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Ukraine is mature enough to express its position on Armenian Genocide – Ukrainian political scientist

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July 12, 2013 | 11:18

Commenting on the submission—to the Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council; i.e., the Parliament) of Ukraine—of the bill to recognize the Armenian Genocide, well-known Ukrainian political analyst Vyacheslav Pikhovshek stated that he will be in favor of its adoption.

162154“It is important for me that this is done not solely because of the political conjuncture, but that it is accompanied with some explanatory work,” the analyst stressed, Analitika.at.ua reports.

“This matter is known to the Ukrainians. We remember that the ‘black chapters’ of history were covered up as much as possible during the Soviet time, albeit these wounds continued to cause pain.

“To my recollection, the Ukrainian parliament has never spoken [about] and has never expressed an official position with regard to this matter. It seems to me that a balanced decision needs to be made. It seems to me we [i.e., the Ukrainians] have matured in our view to express on the Armenian Genocide,” the political scientist stressed.

As Armenian News-NEWS.am informed earlier, a bill on the Armenian Genocide’s recognition was registered on June 6 in the Verkhovna Rada. Ukrainian parliament members Arsen Avakov and Vilen Shatvoryan are the persons behind this law proposal.

Jews must be first to recognize Armenian Genocide – Israeli historian Yair Auron

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Today, President Serzh Sargsyan received Yair Auron, an Israeli historian and specialist of genocide studies, the Armenian presidential press service reports.

g_image-Yair AuronThe Armenian version of his The Banality of Indifference book, which is based on the extensive research of the archive materials, has recently been presented in Yerevan. Present at the meeting was also the former member of the Knesset, former Minister of Immigrant Absorption Yair Tzaban.

President Serzh Sargsyan extended his congratulations on the publication of the Armenian version of The Banality of Indifference and expressed gratitude to Yair Auron for his invaluable work and exertion. The President of Armenia underscored that many of the Jewish intellectuals have been standing side by side with the Armenian nation, sharing the Armenians’ grief and tragedy, taking interest in our nation’s problems. Serzh Sargsyan noted that it would be hard to name one by one all those Jewish intellectuals who have spoken about the Armenian Genocide and said that the modern Israeli historian Yair Auron with his significant work is one of them.

Yair Auron thanked the President of Armenia for his warm words and for the affection and appreciation showed to him by the Armenian public during the days of his visit. He said that all this gives him a new impetus to carry on with his struggle. The Israeli historian underscored that he shares Armenians’ pain first, because of the genocide our nation was subjected to and second, for the policy of unconcern manifested toward that despicable crime. He said that he and a number of progressive Jewish intellectuals are fighting against such policies. According to Yair Auron, the Jews must be the first to recognize the Armenian Genocide. He noted that in recent years, there has been a considerable change of attitude in his country’s civil society and expressed hope that it will also influence the current policies.

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In his book, historian Yair Auron has documented the situation of the two national minorities – the Armenians and the Jews, in the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century, political forces, a complicated balance of morals and pragmatism, and analyzed the attitude of the Jewish community of Palestine and leaders of the Zionist movement toward the Armenian Genocide.

Syria university strips Turkish PM of PhD

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DAMASCUS (AFP) –  Syria’s Aleppo University has stripped Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of an honorary doctorate citing his support for Syrian rebels and photo_1373977278008-1-HDcrackdown on Turkish protesters, state media reported Tuesday.

State news agency SANA said Erdogan was being stripped of the PhD because of “his plots against the Syrian people” and his use of “arbitrary” violence against protesters in Turkey.

SANA quoted Khudur Orfaly, dean of Aleppo University, as describing the decision as “a message of solidarity to the friendly Turkish people, who reject Erdogan’s hostile policies”.

Relations between Syria and Turkey have deteriorated sharply since the uprising broke out against President Bashar al-Assad’s rule in March 2011 and Erdogan became one of Assad’s most outspoken critics.

Turkey is now home to more than 400,000 Syria refugees and harbours many of the opposition’s top civilian and military leaders.

At home, Erdogan has faced a wave of protests since June demanding his resignation.

Human rights groups have accused Turkish police of using excessive force against the demonstrators, and Syrian state television has frequently aired footage of Turkish security forces putting down the protests.

Syria’s state media does not acknowledge the existence of any popular anti-Assad movement, instead blaming the violence on foreign-backed “terrorists”.

 

Egypt voices ‘strong resentment’ at Turkey’s Morsi support

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CAIRO, Qahirah – Agence France-Presse

Egypt’s interim government voiced “strong resentment” on Tuesday at comments by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan backing ousted Islamist president n_50822_4Mohamed Morsi.

The foreign ministry expressed “strong resentment at comments like these, which… represent a clear intervention in internal Egyptian affairs,” its spokesman Badr Abdelatty said.

Erdoğan said on Sunday that democratically-elected Morsi, who was ousted in a popularly-backed military coup on July 3, was Egypt’s only legitimate president.
“Currently, my president in Egypt is Morsi because he was elected by the people,” Erdoğan, who like Morsi hails from an Islamist party, said in an interview with a Turkish newspaper.
Abdelatty called on Turkish officials to put “the historic relationship and shared interests” of their two countries above any “narrow party interests”.

A spokesman for Egypt’s interim president also criticised the Turkish leader’s remarks, calling them “inappropriate” and an “intervention” in Egypt’s domestic affairs.

“It is down to Ankara to respect the will of the Egyptian people who went out on June 30,” Ahmed al-Muslimani said in comments reported by Egyptian daily Al-Ahram’s website.

Genocide Was Prelude to the Holocaust, Israeli Historian Says

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Yerevan—Israeli writer Yair Auron and ex-parliamentarian Yair Tzaban have arrived in Armenia at the invitation of the Union of Writers of Armenia. In his book titled Banality of Indifference, the Israeli historian speaks about the Armenian Genocide for the first time in the history of Israel. The book says the Genocide of the Armenians was Israeli-1-620x300the prelude to the Holocaust. Genocide studies expert Auron expresses his dismay at the behavior of the Israeli authorities. According to him, it is not acceptable to speak about one’s own tragedy and forget the similar pain of other nations. Zori Balayan has written the introduction to the book. The Armenian publication of the book has been released thanks to Moscow-based businessman Karen Baghdasaryan.

“By failing to recognize the genocides inflicted on other nations, we demean the Holocaust. We are obliged to respect the memories of other peoples and must discuss the Armenian Genocide on the parliamentary level,” Yair Auron told a press conference in Yerevan.

Using archived materials, the author of the book analyzes the attitudes of the Jewish community of Palestine and the leaders of the Zionist movement towards the Armenian Genocide at the turn of the last century.

“With this book I expressed my protest against the official stance of Israel, which is unacceptable,” the author said.

Auron said, however, that there have been changes in Israeli diplomacy. “The Israeli Knesset has been discussing the Armenian Genocide issue for the eighth year in a row, and this is a great achievement, as the issue had never been put on the agenda before,” he added.

The historian said the behavior of the Israeli government is immoral. “Israel has no right to deny the Armenian Genocide because of its past,” Auron said.

Ex-member of the Knesset, Yair Tzaban, underlined, in turn, that Israel does not recognize the Armenian Genocide because of diplomatic considerations regarding Turkey; considerations which are in pursuit of military and economic interests.

“For twenty-four years now I have been struggling for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. I was the first minister to visit the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem and participate in the events dedicated to the Armenian Genocide,” Yair Tzaban said.

Snowden nominated for Nobel Peace Prize by Swedish professor

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A sociology professor in Sweden has recommended NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for the Nobel Peace Prize, the Daily Mail reported.

In a letter addressed to the Norwegian Nobel Committee and published in Swedish newspaper Västerbottens-Kuriren, Professor Stefan Svallfors nominated Snowden for his g_image-snowden Awedish‘heroic effort at great personal cost’ shedding light on the expansive cyber-spying conducted by the U.S. National Security Agency.

Because of his bravery, Snowden ‘helped to make the world a little bit better and safer,’ Svallfors wrote.

A nomination for Snowden would be symbolic because it shows ‘that individuals can stand up for fundamental rights and freedoms.’

Svallfors compares Snowden’s act to the rulings in the Nuremberg trials of 1945 because ‘I was just following orders’ was not held as a viable excuse for the Nazis who carried out human rights atrocities.

Svallfors also believes this will help the Peace Prize regain some of respect it lost after prematurely awarding Barack Obama the award in 2009.

‘It would show its willingness to stand up in defense of civil liberties and human rights, even when such a defense [could] be viewed with disfavor by the world’s dominant military power.’

But it may be too late for Snowden to receive the award this year.

Nominations for laureates must be postmarked no later than February 1 for consideration in the following December’s prizes.

Between the months of March and August the advisers review the short list of candidates.

However, Svallfors’ nomination should be taken seriously by the committee for next year’s prize.

As a sociology professor at Umeå University, he counts as one of the ‘qualified’ people who can send their nominations to the committee.

 

RT Report: Syrian rebels’ Damascus chemical cache found by Assad army – State TV

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The Syrian army has discovered a storehouse belonging to rebels in the Damascus area of Jobar, where toxic chemical substances – including chlorine – have been produced and kept, State TV reported.

-3Military sources reported that the militants “were preparing to fire mortars in the suburbs of the capital and were going to pack missiles with chemical warheads.”

A video shot by RT’s sister channel Russia Al Youm shows an old, partly ruined building which was set up as a laboratory. After entering the building, Syrian Army officers found scores of canisters and bags laid on the floor and tables. According to a warning sign on the bags, the “corrosive” substance was made in Saudi Arabia.

On July 7, the Syrian army confiscated “281 barrels filled with dangerous, hazardous chemical materials” that they found at a cache belonging to rebels in the city of Banias. The chemicals included monoethylene glycol and polyethylene glycol.

Syrian UN Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari said that the chemicals were “capable of destroying a whole city, if not the whole country.”

Chief UN chemical weapons investigator Ake Sellstrom and UN disarmament chief Angela Kane are expected in Damascus for talks on Monday, following an invitation from the Syrian government.

It is now crucial to find out where the rebels are getting the chemicals from, defense consultant Moeen Raouff told RT.

“The Syrian military has been doing an extremely good job of protecting the nation,” he said. “And if they found this alleged factory than we need to know what the origins of the chemicals are, if they came through the Turkish, Jordanian, Iraqi or Lebanese borders.”

Raouff added that the discovery is unlikely to change the West’s attitude toward the Syrian rebels.

“The Western allies are intent on toppling Assad,” he stressed. “Again, they’re going for a case like Iraq and Libya. They’re going after one man and destroying the whole nation. So, I doubt that there’ll be a major reaction. And the Security Council hasn’t reacted to this situation prior to this.”

Earlier this week, Russia submitted to the UN its analysis of samples taken in Aleppo, where chemical weapons were allegedly used in March.

Russia’s findings indicated that it was rebels – not the Syrian army – behind the Khan al-Assal incident, in which more than 30 people died.

“It was determined that on March 19 the rebels fired an unguided missile Bashair-3 at the town of Khan al-Assal, which has been under government control. The results of the analysis clearly show that the shell used in Khan al-Assal was not factory made and that it contained sarin,” Russia’s UN envoy, Vitaly Churkin, said.

Syrian rebel groups denied the accusations, in turn blaming government forces.

The United States cast doubt on the Russian analysis. In response, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov underlined that the samples of the chemical weapons had been taken at the very place where they were used and were delivered by Russian experts rather than passed through third-party hands.

“We submitted a full set of documents [to the UN]. That’s over 80 pages, including photographs and precise geographic coordinates [of places where samples were taken], procedures and results,” Lavrov pointed out. “We also guarantee that the samples were taken by experts who did not let go of them till they were delivered to the laboratory.”

Damascus was the first to accuse opposition fighters of launching a chemical weapon attack, and the first to request the UN investigation.

The investigation became stuck after a group of Western nations insisted on launching an inquiry into a separate case of alleged chemical weapons use in Homs in December 2012. The investigation requires access to military objects, which Damascus has been unwilling to give.

So far, the UN has not found any conclusive evidence proving that either side of the conflict used chemical weapons.

Meanwhile, the US, UK and France have submitted several reports in which they claim there is evidence that the Assad government used chemical weapons.

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Erdoğan’s chief adviser knows what’s behind Turkey’s protests – telekinesis

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From Lufthansa to the CIA, Turkey’s government has come up with some worrying conspiracy theories to explain Gezi Park.

By: Fiachra Gibbons
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 13 July 2013 07.00 EDT

The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. His new chief adviser, Yiğit Bulut, said: ‘There is work going on … to kill Erdoğan from afar through methods like img373481telekinesis.’ Photograph: Adem Altan/AFP/Getty Images

It has to be said that when the Turkish government began to flail around for the “real reasons” behind the Gezi protests, their initial conspiracy theories lacked imagination – the CIA, Europeans jealous of their economic success, unspecified foreign forces in cahoots with terrorists, Twitter, the “interest rate lobby”, and, of course, the international Jewish conspiracy. What would a search for a scapegoat be in Turkey (or indeed Greece) without our old friends the Elders of Zion?

Since it was obviously inconceivable that the Turkish people themselves – knowing they were living through a golden age of good governance, piety and profit – would ever take to the streets, there must have been a plot.

Well now we have the answer – it was all a giant telekinetic attack by dark forces to discredit Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, because he had made Turkey a “model for the world”. Quite rightly, the man who made this astonishing discovery, Yiğit Bulut, has just been made Erdoğan’s chief adviser. No, this is not a joke. Telekinesis, you may have noticed, is a Greek word.

Ministers, and the majority of Turkey’s media, have been outdoing each other for the last month with outrageous theories and often outright lies to mask Erdoğan’s staggering mishandling of a minor planning dispute over an Istanbul park that brought millions on to the streets in protest at his authoritarian style and police violence against demonstrators.

His ruling AK party has variously claimed that the Gezi protests were the work of CNN or the BBC and even Reuters (after one of the agency’s reporters asked Erdoğan an “unapproved question”). In one faked newspaper interview, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour “confessed” to starting the protests “for money”. Fingers were also pointed at leading liberal journalists, some of whom have since been sacked by media owners afraid of incurring further government wrath (Turkey is already the world’s No 1 jailer of journalists).

More shocking even than the smearing of those killed by police is that Erdoğan’s AK party – once a slick media machine – can still not put a consistent conspiracy story together. It has to be said that Egypt’s military coup has not helped the mood of Turkish Islamists – or that in a self-fulfilling prophecy amid so much nuttiness, Turkish bond rates have near doubled in as many months.

What all the many theories lacked – apart from facts, which would “be shortly announced” but never were – was a protean element: something that would lift the whole puzzling debacle of Erdoğan thrashing his own and his country’s reputation over a scraggy patch of grass out of the rational altogether and into another dimension.

Step forward Bulut – TV presenter, commentator, and climber of many greasy poles – who until Gezi was best known for his inordinate use of hair oil. Having got his astral ball rolling by declaring that the protests were paid for by the German airline Lufthansa, afraid that “100 million passengers would be diverted from Germany to Turkey” by a controversial monster airport Erdoğan wants to build near Istanbul, Bulut then took flight.

Turkey’s enemies, he claimed, were planning to assassinate Erdoğan – by telekinesis. “There is work going on in many centres in the world to kill Erdoğan from afar through methods like telekinesis,” Bulut told TV viewers last month. This week Bulut became Erdoğan’s official eminence grise.

Utterly mad it may sound, but there may be method to it – a message to diehard religious supporters that Erdoğan’s erratic, confrontational behaviour may be because he is engaged in a life-or-death struggle behind the scenes.

Should Turks be worried? They should if this offers a glimpse of Erdoğan’s own state of mind. At a mass rally in Istanbul at the height of the protests, he compared himself to Adnan Menderes, the first elected Turkish leader who was hung by the military on a short rope on the prison island where the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan is now held.

Since then, rather than building bridges, Erdoğan has been busy tightening his grip and settling scores – the latest being robbing engineers and architects who so irritated him over Gezi Park of their overseeing role in planning.

Yet in reality the greatest danger to Erdoğan has always been Erdoğan himself and the company he keeps – from his property tycoon son-in-law to his old Kasimpaşa pals who go everywhere with him and once locked him inside his armoured Mercedes outside a hospital when he passed out during Ramadan. Only five years ago his new chief adviser was attacking him and his party as a “fascist” threat to Atatürk’s secular republic. As a hopeless nostalgic for the Ottoman empire, Erdoğan might be wise to remember that far more sultans died at the hands of their retainers than ever did in battle.

Globe Spots: Armenia among top 10 countries for 2013

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Globe Spots portal released the ranking of top 10 countries to travel to in 2013.

“For the fifth year, we have captured what’s happening on the travel scene. As usual, we focused on destinations we think will be hot – or at least should be. All this is of course g_image-top 10based on dubious rumours, crazy speculations and a bit of travel experience,” says the report posted on globespots.com.

Armenia is fifth in the ranking, according to the report.

Top 10 for 2013 includes Portugal, Mozambique, Kyrgyzstan, Panama, Armenia, Rwanda, Cuba, Ukraine, Malawi and Canada.

“Those willing to dig a little deeper will discover a truly amazing country with a beautiful landscape, but will also encounter genuinely nice people always ready to offer them a shot of aragh (introduced by never-ending toasts), or welcome them at their khorovats picnic… or both. And with visa requirements being lifted for EU citizens, starting in January, there’s even less reason to pass on this one,” says the report.