Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), made a preaching at the ecumenical service held on May 7 at the National Cathedral in Washington, the United States for commemorations of the centennial of the Armenian Genocide.
The event, entitled “The holy martyrs of the Armenian Genocide: a prayer for justice and peace,” brought thousands of guests and leaders of different religions in memory of the persons caught
Armenia issues two stamps dedicated to the centenary of the genocide, one of Henry Morgenthau and Aure on the Near East Relief
On May 6 in the US Library of Congress in Washington was initiated by the Armenian Computer “Haypost” envelope first-day stamp 300 drams representative Herny Morgenthau (1856-1946), the American ambassador stationed in the Empire Ottoman Armenians during the genocide. He also who had denounced many times the crimes organized by the Young Turks against the Armenian population. The issuance of this stamp is the 100th anniversary of the genocide of the Armenians.
“Haypost” also launched the postage block 480 drams representing tabeau a genocide survivor with her child in the back. The show carries the inscription “Near East Relief” with the phrases “we thank you America” (America, thank you) and “Lest They Perish” (do not let them disappear). This stamp was created with the support of Hayk Demoyan Director of Armenian Genocide Museum in Yerevan. Present at the launch ceremony of the two Armenian stamps, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, Catholicos Karekin II, Vicken Sargsyan the head of the presidential staff of the Armenian government and responsible for cooridination the commemoration of the centenary of the genocide, Dikran Sarkisian, the former Prime Minister and current Ambassador of Armenia in Washington and Narine Seferian the responsible development of “Haypost”.
Krikor Amirzayan
Sweden’s Left Party proposes to include materials on Armenian Genocide in school textbooks
Sweden’s Left Party has initiated the inclusion of materials on the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the Genocide of Assyrians and Pontic Greeks into the school textbooks, said Hans Linde, a Foreign Affairs spokesperson for the Left Party, Horizon Weekly reports.
Linde said that in order to prevent new genocides, it is necessary to recognize the past genocides and tell the wide masses about these crimes.
The Swedish parliament recognized the Armenian Genocide on March 11, 2010.
Thierry Meyssan: Today’s Turkey continues the Armenian Genocide with the massacres of Deir ez-Zor and Kessab
“The world has just commemorated the centenary of the genocide of Turkish non-Muslims. However, contrary to conventional wisdom, this crime began with the Hamidian massacres of 1894-95, which were ordered by Sultan Abdülhamid II, and continued on a huge scale with the massacres perpetrated between 1915 and 1923, planned by the young Turks. They continue today with the massacres of Deir ez-Zor and Kessab, organized by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. For 120 years, the Turkish power elite have been successively massacring non-Muslimns – to general indifference – in order to build a homogenous nation,” Thierry Meyssan writes in an article published by Voltaire Network.
According to the author, “the centenary of the genocide of Turkish non-Muslims prepared the stage for festival of hypocrisy.” “While certain states celebrated the memory of the victims in Yerevan, others showed themselves to be shameless.”
“President Erdoğan had the opportunity to confess to this very old story, of which he is in no way responsible. Had he done so, he could have made his country a normal state. But no! Instead he hung onto his lies, denying History and affirming that there had been “only”100,000 dead, and that they had been executed for their participation in terrorist activities,” the article reads.
“By draping itself in this absurdity, today’s Turkey is not only manifesting its support for the Hamidian massacres of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1894-95) – which caused between 80,000 and 300,000 victims – but especially for the crimes committed by the “Special Organization” of the Union and Progress Committee (UPC), starting from 1915 until the election of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as President of the Republic (1923), which caused between 1,200,000 and 1,500,000 deaths – and its ideological continuity with the ancient régime. And this is what we all noted with horror when, last year in 2014, we watched the Turkish army accompany the al-Nusra Front (in other words al-Qaïda in Syria) to Kessab for the purpose of chasing away the Armenian population. Or again, when the same Turkish army helped Daesh to dynamite the Deir ez-Zor Memorial, which commemorated the 1916 extermination of more than 200,000 Armeniens in the camp that the Turks had built for them,” the author writes.
“Pan-Islamism, the project of Sultan Abdülhamid II and the Young Turks early in the 20th century, like the AKP today, aims to become the leader of the sunnite world, and in order to achieve this aim, it intends to create a homogenous sunnite state. This project required the extermination of the Christians (Armenians, Pontic Greeks, and Assyro-Chaldeans) and the Yezidis. They all died, exactly as Daesh is exterminating Christians and Yezidis today,” Thierry Meyssan continues.
According to him, the intervention of the Turkish army into Syrian territory, at Kessab and Deir ez-Zor, is coherent with this project, since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hopes to annex Northern Syria once NATO has overthrown President Bachar el-Assad.
Thierry Meyssan is a French intellectual, founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace Conference.
Genocidio en Armenia Jaime Daremblum “La Nación (Costa Rica)”
ByJaime Daremblum Director, Center for Latin American Studies “La Nación (Costa Rica)”
Sin ambages, el Pontífice rememoró la sistemática liquidación de seres humanos perpetrada por los turcos. Aquello constituyó nada menos que el primer genocidio del siglo XX, reiteró el Papa.
El mensaje del papa Francisco generó también un corolario: no es dable opacar ni borrar la naturaleza del crimen perpetrado por los turcos. No obstante, los sucesores políticos del Imperio otomano han insistido en reescribir la historia, faena en la cual, dichosamente, no han tenido éxito.
El Parlamento Europeo, el miércoles pasado, se unió a la exhortación papal para urgir a Turquía a reconocer la masacre sistemática de armenios de 1915 como un genocidio. Este ha sido un importante reclamo internacional que Turquía repetidamente ha desdeñado. Desde las páginas de prensa que han apelado por esta expresión humanitaria, algunos analistas han puntualizado que la acción violenta del Imperio otomano conlleva un señalamiento que lo ubica en la misma categoría del Tercer Reich nazi y de las fórmulas inhumanas de Stalin y Pol Pot.
La reacción de Ankara al holgado balance de la votación del Parlamento Europeo, que demanda de Turquía aceptar ese capítulo histórico, fue negativa. Aceptar el pronunciamiento podría fomentar una genuina reconciliación de los pueblos europeos con la nación turca, advirtió el Parlamento.
Y, a todo esto, ¿qué dicen los líderes turcos? El presidente Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordenó de inmediato retirar su embajador ante el Vaticano. Además, se adelantó a rechazar la medida europea antes de ser votada en el Parlamento. Previamente había criticado duramente al Papa y, de seguido, comentó que “le entraba por un oído y le salía por el otro”. Qué actitud más distante y diferente la de la República Federal de Alemania, que pidió perdón al mundo por las acciones de los nazis. Pero, así suele ser Erdogan, altanero y conocido por sus desplantes a líderes de las democracias.
No debemos omitir el hecho de que Turquía celebrará elecciones parlamentarias en dos meses y Erdogan busca ampliar su bancada. Sería extraño que su truculencia con Europa le depare votos, aunque cosas aún más exóticas hemos visto en el mundo.
Remembering the Armenian Genocide 100 Years Later Lela Gilbert
By Lela Gilbert The Hudson Institute
This papal declaration instantly flared into a diplomatic uproar. It absolutely infuriated Turkey’s Islamist President Tayyip Erdogan, who “warned” the Pope against repeating his “mistaken” statement.
There was actually no mistake about it: The fact is, the Armenian Genocide cost 1.5 million Armenian Christians their lives, along with another million Assyrian and Greek believers.
And, thanks to the Pope’s pronouncement and Erdogan’s outrage, the rest of the world was effectively reminded of the approaching centennial of that genocide, which will take place on April 24.
A death march to nowhere.
The horror story began on April 24, 1915, when Turkish authorities arrested hundreds of Armenian professors, lawyers, doctors, clergymen and other elites in Constantinople (now Istanbul). These revered members of the community were jailed, tortured and hastily massacred.
That mass murder marked the initiation of a death sentence on an entire religious population.
As reports of the leaderships’ slaughter spread across Turkey, terror gripped Armenian cities, towns and villages, which in 1915 were home to approximately 2,100,000 souls. According to the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, by 1922, only 387,800 Armenians remained alive.
After killing the most highly educated and influential men in the community, the Turks began house-to-house searches. Ostensibly they were looking for weapons, claiming that the Christians had armed themselves for a revolution.
Since most Turkish citizens owned rifles or handguns for self-defense in those days, it wasn’t difficult for the Turks to find arms in Armenian homes. And this served as sufficient pretext for the government to arrest enormous numbers of Armenian men who were subsequently beaten, tortured and, like the others, mass murdered.
The family members who survived – mostly women, children, the ill and the elderly – were forced to embark upon what has been described as a “concentration camp on foot.” They were told they would be relocated; in reality, they were sent on a death march to nowhere. They were herded like animals, – with whips and cudgels and at gunpoint.
These captives were provided with little or no food or water. Old people and babies were the first to die. Mothers were gripped with insanity, helplessly watching their little ones suffer and succumb; more than a few took their own lives. Eyewitness accounts and photographs remain today, and they are heart wrenching. Corpses littered the roads; nude women were crucified; dozens of bodies floated in rivers.
On Jan. 5, 2015, Raffi Khatchadourian published a personal essay in The New Yorker about his Armenian grandfather, who somehow survived the Armenian Genocide. He described the brutality:
Whenever one of them lagged behind, a gendarme would beat her with the butt of his rifle, throwing her on her face till she rose terrified and rejoined her companions. If one lagged from sickness, she was either abandoned, alone in the wilderness, without help or comfort, to be a prey to wild beasts, or a gendarme ended her life by a bullet.
Another portrait of those terrible times, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, is a work of historical fiction written in the 1930s by Franz Werfel, an Austrian Jew. A meticulously researched account based on a true story, the novel relates the insubordination of a group of some 5,000 Armenian villagers who lived at the foot of a seaside mountain called Musa Dagh. Led by a courageous Armenian veteran of the Turkish army, the townsmen defied Turkish relocation orders. Instead, they fought for their lives and many of them survived; French ships eventually rescued them.
A portrait of defiance and courage, Forty Days of Musa Dagh inspired Jews in Polish ghettoes to fight to the death against their Nazi overlords. Unsurprisingly, Werfel’s book fed the flames of many a Third Reich book-burning.
Some Turks claim that World War II-era Armenian Christians had aligned themselves with Russia and were therefore a threat to Turkish security. But although the excuse that Armenian Christians were “enemies of the Turkish State” is still bandied about, German historian Michael Hesemann documented that they were killed for explicitly religious reasons:
In the end, Armenians weren’t killed because they were Armenian, but because they were Christians. Armenian women were even offered to be spared if they convert to Islam. They were then married into Turkish households or sold on slave markets or taken as sex slaves into brothels for Turkish soldiers, but at least they survived. A whole group of Islamized Crypto-Armenians was created by this offer to embrace Islam. But at least it shows that the Armenians were not killed because they were Armenians, but because they were Christians.
Indeed, the Armenian Genocide is described as a jihad in numerous accounts. Needless to say, that scenario is far from over. In fact the story of Christians being massacred by Islamist forces continues apace in the Middle East.
Not so long ago…
A little more than year ago, a nightmare scenario materialized in the Armenian town of Kessab, Syria. On March 21, Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists attacked Kessab, driving the Christian residents out of their ancestral homes in an assault eerily reminiscent of the 1915 attacks.
In one article, which appeared on April 8, I quoted first-person statements from a few of Kessab’s residents:
“Before sunrise, we woke up to the horror of a shower of missiles and rockets falling on our town. Thousands of extremists crossed the borders towards our town. Missiles were fired from Turkey to destroy beautiful Kessab and to celebrate the approach of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Kassabtsi heroes defended the town with their simple hunting weapons…
We had to flee only with our clothes. We couldn’t take anything, not even the most precious thing – a handful of soil from Kessab. We couldn’t take our memories…”
It was widely reported that the Turkish army assisted in this incursion or, at the very least, turned a blind eye to it. And certainly, as noted above, the residents of Kessab had not forgotten the genocide. In fact, they viscerally felt that their sudden expulsion and the ravaging of their homes and churches was a replay of the 1915 horrors, 99 years after the fact.
In Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter, I attended the April 2014 remembrance of the genocide, which was followed by an impassioned demonstration in front of Jerusalem’s Turkish Consulate on behalf of Kessab. Dozens of protesters wearing “Save Kessab” T-shirts sang, chanted and demanded the rescue and repatriation of the town’s expelled population.
Of course the Middle East’s Christian persecution story didn’t end with Armenian Christians alone. And it continues with ISIS and other radical Muslim militias even now, as gruesome videos of beheadings and mass shootings continue to remind us.
I visited the Christian refugees in Erbil’s Christian enclave, Ankawa in November 2014. These mostly Assyrian Christians already knew about the Islamic State’s killing of Christians in Syria and Iraq. Then, suddenly, their own cities, towns and villages were given short notice – less than 24 hours, and sometimes just minutes – to get out or face death.
As I have written elsewhere,
The refugees lost their personal history, their identity. They were stripped of passports, birth and baptismal certificates, diplomas, national identification papers, commercial licenses and deeds of property. They handed over or left behind personal treasures like inherited jewelry, trophies, photographs and family memorabilia. The terrorists took their automobiles, cash, cellphones, computers, and business and personal files.
By the time they arrived in Erbil, collapsing in exhaustion in churchyards and on sidewalks, they had lost everything. They left their family homes with, as the saying goes, nothing but the shirts on their backs.
Their Christian faith was bruised and battered. In some cases, all hope was lost.
“Who speaks today of the annihilation…?”
It’s no wonder that Israelis ask me – some of them the offspring of Holocaust survivors – “Why aren’t you Christians doing anything about the persecuted Christians in the Middle East?”
They certainly have a point. Today’s fragmented global Christian community could learn valuable lessons from successful Jewish advocacy and activism. But the Jews’ insistence on paying attention to persecution – both their own and that of others – springs from a dark and haunted past.
In 1939, as he planned his “Final Solution” to rid the world of Jewry, Adolf Hitler notoriously said, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Of course he was very wrong. Today, during the centennial of the Armenian Genocide, countless voices will speak out in remembrance of Turkey’s murdered Christian population.
As Hitler implied, and as Pope Francis indicated with the words “first genocide of the 20th Century,” the Armenian Genocide became a prototype for the Third Reich’s Holocaust.
Yet despite the Genocide and the Holocaust – and despite a sorry world’s declarations of “Never Again” – Jews and Christians continue to pay with their lives for anti-Semitism, anti-Christianity and Islamist fanaticism.
ISIS rapes, plunders, kidnaps, tortures and murders Christians by the thousands. Iran repeatedly threatens to annihilate Israel, while pursuing nuclear ambitions and supporting deadly terrorist attacks on Jews.
While such diabolical ideologies persist in driving the world mad, what can we do but stand together in defiant resistance?
Let’s resolve to speak the truth boldly.
Let’s pray effectually and fervently.
And let us take the time to recall, with reverence and resolve, 100 years of unspeakable losses.
Istanbul: Camp Armen orphanage “They Want to Demolish Peoples’ Memory in This Country”
Nor Zartonk calls out to protect Camp Armen: Camp Armen is a place where our hope will cherish in spite of our losses and we will live together in peace and fraternally, one way or another.
Nor Zartonk made a statement and called out to protect Camp Armen, a former Armenian orphanage in Tuzla district of İstanbul after the attempt of demolition the camp.
“We call everyone who supports our mutual past and future to protect Camp Armen.
In Nor Artonk’s statement, it was emphasized that Camp Armen, built with the labor of more than 1500 children, was the hope to live together. Camp Armen was the past and the mutual memory of all people’s living in this country.
Extermination policy continues
It was stated that Camp Armen was built without state assitance and in spite of all difficulties and oppressions and it was reminded that this demolition process was a part of the extermination policies.
“After 1980 coup d’etat, orphanage’s founder and manager Hrant Güzelyan was tortured with the claim he was raising Armenian militant in the orphanage and they closed down the building unlawfully by occupying its territory and left it to rot. Now, they want to demolish it totally.
“This is not only a worn-out building left to rot for a long time with mingled bureaucratic process they even didn’t want to handle and this is not only its green surrounding once made by children.
“It is a ‘homelike’ orphanage once embraced and was built by the labor of more than 1500 poor and orphan children like an embroidery that they want to demolish now.
“It is an orphanage for poor Armenian children grew up in this country whose families and elder ones exposed to genocide or witnessed genocide in which they dealt with their losses and pain and created a new life and hope.
“It is the tradition of these people to adopt their pain, loss, mutual past and history despite the state and official institutions’ ongoing massacres, murders, threat and extermination policies spread over time and their denials they want to destroy!” (YY/BD)
Source: bianet.org
Azerbaijan: Sports Body Defends Baku Games Amid ‘Devastating Clampdown’
May 06, 2015
BRUSSELS — A senior European sports official has defended plans to hold the first-ever European Games in Baku next month amid what rights groups say is a growing crackdown on the media and civil society by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s government.
Speaking at the European Parliament in Brussels on May 6, European Olympic Committees (EOC) Vice-President Janez Kocijancic indicated that the organization will not act on the basis of political concerns, saying the EOC “cannot accept political engagements.”
Rights defenders have questioned plans to hold the inaugural European Games on June 12-28 in Azerbaijan, where several journalists, activists, and government critics jailed in the past year are widely considered to be political prisoners targeted in a campaign to silence dissent.
The long-ruling Aliyev is “forging ahead with the most devastating clampdown on human rights in 24 years of post-Soviet independence,” said Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at the New York-based Human Rights Watch, at the same panel in the European Parliament.
“He has arrested many of the Azerbaijani human rights advocates and journalists who could have brought scrutiny and transparency to the conduct of these games if they were not in jail,” Worden said.
Rasul Cafarov, an activist who was arrested in August after announcing plans for a campaign to draw attention to the rights situation ahead of the European Games, was sentenced to six and a half years in prison last month after a trial on financial crimes charges he says were politically motivated.
Worden said that the EOC, which groups 49 national Olympic Committees in the region, “has the power and the leverage to tell Baku to release prisoners and to stop threatening journalists before the games begin.”
Kocijancic said that the organization expects that it will help “democratize every society where we will go” and use “whatever influence we have to make this society better and more open,” but that EOC cannot accept responsibility for changing political matters as this is not within the scope of its activity.
He noted that Azerbaijan chaired the Council of Europe for six months last year, and said that the oil-producing Caspian Sea coast nation has increased trade with the European Union “tremendously.”
Based on reporting by RFE/RL’s Rikard Jozwiak in Brussels
Sing For Silenced Voices: Eurovision 2015 & The Armenian Genocide
Alex Robert Ross , May 14th, 2015 09:24
On the centenary of the genocide that scattered them across the globe, members of the Armenian diaspora have united for the country’s Eurovision Song Contest entry. With perpetrators Turkey refusing to accept responsibility (with the support of the UK and US), Alex Robert Ross argues that this political moment is timely
On the eve of invading Poland on August 22 1939, Adolf Hitler – seeking to justify the efficiency and value of genocide – asked his commanders rhetorically: “after all, who today still speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?” His argument, the argument that propped up the Final Solution and the Third Reich as a whole, was that the destruction of an entire race of people was not only possible, but that the perpetrators would remain free from reproach.
A century on from the Armenian Genocide and that question still bears repeating. Few today still speak of the annihilation of the Armenians. Few people speak of Armenia or the Armenians at all. So let’s speak about it. 100 years ago, Ottoman Turkish forces rounded up and murdered 1.5 million ethnic Armenians living within their borders , roughly 75% of the Armenian people in the world at the time. It wasn’t the Ottoman Empire’s first attempt to murder Armenians, nor was it their last, but it was their most brutal and most sustained effort; their most meticulously planned. The massacres involved mass burnings, drowning, poisoning, rape, and starvation. Few made it out alive, and fewer still made it out with their families beside them. Those that did escape – my family amongst them – were left with hellish images burned into their memories.
Genocide denial may seem like a bizarre concept in the Western world. Indeed, Germany, Uruguay, France, The Vatican, 43 US states, the individual governments of Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales, and dozens of other governments have come forward and officially recognised the massacres as an attempt to destroy a people.
Not Turkey, though. The Turkish government not only refuses to acknowledge the massacres as genocide, but denies the massacres altogether. They were, they say, a botched security measure during the War, an “alleged” crime that was mostly the fault of the Armenians in the first place. The Turkish government have bought off US congressmen to lobby for denial and founded institutes to look into their history and paid the historians within them to find that nothing sinister occurred . Having been scaled down after the high-profile trials of Orhan Pamuk and Elif Safak, Article 301 of the Turkish constitution now places only a two-year jail term on “denigration of the Turkish Nation”, a law that has led to journalists and members of the public facing prosecution for referencing the genocide . It’s a concept backed up by America and the UK, both of whom refuse to officially recognise the events despite promises to the contrary, mostly for strategic military purposes . The BBC still puts the word genocide in inverted commas.
This leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. The Armenian diaspora – larger in numbers than the population of modern Armenia – is defined by those events. Were it not for the genocide, they would not be in whichever far-flung part of the world that they have ended up in. So, to turn a blind eye to Turkey’s crimes not only sends a signal to the world that mass murder can go unpunished; it also tells the Armenian people that their trauma is a symptom of a lively imagination, that their existence in London, Los Angeles, Beirut, or St. Petersburg is not the result of an empire trying to destroy their ancestors’ lives and cultures, but instead a side-effect of a war that imposed on everyone. It covers over the stories of those that fought to defend their families’ lives in places like Musa Dagh, rallying against forces many times larger and more powerful than they were.
The lives of Armenian people today and the continuation of diaspora culture – cooking the food and speaking the language that the Ottoman Empire sought to wipe away like a nasty stain – is an act of defiance, a statement that Turkey failed.
In a culture of denial and silence, visibility is a radical statement in itself. System of a Down – themselves members of the diaspora – have quite literally flown the flag for the Armenian people since they gained unlikely mainstream recognition at the turn of the century. Their recent reformation and free show in Armenia’s capital Yerevan beautifully turned the centenary of the genocide into a defiant celebration rather than the morose spectacle that it likely would have been.
Aside from that, though, the Kardashian family have been the only bona fide celebrities with links to the country. Not that that’s all bad. Kanye West and Kim Kardashian made a pilgrimage of sorts to the country just the other week and, with the eyes of the entertainment media squarely on them at all times, forced the genocide into the spotlight. Like System of a Down, the Kardashians are treated as heroes by many of Armenian descent, not necessarily because of their personas, but because they are prominent in the Western cultural landscape. In the face of adversity and reticence, that’s progress.
Outside of this, and with little sporting prowess to speak of (occasional Olympic medals for Greco-Roman wrestling and weightlifting aside), the spotlight can only really remain on the Armenians sporadically. There is only one annual event that guarantees the country and its descendants any attention. Armenia revels in the Eurovision Song Contest.
Given that the competition relies heavily on both a camp adoration for Eastern European idiosyncrasies and an appreciation for ancient stringed instruments, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Armenia has had a pretty consistent record in Eurovision since its first entry in 2006. They’ve broken into the top five on three occasions, rarely falling into the nether reaches of the standings.
More important, though, is the controversy that they end up courting almost every year. At war with neighbouring Azerbaijan – a country complicit in the massacres and politically keen on anti-Armenianism ever since – Armenia’s songs are often seen as statements of aggression in what the West perceives as a petty squabble between two insignificant nations.
Take Emmy’s 2011 entry ‘Boom Boom’, a seemingly innocuous and frivolous track that, through very broken English, appears to be about a crush of some sort. She was reminded that “Boom Boom” might be perceived as an aggressive title given the political climate. It remains the only of the country’s entries to fall at the semi-final stage.
In 2009 Azerbaijani authorities tracked down citizens that had voted for that year’s Armenian entry by phone and questioned them on the grounds that their actions were unpatriotic . That same year, Armenia went out of their way to wind their neighbours up by showing images from the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region that the war centres on during their typically cringeworthy results announcement .
Aside from Armenia withdrawing from the 2012 contest in Azerbaijan over very serious security concerns, this all sort of looks petty and amusing. Whatever deep and damaging concerns and histories lie beneath such a conflict, we in the West will always see such things as beneath us.
But this year is different. Rather than pick a fight or prod at their local antagonists, the Armenian Eurovision entry for 2015 is essentially a closed system, a concept so simple that any criticism it might court will only be seen as unfair aggression.
It’s not entirely subtle, though.
To mark the centenary of the genocide, the country has put forward the closest thing to an Armenian supergroup that they plausibly can with the English-speaking musicians at their disposal. There’s some decent talent in there, but the quality is somewhat by the by. They’ve called the group Genealogy. If that appears to lack subtlety, we’re really just scratching the surface.
The ‘supergroup’ is made up of six people of Armenian descent, five of them from different continents and, in the middle, one resident Armenian tying them together. There’s an Ethiopian-Armenian dub/dance musician, an Australian-Armenian opera singer, a Japanese-Armenian pop star. It’s bizarre in any number of ways.
The track itself, a solid rock ballad with roaming harmonies and the obligatory Eurovision fiddle bridge, works pretty well even as a standalone pop song. Again, though, the quality is almost irrelevant. The commission has already had to change the name of the song from “Don’t Deny” to “Face The Shadow” – frankly just a more poetic way of saying “Don’t Deny” – because of protests from Turkey and Azerbaijan. The lyrics remain the same, of course, with a refrain endlessly repeating the original song name.
The crowning achievement of the entry, though, is its video. When the edit jumps away from the group themselves, there are shots of Armenian families gathering to have photographs taken in early 20th Century dress, mothers and their sons, idyllic shots of familial tenderness. As the chorus rings out for a second time, the people in the images fade away, leaving only empty chairs. It is visible absence.
By the end of the fiddle solo, the chairs are full again, each member of the band occupying a space, staring defiantly back at the camera. The descendants of now invisible people, their very existence, like the food and language of a diaspora, is as radical a statement on the failure of their oppressors as is needed.
And therein lies the genius. That these disparate people exist, gathered from all over the world, is a direct result of genocide, of fleeing in the face of mortal danger. So, whilst it’s always possible to protest about lyrics or song titles or even choreography, attacking a band because of their members’ birthplace is beyond even Eurovision’s remit for political neutrality.
The UK and The United States have already passed up the opportunity to recognise the events of 1915 this year. The annual march through London, one of hundreds around the world, has been and gone, and the easy get-out of an anniversary has passed. Eurovision, then, might be Armenia’s best shot at visibility in the West.
Source: thequietus.com
Canadian Senate reaffirms recognition of Armenian Genocide
The Canadian Senate reaffirmed its recognition of the Armenian Genocide by reiterating support for Motion 44, first approved in June 2002, according to Horizon Weekly.
“By formally recognizing the Armenian genocide, Canada lives up to the principles that we have promoted throughout the world. Any country that desires to suppress its past, any country that does not confront its past head on, seriously risks a failure to liberate itself from its own history,” stated Sen. Thanh Hai Ngo in his declaration.
On the heels of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide he added that “this heinous crime remains unanswered, since Turkey refuses to recognise it. The Senate of Canada has not been indifferent to the atrocities committed during the Armenian genocide. We have to promote justice, human rights, tolerance, and peaceful co-existence between nations because it is the right thing to do. It is my honor to speak before this Chamber on the Centennial Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, and to reaffirm our strong commitment towards Motion 44, as passed in June 2002.”
Speaker of the Senate, Honourable Leo Housakos marked the solemn occasion of the Armenian Genocide and greeted the Ambassador of Armenia Mr. Armen Yeganian and members of the Armenian Community sitting in the Gallery, at the opening of the session. Other Senators joined their colleagues reaffirming the Upper Chamber’s commitment towards human rights, international justice and peace.
The reaffirmation of this historic motion was realized through the collective effort of the Armenian Genocide Centennial Committee of Canada.