Nobel Prize winner Thomas Eliot has called April “the cruelest month.”

I live three miles away from Columbine, the High School in the United States were a massacre of a dozen took place on April 20, 2007.

I am Armenian, whose extended family was destroyed in the WWI genocide that started in April of 1915.

I am a board director of the Colorado Coalition for Genocide Awareness and Action that tomorrow will applaud a Holocaust commemoration resolution at the Colorado State Capitol tomorrow and will be present at the singing ceremony of the Sudan divestment bill – to help stop the genocide in Darfur – coming Thursday.

I am a friend of Tutsi survivors, whose families were killed in April of 1994 in the Rwandan genocide,

I am preparing a group presentation for tomorrow on comfort women based on the account of Maria Rosa Henson, a 15-year old child during WWII who was captured by the Japanese army in April of 1943 to become a sex slave (there were 200,000 women and children like her),

I fear April. I fear it a lot. On Saturday I told some friends I hope Turkish military units don’t attack Northern Iraq and start butchering Kurds. It’s April, after all. The month when Hitler was born, the month that has so much injustice to remember and commemorate. And the month of, “never again.”

It was also several hours ago, in April, that over 30 students were massacred in Virginia Tech university. It is still April.

But is it April that makes humans inhuman or humans that make April inhuman? Is April more powerful than all of us? Are guns more powerful in America than Americans to regulate its use and easily prevent massacres like the Michigan Tech? Are we, humans, free? Are we free of ourselves, from our history of demonizing April?

Can we start with gun control in April and continue by stopping denial of historical injustices, like the sexual slavery of WWII women by the Japanese army? Why are YouTube videos about WWII “comfort women” being removed in April, such as a photo presentation at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yc18Wx-txE.

So many questions and no answers. I am just tired. Tired of our cover-up of April. Tired of making April the cruelest month of the year. Tired of making ourselves fear April.

I rearly open e-mails that have “FW:FW:FW [forwarded at least three times)” in the subject, but this one was from non other than the president of my community college that I graduated in 2006.

(The president is a good friend; he travelled with me across America last year to help me receive my All-USA Academic Team award.)

As I opened the e-mail, I realized he had forwarded the message to several people, including me (thanks God it was not a network broadcast to all current and former students, as I thought was the case in the first place.  If it were the case, he could get sued for forwarding a spam.).

The e-mail?  One of the old, and also one of the most convincing, urban legends of all times: Microsoft and AOL will give you $245.00 for every person you forward the e-mail to.

Read carefully…THIS TOOK TWO PAGES OF THE TUESDAY USA TODAY – IT IS FOR REALTo all of my friends, I do not usually forward messages,
But this is from my friend Pearlas Sandborn and she really is
an attorney.

If she says that this will work – It will work. After all,What have
you got to lose?

SORRY EVERYBODY.. JUST HAD TO TAKE THE CHANCE!!! I’m an
attorney, And I know the law. This thing is for real. Rest assured
AOL and &nbs p; Intel will follow through with their promises for
fear of facing a multimillion-dollar class action suit similar to the one
filed by PepsiCo against General Electric not too long ago.

Dear Friends: Please do not take this for a junk letter.
Bill Gates sharing his fortune. If you ignore this, You will repent
later.

Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet companies
and in an effort to make sure that Internet Explorer remains the
most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail
beta test.

When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will
track it (If you are a Microsoft Windows user) For a two weeks
time period.

For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay
you $245.00 For every person that you sent it to that forwards it on,
Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives
it, You will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact
you for your address and then send you a check.

Regards. Charles S Bailey General Manager Field Operations
1-800-842-2332 Ext. 1085 or 904-1085 or RNX 292-1085

Thought this was a scam myself, But two weeks after receiving this
e-mail and forwarding it on. Microsoft contacted me for my address and
within days, I received a check for $24, 800.00. You need to respond
before the beta testing is over. If anyone can affoard this, Bill gates is the
man.

It’s all marketing expense to him. Please forward this to as many
people as possible. You are bound to get at least $10, 000.00
We’re not going to help them out with their e-mail beta test without
getting a little something for our time. My brother’s girlfriend got in
on this a few months ago. When I went to visit him for the Baylor/UT
game, she showed me her check. It was for the sum of $4,324.44 and
was stamped “Paid In Full”.

If the body of the e-mail is tempting, consider the smart subject of the letter too: “FW: Fwd: Fw: PLEEEEEEASE REEEEEAD! IT WAS ON GOOD MORNING AMERICA TODAY SHOW].”

Yet the first sentence of the letter already gives a hint for an urban legend: this took two pages of the Tuesday USA TODAY.  Well, if it were the case, there would have been a link to USATODAY.com, especially that it is from Tuesday (last Tuesday).

This urban legend dates back to 1997, and the exact wording of the e-mail is at least three years old.  I found the info through http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/nothing/microsoft-aol.asp, which is the website for urban legend directories.

The South Carolina State Museum no longer needs tour guides, cell phones are in charge now.  The Daily Gamecock reports that cell phones are replacing old tape players to tell the visitors about the Museum exhibits.

The museum launched an up-to-date and cheap method of “digital tourism” in March when it set up a telephone number visitors can call to get information about the latest exhibits.

Visitors can call the number anytime from anywhere; it’s not limited to the museum itself.

Currently, the cell phone “tour” is only available for one exhibit, the “Edmund Yaghjian: A Retrospective” collection. LINK

Last Friday, March 23, 2007, when I was very sick after having returned from snowy Montreal, I decided to go to POW WOW in Denver with my Mom.

POW WOW is a Native American festival where hundreds of nations across America gather to dance, sing and get to know each other.

First time in my life I saw real America – the real beauty of America with her tortured children who were celebrating survival, their survival.

Glenn Morris, indigenous politics professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, told our class this past Thursday that when he was taken to a Native American reservation in Costa Rica in 1986, he felt embarrassed that he had been told in all his academic life (plus a law degree from Harvard) that there were no Native Americans in Costa Rica. His new friends in Costa Rica started to laugh when Prof. Morris made his confession. The Native Costa Ricans told him not to worry – they, too, thought there were no Indians left in America.

And perhaps most people in the world have no idea about festivals like POW WOW. Neither do most people who live in Colorado. Most of the audience were Native Americans themselves, who had traveled to see their brothers and sisters dance and sing. Where was white America? I guess in AMCs or other movie theaters to watch “300” in order to reaffirm their hatred for the Iranians, or the savage Persians.

But in POW WOW, I did not care about white America. I was in real America; I was with the real landlords of my apartment who were there to show me the beauty of survival; who were there to tell me that no matter what and no matter when, genocide survival is inevitable and will be celebrated one day.

My romanticized amazement for Native America was shared by the person I had went with – my Mom.  She wanted to be photographed with every Native American she saw. For me it meant taking photographs every minute of my presence in POW WOW at the Denver Coliseum.

Surprisingly, she now wants me to post her photographs at Blogian. And since it is April 1 today, why not?

Well, I can’t post the rest of the 270 photographs; the internet is too slow…

But I have to post this one! This photo is from yesterday. My Mom had mask on her face and she reminded me of POW WOW. So I asked her where the Navajo souvenir arrow we bought at the festival was. When she brought it, I took this photo.

I will be in Canada upcoming week to talk in Toronto about cultural rights on March 19, 2007.   See the flyer below (click on http://blogian.hayastan.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/aaa.jpg if it doesn’t show the details)

The Armenian Weekly has published an interview with this blogger in their March 3, 2007, online edition.

 

Activist of the Hye Plains

Up-and-Coming Denver Blogger and Filmmaker Simon Maghakyan Tells it Like it is

By Andy Turpin

 

WATERTOWN, Mass. (A.W.)—When you think of Colorado, you likely picture the Rocky Mountains, rough-and-tumble cowboys, granola-munching trust fund hippies, or perhaps the enjoyment of a Coors beer.

But it doesn’t usually scream Armenian.

There is a vast land of tumbleweeds between Racine and Glendale where few Armenians reside. That is changing, though, with high profile Armenians like David Barsamian broadcasting his views from Boulder, Colo., and a younger generation shaping itself out of Denver.

Simon Maghakyan, 20, currently a student at the University of Colorado in Denver, is part of a recent wave of immigrants who have come to Colorado from Armenia or Russian-Armenian communities like Sochi.

In 2006, Maghakyan was named the USA TODAY All-USA Academic First Team recipient for community colleges students. He was also selected as Colorado’s New Century Scholar, which is an award given each year by the American Association for Community Colleges to a top student from each state.

 

Armenian Weekly—When did you and your family come to the U.S.?

Simon Maghakyan—I came to America in July 2003 with my mother. My father and older brother had moved to America before that.

 

AW—Why did you choose Colorado?

SM—Colorado wasn’t my choice. My father had originally moved here from California. That’s how I ended up coming here. But I am glad I have the chance to go to the University of Colorado in Denver and work at the State Capitol.

 

AW—Tell me about the Denver Armenian community and your experiences.

SM—Colorado’s Armenian community is diverse, like almost any Armenian community. There are Armenians from Armenia, Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Russia and refugees from Azerbaijan. And there are many Armenians who have come from California.

The earliest mention of Armenians in Colorado dates back to the late 1800s, when Denver’s oldest newspaper, The Rocky Mountain News, wrote about Armenian merchants who hoped to return to their homeland. A flood of articles about the Armenian Genocide reached many of Colorado’s newspapers between 1915 and 1923. Even today, Colorado’s State Capitol honors the Armenian Genocide with a quarter-century-old memorial in an Armenian garden in its northeastern grounds.

The Genocide was part of Colorado’s daily life during WWI, when many joined together to raise funds for the “starving Armenians.” One local newspaper, The Littleton Independent, was so outraged that it published an editorial suggesting massacring the Turks in order to save Armenian lives and American money sent for the Armenians.

In Colorado, you will always meet people who have Armenian last names or will tell you that they have some Armenian blood. When I was visiting a friend at the hospital, her doctor walked by and had an Armenian last name on his nametag. I asked him in Armenian whether he spoke Armenian, and his answer in English was, “I don’t speak Arabic” and ended up saying that his father spoke Arabic and so he had assumed that Arabic was the language of the Armenians.

There was also this former deputy cabinet minister (I think of environment or forestry) from Armenia who suddenly appeared, and soon disappeared, from nowhere in 2005. While here, he decided to “unite” the Armenian community by establishing The Armenian Heritage Center of Colorado, and purchased a church building in order to “do business in Colorado.” In addition to hosting church services, he was planning to open a tourist agency and bingo. He had apparently earned his millions from Armenia’s poor population and through deforestation, and then had escaped to America. He once threw a huge party for his birthday at an Armenian restaurant and invited every Armenian in Colorado. Of course, I did not attend. I’ve gotten my share of Armenia’s deforestation already. My little niece in Yerevan has trouble breathing in the polluted streets.

Even though I had no respect for this individual, I was still surprised that he wanted to use the stolen money in an Armenian community and make money out of it again. Most former bosses like him—there are dozens and dozens—just run to places where no Armenians will find them, such as Spain.

 

AW—Is there much solidarity among Armenians in Colorado?

SM—The answer can be both yes and no, depending on several factors. If you are an Armenian from Sochi, you will tend to be friends with Armenians from Sochi more than with Armenians from Lebanon. I think this is human nature. I should also note that I live in a Denver suburb that has few Armenian families, so I don’t really get to experience the daily Armenian life in Colorado. But every time I go to an Iranian store (where many, if not most goods are imported from Glendale), I will meet new Armenians who always ask who my father is. I guess that’s solidarity, because Armenians think they know every other Armenian in this world. Lots of Armenians will share their phone numbers, having just known each other for five minutes. Yet most of the time, we don’t end up calling each other.

 

AW—What is the general public’s view on the Genocide in your experience?

SM—On political level, the State of Colorado has acknowledged the Armenian Genocide for five consecutive years. Even so, the average person doesn’t know about such resolutions. However, there is the Colorado Coalition for Genocide Awareness and Action, which is a unique and diverse organization founded by Roz Duman that deals with contemporary genocide education and tries to prevent the continuation of the Darfur genocide. It is an inclusive organization that has tried and continues to try and reach all communities in Colorado. On Jan. 22, I, along with other members of the Armenian community, was invited to speak at a comparative genocide studies seminar for Colorado seniors. This was a very well informed group, and I wish there were more Coloradoans like them.

 

AW—What are some of your current and future projects?

SM—I continue to develop and update my website www.Blogian.net when time permits, and help with organizing Armenian Genocide commemoration events for this upcoming April 24. With the mentorship of Native American studies professor Glenn Morris, I am researching the destruction of the Julfa cemetery and the oil politics behind it for my Cultural Rights class. I often consult him when I am not balanced in my research. I don’t want to produce a biased work that makes Azerbaijani people look evil. I will be talking in front of a Toronto audience in mid-March about cultural rights. I am also planning to work on a short video about human trafficking for my International Women’s Resistance class. I hope students from the class will help me with the project. I am also trying to get more involved with the Colorado Coalition for Genocide Awareness and Action, which has invited me to serve on their board of directors.

Simon Maghakyan’s short documentary films on Armenia’s deforestation crisis and the destruction of Armenian monuments in the old Julfa region of present-day Azerbaijan may be seen on www.YouTube.com , keyword: Blogian.

The video giant YouTube.com has removed a Greek video that declared Turkey’s founding father Kemal Ataturk a homosexual, reports AP via MSNBC.  This followed a Turkish court’s order to block YouTube.com in Turkey for insulting allmighty Ataturk.

Apparently, insulting Turkishness is not only a crime in Turkey but also in YouTube.  If you want to get a sense of the video war in YouTube.com for the homosexual comments, search “gay Ataturk” in YouTube.com.

Computing from the UK has more:

Turkey shoots down Youtube over insulting video

Video rulted offensive to nation’s founder Ataturk

Tom Sanders in California, vnunet.com, 08 Mar 2007

A Turkish court has ordered local ISPs to block access to the Youtube video sharing service in response to the publication of a video that mocked the nation’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

The video displayed pictures of the founding father of the modern Turkish with insults written over it in English.

Youtube has since removed the video and the ban on the website has reportedly been lifted. It’s unclear when access to Youtube will be restored.

The video was reportedly uploaded by an ethnic Greek from Cyprus. Turkey and Greece have been battling each other over control of the island. Turkey in 1974 invaded the territory and created the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus that is only recognized by Turkey.

Turkey has an uneasy relation with freedom of speech. The nation’s penal code makes it a crime to insult “Turkishness”. Courts routinely press charges against writers and journalists for mentioning the Armenian genocide of 1915-1917. Turkey denies that a coordinated ethnic cleansing ever occurred and blames the deaths on collateral war and natural circumstances.

I am behind at my work, in my classes, in updating Blogian! I don’t know why, but I am trying to catch up with everything. So my apologies for not updating Blogian for a few days. I was so out of mind that wrote a post titled “It was not genocide” referring to the UN court decision that Serbia was not guilty of genocide. As one reader pointed out, the court did not say that a genocide was not committed against Bosnian Muslims, but that the country of Serbia could not be held responsible for the actions of Serbian militias in Bosnia. These are different entities, with a reference to a new theory that not only states can violate human rights, but also non-governmental groups.

via ArmeniaNow.com (June 2004)

Human rights violation or not, the deforestation in Armenia’s capital Yerevan is becoming more and more alarming day by day. My sister says she is unhappy that the cold is gone, because the construction has started again and it is sometimes impossible to breath in the streets. But her five-year-old daugther has been having trouble breathing during the winter too. She is young and doesn’t have the immunity to fight pollution. 🙁 Bear in mind that this climate change+construction dust just became this intolerable in the last 3.5 years, because 3.5 years ago I was in Armenia and the problem was not this tangible.

The title of this post is from an Agence France-Presse article that appeared at YahooNews several hours ago. I hope you will read this having in mind that this happens all around the world. If you care about Yerevan, maybe you should do something about it. I should take my own advice, but I don’t really know what to do at this time apart from the 9-minute film that I produced and posted at YouTube.com.

Crazy Horse, a Native American leader, has said that we have not inherited the land from our ancestors but borrowed it from our grandchildren. We had borrowed the land for thousands of years from today’s 5-year-olds in Yerevan who have trouble breathing. Will we have 5-year-olds in 25 years who will breath at all?

As an economy blossoms an ancient capital suffocates

 

by Mariam HarutunianThu Mar 1, 11:10 AM ET

Waking one cold winter morning, Yerevan resident Susanna Pogosian drew back the curtains and got a shock: workmen had razed the trees opposite her home, literally overnight.

“Trees that had stood there for decades were lying on the ground. We were all in shock. It happened right in front of the eyes of the police, who didn’t lift a finger,” said Pogosian, recalling the day last month when the trees in the nearby playground were cut down.

Residents of this ex-Soviet republic are finding that after the dire economic straits they experienced in the 1990s, the runaway growth they now enjoy also has a downside: destruction of greenery and creeping desertification.

The Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse brought this country a war with neighbouring Azerbaijan and the shut-down of factories, but also the destruction of thousands of trees as energy supplies failed and people scoured the hills for fuel.

The war has since been replaced by an uneasy ceasefire and despite closed borders with both Azerbaijan and Turkey, the economy is on the rise, thanks partly to investment by emigres from Russia and the United States.

Economic growth in Armenia has averaged 10 percent annually for the last 10 years, according to the World Bank, and last year’s growth rate was 13.4 percent, according to official statistics.

But this upswing has not been matched by improved governance in the Armenian capital, where poor oversight means that the land is drying up in and around this city of some 1.2 million people.

Yerevan, famous for the pink colouring of city centre buildings, dates from before the eighth century BC and, like many Soviet urban centres, has since seen a sprawl of high-rise apartment blocks on the outskirts.

Residents take pride in the lush city centre parks and in Yerevan’s unique position, within sight of nearby Mount Ararat, a revered national symbol that actually lies in Turkey.

But now they find desert animals such as snakes and scorpions increasingly turning up in their apartment blocks located in the valley in which Yerevan was built.

Pogosian says she and others fought a legal battle to prevent the development near her house, but to no avail and the foundations are now being dug.

“A well-known businessman caught sight of the land, and wants to build a hotel complex… Eventually, as he had a permit from the ministry for nature protection, they decided to carry out their barbaric plans at night,” she said.

Ecologist Karine Danielian, of Yerevan’s State University, says the city has lost 12 percent of its green space in recent years.

“Big businesses have built on any large or small space between buildings,” said Danielian.

“The capital is reverting to semi-desert with all the climatic characteristics, flora and fauna that implies…. The tall buildings appearing in the centre reduce air circulation. The city is being suffocated,” she said.

The head of the city’s environmental protection department, Avet Martirosian, says he is concerned by the loss of green space and developers are now required to plant additional trees and grass when they build.

City authorities also plan an ambitious “re-greening” programme.

This will include planting 50,000 trees and 30,000 shrubs, with special attention paid to restoring vines and creepers that once covered many buildings, shielding them from noise, dust and the sun, says Martirosian.

He says 150,000 dollars (114,000 euros) has been allocated to growing saplings at a nearby nursery, including varieties that can cope with pollution.

Under the plans, the amount of green territory in the city will increase by 4,500 hectares (11,000 acres) by 2020, he says.

This does not satisfy ecologists or sceptical local residents in a country where corruption and poor governance are serious problems however.

Danielian says that the new saplings will be no replacement for the mature trees that are being lost. “Why should we repeat the mistakes other cities have made?” she queried.

Local resident Aik Bersegian, a 60-year-old mechanic, is also distrustful: “These plans only exist on paper. The authorities adopted a law on protecting the environment but themselves don’t respect it. It’s happening in front of our eyes.”

LINK

via LiveScience

Human Compassion Surprisingly Limited, Study Finds
By Sara Goudarzi
February 16, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO—While a person’s accidental death reported on the evening news can bring viewers to tears, mass killings reported as statistics fail to tickle human emotions, a new study finds.

The Internet and other modern communications bring atrocities such as killings in Darfur, Sudan into homes and office cubicles. But knowledge of these events fails to motivate most to take action, said Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon researcher.

People typically react very strongly to one death but their emotions fade as the number of victims increase, Slovic reported here yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“We go all out to save a single identified victim, be it a person or an animal, but as the numbers increase, we level off,” Slovic said. “We don’t feel any different to say 88 people dying than we do to 87. This is a disturbing model, because it means that lives are not equal, and that as problems become bigger we become insensitive to the prospect of additional deaths.”

Human insensitivity to large-scale human suffering has been observed in the past century with genocides in Armenia, the Ukraine, Nazi Germany and Rwanda, among others.

“We have to understand what it is in our makeup—psychologically, socially, politically and institutionally—that has allowed genocide to go unabated for a century,” Slovic said. “If we don’t answer that question and use the answer to change things, we will see another century of horrible atrocities around the world.”

Slovic previously studied this phenomenon by presenting photographs to a group of subjects. In the first photograph eight children needed $300,000 to receive medical attention in order to save their lives. In the next photograph, one child needed $300,000 for medical bills.

Most subjects were willing to donate to the one and not the group of children.

In his latest research, Slovic and colleagues showed three photos to participants: a starving African girl, a starving African boy and a photo of both of them together.

Participants felt equivalent amounts of sympathy for each child when viewed separately, but compassion levels declined when the children were viewed together.

“The studies … suggest a disturbing psychological tendency,” Slovic said. “Our capacity to feel is limited. Even at two, people start to lose it.”

The ugly truth about ugly leaders who want Armenia’s death is revealed. A 2,000-year-old coin that reads “Antoni Armenia devicta” (“For Antony, Armenia having been vanquished”) has another side. Turn it around and you will see the face of Antoni’s young lover thought-to-be-hot Cleopatra, as bad as her and her degenerate Antoni’s desire to see Armenia vanquished.

2,000 years… and ugly politicians still hope they will kill Armenia one day. BBC link