United Press International, in it's "Armenian survivors sue Turks, Germans" 13 January 2006 article, informs of a new lawsuit brought by Armenians in California against a German bank. The plaintiffs argue, "Deutsche Bank funded the Turkish government's mass genocide of Armenians in return for these looted Armenian assets [during WWI]."

Photo: Mark Geragos, one of the most famous American lawyers. Geragos, of Armenian background, is one of the lawyers in the lawsuit. With similar lawsuits he has made a few million dollars lately.

Armenian survivors sue Turks, Germans

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 13 (UPI) — Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank are being sued for their alleged effort to keep victims of Turkey's 1915 Armenian genocide from recovering looted assets.

Lawyers for the heirs of genocide victims also said they are suing Turkey.

"The German banks have systematically thwarted the recovery of millions of dollars in assets deposited by Armenians prior to the 1915 genocide," plaintiffs' lawyers said Friday.

"In addition, the lawsuit seeks damages for looted Armenian assets forcibly taken by the Turkish government during the genocide. Deutsche Bank funded the Turkish government's mass genocide of Armenians in return for these looted Armenian assets."

The plaintiffs' lawyers earlier settled similar Armenian genocide lawsuits against New York Life Insurance and AXA for $37.5 million.

– from http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?Stor…13-051531-1176r

Photo: An Armenian girl carries a placard in Jerusalem during a gathering marking the 90th anniversary of the Genocide (April 2005/AFP file)

Though this news is supposed to make us happy for genocide survivors and their generations getting back what was illegaly taken from them, I have mixed feelings about such actions. Not to say that I suggest these lawsuits should not take place… But the pain of the Genocide is so univeral and so many people have been affected by it, including many members of my extended family, that I don't feel comfortable with the ungoing lawsuits. One would say I am not happy because I have no financial benefits from it… I don't think it's what I mean. What I mean is that Armenians lost over one million lives; Armenians lost most of their homeland that they lived in for at least 2500 years; Armenians lost uncountable sacred and national symbols; Armenians lost Ararat. What do these lawsuits have to do with the pain of the Genocide? It helps to the "recognition"? Why the hell we need "recognition"? And if we even do, who is to "recognize" the Armenian genocide? George Bush? Candie or the Dick? We do not need "genocide recognition." We need genocide education and genocide awareness.

As long as I have lived in the United States, I have always been in touch with Armenian international students (both high school and university), except for this year (though the kids are scheduled to leave after June 2006, so the year is not really over yet). Some of them have become best friends, especially the kids from 2003-2004. Oh, even when I was back in Armenia, I still had friends who would come to the U.S. to participate in the program.

Romella, 16-year-old
FLEX 2005-2006 student
(from 6 News)

I do not know why I didn’t get to meet the kids from this year, but I am fairly glad I did not have such an opportunity.

If I did, I would also know (or know about) Romella Papazyan, a 16-year-old kid who died a month ago while she was driving an ATV. Please do not misunderstand or misinterpret my words… If I knew her, her death would be very devastating for me, which is the reason that I have stated my having been glad at not encountering this year's class.

I encountered the news about this girl’s death in American newspapers. Washington County Pilot-Tribune and Enterprise, for example, wrote a commemorative article about Romella on 30 December 2005, and published her photo as well.

I do not wish to further elaborate on the details of her accident, due to the fact that describing this tragedy is not the reason I am writing this. I simply want to take the opportunity to express my concerns about the organization, FLEX , which brings about 50 exchange students from Armenia to the U.S. every year for high school studies. My concern is not about Armenian kids being “spoiled” by American high school standards. C'mon. America is not the one who is gonna spoil them. If they are already spoiled, they will become much more spoiled here indeed (like a girl whose sister I knew in Armenia). But, I wonder, why is it that those I call my friends, not simply individuals I have become acquainted with, but true friends, do not get spoiled, i.e. participate in immoral behavior, while in the United States?

My primary concern is the American families who host these kids. And the concern comes from a person who personally knows at least two of these families and from a person who has been told many stories by these kids about their host families.

I once even e-mailed the administration of FLEX expressing my concerns about the host families. I was told it was not my business. But this family I know (who are great people, and who have become my friends too) told me that the families go through long processes of trainings, etc.

Long processes? Well, here are some things that happened too:
When a friend of mine from my High School in Armenia was a student in the U.S. in 2002-2003, he was staying with a single host father, who would expect the kid to pay from his scholarship to buy food for the host father. From last year, there were two girls (one of them was not from Armenia) staying with a single host mother. This woman would not buy food or not do so on a regular basis, so the kids spent many nights being hungry (I have personally met both of them in the spring of 2005). Finally, after tolerating one year, they requested a family change for the last week before they left for their homes (they were also forced to work at the business place that the host “mother” owned). One of my best friends (2003-2004 Alumni) has told me that there have been “far worse incidents” with her girlfriends and their host families, but I did not ask her to share these stories. There are more examples of course….

I think the problem is in the selection of the host families. Many of them are people who have never had children and thus do not know the proper method by which to treat these international students. Some of them are single adults, who are bored and want to have a host kid for a year. But the abusive stories are so numerous, that I highly doubt if this program actually benefits the students, as the program claims to aim.

And by the way, Romella was not wearing a helmet, according to the newspapers, when she was driving. Are the host parents going to answer for this?

I guess it is not my business, according to FLEX.

In the post, "Pamuk, say you are sorry," I quoted Turkey's Justice Minister Cemil Cicek (Jemil Chichek) urging Turkey's most famous novelist, Orhan Pamuk, to apologize for accepting the Armenian genocide.

"Why didn't he come out and say: 'I never said such a thing.'" Cicek asked.

Because lying will not be the answer to all of your problems, Mr. Cicek !!!!!!

Truly,
Maral

A friend of mine, Maral Der Ohanesian, more liked the quote "Why didn't he come out and say: 'I never said such a thing' " from the same Cicek in the same article. Maral responds to the Justice Minister, "Because lying will not be the answer to all of your problems, Mr. Cicek! "

In Turkey's political culture of denial lying, perhaps, is the best way around. And the call to deny comes from the JUSTICE Minister, a denialist-in-chief of the Armenian genocide.

Today, I was jokingly called a traitor . My betrayal was attending two Armenian Christmas services at the same time. I know this does not make sense, but be patient and read. Armenians, who are generally labeled as family and church oriented, have two churches: both of them Apostolic (eastern Orthodox) indeed.

The first church is the Holy See of the Armenian Apostolic Church (based in Echmaidzin, Armenia). The next one is the Cilicia Armenian Apostolic Church (now based in Antilias, Lebanon). The Catholicos (Patriarch) of All Armenians is the head of the Echmiadzin church: the Catholicos of Cilicia is the head of Antilias (after the Genocide, the See of Cilicia moved to Lebanon from Armenian Cilicia in Turkey). Both of them are the same, and they all started with Echmiadzin becoming the Holy See in 301AD. But due to political reasons (Armenia being destroyed by invaders and the See moving to different places), we happened to have two heads of our church. I don't know the exact history (and both sides have different arguments), but the division was deepened after Soviet Union was established, and an Armenian nationalist party in the Diaspora, called Dashnaktsutiun, wanted to have more control in the Diaspora, and the See of Cilicia established prellacies in the United States (though there was already the Diocese- belonging to Echmiadzin). This is very confusing; so if you don't get it, don't feel bad. In short, Armenian Church is divided.

Photo: Armenian Christmas (Holy Birth) Service at a rented church. 8 January 2006 (this was the first service)

So I live now in this American state in the Midwest, which has about 2000 Armenians. Less than 5%, indeed, attends the Church services (the priests come over from California, because we do not have our own). As every other traditional Armenian diasporan community, we have two services in our state (we rent out churches for the service). I always go to every service we have, despite the church it holds. This does not happen every other week. Sometimes it is only once in two or more months. I guess the competition makes both of the churches to hold services; so I guess division has a positive side too.

So today we had Christmas service; in two different churches at the same time. We went to the one we got the first invitation from (first come, first serve). The next one only let us know about the service yesterday, and when I angrily asked why could not they have scheduled another day since there was already an Armenian church service, I was told that the airline tickets for the priest (coming from California) had been bought 3 weeks before.

After we received communion in the first church, my Mom and I left for the next church (we really wanted to see our friends at the "other church" as well). Of course, some of the organizers in the first church were not happy , neither the ones in the next one. But who cares. If they want to have two different services at the same time, I guess I have to go to both of them.

We really had nice time at the second one (when we went, the service was over). We joked a lot, and we "married" a couple. I was the tamada (the toast master). Oh, in the first one, during the service, the fire alarm turned on, so it was quite noisy for a while.

OK. If you think this story was interesting, leave here a comment, so that I know whether I should post things like this.

P.S. If you were wondering why the hell Armenians would have Christmas service on 8 January 2006… Since 301AD, Armenians have been celebrating the Christmas on 6 January. It is said that the rest of the world did the same, until in the late 4th century the Greeks switched the date to a Pagan celebration, on 25 December, to gain more popularity.

Hold on, I am not the one saying "Turkish abuse." Not even the Greeks, nor the Assyrians. This time it's the Indian news agency Rediff, while writing about the wiki tickies of Wiki, which, according to http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki, "is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser."

The thing is that the "encyclopaedia" http://en.wikipedia.org gives the chance to edit every single entry it has. No, kidding. I mean even can edit it. if he has access to the Internet, indeed.

What's hilarious about http://en.wikipedia.org is that it makes denialist Turks to suffer on that website day by day changing the entry on the Armenian genocide. The Indian site says, "The revert wars on 'Orhan Pamuk' and the 'Armenian genocide' were absolutely fascinating, for example." Writing about the abuse, the paper adds, "You can learn Turkish abuse by the bucketful by trawling through the archives. "

Photo: Turkish denier after finding out his entry on the Armenian genocide was changed again (photo taken by Blogian with Hayastan.com's digigal camera)

UPDATE: I recieved a "nice letter" from an Azerbaijani Turkish user cursing me. I am afraid he was the one in the picture above.

As we all know, Turkey's most famous novelist, Orhan Pamuk, is on trial for saying "one million Armenians were killed in Turkey." Almost every newspaper in the world has written on Pamuk's trial, yet Pamuk is not alone in his country. There is a more dramatic case, which I want to mention here. The person in this case is not a writer, let alone a famous one like Pamuk.

The person I am talking about is Erkan Akay, an ordinary Turk who cannot stand the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide. This person, according to the Turkish BIA News Center, was "sentenced […] to a year in prison" on 14 December 2005 (yet only one or so newspapers reported this). The "crime," indeed, was the same: he "insulted the Turkish identity and the Republic." What reader Akay had dared to say in a letter to a magazine was "Turks massacred the Armenians and committed genocide, [and] the murderers were then presented as heroes," and "the roots of the Republic of Turkey, which is called the New Turkey, stand in past murders, and the state was established on dirty secrets."

Indeed, a brave human. Braver than Pamuk, braver than the rest of the 60 million Turkish citizens.
Brave job, Erkan Akay. Teşekkürler… (thank you in Turkish).

The Union of Councils for Soviet Jews reports on 6 January 2006 about another vandalism against the Armenians of Russia.

archival photo: another Armenian religous monument desecrated by Russian neo-fascists, known as "skinheads"

Unidentified vandals smashed a cross erected by the Armenian community of Syktyvkar, Russia (Komi Republic), according to a December 28, 2005 report by Igor Sazhin, head of the local branch of the human rights group Memorial, a participating NGO in a European Commission sponsored project to monitor xenophobia in Russia (UCSJ, the Moscow Helsinki Group, and the Moscow Bureau on Human Rights are the main grantees of the project).

The recently erected cross was broken in two at some point the previous day. Mr. Sazhin believes that the vandalism was the work of local neo-fascists, whom he blames for the still unsolved December 1, 2005 arson attack against a mosque in the city. The Armenian community plans to rebuild the cross.

Forbes informs on 6 January 2005, Turkey's Justice Minister Cemil Cicek (Jemil Chichek) urged Orhan Pamuk, the prominent Turkish novelist on trial for admitting the Armenian genocide, to apologize, so that his case can be dismissed.

Orhan Pamuk went on trial Dec. 16 for saying "30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands," but the proceeding was immediately stopped to await a ruling by the Justice Ministry on whether to proceed.

The controversy comes at a particularly sensitive time in the overwhelmingly Muslim country's push to join the European Union, which severely criticized the trial, questioning the commitment to freedom of expression in a country that opened membership negotiations with the bloc in October.

In urging Pamuk to apologize, the minister appeared to be looking for a way to end the case. Dozens of other people are facing similar charges.

"I wish he would" apologize, Cicek said on private NTV television, adding that he would like the writer to say: "I am sorry."

– from http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/ap/2006/0…/ap2433531.html

My "alleged masterpiece," as Harut Sassounian described my sarcastic letter to an American newspaper, made an editorial in USA Armenian Life Magazine , Hye Kiank Armenian Weekly on 6 January 2006, where Appo Jabarian, the publisher, wrote:

In their decades-long desperate attempts to obstruct
justice sought by the heirs of the 1.5 million victims
of the Armenian Genocide, the denialist Turkish
officialdom and its cronies in Israel and USA have
come up with an initial “invention”: rewriting
history.

When the foundations of the denialists’ “invention”
proved to be very shaky, the fathers of this ill-fated
invention came up yet with a new “invention”: they
started employing the word “alleged”, “allegations”.
So, every time a denialist intends to attempt to
discredit the veracity of the Genocide, he/she resorts
to profusely using the word “alleged” or “allegation”.

Probably, the most popular term among the denialit
Turks is the term “alleged Armenian Genocide” or
“Armenian allegations that a genocide has occured in
1915”. Every international act of recognition of the
Armenian Genocide drives the denialist Turk’s or his
cronie’s blood pressure to even higher degree.

And now, decades later, when the momentum of
international recognition is picking up steam, the
favorite anti-blood pressure “allegation” or “alleged”
tablets have proven to be very popular among the
so-called Turkish nationalists, and their cronies in
the West.

On Monday January 2, 2006, The Jewish Advocate of
Boston, MA broke new record in its attempt to please
the Turkish denialists. The Advocate has published a
photo showing skulls and living individuals
accompanied by the following caption: “A historical
photo of alleged victims of the Armenian genocide.”

Soon after the publication of the anti-Armenian biased
photo and the article, Simon Maghakyan, a fellow
member of Yahoo!ArmenianGroup wrote: “I read your
‘alleged’ article in the ‘alleged’ Jewish Advocate
about the ‘alleged’ Armenian genocide at the ‘alleged’
website
http://www.thejewishadvocate.com/this_week…ontent_id=689.”

Maghakyan continued: “The ‘alleged’ photo of the
‘alleged’ victims of the ‘alleged’ Armenian genocide
you posted, shows the ‘alleged’ Armenians and some
‘alleged’ Armenian skulls of ‘alleged’ Urfa, where my
‘alleged’ grandparents were ‘allegedly’ murdered
during the ‘alleged’ WWI. My ‘alleged’
great-grandfather’s ‘alleged’ name was Gevork
Maghakyan, and he was ‘allegedly’ shot in the
‘alleged’ Armenian cathedral of ‘alleged’ St. Mary,
where many ‘alleged’ Armenians, including my other
‘alleged’ relatives, were ‘allegedly’ burnt alive.”

Maghakyan concluded: “Happy ‘Alleged’ New Year to you
and thank you for calling my family members ‘alleged’
victims. I hope it makes you feel special and unique!
With ‘alleged’ best wishes, ‘Alleged’ Simon Maghakyan
from ‘alleged’ Littleton, Colorado, USA”
Upon reading Maghakyan’s hilarious comments, Harut
Sassounian, another fellow member of
Yahoo!ArmenianGroup, and long-time-contributor to USA
Armenian Life, wrote: “Dear ‘alleged’ Simon, Your
‘alleged’ letter to the ‘alleged’ editor of the
‘alleged’ Jewish Advocate is an ‘alleged’
masterpiece!”

Sassounian signed: “‘Allegedly’, Harut Sassounian.”
Another fellow member Prof. Dennis Papazian wrote:
“Good show Simon, we have to mock them.”

This writer forwarded the following: “Dear Simon,
That’s the way to go with these ‘allegation’-minded
‘allegedly’ existing individuals, and governments.”
He continued: “Both my ‘alleged’ paternal and maternal
grandparents were ‘allegedly’ orphaned during the
‘alleged’ Armenian Genocide of 1915-23. “

He added: “Collectively, they have ‘allegedly’ lost
over 85 relatives, including their parents, uncles,
aunts, grandparents. They were ‘allegedly’ uprooted
from Sis, capital of Cilicia, Western Armenia.”

He concluded: “Putting all ‘allegations’ aside, here
is my wish to you all. I shall repeat this wish until
it materializes. If it doesn’t materialize during my
generation, I’d like to invite the upcoming
generation(s) to repeat it until it eventually
materializes: See you and your loved ones next year in
Western Armenia!”

He signed: “ ‘Allegedly’ existing in Glendale, CA USA,
Appo Jabarian.”

Radio Liberty reports on 6 Jan 2006:

Georgian media quote police officers as saying the schools were located in the predominantly ethnic Armenian region of Samtskhe-Javakheti.

They include branches of the Yerevan-based Law and Economics University and an examination center of the Movses Khorenatsi University, which is also headquartered in the Armenian capital.

Those schools were allegedly operating without a licence from the Georgian Education Ministry.