Monday, November 17 2014

 Before the 100^th year of the Armenian
Genocide the question what the divided Armenian nation has come to after 100
years of sufferings is still open. Don’t you think that the Armenians need a
new multilevel strategy so as to achieve historical justice?

 

After
the Armenian Genocide our people regarded it as not only an attempt to
annihilate them but also a campaign to deprive them of their homeland. The more time
passed, the less painful the scars of the survivors grew. But they have not
forgotten the loss of their homeland and have passed this memory to their
descendants. As a result, we see that their grand grandsons are still aware
that they have lost their homeland. Before 1965 we were moving in the right way
as we regarded the Armenian Genocide as the loss of homeland. But today, some 50 years later, we are
beginning to realize that we have got into a trap skillfully made by Turkey. In
order to deviate the world's attention from the gist of the problem, the Turks
began denying the very fact of the Armenian Genocide and, even more, claiming
that Armenians also killed them. As a result, the problem of the loss of
homeland has gone to the background and we are now struggling only for the
recognition of the fact of the Armenian Genocide.

 

What have we come to as a result of this policy?

 

By demanding international recognition
of the Armenian Genocide, a reality that was indisputable for 50 years after
1915, we have gone back to the zero level. Each recognition by one or another
foreign parliament was followed by a false reaction of the Turkish authorities,
who pretended to be worried that the world might recognize the Armenian
Genocide. In fact, they did not care. The key goal of their denial policy was
to involve Armenia and Armenians worldwide into a senseless debate. Few people
are aware that none of the more than two dozens of resolutions adopted on the
Armenian Genocide so far - except for those by the parliaments of Russia,
Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh – have a point saying that the genocide was
committed in the homeland of Armenians. What they all say is that it was
committed in the Ottoman Empire. The key task of Armenia before the 100th year
of the Armenian Genocide must be to achieve worthy compensation for this crime.
We must do this to prevent any attempts by Turkey to involve us in trials for slander.

 

Don’t you think that the dual standards applied by
great powers can become a serious challenge to this process?

 

The
use of dual standards by great powers is not nonsense. Nor it is a secret
any more. This very policy has given birth to a Muslim state in the very heart
of Europe in Serbian Kovoso just because local Albanians once suffered from
ethnic cleansing. So, the key purpose of Kosovo as an independent state was to
preserve Albanians as an ethnic-religious group. And who says that the same is not true
for Armenians? In 1920 in Paris, Sanremo and Sevres the world adopted decisions
that formed Armenia as a state where Armenians would be able to preserve their
ethnos. The British Prime Minister of that time David Lloyd George even agreed to
give Armenia Trabzon, a land that has never been part of historical Armenia.
The key goal of the decision to give Armenia a territory of 160,000 sq km was
to save Armenians as one of the oldest civilizations in the world. Then the
international law was interpreted in our favor. Today the situation is different: the
world is trying to maintain the status quo formed after the World War II.

 

But wasn’t Ukraine an attempt to break the world order
formed after the Yalta conference?

 

When
it comes to the need to destroy Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria or Libya, some states
neglect the current status quo. Ukraine was just the last attempt to break the
Yalta world order. The West has certainly achieved its goals in that country. By giving Crimea
to Russia, it has turned the brotherly Russian and Ukrainian nations into
enemies. So, before appealing to international courts for compensation for the
Armenian Genocide, we need to check up the world community's approaches and to
try to make our approaches closer to theirs – for the courts will certainly be
pressured. One of such factors is Turkey's NATO membership, especially in the
face of growing threats from the ISIL. If the courts show impartiality, they
will be on our side despite any dual standards or geopolitics.

 

What are the implications of the appointment of Etyen
Mahcupyan as senior advisor to the Turkish Prime Minister?

 

The
key implication of this appointment is that Turkey's policy to deny the
Armenian Genocide is no longer successful. Today the global awareness of the Armenian
Genocide has reached a level that prevents the Turks from just denying it. So,
now they are looking for other ways to do it. The first such trick was
Erdogan's condolences to the descendants of Armenian and Muslim victims, the
second and the most evident was the appointment of Mahcupyan as Davutoglu's
senior advisor. The very signing of the Turkish-Armenian normalization
protocols was also a trick used by them in Ankara just to show that they are
amicable towards Armenians and are even ready to open the border they earlier
closed. In other words, the Turks have stopped denying the Armenian Genocide
pointblank and are searching for ways to distract the world community's
attention from the gist of the problem. All they are doing now is just
imitation.

 

Do the last actions of the ISIL pose a real threat to
Turkey’s security?

 

With the United States' policies
usually yielding their fruits decades later, it is hard to say why the
Americans first formed a group for fighting Bashar al Assad and then, when that
group fell apart, started fighting its radical part. One thing is clear - the
ISIL has been formed in the West. One proof is Turkey's double game. On the one
hand, that country is trying to fit into the United States' policy in the
Middle East, on the other, it is trying to convince the Islamic world that it
is loyal to them.  But the problem here
that by showing its loyalty to the US and NATO, Turkey is beginning to be seen
as enemy by the ISIL. The Turks are urging their allies in the West to fight the
Islamic fighters on land, but the Americans will never do this as they still
remember Vietnam and Korea.