As Armenian-Americans overwhelmingly support Obama in this presidential race, the McCain-Palin ticket is trying hard to reach even a few Americans of Armenian heritage.

The Republican ticket’s not-so-profound support for Armenian causes aside, one wonders about even the awareness of such issues in the ticket. Senator McCain, who has been to Armenia, is definetly aware of issues that concern Armenian-Americans. But what about Governor Palin? Does she even know if such a country exists?

According to The National, Sarah Palin does know at least one Armenian-American. Here is the latter’s story:

[...]

Andrée McLeod is shouting into the phone from a desk set up in her bedroom as I wait for her at a kitchen table annexed by stacks of paper. “She’s only powerful if you think she is! This right here, if it turns out to be true, is a bunch of bull****!”

It is because of McLeod, a lovably obstreperous woman of Armenian descent somewhere in her fifties, that the world knows of Governor Palin’s preference for Yahoo over .gov – one of the little details from Alaska that suggest uncomfortable parallels between the modus operandi of the Palin State House and the Bush White House, which also liked to transact government business on private e-mail accounts.

The stacks covering the table are the fruits of McLeod’s request for e-mails and phone calls between Palin and two aides, whom McLeod suspected of working in concert to oust the Alaska Republican Party chair, Randy Ruedrich – a violation of the state executive ethics code, which forbids conducting party business on state time. It might seem a venial sin – but it was also precisely the accusation Palin had earlier wielded to eject Ruedrich from the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission– with the help of Andree McLeod herself.

McLeod emigrated from Beirut with her family in 1963, and moved to Alaska from Long Island thirty years ago. She was apolitical until 1995, when she spied an opportunity to earn money for grad school by operating a falafel cart in Anchorage. The town fathers squashed her plans, declaring fried chickpeas “potentially hazardous.” She took the fight to city hall, wound up running for mayor, and her local state house seat twice, losing the last time in a tight race that required a recount.

McLeod told me that she’d met Palin shortly after her own failed state house bid in 2002. They’d stuck up an unlikely friendship, the home-grown beauty queen and the cerebral but scrappy and energetic import. Palin complained to McLeod about Ruedrich’s penchant for doing party work from his office at the AOGCC, where Palin also served – appointed by Murkowski after her losing bid for Lt. Governor marked her as a “comer” in the state party. McLeod got tired of Sarah’s ceaseless complaints and told her to do something about it already.

“She didn’t know how to go about it,” McLeod says. “I would guide. So that reporters would ask her, but there was a role I played in the background, making sure all the information was correct. But she did the exact same thing she accused Randy of doing. Had I known that I wouldn’t have given her the time of day.”

The takedown of Randy Ruedrich was Palin’s first public scalping (of a fellow Republican, no less) and it helped cast her as a dogged reformer.

“It’s true, Andrée’s almost responsible for creating Sarah Palin,” Rick Rydell, an Anchorage talk radio host and 2004 Alaska Republican Man of the Year, tells me over sushi a few days later. Rydell has just finished his show, which airs weekdays from six to nine in the morning. His Harley is parked out front and we’re sampling some hijiki and gyoza, talking about the Palinistas – his disparaging moniker for those still “drinking the kool-aid.”
[...]

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If one believes in the domino effect, Kosovo’s independence may see a boom in more states. But even as some European Union members don’t recognize Kosovo, one wonders if that “domino effect” is boom of self-declared republics recognized by some and unrecognized by others (such as South Ossetia and Abkhazia).

Whatever the case, Hungtington’s clash of civilizations is one theory not working in Kosovo. There is not a clear-cut clash of Christianity and Islam in the conflict - not at least in the walls of the United Nations.

Kosovo, reportedly, is failing to get Islamic support in the face of a Serbian-sponsored United Nations resolution that will ask an international court to consider the legality of Kosovo’s claim to independence.

[...]

Ironically, despite the fact that around 90 percent of Kosovo’s two million people are Muslims, only six members of the 57-state Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) have recognized its independence.
 
The day after the independence declaration, OIC secretary-general Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu issued a statement declaring “our solidarity with and support to our brothers and sisters there.”
 
“There is no doubt that the independence of Kosovo will be an asset to the Muslim world and will further enhance joint Islamic action,” he said.
 
But at an OIC summit in Dakar, Senegal, less than a month later, OIC heads of state resisted an initiative led by Turkey and merely voiced “solidarity,” leaving recognition up to individual member states.
 
The only six to have taken the step so far are Turkey, Albania, Afghanistan, Burkino Faso, Sierra Leone and Senegal.
 
Analysts attribute the Islamic states’ unwillingness to support Kosovo to a reluctance to anger Russia, Serbia’s historical ally, which strongly opposed the independence move.

[...]

While Russia might have influenced such behavior (although we should be observant of conventional anti-Russian explanation lately), the idea of “territorial integrity” is crashing Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” in international relations. Azerbaijan, for one, won’t support Kosovo due to the fear of the “domino effect” on Nagorno-Karabakh, the breakaway Armenian region. What is the future of unrecognized states?

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Advocates for the Protection of Sacred Sites; Save the Peaks Coalition; Indigenous Environmental Network; International Indian Treaty Council; Seventh Generation Fund; Vallejo Inter-Tribal Council; Morning Star Institute

For Immediate Release: September 25, 2008

Senate Indian Affairs Committee & Other Congressional Committees Urged to Convene Hearings on Sacred Lands

Indian Country, USA— Tribal Nations, Native rights organizations, and social/environmenta l justice allies are calling on the U.S. Senate Indian Affairs Committee and other Congressional Committees to conduct hearings concerning federal land management practices that threaten or destroy Tribal sacred lands. The Advocates for the Protection of Sacred Sites, The Save the Peaks Coalition, Indigenous Environmental Network, International Indian Treaty Council, Seventh Generation Fund, Vallejo Inter-Tribal Council, and Morning Star Institute have joined together to address the lack of federal government cooperation and consultation with Tribes in balancing destructive corporate development of Tribal ancestral lands an d honoring Tribal rights and needs. The groups are also calling on the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation to investigate federal government non-compliance with Tribal consultation requirements and to assist in immediately remedying the problems. ”Corporate development of federal lands that overlap sacred Tribal ancestral lands not only further the desecration and destruction of sacred places and areas which Indigenous Peoples have traditionally used and safeguarded, but harm longstanding and positive Tribal social and cultural structures, increase threats to endangered and threatened species, and cause environmental destruction,” stated Mark LeBeau, Co-Chair of the Advocates for the Protection of Sacred Sites. “The protection and preservation of sacred places are essential to the practice of Indigenous Peoples’ freedom of religions, a fundamental human right which is recognized by both federal and international law.”

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted by the UN General Assembly on September 13, 2007. This Declaration represents the dynamic development of international legal norms and sets an important standard for the treatment of Indigenous Peoples by states. It is a significant tool towards eliminating human rights violations against the planet’s 370 million Indigenous Peoples and assisting them in combating discrimination and marginalization. Article 12 of the Declaration affirms that “Indigenous peoples have the right to manifest, practice, develop and teach their spiritual and religious traditions, customs and ceremonies and the right to maintain, protect, and have access in privacy to their religious and cultural sites.”"Congress and the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation must intervene where the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and other federal agencies have fallen short in their fiduciary responsibilities to federally-recognize d Tribes, including working cooperatively and constructively with Tribes to resolve disputes,” said Radley Davis, Co-Chair of the Advocates for the Protection of Sacred Sites.

On July 11, 2008, more than 1,000 Native rights and environmental justice advocates arrived in Washington, DC after walking across the US to raise awareness about key issues affecting Native peoples and the environment. The successful journey, known as the Longest Walk 2, delivered a 30-page manifesto and list of demands to Congress, which included the protection of sacred places and climate change mitigation.

House Judiciary Chair, US Representative John Conyers (D-MI) promised representatives from the Longest Walk 2 that their issues would be addressed but set no timetable. “The Committee on the Judiciary will hold hearings on each one of these items that you have outlined here,” stated Rep. Conyers.

Tribal Nations and Native rights organizations are aware of hundreds of threatened sacred places throughout the US and are highlighting two critical threatened sacred places as evidence for immediate political action: The Medicine Lake Highlands located in California and the San Francisco Peaks located in Northern Arizona.

The Medicine Lake Highlands, northeast of Mt. Shasta, are sacred to the Pit River, Wintu, Karuk, Modoc, Shasta, and other Tribal nations. The Pit River people believe that the Creator and his son bathed in the lake after creating the earth, and then the Creator placed healing medicine in the lake. In the 1980s the BLM gave energy development leases in the Highlands to developers, without first conducting adequate environmental review and consulting any of the Tribes that would be affected by the projects. Developers such as Calpine Energy Corporation have used any tactic that money could buy to try to achieve their goal of building massive power plants in the sacred Highlands to harness geothermal energy, including activating teams of20lawyers, lobbying state and federal representatives, buying-off some adversaries, and information spinning.

“The developers are attempting to move ahead in spite of the fact that project-drilling in the Highlands would likely release dangerous chemicals, including arsenic, chromium, and hydrogen sulfide, into the surface and ground waters that Californians and all other living things in this region rely upon,” stated James Hayward, Co-Chair of the Advocates for the Protection of Sacred Sites. “This proposed project must be stopped and the US government must assist in this effort.” 

In November 2006, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal agencies neglected their fiduciary responsibilities to the Pit River Nation by violating the National Environmental Protection and the National Historic Preservation Acts and that the agencies never took the requisite “hard look” at whether th e Highlands should be developed for energy at all. As a result, the court rejected the extension of leases that would have allowed Calpine to build geothermal plants and ordered judgment in favor of Pit River. Now BLM and Calpine are at it again as they prepare to attempt to conduct geothermal resource exploration in the sacred Glass Mountain region of the Highlands. BLM contends that the ruling was not explicative enough and so it is moving forward with the exploration. The Advocates for the Protection of Sacred Sites strongly oppose BLM’s reinterpretation of the ruling and will stop the agency.

Louis Gustafson, Citizen of the Pit River Nation, says, ”The government has agreements not to bomb holy mosques when they’re at war, but we have to go through all these hoops just to protect our holy place.”

Arizona’s San Francisco Peaks are recognized internationally as a sacred place. The Peaks are a unique ecological island and are held holy by more than 13 Native American Nations. Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort, located on the holy Peaks, is attempting to expand development, clear-cut acres of old growth trees, and make fake snow from treated sewage effluent, which has been proven to have harmful contaminants. The US Forest Service manages the San Francisco Peaks as public land and has faced multiple lawsuits by the Navajo Nation, Hopi, White Mountain Apache, Yavapai Apache, Hualapai, and Havasupai tribes, as well as the Sierra Club, Flagstaff Activist Network, Center of Biological Diversity, and others after it initially approved the proposed ski area development in 2005.

On August 8, 2008 the 9th Circuit of Appeals overturned a previous court ruling stopping the proposed development. The case is expected to be appealed to the Supreme Court.

“We have no guarantee for the protection for our religious freedom when it comes to government land use decisions,” stated Klee Benally of the Save the Peaks Coalition. “This case underscores the fact that we need legislative action to ensure protection for places held holy by Native American Tribes. Federal land management policies are inconsistent when addressing Native American religious practice relating to sacred places. From the San Francisco Peaks, Medicine Lake Highlands, Yucca Mountain, Bear Butte, Mt. Taylor, Mt. Graham and the hundreds of additional sacred places that are threatened or are currently being desecrated, we need consistent protective action now.”

“The corporate projects proposed in the Medicine Lake Highlands and on San Francisco Peaks must be stopped. Key federal lawmakers and administration officials must work more rigorously with Tribes to ensure adequate cooperation and consultation on proposed projects that overlap Tribal sacred lands,” stated Radley Davis. “Our call for hearings is a critical measure that must be taken seriously to ensure that balancing corporate and agency development of Tribal ancestral lands and the needs and rights of Indigenous Nations are honored.”

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By Hasan Cemal

h.cemal@milliyet.com.tr

Alone with my dear Hrant at the Genocide Monument

Let’s first show respect to each other’s pain

YEREVAN

I remember, Hrant Dink once said “let’s first show respect to each other’s pain and sorrow.”
Maybe these words of Hrant and the pain he experienced was what brought me, for the first time in my life, to Armenia , and made me experience at daybreak a hurricane of emotions in front of the Genocide Monument .

The Mount Ararat appears and disappears in the fog. It looks sorrowful. How noble, how delicate it looks with its peak in snow. You feel you can catch it if you reach out.

I am alone with Hrant in front of the Monument, thinking of the pain and sorrow.

I think of respecting the pain.

Understanding the other’s pain.

And I think of sharing the pain.

In the strange silence of the daybreak, I am alone with Hrant. And Rakel’s cry is in my ear…

The tragic pain experienced by the Armenian nation and by him had matured Hrant. Maybe this pain helped him to speak and write in the language of his conscience. One always learns something from others. So I learned from Hrant, in his life and in his death.

I learned that one can not escape history.

At the crystal clear silence of the morning, I thought once more, with Hrant in my mind, how meaningless it is to deny the history, and at the same time, how risky it is to be a slave of history and pains and sorrows.

My maternal uncle’s voice came from afar: “Roots don’t disappear, my son!”

He was a Circassian, of the Gabarday tribe.

But he didn’t mention his Circassian identity; he made clear he didn’t enjoyed talking of the “roots.”

This was our “fear of the state.”

When I insisted, he would say “don’t mention these things.” But near to his death he whispered in my ear: “Still, the roots won’t disappear, Hasan my son!”

People’s roots, the land they have their roots in, are very important. As it is a crime against humanity to separate people from their language and identity so it is an equally great crime to separate people from their roots and lands. And to find an excuse for these actions is an inseparable part of the crime.

Armenians experienced that great pain.

They experienced it when they were uprooted from Anatolia . They experienced it in 1915, in 1916. And the longing for Anatolia never stopped in their soul.

Turks had experienced the same pain, too.

They experienced pain when they were uprooted from the Balkans and the Caucasus, and at the time of war in Anatolia .

Kurds experienced the pain, too.

They experienced pain when their language and identity was denied, when they were expelled from their lands.

I don’t compare pain and sorrow.

That would be wrong.

Pain and sorrow can’t be compared.

Hrant’s voice is in my ear: “Let’s first show respect to each other’s pain.”

Hrant tells silently his own pain: “I know what happened to my ancestors. Some of you call it ‘a massacre,’ some ‘a genocide,’ some ‘forced evacuation’ and yet some ‘a tragedy.’ My ancestors had called it, in the Anatolian way of speaking, ‘a butchery.’

“If a state uproots its own citizens from their homes and lands, and without distinguishing even the most defenseless among them, the kids, women and elderly,  expels them to unknown and endless roads, and if as a result of this, a great part of them disappear, how can we justify our deliberations to choose between words to characterize this event. Is there a human way of explaining this?

“If we keep juggling ‘do we call this genocide or evacuation’ if we can’t condemn both in an equal measure, how will choosing either genocide or evacuation help to save our honor.” (*)

Is it necessary to qualify the pain, to categorize it?

Of course, it is not unimportant, insignificant.

But I don’t think it’s a must. The genocide debate locks a lot of things, especially when it becomes a part of the equation among Turks and Armenians, Turkey and Armenia and the Armenian Diaspora.

History gets entangled.

Reason and common sense get entangled.

Dialogue gets locked.

And this entanglement helps “the fanatics.” It becomes easier to produce hate and enmity out of the pages of history.

Yet, what we need is to make the fanatics’ job more difficult. We have to find a way to walk down to road of love and peace without becoming a slave of history, without becoming a hostage of past pain and sorrow.

At a foggy morning, in front of the Genocide Monument , I listen to the voice of Hrant Dink. He asks: “Do we behave like the perpetrators of the great tragedy in the past, or are we going to write the new pages like civilized people by taking lessons from those mistakes?” 

Let’s first understand each other’s pain, share it and show respect to it.

Things will follow.

Won’t it my dear Hrant?

You always said “not confession, nor denial, first understanding.” And you knew, as you knew your own name, that understanding was only possible through democracy and freedom.

My dear brother;

The sun rises like a red orange in Yerevan . In the beautiful silence of the morning, I lay white carnations at the monument. You and your pain and sorrow brought me to this part of the world.

Yes, let’s first show respect to each other’s pain and sorrow.

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* Hrant Dink; “Two People Close, Two Neighbors Afar” International Hrant Dink Foundation, Istanbul , June 2008, p.75

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