diplomat Archives

136 Turkish diplomats seek Germany asylum

February 24, 2017 by administrator

Germany says it has received 136 asylum requests from Turks holding diplomatic passports since the July coup attempt against the Turkish president.

The figure is a total for the period August 2016 to January 2017, BBC News reports citing German media.

Turkey has urged Germany not to grant asylum to any military officers. Some posted to Nato bases in Germany are thought to be among the group.

In Greece, two more Turkish soldiers have requested asylum.

The pair – reported to be commandos – are believed to have taken part in the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

They are in Greek police custody, having applied for asylum last week in Orestiada, a small border town near Turkey.

Last month a Greek court rejected Turkey’s request to extradite eight other Turkish soldiers who fled after the coup attempt. Turkey is appealing against that ruling.

The German interior ministry did not identify the 136 Turks who requested asylum. Not only diplomats but also their spouses and children hold diplomatic passports.

It is not clear if any of them have been granted asylum yet.

Soldiers who fled after the coup attempt fear that they will not get a fair trial in Turkey.

The Turkish authorities have dismissed at least 100,000 public servants, including teachers, police and members of the judiciary.

Tens of thousands of suspects are in detention. The crackdown is targeting suspected supporters of Fethullah Gulen, a cleric who lives in self-imposed exile in the US.

Meduza: Более 130 граждан Турции с дипломатическими паспортами попросили убежища в Германии

The Great Crime: forgotten American diplomat resisted the #ArmenianGenocide.

February 4, 2017 by administrator

A poster by Douglas Volk for the American Committee for Relief in the Near East.

By Edward White February 3, 2017,

How a forgotten American diplomat resisted the Armenian Genocide.

Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history..

Brief though it was, Henry Morgenthau’s career as U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire marked one of the most astonishing chapters in American overseas diplomacy. In January 1916, he left Constantinople having served for little more than two years and headed home to New York, determined to help Woodrow Wilson win a second term. “I could imagine no greater calamity,” he later recollected, “for the U.S. and the world than that the American nation should fail to heartily endorse this great statesman.”

Morgenthau was convinced that Wilson was the best candidate to reshape an international order that had descended into savagery. In the preceding nine months, he had seen it with his own eyes, as the Ottoman government carried out an unspeakable offense against its people, slaughtering more than a million ethnic Armenians. Protected by American neutrality during the first three years of World War I, Morgenthau was the fulcrum of a network of American diplomats, missionaries, and businesspeople who gained an eyewitness perspective of the massacres. Their testimony constitutes a compelling body of evidence about what happened to the Armenians: an outrage for which the term genocide was invented.

News of the massacres reached Washington through Morgenthau, but it was U.S. consulate officials in more remote regions who saw up close what’s known in Armenian as Medz Yeghern, “the Great Crime.” Leslie Davis was U.S. consul in the province of Harput, an area of Turkey in which Armenians accounted for about a third of the population. Seated amid the Anatolian highlands, Harput was roughly seven hundred miles from the capital, necessitating a twenty-one-day journey: eighteen on horseback to a railway station, then three on a train. Davis himself described the Harput consulate as “one of the most remote and inaccessible in the world”; the urban splendor of Constantinople seemed as distant as the moon.

Until 1910, Davis had worked in a presumably well-paid but sedate job as a lawyer in the Manhattan financial district. On entering his thirties, and fearing that life was passing him by, he applied to join the State Department, likely with romantic dreams of intrigue and exotic adventure in faraway lands. His first posting was to Batumi, in what is now Georgia, where his taste for outdoors pursuits earned him a reputation as a very American type of eccentric: a Teddy Roosevelt of the Black Sea who took every opportunity to make life more rugged and uncomfortable than it needed to be.

In April 1914, just two months before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he was transferred to Harput. Surveying his new jurisdiction, Davis was full of optimism: “the country was peaceful and the people were hopeful of progress.” Railroads were under construction; the ethnic and religious populations existed in apparent harmony. He reported “nothing but good feeling between Mohammadean and Christian,” after attending a ceremony at a college run by American missionaries, “and the Turks and Armenians appeared to be on friendly terms … Who could have then foreseen,” he wondered, “amid those peaceful surroundings … what is probably the most terrible tragedy that has ever befallen any people in the history of the world?”

35 Turkish diplomats seek German asylum

October 25, 2016 by administrator

Reuters,

The German Interior Ministry says 35 Turkish citizens with diplomatic passports have applied for asylum after a failed military coup in Turkey in July that was followed by a crackdown on suspected supporters of the putsch.

Interior Ministry spokesman Johannes Dimroth told a regular government news conference the figure included Turkish diplomats as well as their family members, but did not say if they had all been based in Germany.

He said he could not give any more details on the diplomats and their motivation to apply for asylum in Germany.

At the Turkish embassy in Berlin, nobody was immediately available to comment

It was not clear if the Turkish government has requested the extradition of the diplomats by German authorities.

In Turkey, more than 32,000 people were put in jail and 100,000 have been dismissed from jobs in the security and civil services for their alleged links to a religious network the government says staged the July 15 military coup.

The scale of the purges has drawn criticism from opposition politicians and Western allies that President Tayyip Erdogan may be using the coup to consolidate power.

Accused mastermind, US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, denies involvement in the unsuccessful coup that killed 240 people who resisted it and around 100 rogue troops.

Originally published as 35 Turkish diplomats seek German asylum

Another Seasoned U.S. Diplomat Hounded Out of Office

June 3, 2016 by administrator

BY HARUT SASSOUNIAN

The headline of the May 17 opinion column by David Ignatius in The Washington Post — “When diplomats get punished for doing their jobs” — triggered unhappy recollections of the forced resignation of John Evans, U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, for daring to speak about the Armenian Genocide, as described in his recently published book, “Truth Held Hostage: America and the Armenian Genocide — What then? What now?”

The Ignatius article was about the scandalous treatment of another diplomat, Robin Raphel, a former assistant secretary of state, who was investigated by the Justice Department for espionage.

Raphel was a distinguished American diplomat. In a 2014 article, Washington Post reporters described her as “a fixture in Washington’s diplomatic and think-tank circles…. At the time of the raid, Raphel was a senior adviser on Pakistan for the office of the special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan. In that job, she was chiefly responsible for administering non-military aid such as U.S. economic grants and incentives. The 67-year-old longtime diplomat was among the U.S. government’s most senior advisors on Pakistan and South Asian issues…. At the time of the FBI search of her house, she had retired from the Foreign Service but was working for the State Department on renewable, limited contracts that depended in part on her security clearance.”

Raphel began her government career as a CIA analyst. She served 30 years in the Foreign Service while stationed in Great Britain, India, Pakistan, South Africa and Tunisia. In 1993, she was appointed as first assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs. She retired from the State Department in 2005 and returned in 2009 to work as an advisor to Richard Holbrooke, special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Prior to that position, Raphel worked as a lobbyist for Cassidy & Associates, representing Pakistan, Equatorial Guinea and Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government, according to The Washington Post.

Raphel’s investigation began on Oct. 21, 2014, when the burglary alarm was triggered in her house. Incredibly, FBI agents could not bypass the alarm system, something common burglars are able to do! Raphel rushed to her home and found the agents going through her files which included some classified documents. Simultaneously, other FBI agents were searching and sealing her State Department office. Subsequently, Raphel was placed on administrative leave, had her security clearance revoked, and her contract with the State Department was not renewed.

The New York Times revealed in March of this year that “the inquiry began when American investigators intercepted a conversation in which a Pakistani official suggested that his government was receiving American secrets from Raphel, conversations that led to months of secret surveillance,” and accusations that she was spying for Pakistan.

In his opinion column, Ignatius noted that her case raises “disturbing questions about how a diplomat with nearly 40 years’ experience became the focus of a career-shattering investigation — apparently without anyone seeking clarification from knowledgeable State Department officials about her assignment to open alternative channels to repair the badly strained relationship with Pakistan.”

Raphel explained to Ignatius: “The FBI’s case of me was flawed from the beginning because they had a fundamental misunderstanding of what diplomats do.”

Jeff Smith, a former CIA general counsel who was one of Raphel’s attorneys, told Ignatius that “if the Bureau [FBI] had talked to senior people at State who were knowledgeable about her work, I believe they would never have launched this investigation.”

Amy Jeffress, another one of Raphel’s lawyers, told The N.Y. Times in March: “It is of utmost importance to our national security that our diplomats be able to do their work without fearing that their routine diplomatic communications will subject them to criminal investigation.” Raphel’s colleagues raised $90,000 for her legal defense fund.

Even though the Justice Department ended up dropping all charges against Raphel, her case had a “chilling effect on other diplomats, who feared they might be next,” several State Department officials told Ignatius.

The hounding of experienced personnel like Amb. Evans and former assistant secretary of state Raphel deprives the United States of competent and honest diplomats who can fearlessly defend the foreign policy interests of the United States in an effective and fair manner.

It is still not too late to hold a congressional hearing on the appalling mistreatment of two outstanding civil servants Evans and Raphel. At the very least, the President or the Secretary of State should issue a formal apology to both diplomats!

Edward Djerejian – The son of a genocide survivor became illustrious American diplomat

September 5, 2015 by administrator

Edward Djerejian, American diplomat

“Where are the Nelson Mandela?” Asks Edward Djerejian, sitting in front of his office at Rice University in Houston. “I do not see a Nelson Mandela in Turkey. I do not see a Nelson Mandela in Azerbaijan. I do not see a Nelson Mandela in Armenia. We need it. The great challenge for Armenia now is reconciliation with its neighbors. “If anyone can ask such a question, it is Djerejian.

Because of her family lived in Western Armenia, he has devoted his life to the diplomatic career at an age when most teenagers are still wondering who they are and what career they will want to embrace. “I was still in college in New York, when I heard my parents talk about the genocide.” “I said,” Why did I survive? Why am I here when so many others died?

I had the impression that I had, somehow, to honor those who were not so lucky and also express my gratitude to the United States, this great country of my parents granted political asylum. “

Djerejian served under eight presidents of the United States, including as ambassador to Israel. But of all his positions Damascus, the Syrian capital, remains in his eyes the most poignant experience. For it is in Aleppo, northern Syria, his father Bedros escaped death. He who lost both his parents at the hands of Ottoman Turks, was forced to walk with other Armenians Hadjin – where originates the Djerejian family – up to Deir Ezzor in the Syrian desert.

When the exiles reached Aleppo, Bedros managed to escape and found refuge with a Syrian Arab family, who employed as stables boy in charge of the care of horses.

While working for this family, he learned that two young Armenian, who lost their parents during the death march, had been placed in the home of an officer in the Turkish army to become part of his harem . Bedros was so outraged he did, on its own initiative, the journey on horseback to save these adolescents, placing them safely in an Armenian church in Aleppo.

The story could have ended there, but the two girls had an older brother in Worcester, Massachusetts, who had become an American citizen. He managed to bring them to the United States, where they explained to him how Bedros had saved them.