using the opportunity to get attention for the genocide, but that it would never work. I asked her if anyone she knew went to the demonstrations and she said no, in the most ‘of course not’ kind of way.

Interestingly, and to give some credit to a few ethnic Armenians from the Diaspora who openly voiced concerns that two individuals from Armenia and Turkey had faced pressure from their respective Governments under the same number article — 301 — N mentions another reason why some local Armenians couldn’t be bothered to turn out for the Dink memorials in Yerevan.

Another friend, Viken, had a more measured response. “No, I did not go to the demonstrations. Because there is a man that they have jailed for saying something against the government here.” He was referring to Jhirayr Sefilian, a Karabakh war veteran. He was against certain areas in the buffer zone around Karabakh to be returned to Azerbaijan and said so, referring to those in power as “illegal authorities” at a meeting of the Unification of Armenian Volunteers organization in Yerevan. The comments were later published in a local paper in early December, and soon after, Sefilian and eight other members of his opposition group were taken into custody, their homes searched. Viken was saying it was hypocritical to call out Turkey, when the Armenian government isn’t any better, arresting people simply for their words.

I agreed, somewhat, with these responses. The same Armenian nationalists who didn’t like some of Dink’s positions on genocide acknowledgment (he was against the bill in France that made it a crime to deny it for it limited free speech, he was against many of the diasporan campaigns to seek resolutions from Western governments) now were protesting his death, simply because he was an Armenian assassinated by Turks.

[…]

Why for example, when Armenians discuss how many were killed in the genocide, they only use the figure 1.5 million Armenians, when there were Assyrians and Greeks and Jews who were killed and forced out too? Why can’t we also talk about the innocent Turkish lives lost as well? It is some form of neglect, some form of censorship: only the Armenian lost lives matter to us. And it seems parallel to the blind kind of Turkish nationalism Dink was working against.

Of course, the Genocide is still crime against humanity and needs to be recognized as such, just as we shouldn’t forget that Sefilyan is being detained and hasn’t been assassinated by ultra-nationalists probably because he is actually one of them, but anyway. N’s great post can be read in full here, while I’ve since added a category for Zhirayr Sefilyan to this blog to sit alongside one already set up for Hrant Dink.

Incidently, in the case of the latter, I still believe that the Armenian and Turkish blogospheres have handled this story far better than the local Armenian and Diaspora media.