A research on the WWI Armenian Genocide based solely on official Ottoman sources that Turkish historian Taner Akcam alluded to in a recent interview will first appear in Turkish and then in English.

The winter 2007 newsletter of the Zoryan Institute, received in an e-mail, informs:

Vahakn Dadrian, Zoryan’s Director of Genocide Research, and Taner Akçam, renowned Turkish Sociologist and Historian, are collaborating to present the results of their archival research on the Takvim-i Vekâyi.

The Takvim-i Vekâyi, the official gazette of the Ottoman government, provides the only official record of the military tribunals prosecuting the Armenian Genocide. It documents the indictments, court sittings and verdictsn for thirteen trials, which took place 1919-1922 in Istanbul, of individuals accused of crimes against the Armenians in 1915. These military tribunals were extensive and represent one of the period’s most important political undertakings. The Takvim-i Vekâyi is a prime source of legal and eyewitness testimony for the Genocide.

The gazette was printed in Arabic script and is currently dispersed in different libraries throughout the world. It is very difficult to get a complete collection owing to the attempts of the Turkish state to systematically remove as many of the existing issues from circulation as possible. However, working with the Institute for the last five years, the authors have been able to compile a complete collection of these gazettes, have transliterated them into modern Turkish, and translated them into English.

The Key Indictment focused on the Cabinet Ministers and top leaders of the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP). The main feature of the Key Indictment is the set of forty-one documents contained within it. Most of these documents consist of decoded telegrams sent to and from the Interior Minister (Talât), the IIIrd and IVth Army Cdr., the Deputy Cdr. of the Vth Army Corps and the XVth Division from Ankara province, the Directors of the Special Organization, two Military Governors of Istanbul, and a host of governors and district commissioners.

The authors provide readers with an authoritative English translation, accompanied by an extensive historical and legal introduction. Against the ongoing industry of denial undertaken by the Turkish state and the contemporary political background of independent Armenia in its relation to Turkey, this record assumes critical relevance.

The Turkish edition will appear soon and the English edition will follow shortly thereafter.

You may never hear this on CNN, but the North American continent doesn’t consist of Canada, Mexico and the U.S. any longer.  You need to add one more country to the list – Lakota.

Yes, the leaders of the Native American Lakota nation have formalized their independence from the United States by dropping from treaties with the United States that they say were never implemented in the first place.

Russel Means talking during Columbus Day protest in Denver

According to Agence France Press:

[…] 

“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,” long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

[…]

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free — provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said.

The declaration of Lakota’s independence was arguably made possible by the recently-adopted United Nations Declaration on Indigenous Rights.  I have commented on the declaration before arguing it lacks condemnation of the worst threat posed to indigenous people – cultural genocide.  But I guess the declaration at least inspires indigenous nations to strive for more rights.

And in case you are thinking “who the hell would want to secede from America” be advised that the Lakota reservation is one of the poorest places in the world.  The Lakota people die the youngest in the entire world, excluding those who die from AIDS in Africa. 

Oppression at the hands of the US government has taken its toll on the Lakota, whose men have one of the shortest life expectancies — less than 44 years — in the world.

Lakota teen suicides are 150 percent above the norm for the United States; infant mortality is five times higher than the US average; and unemployment is rife, according to the Lakota freedom movement’s website.

Rape of Native American women (overwhelmingly by whites) is three times higher in the United States than that of the rape of all other women. 

According to the official website of the Lakota delegates who visited Washington D.C. to drop from the treaties:

We are the freedom loving Lakota from the Sioux Indian reservations of Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana who have suffered from cultural and physical genocide in the colonial apartheid system we have been forced to live under.

We are continuing the work that we were asked to do by the traditional chiefs and treaty councils, and 97 Indian Nations at the first Indian Treaty Council meeting at Standing Rock Sioux Indian Country in 1974.

During the week of December 17-19, 2007, we traveled to Washington DC and withdrew from the constitutionally mandated treaties to become a free and independent country. We are alerting the Family of Nations we have now reassumed our freedom and independence with the backing of Natural, International, and United States law.

We do not represent those BIA or IRA governments beholden to the colonial apartheid system, or those “stay by the fort” Indians who are unwilling claim their freedom.

And  a poem by Dennis Banks quoted in my most favorite book – Mary Crow Dog’s Lakota Woman:

They call us the New Indians

Hell, we are the Old Indians,

the landlords of this continent,

coming to collect the rent.

The selective Radio Free Europe report on a British Embassy-sponsored event called “Days of Azerbaijan” in Armenia has been brought upon fierce criticism from bloggers  after the U.S. State Department-sponsored news agency failed to mention that a group of bloggers in Armenia had protested the event by handing a soap to the Armenian organizers of “Days of Azerbaijan” as reported by sources such as PanArmenian.net and ArmeniaNow.

Giving the soap to the infamous organizers (some members of former president Ter-Petrosyan’s regime) of the event would be like giving a napkin to someone (in the United States culture) for cleaning a brown nose.  I wanted to emphasize this because one Armenian blogger has accused his colleagues of… homophobia for giving a soap (in the comments section of OneWorld Multimedia’s post).

Being one of the few bloggers that has spoken for Armenian and Azeri rehumanization, I still have to protest “Days of Azerbaijan” for my VERY PERSONAL reasons.

VERY PERSONAL, because I treat every medieval Armenian cross-stone that Azerbaijan reduced to dust two years ago as my own dead relative and I don’t want a group of idiots organizing “Days of Azerbaijan” in Armenia during the second anniversary of Djulfa cemetery’s destruction. 

And ironically, it doesn’t seem any Armenian blog commemorated the second anniversary of the loss of ancient Armenia’s largest historic artifact.  That includes me, but all I have been doing in the last 10 days is working on a project for Djulfa. 

If “Days of Azerbaijan” included commemoration and condemnation of Djulfa’s destruction I’d be for the event.  But since one of the organizers, Ashot Bleyan, has suggested in the past that Armenian students shouldn’t learn about the Armenian Genocide, one can’t expect much from morons like him. 

Work for peace, but don’t piss on the memory of the destruction of the world’s largest artifact of Armenian heritage.  And soap was good enough; I wouldn’t mind if the bloggers had used a sledgehammer-toy to “smash” the heads of the organizers like Azerbaijani soldiers reduced to dust thousands of sacred stones in Djulfa.  Maybe that would remind us all that this month is the commemoration of a vital loss of an ancient heritage.

Set to come up in March of 2008 in English translation by Maureen Freely and introduced by Elif Shafak, here is an excerpt from “My Grandmother,” a story of a Turkish lawyer who found out at an adult age that her grandmother was a hidden Armenian and a survivor of the Genocide. 

This excerpt is by another translator, Ayşe Agiş:

Whenever I remember the January of that year I get the shivers; I feel the cold in my deepest core, an ache takes hold of me. When she wanted to describe great suffering, my mother used to put her hand on her left breast and say, “Here, right here, there is a place which is one continuous ache.” So, I too, feel a gnawing, continuous ache in the depths of my heart.
       The freezing courtyard of the mosque is surrounded by a wall of huge, dark old stones. In the middle is the big “musalla” stone, so cold that just to look at it makes me shiver; and on it is a coffin. The “musalla” and its supporting base are both made of enormous blocks of stone. The stone under the coffin is so cold that I fear my hand would get stuck if I touched it. I keep away. It is as if all this, the giant walls, the stones, have all been designed to make the human being feel helpless, abject.
       Ever since, whenever I see a musalla stone, I feel cold whatever the season, and I hurry past. Sometimes, just out of the blue, that mosque courtyard, that musalla stone and that cold come to my mind. And I feel frozen all over again.
       Emrah called that night. “We’ve lost our grandmother,” he said.
       I know she is dead. This morning, at the cemetery, in the “gusulhane” (the very word makes me shiver), the women washed her, prepared her; then invited us in for the ceremonial farewell. I bade farewell to her cold body, kissed her cheeks. On my lips I still feel that chill which does not at all suit that skin so familiar to me. I know that she has been placed in this coffin, but I still cannot accept it. It all seems as if it is happening in a dream. I cannot believe that my grandmother would be lying so still and so helpless in that coffin. And also, that we, her family can be looking on in such helplessness.
       We, the women, stand waiting in the most isolated corner of the courtyard. As we stood there, embracing and weeping with the newcomers, a man from among the male throng came over in a flurry and asked:
       “What are the names of Aunt Seher’s mother and father?”
       There was no immediate answer to this question from the group of women. We each gazed at the others. Our silence went on for a noticeably long time. Then finally, the silence was broken by one of the women, my aunt Zehra:
       “Her father’s name is Huseyin, her mother’s Esma.”
       As soon as she uttered these names, my aunt turned her eyes to me as if asking for affirmation, or so it seemed to me.
       Just as the man turned away, relieved finally to have extracted an answer from this strangely reticent crowd of women, the following words tore themselves from my heart and broke out of my mouth:
       “But that’s not true!… Her mother’s name is not Esma, it is Isquhi. And her father is not Huseyin, but Hovannes!”

In a rare detailed interview to an American publication Turkish historian Taner Akcam has revealed information about his upcoming book on the Armenian Genocide saying it will show “[t]he genocidal intent… based only on Ottoman documents.”  

Speaking to Minnesota Law & Politics, Akcam – one of handful Turkish historians to publicly acknowledge the Armenian Genocide by Ottoman Turkey – has said:

I’m working on some research projects. I just finished work with another leading scholar of the Armenian Genocide, Vahakn Dadrian. We are writing a two-volume book on the indictments and verdicts and minutes of the Istanbul trials. This is a very important first-hand account of the Genocide.

I’m also working on a book I call the Demographic Policy. My central argument in A Shameful Act was that the Armenian Genocide was not an isolated act against Armenians but a part of a demographic policy enacted during World War I. It had two main components. One was against the Muslim non-Turkish population, who were redistributed, relocated and resettled among the Turkish population with the aim of assimilation. The second was against the Christian population, the Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians. The goal was to get the Christians out of Anatolia, what we now know as Turkey-to forcibly move them to Greece or Iran. Or, in the case of the Armenians, to eliminate them altogether.

In 1914, Anatolia was about 25 to 30 percent Christian. After the war it was 3 to 4 percent. The aim was to reduce the Christian population to no more than 5 or 10 percent so that they would have little sway in Turkey.

Akcam has also given interesting details about his life including hesitations to talk on the Genocide:

I grew up in a very secular family. My father was an atheist, but I grew up, of course, within Islamic culture. I am sure I carry on much of this Islamic culture in the way I live, but in terms of my personal convictions, I am very secular.

Please understand that I am a very ordinary Turkish intellectual. I come from the ’68 Generation — here it was the Hippie Generation, but we too were against the Vietnam War, American foreign policy, and so on. As progressive people of that time in Turkey, we believed that we, Turks created our nation-state in a fight against the great imperialist powers. We assigned a very negative role to the Christian minorities in Turkey, to the Armenians. To us, they were collaborators. This is how we perceived ourselves and the world, and how we saw Turkey’s past. Since we saw all Christians in Turkey as allied with the imperialist state, we had a very negative image of them. As progressives, we always thought it was better not to touch on the topic of the Armenian Genocide, because to do so would be to enter a very dark, suspicious terrain, which could not be understood easily. It was not easy for me to decide to work on the Genocide. At first I thought: I’m working on a very suspicious terrain, better not to go in, actually.

After giving fascinating details about Turkey’s current Islamic leadership’s somewhat “silent” acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide and their pressure from nationalist groups, Akcam provides us with some insights to the structure of nationalist Turkish groups in and outside Turkey:

The group who organizes the campaign against me in Turkey and here in the U.S. is a part of what we call the “Deep State,” the military-bureaucratic complex. This non-elected government body is behind the campaign to discredit Genocide scholars. The nationalists and the Social Democrat Party are behind this effort. Here in the U.S. there are some groups organized and controlled mostly by Turkish diplomats. I can give three names: ATAA (Assembly of Turkish American Associations); Turkish Forum (an e-mail group, coordinated between different initiatives in different states in the U.S.) and a Web site, TallArmenianTale.com (one of the most popular Armenian Genocide denial sites).

Definitely there are Turkish diplomats who nourish these sites with information. I mean, who could have given TallArmenianTale.com the exact date of my arrest in 1974? Even I had forgotten that! It was for leafleting! And there is no record of this in any journal or newspaper. This is what that Web site claims is a terrorist act. There must be some police officer in Ankara from whom they got the information. All these groups that I mentioned (ATAA, Turkish Forum, TallArmenianTale.com, some diplomats and police officers from Turkey) are very well connected.

Akcam has taken interest in the above Turkish websites especially after one of them – TallArmenianTale.com – organized hate campaigns against Akcam.  Operated by mysterious “Holdwater,” TallArmenianTale.com is one of the worst anti-Armenian websites and was most secretive until Akcam discovered that “Holdwater” is none other than Turkish-American cartoonist Murad Gumen. 

It turns out that it wasn’t as much the concern for “the safety of American soldiers in Iraq” but  for losing free airfares to Turkey that made some United States lawmakers drop support for commemorating the Armenian Genocide.

New investigation by Politico states that “[o]rganizations promoting Israel, China and Turkey were among the biggest trip sponsors this year” for Congress members.”

According to the report, the trips to Turkey might have paid off.

[…]

Sixteen lawmakers and congressional staffers flew to Istanbul and Ankara on two different trips this year, courtesy of the USAFMC’s “Congressional Study Group on Turkey,” a 2005 creation whose funding includes pro-Turkey interest groups and companies that do business with the country.

Turkey has been in the spotlight this year as it fought a possible congressional recognition of the genocide in Armenia.

The Turkish government mounted a full-court lobbying press against the resolution, which ultimately was defeated.

The nation is also involved in sensitive negotiations over whether it can wage its military battle against the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) over the border in Iraq.

“There was not a meeting we had where those two things did not come up,” said Marilyn J. Dillihay, the legislative director for Rep. Stephen I. Cohen (D-Tenn.). 

“For somebody who is a new staffer like me, it was a fabulous immersion in those kinds of issues,” she said, especially because the issues “were at the forefront this year.”

The week-long trips occurred in May and August, just when Congress was debating the Armenian resolution.

The new ethics rules say that such trips cannot be planned or arranged by a lobbyist.

That doesn’t mean that lobbyists cannot meet the delegations when they arrive.

While the sponsors are not allowed to explicitly tell lawmakers how to vote on a piece of legislation, there is nothing to prohibit them from making the case for their position.

The talk about the Armenian genocide resolution made a big impact on her, Dillihay said.

What she learned, she said, was that “what seemed like a nonbinding, whoop-de-do resolution, had huge resonance somewhere else.”

“The more I have learned about it, the less I thought it was the proper thing to do,” she said.

The Capitol Hill delegation’s agenda included meetings with Turkey’s prime minister and the ministers of foreign affairs and economic affairs.

The trips were entirely planned by the USAFMC, according to the group’s executive director, Peter Weichlein, who responded to written questions.

“No representatives of the Turkish government have any influence over any aspect of our trips, programming and funding,” he wrote.

During the August trip, the travelers stopped at the home of former U.S. Rep. Stephen Solarz, a longtime lobbyist for Turkey.

Solarz spoke to the group about the Armenian resolution and the PKK issue, Dillihay said.

“He expressed a sense of what kind of effect it could have on Turkey and U.S.-Turkish relationships,” Dillihay said.

“If it was lobbying, it was soft as it could be. It was just like somebody hosting you in their house for lunch,” she said.

The purpose of the meeting with Solarz was refreshments and a discussion of history, Weichlein wrote.

Cohen, who also went on a trip to Turkey, opposes the Armenian resolution, citing Turkey’s strategic importance in the Middle East region and support for the U.S. in the Iraq war.

Bob Livingston, the former congressman whose firm took the lead in lobbying for Turkey on the Armenia issue, told Politico he was not involved in planning the congressional delegation’s visit.

“I had absolutely nothing to do with this trip,” he said.

Livingston said Solarz was working with his firm to lobby for Turkey at the time he met with the congressional delegation, and that he himself is on the USAFMC board.

In fact, even if Solarz did lobby the group, he would have been in compliance, said Jan Baran, an ethics expert at Wiley Rein.

Baran, who has done work for USAFMC on other matters, said the rules prohibit a lobbyist from traveling with a congressional delegation, not from meeting with one once it has arrived.

The ethics rules definition of “a trip” as only applying to the physical movement between locations “is fundamentally absurd,” Baran said.

[…]

Amid international controversies, the male elephant in Armenia’s Yerevan Zoo has finally found a partner.  But instead arriving directly from South Asia, Hrantik’s girlfriend comes from where many Armenian guys go to for fun – Russia.

But Hrantik should feel very luck because his new wife – yes, they had an actual wedding – is a super star who has abandoned her career to make Hrantik happy. 

Russia Today informs:

December 16, 2007, 18:41

Two elephants marry in Armenia

The zoo in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, has marked the wedding of two elephants – Grand and Candy. Hundreds of guests attended the ceremony, complete with traditional Indian dances.

The bride came all the way from Moscow. She was a star of Moscow’s Animal Theatre, but abandoned her career to be with the elephant she loved.

New living quarters were built at the zoo especially for the newlyweds.

Istanbul-based young American photographer Kathryn Cook’s “Memory Denied: Turkey and the Armenian Genocide” project has been granted $25,000 as the winner of the 2008 Aftermath Project, reports PDNonline:

The Aftermath Project has announced a $25,000 grant for photographer Kathryn Cook to support her project “Memory Denied: Turkey and the Armenian Genocide.”

A one-time special award of $2,500 will go to Natela Grigalashvili of Tbilisi, Georgia, for her project “Refugees of Georgian Villages.”

Finalists for the 2008 Aftermath grants were Pep Bonet of Mallorca, Spain; Tinka Dietz of Hamburg, Germany; and Christine Fenzl of Berlin, Germany.

The Aftermath Project, which is supported largely by the Open Society Institute, sponsors projects that show the effects of war and conflict.

Judges for this year’s grants were photographer Jeff Jacobson, Fortune deputy picture editor Scott Thode and photographer and Aftermath Project founder Sara Terry.

Cook is an American photographer based in Istanbul who is represented by Agence Vu and Prospekt. Her project on Turkey examines the impact of the Armenian massacres of the early 20th century and the scars it left on the country’s national identity. Turkey still refuses to officially label it “genocide,” a word Cook uses in the title of the project. The Aftermath Project says her work “explores the many ways that the greater implications of memory and history continue to resonate at home and abroad.”

Cook has worked as an Associated Press photographer in Panama, freelanced for a variety of publications including Time and The New York Times, and was featured in PDN’s 30 this year.

Georgian photographer Grigalashvili was awarded a grant for a project on refugees who have fled conflicts in the Caucasus region and have settled in villages in the mountains of Georgia.

All five photographers recognized this year will have their work included in “War Is Only Half the Story, Volume 2,” to be published in Spring 2009 by Aperture, Mets and Schilt, and The Aftermath Project.

America’s public television, PBS, has posted essays written by U.S. High School students dealing with the Armenian Genocide resolution in the Congress.

Erika Martin, for instance, has written in her essay:

The House of Representatives should not pass the resolution acknowledging the Armenian genocide at this point in time.

The genocide occurred form 1915-1917 where approximately 1.5 million Armenians were massacred by the Ottoman Empire. The Armenian Genocide should be recognized, but at the proper time when innocent lives are not in danger by the potential consequences that could occur from passing the resolution.

[…]

Kim Kinden, on the other hand, has argued that moralpolitik is realpolitik:

On October 10, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the resolution and around mid-November the House of Representatives will cast their votes and come up with the final verdict. They should pass the resolution because the Turkish government needs to recognize this tragic event as a genocide.

The Armenian Genocide began in 1915, during the Ottoman Empire, and ended in 1917. During that time there was at least 1.5 million Armenians murdered out of 2.5 million.

The House of Representatives should pass this resolution because the Armenian Genocide is not that different from the Holocaust.

The Holocaust had way over 1.5 million victims, but they still died for no real reason, just like the Armenians who were murdered. Also, they were starved and tortured just like the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

[…]

A columnist in Lebanon calls for establishing Commemoration Day for the Destruction and Desecration of Nakhichevan’s Armenian Heritage in an article on  the eve of the second anniversary of the world’s largest ancient Armenian cemetery’s demolition by the Republic of Azerbaijan.

Writing for Lebanon’s largest Armenian-language daily newspaper, Azdag Daily, columnist Avo Katrjian recalls in his December 12, 2007 (received in e-mail as .pdf) piece that two years ago this month Azerbaijani servicemen were videotaped as destroying cemetery memorials in an ancient Armenian site that testified to the long presence of the Armenian people in Nakhichevan.

The article draws parallels of Turkey’s treatment to Armenian monuments to that of Azerbaijan’s and concludes that there are the same.  It would be fair, nonetheless, to note that there are many Armenian monuments that still stand in Turkey while in the Republic of Azerbaijan every single one of them have been reduced to dust.

As Azerbaijan has been denying the destruction by claiming that there have never been Armenian monuments in Nakhichevan because Armenians didn’t live there, Katrjian reminds that Nakhichevan’s flag adopted in 1937 – when Nakhichevan was already part of Soviet Azerbaijan – had the word “Nakhichevan” written in Armenian and Azerbaijani.

Wikipedia has the 1937 Nakhichevan flag (said to be Soviet Nakhichevan’s very first) posted in its short entry on Nakhichevan ASSR (or the Nakhchivan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic).

The full post is available at Djulfa Blog.