Founders of a new, semi-official United States Task Force on Genocide were grilled on official attitude toward the Armenian Genocide during their very first press conference, according to Corporate Crime Reporter and CNN.

An official press release was also issued on the task force on November 13, 2007, making no reference to the Armenian Genocide:

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen today announced that they will co-chair a Genocide Prevention Task Force jointly convened by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the United States Institute of Peace. The Task Force will generate practical recommendations to enhance the U.S. government’s capacity to respond to emerging threats of genocide and mass atrocities.“The world agrees that genocide is unacceptable and yet genocide and mass killings continue. Our challenge is to match words to deeds and stop allowing the unacceptable. That task, simple on the surface, is in fact one of the most persistent puzzles of our times. We have a duty to find the answer before the vow of ‘never again’ is once again betrayed,” said Secretary Albright.“We are convinced that the U.S. government can and must do better in preventing genocide—a crime that threatens not only our values but our national interests,” said Secretary Cohen.[…]“The Task Force will harness tremendous expertise from across the spectrum and include distinguished Americans with experience in politics, diplomacy, economics, humanitarian and military affairs,” said Ambassador Brandon Grove, Executive Director of the Genocide Prevention Task Force. “It is a unique partnership of organizations and individuals that care deeply about preventing genocide.”The Task Force will issue a report in December 2008. Continue Reading »

An interesting article in ArmeniaNow reveals two interesting things on cultural property in the South Caucasus – governments are highly involved in both protection and destruction.

For one, the article says, Armenia has welcomed European observers to monitor Azeri monuments on Armenian territory regardless whether Azerbaijan (which has twice denied such monitoring) agrees monitoring of Armenian monuments on its territory or not. 

The news that the government of Armenia has given its consent to the European observers to carry out a monitoring on the state of cultural monuments on the territory of the republic, regardless of the official Baku’s standpoint on receiving such group of experts, caused an ambiguous reaction in Armenia. It should be noted that the Secretary General of the Council of Europe Terry Davis declared this during his visit to Yerevan on November 5. Commenting on the news, he stressed that such position is in the country’s interests as it can have a positive impact on its international image.

This has invited criticism by those who think Armenia needs to improve civil rights and not “show off” that it is not destroying Azeri monuments as a means of promoting itself as a democratic country.

“Does the Council of Europe have the right to judge Armenia’s image not from the view of adhering civil freedoms, but of the declared interest in preservation of the Armenian nation’s cultural heritage?” wonders a well-known art critic, the Head of Avan’s Museum of History and Archeology Ara Demirkhanyan.

The ArmeniaNow article also shows a possible link between the destruction of world’s largest Armenian cemetery in Azerbaijan (reportedly destroyed in 1998, 2003 and finalized in 2005) and the now-deceased former Azerbaijani president Heydar Aliyev, who was succeeded by his son.  It is not ruled out that the order was central, concludes an interviewee.

It’s noteworthy that it was in that period when a special archeological expedition started operating on the territory of Nakhijevan. “It [the expedition] was called by a direct order of Heidar Aliyev in 2001,” says the Deputy Head (on scientific issues) of Azerbaijan’s National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Archeology and Ethnography Najaf Musiebli. “That expedition continued its work up to 2003. During the three years large-scale field works were held on the territory of Nakhijevan aimed at revealing historical monuments so far unknown to science. As a result of archeological excavations monuments of ancient settlements were discovered.”

“It’s quite possible that the given archeological party, besides other things, was engaged in making an ‘inventory’ of Armenian monuments that were subject to extermination. This is indirectly confirmed by the timing of its activity,” Demirkhanyan says.

Musiebli’s recently published (November 5) statement in this connection is worth mentioning here: “We have to say that the expedition was not organized by chance. Constant disinformation of the world community by the Armenians that the territory of Nakhijevan is also an ancient Armenian land forced the state to call a scientific-research expedition and as a result of numerous archaeological facts the false propaganda of the occupants was proved.”

This will demonstrate my poor knowledge of Armenia’s constitution, but I will still ask the question (which is not rhetoric).

Can Levon Ter-Petrosian run for presidency if he has already been elected twice? 

The Armenian Constitution  – which limits presidency to two terms with four five years each – was adopted after Ter-Petrosian got elected the first time.  He resigned after getting elected the second time.  Does this mean he can run again? Did the recent constitutional reforms address/change the question? 

UPDATE: Please see the comment section for discussion.

The Republic of Georgia has declared a state of emergency, reports International Herald Tribune, “after riot police officers used tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon to clear thousands of demonstrators from the streets.”

For 15 days, says the order, Georgians cannot assemble in the capital of Tbilisi. In other words, any demonstration in this former Soviet city will be illegal in the next two weeks.

The irony of the Georgian leadership’s new anti-democratic actions is the fact that the current president was democratically elected after a peaceful – or roseful? – revolution.  Until today, he was also considered the most democratic leader in the Caucasus.

Obviously, an entire dissertation can be written about this sudden political transformation.  But the main question that comes to my mind is whether democracy takes longer to establish than some people think and whether whatever escalates fast also ends fast.

In the context of Armenia’s recent political developments – where you have a former president campaigning for another presidential election – I wonder how and how fast things change in the Caucasus. 

It seems there is a long way for people in the former Soviet Union to go before establishing sustainable democracies. And my regrets go to the people of Azerbaijan, in this case, where the government is becoming more and more authoritarian every single day – much worse than Georgia, or even Armenia, could perhaps ever get.

In its second report (since the Djulfa destruction) on religous freedom in Azerbaijan, the U.S. State Department has failed again to mention the wipe out of the world’s largest Armenian Christian cemetery by the Azeri authorities in December of 2005.

Released on September 14, 2007, the International Religious Freedom Report on Azerbaijan is a copy-past of at least 6-year-old reports in regards to the condition of Armenian churches in Azerbaijan stating that “all Armenian churches, many of which were damaged in ethnic riots that took place more than a decade ago, remained closed.”

Even outside the Azeri exclave of Nakhichevan, where the Djulfa cemetery existed, the statement did not reflect actuality. A church in central Azerbaijan’s Nizh village, for instance, was reopened in early 2006 for the Udi Christian minority after a publicized restoration eliminated the Armenian letters on church walls and nearby tombstones.

What’s the purpose of the report?

The report is available at http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2007/90164.htm.

Tired of the e-mail contest between the Armenian Assembly of America and the Armenian National Committee of America informing you about the new number of U.S. Representatives who have co-sponsored House Resolution 106 urging George W. Bush to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide as such? Then DO IT YOURSELF!

Visit www.thomas.loc.gov, type “Armenian Genocide” in the Search Bill Text, click on SEARCH, select H.RES.106.IH (the first item).

You can find out the number and the list of the cosponsors (AND MANY OTHER THINGS such as the text of the bill in full) by clicking on “Bill Summary & Status.” 

And if you still can’t do it yourself… the number of the cosponsors is now 220.

This week’s Reporter (June 30, 2007) has my newest article on the destruction of Djulfa cemetery that I just wrote for them using much information from my last semester’s research.

You can download the PDF version of current issue’s Section A – where my piece is – from here.

Here is the article in full:

International Reaction to Djulfa cemetery destruction has been only words and no action

by Simon Maghakyan

June 30, 2007

DENVER, CO. – After several failures to visit Djulfa (Jugha), where the largest medieval Armenian cemetery was reduced to dust by Azerbaijan’s military a year and a half ago, officials at international organizations are talking again about sending experts to the region.

      While reports about plans to send a mission by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to Armenia and Azerbaijan have again appeared in the media, words are all that have reached so far the remote shores of the Araxes where an archeological monument with thousands of ancient Armenian burial stones, khachkars, existed not too long ago.

      Still a UNESCO spokesperson says their talks are serious and, according to Armenpress, the organization is now working out the details of a visit both to Nakhichevan – where Djulfa is located – and Karabakh, where Azerbaijan alleges Armenians have destroyed Azeri monuments.

      And this week, the Armenian Foreign Ministry spokesman Vladimir Karapetian said that UNESCO has already determined the make-up of its monitoring group and that currently the issue is with the visits’ timing.

      Armenians and others have long urged UNESCO to interfere in the destruction of the Djulfa cemetery and other Armenian monuments.

      In October 2006, an international group of parliamentarians from Canada, France, Greece, the United Kingdom, Russia and Switzerland traveled to UNESCO’s Paris headquarters in order to request that Director-General Koїchiro Matsuura take up an investigation in Djulfa.

      Canadian Parliamentarian Jim Karygiannis, a member of the delegation to Paris, this week told this author that he still has not heard back from UNESCO.

***

      In addition to UNESCO, the Council of Europe Secretary General Terry Davis has expressed interest in sending experts to monitor cultural sites whenever a relevant agreement with Armenia and Azerbaijan is reached.

      But efforts by the European Parliament to send a delegation to Djulfa, headed by British MP Edward O’Hara, first in 2006 and again in April 2007 have been unsuccessful. This was despite the February 16, 2006 European Parliament resolution condemning the destruction of Djulfa and calling on Azerbaijan to allow “a European parliament delegation to visit the archaeological site of Djulfa.”

      O’Hara told this author that no party but himself is to blame for this year’s postponement which was “entirely due to domestic commitments.” This explanation is different from last year’s cancellation, which as The Art Newspaper (London) reported in June 2006, was due to Azerbaijan’s refusal to allow ten delegates to enter its territory.

      Meantime, there has been no reaction towards claims by Azeri officials and nationalist historians that the cemetery did not exist or was not Armenian. Foreign diplomats and organizations with presence in Baku have also been quiet toward Azerbaijan’s anti-Armenian activities. Former Norwegian Ambassador Steinar Gil, who publicized a case of vandalism at an Armenian church in central Azerbaijan, remains the only exception.

      Thomas de Waal, an expert on Armenian-Azerbaijani relations says that “foreign investors and diplomats in Azerbaijan are very sensitive towards anything that touches on the Armenian-Azerbaijani issue and the peace process and are therefore very timid about raising the issue of the destruction of cultural monuments.”

***

      Azerbaijan’s continuing military build-up and threats to launch a new war to win control over Nagorno Karabakh add on to the concern for the peace process. But Human Rights Watch has also blamed the West, especially the United States, for trading human rights for oil in Azerbaijan for inaction to condemn broad range of human rights violations.

      The U.S. State Department did not react on the Djulfa vandalism until pressed for comment. Following a congressional hearing on February 16, 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sent a written response to Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-Calif.) acknowledging U.S. awareness of “allegations of desecration of cultural monuments” and urged Azerbaijan to “take appropriate measures to prevent any desecration of cultural monuments.” She also said the U.S. has “encouraged Armenia and Azerbaijan to work with UNESCO to investigate the incident.”

      During a visit to Armenia in March 2006, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matt Bryza called the destruction a “tragedy.” He said: “it’s awful what happened in Djulfa. But the United States cannot take steps to stop it as it is happening on foreign soil. We continually raise this issue at meetings with Azeri officials. We are hopeful that the guilty will justly be punished.”

      Later that month, Bryza’s State Department manager, Assistant Secretary Dan Fried, told the Armenian Assembly of America conference in Washington that he “would be happy to raise issues of Armenian historical sites” with Azerbaijani officials because respect and protection for cultural sites is “a universal policy of the United States.”

      And in her May 12, 2006 response to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), U.S. Ambassador-designate to Azerbaijan Anne Derse noted that the U.S. is “urging the relevant Azerbaijani authorities to investigate the allegations of desecration of cultural monuments in Nakhichevan. If I am confirmed, and if such issues arise during my tenure, I will communicate our concerns to the Government of Azerbaijan and pursue appropriate activities in support of U.S. interests.”

***

      The destruction of Djulfa, nonetheless, did not make it into the State Department’s 2006 International Religious Freedom Report on Azerbaijan released on September 15, 2006. The report only repeated the previous years’ language that “all Armenian churches, many of which were damaged in ethnic riots that took place more than a decade ago, remained closed.”

      Likewise, the report failed to notice the words of the Norwegian Ambassador that a church in the village of Nizh was in early 2006 “restored” with Armenian lettering eliminated from its walls and nearby tombstones. That “restoration” was part of the Azerbaijan’s effort to present the Armenian cultural heritage on its territory as “Albanian” – that is belonging to a culture that became extinct hundreds of years ago – and therefore not Armenian.

***

      The most detailed outsider’s account of Nakhichevan’s Armenian heritage remains that of Steven Sim, a Scottish architect who visited the area in the summer of 2005. During his visit he found no trace of a single medieval Armenian church he had travelled to research, with local interlocutors denying there were any churches there in the first place.

      Still, while traveling along the border with Iran, Sim did manage to see the Djulfa khachkars from his train before the hand-crafted stones were erased from the face of the Earth in less than half a year.

      More than 350 years ago before Sim’s visit, a foreign traveller to Djulfa had estimated 10,000 khachkars in the cemetery. By 1998, less than seven decades after a Soviet agreement with Turkey placed Nakhichevan under Azerbaijan, there were only 2,000 khachkars remaining while the entire Armenian population had disappeared.

      According to eyewitness reports cited by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), Azeri authorities made efforts to destroy much of the Djulfa cemetery in 1998 and again in 2002. Describing what he saw in Djulfa in August 2005, Sim reported “what I saw was real savageness, but I cannot say that they did not leave anything, since there are still lying khachkars.”

      Four months later, on December 15, 2005, Russia’s Regnum News Agency was the first international outlet to quote reports of approximately “100 Azerbaijani servicemen penetrate[ing] the Armenian cemetery near Nakhichevan… using sledgehammers and other tools… to crush Armenian graves and crosses.”

      This final stage of destruction, which also amounted to desecration of Armenian remains underneath the burial monuments, had reportedly started on December 14 and lasted for three days, leaving no trace of a single khachkar.

      An Armenian film crew in northern Iran, from where the cemetery was visible, had videotaped dozens of men in uniform hacking away at the khachkars with sledgehammers, using a crane to remove some of the largest stones from the ground, breaking the stones into small pieces, and dumping them into the River Araxes using a heavy truck.

      Nevertheless, Azeri president Ilham Aliyev told the Associated Press that the reports of the destruction are “an absolute lie, slanderous information, a provocation.”

      By March 2006, photographs of the cemetery site showed that it had been turned into an army shooting range. An Azerbaijani journalist who visited the area on behalf of the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting in April 2006 similarly found no traces of the cemetery left.

Armenia’s tiny Jewish community is “deeply irritated,” in the words of its leadership, with an interview in the Azerbaijani media where the Chief Rabbi of Azerbaijan’s European Jews is quoted as accusing Armenia of intolerance and praising Azerbaijan for tolerance toward its minorities.

 Photo: Azerbaijan’s Chief Rabbi who says “Azerbaijan’s propaganda by an ethnic or religious minority leader [from Azerbaijan]  is taken with large trust in the world”

The letter, co-signed by Rimma Feller Varzhapetyan (Head of Armenia’s Jewish Community), Rabbi Gershon Meir Burshtein (Chief Rabbi of Armenia), and Villy Veiner (President of Menora Cultural Center) and published in full by PanArmenian, ridicules Azerbaijan’s Chief Rabbi Meir Bruk.  Indeed the Azerbaijani Rabbi is very interesting.  He is quoted as saying in the anti-Armenian newspaper that “Azerbaijan’s propaganda by an ethnic or religious minority leader [from Azerbaijan]  is taken with large trust in the world” (“Пропаганда Азербайджана представителем этнической группы или духовного лидера пользуется большим доверием в мире“) crediting his own campaign about tolerance in Azerbaijan.

Rabbi Bruk said in his interview to Azerbaijan’s Russian language Zerkalo newspaper on June 12, 2007 that “Armenia is weak spiritually and economically.”  Not surprised with seeing regular anti-Armenian “dirt” in the Azerbaijani media, Armenia’s Jewish leaders say they still cannot remain silent on the “well-paid order” their kin is obeying.

Armenia’s Jewish leadership calls “illiterate” Azerbaijani young Rabbi’s data that there are only 200 Jews left in Armenia because of the intolerance in the country.  There “are officially registered four Jewish public, religious and cultural organizations in the republic,” they write, “which are recognized by all world Jewish organizations. Here we have a working synagogue headed by the Chief Rabbi of Armenia.”

Although there is some extent of anti-Semitism in Armenia, the outcry of Armenian Jews is especially reasoned due to the outrageous intolerance of not only anything Armenian (remember the wipe out of the medieval Armenian cemetery in 2005), but the recent imprisonment and persecution of independent Azeri journalists, for example, across Azerbaijan.

The desecration of Jewish graves in Azerbaijan is of course not government sponsored.  So compared to how the Armenian culture has been wiped out in Azerbaijan by the state, yes, Jews live in a country of extreme tolerance.  They are just a bit scared to wear the star of David in Azerbaijan says the New York Times and their leaders need to do a bit of, in the words of Rabbi Burk himself, “propaganda” to fit in the anti-Armenian society. 

Here is more from the letter by Armenia’s Jewish leadership:

Doesn’t Mr. Bruk know the opinion of the European Parliament on countless violations of democratic bases and human rights committed by Azerbaijan, the continuing political and judicial prosecutions of any kind of dissent?

And of course God forbid Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh from goods that Mr. Bruk promises them in case if Armenia returns Nagorno Karabakh to Azerbaijan. Nobody here has forgotten Sumgait, Kirovabad, Baku, and Karabakh. People in other countries, including Israel too remember those “goods”.

We think that the wise Rabbi has forgotten that his and our mission is in peacekeeping and helping our countries to settle the accumulated problems on the level of popular diplomacy, and not in compressing the complex relations between the two neighbors, which are intense and without it. Our mission is not to become marionettes in the hands of certain political and financial bosses.

At the end we’d like to draw the attention of the whole European community, public and religions International Jewish Organizations that Jews of Armenia are deeply irritated at the above-mentioned article. We think that similar statements made by an official religions leader, Mr. Bruk, are of quite provocative character, they promote ethnic discord and are contrary to the tolerance policy declared by those organizations. We hope that actions of Mr. Bruk will receive adequate evaluation and condemnation.

John Marshall Evans, the U.S. Ambassador to Armenia who was fired for referring to the Armenian Genocide as such, is still  America’s de jure Ambassador to the Republic of Armenia.

According to the State Department website, Evans is Ambassador from “08/11/2004 to present.”

As 79-year-old “Dr. Death” Jack Kevorkian – a campaigner of assisted suicide – is set to leave prison coming Friday, the question of “right to die” will perhaps become a hot topic as the celebrity pathologist says he will “work to have it legalized.”

But I believe the fight to legalize assisted suicide needs to address the fundamental question first – is there a fundamental right to suicide? At the end of this entry I try to give an answer.

An article by the Associated Press at ABC News says, “as he prepares to leave prison June 1 after serving more than eight years of a 10- to 25-year sentence in the death of a Michigan man, Kevorkian will find that there’s still only one state that has a law allowing physician-assisted suicide Oregon.”

The only son of Armenian Genocide survivors, Kevorkian has been quoted as saying that as an Armenian he knows what pain and suffering is. But, I think, he may not see his struggle succeed during his lifetime because the root of the question – whether somebody has a right to die – has not been established; not even debated much.

This semester I took my first introductory class to law – Constitutional Law II with Denver Attorney Charles Norton who teaches at the University of Colorado at Denver. One of the students initiated a debate on “right to die” and continued arguing – with intuition – that is should be recognized in the Constitution. The debate was quite long but did not seem very academic. The professor discouraged the off topic and I was silent all the time. On my way to home something in me also said that a person should have the right to decide their fait, and I came up with a constitutional argument.

Several weeks after the first debate the topic was again brought up by the same student. After not talking for an hour, I finally presented my thesis and ended up including it in my final paper as a final thought (it was not part of the questions though). I guess if I end up feeling stronger about the issue and take time a PhD thesis could be written on this, but right now I just want to present the thought to those of you who have background in constitutional law. And by the way, please don’t plagiarize my thesis below.

Death is universally inevitable. One cannot have right to something that is already absolutely unavoidable. Yet voluntary conscience decision to end one’s own life is an extreme application of one’s right to pursue happiness (which can be established with the Palko formula of a fundamental right).

In short, there is no right to die but there is right to happiness which, in an extreme situation, may mean to end life.

With the Palko test (a Supreme Court case that established the precedential definition of a fundamental right with the following criteria: 1.”principle of justice so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental;” 2. liberty and justice would not exist if the fundamental right was sacrificed), the United States Supreme Court will never recognize a right to suicide because it is not rooted in the traditions of the American people.

Quit contrary, America’s major religious [Judeo-Christian] tradition holds it a crime to commit suicide. In addition to the tradition, death is universally inevitable. One, I would think, cannot have a right to something that is already absolutely unavoidable.  

Fifth-century historian Yeghishe has said, “Unconscious death is death, conscious death is immortality.” Voluntary conscious decision to end one’s own life could be an extreme application of one’s right to pursue happiness.

Although a right to “pursue happiness” is not specifically mentioned in the U.S. constitution, it is mentioned in America’s birth certificate – the Declaration of Independence – which is a written document (if not THE written document) of America’s collective conscience.

If the Palko test is impartially applied, I think it would be an objective and valid argument to say that right to pursue happiness is a fundamental one and liberty and justice cannot exist without recognizing it. It may take a long time before the Court, if ever, recognizes such a right and only after its establishment it would be possible to argue that voluntary conscious decision to suicide is part of the fundamental right to pursue happiness.

So Dr. Kevorkian’s struggle may be a long one, and it may be wise to consider the Constitutional issues involved with it. I will charge only $15,000 an hour to present this argument to the United States Supreme Court. 😉