Armenia and the information war

[Sako]

Re: Armenia and the information war

And a great sense of humor, lol.

[ninetoyadome]

Re: Armenia and the information war

i just love how they make these claims and they have no proof to back them up. it said they complained to international organizations and they didnt do anything because no such thing exists. i mean how to they know in the basement of the prison of Shushi azeris r being tortured? its all azeri fantasy, its all speculation, its all idiotic claims with no proof.

[Lucin]

Re: Armenia and the information war

Guys, let's pronounce our cities' names correctly; it's Shushi and Nakhijevan rather than 'Shusha' and 'Nakhichevan'...

[ninetoyadome]

Re: Armenia and the information war

Guys, let's pronounce our cities' names correctly; it's Shushi and Nakhijevan rather than 'Shusha' and 'Nakhichevan'...

i copied pasted that line, i forgot to change it.

[Lucin]

Re: Armenia and the information war

i copied pasted that line, i forgot to change it.

It's OK. I just wanted to remind all of us.

[ArmSurvival]

Re: Armenia and the information war

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ “I believe we’re very passive as a society and as journalists. Just look at the number of materials published by Armenian media. I mean not their own materials, but those published in Azeri or Turkish media,” Eurointegration Social Organization Chairman, Karen Bekaryan told a news conference.

According to him, Armenian journalists always miss out on important factor: information streams or “information wars” play crucial role in international relations. “We don’t even realize that we are willingly or, perhaps, on our own initiatives, contributing to the interests of the opposite party,” stated Bekaryan, citing the incident when the road map agreement was published in Sabah Turkish newspaper. “Someone reprinted the material and the public was wondering whether the information is reliable. Yet, we’d never undertake such a step towards Turkish society. Still, we’re forgetting that we’re at informational and psychological war.”

Alexander Iskandaryan , Caucasus Institute Director begged to disagree, stating that the problem lies in the state the society is in. “Armenian society is currently in a state where it could turn any event into a problem. Afterwards, articles start to appear in the media, saying that we’ve once again “sold” the Krabakh. This reflects the state of society but not the state of journalists. Journalists are just allowing themselves to be run by the society,” Armenian politologist stated.

http://panarmenian.net/news/eng/?nid=32560

[jgk3]

Re: Armenia and the information war

Guys, let's pronounce our cities' names correctly; it's Shushi and Nakhijevan rather than 'Shusha' and 'Nakhichevan'...

Really? Nakhichevan has to take a j instead of a ch? Alrighty then.

[Federate]

Re: Armenia and the information war

Really? Nakhichevan has to take a j instead of a ch? Alrighty then.

Actually, Nakhichevan is fine depending on your dialect. In Western Armenian, Նախիջեւան is pronounced Nakhitchevan but in Eastern Armenian, it is pronounced Nakhijevan.

The wrong way of saying Nakhichevan would be calling it "Naxchivan", an "azeri" fabricated term.

[Federate]

Re: Armenia and the information war

Rouben Galichian chronicles the invention of Azerbaijan and its history



Yerevan - Rouben Galichian has written a new book, The Invention of History: Azerbaijan, Armenia, and the Showcasing of Imagination.

The title is reminiscent of the classic collection, The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. So many national traditions – sources of national pride or marks of national distinctiveness – seem to have long pedigrees. In The Invention of Tradition, the authors show that Scottish "clan tartans" are a 19th-century invention, the Scottish kilt was invented by an Englishman, no less, in 1730, many British royal rituals originate in the 19th and 20th centuries, and so on.

Mr. Galichian's new book focuses on the history of Azerbaijan. He argues that Azerbaijan as an entity north of the River Araks is an invention of 1918, and that the edifice of Azerbaijani national history is built with bricks that have their Armenian inscriptions hacked off of them.

The falsification of Azerbaijan's history, especially as it relates to Karabakh, concerns Mr. Galichian. But he is especially concerned by Azerbaijani efforts to propagate a novel history of Armenia, one that does not include Armenians until the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Historical maps have been a major focus of Mr. Galichian's interest until now. He is the author of Historic Maps of Armenia: The Cartographic Heritage (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), Countries of the Caucasus in Medieval Maps: Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan (London: Gomidas Institute, 2007), and a book about Armenia in world maps.

Armenian Reporter editor Vincent Lima caught up with Rouben Galichian at Mr. Galichian's apartment in Yerevan on May 31 and asked him some questions.

Armenian Reporter: Mr. Galichian, thank you for taking the time to talk to me about your book, The Invention of History. This is your fourth book?

Rouben Galichian: Yes, it is.

AR: All of your books have been about historical geography. This time you have focused on questions about the history of Azerbaijan. The first point you make in the book is that the Republic of Azerbaijan is an invention of 1918.

RG: The reason I wrote this book is exactly that.
Borrowing a name

In 1918, when the countries south of the Caucasus Mountains became independent, the country that is now called the Republic of Azerbaijan was originally supposed to be called the Southeastern Transcaucasian Republic. But the Musavat nationalist party decided on the name Azerbaijan, purely for political reasons.

The political reason was that they were trying to establish an Islamic belt of countries that started from Turkey toward Central Asia. Azerbaijan was going to be one of them. Another reason was that they intended to take control of the Iranian province of Azerbaijan too.

The Iranian province of Azerbaijan, which Armenians call Atpatakan, is about 2,000 years old, and in the past has been part of Lesser Media. The name Atpatakan – or Atropatakan – comes from the name of the general Atropat, who protected the country and wouldn't let Alexander the Great conquer it. It had always been south of the River Araks, never to the north of it. Suddenly in 1918, north of the River Araks, a country appears, with the same name. It is analogous to today's Macedonia and Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

But that was not enough.
Borrowing an identity

The newly established country wanted to show the world that it had all of the cultural and historical background [of a legitimate nation].

It was a mixture of various races: Persian, Turkic, Tatar, Mongol, local Albanians – who had evolved and converted to Islam and became Lezgins – and Shirvanis, and God knows how many peoples. According to the ancient historians there were 26 tribes living in Caucasian Albania in ancient times.

But there was a problem. There were some Islamic monuments there, which they could point to and say, "This is our heritage," but a majority of the monuments were Christian. There were churches, there were tombs, there were khachkars, and all sorts of things that could not be Islamic. Therefore the Azerbaijani authorities began a campaign saying, "We are actually the descendants of the Caucasian Albanians. They were our ancestors. They used to be Christian and they converted to Islam. And we are them."

At the same time, to be in Turkey's good books, they claimed that they are the descendants of the Oghuz Turks – the Kara Koyunlu, Ak Koyunlu, etc. – and the various tribes.

This is a contradiction. One is a central Caucasian tribe; the other is a Central Asian tribe. How could you have two ancestors so different from each other? You must be a mixture of races. Well, they said no, we are Albanian and the Turkish population has been in this part of the world for over 2,500 years.

The reason for their claim is that once they establish that they are Albanian, they can tie the Christian monuments to Albanians, not Armenians. Suddenly, lo and behold, you're the owner of a huge tradition of buildings, churches, monasteries, etc., that belong to your ancestors, and they built it. Well, it is not true; it is a complete fallacy.

First of all, the Caucasian Albanians disappeared in the ninth and tenth centuries; most of them converted to Islam. A very small minority remains Christians today: 6–8 thousand Udis. The churches and monuments are mostly from the 12th to 18th centuries. How could a people who had disappeared build those Christian monuments? They had converted to Islam. How could they have built those Christian monuments?
Armenians as newcomers

And at the same time the Azerbaijani authorities have started saying that Armenians are newcomers in the southern Caucasus: They came here during the early part of the 19th century; the Russian army brought them there.

To prove it, they cite one monument that exists in a village in Karabakh. A community that had moved to that village set a memorial stone there in the 1970s, saying Maraga is 150 years old. So it brings back the Maraga people to the region in about 1827, 1828 [which is the time the Czarist Empire annexed the area from the Persian Empire]. This is a small community, part of only tens of thousands of Armenians who moved with the Russian forces in the 1820s, escaping the Ottoman yoke. And there were hundreds of thousands of Armenians already living there.

The Azerbaijanis also say that even Shah Abbas the Great was their king, an Azerbaijani king. My question is this: If he was indeed an Azerbaijani king and there were no Armenians living in that area, the south Caucasus, how could he move 3–4 hundred thousand Armenians from the Nakhichevan area to Persia for his scorched earth policy? Where did these Armenians come from?

AR: And why would he destroy his native Azerbaijan with his scorched-earth policy?
Destroying a heritage they claim

RG: There are contradictions. The Azerbaijanis say this is their heritage and at the same time they start destroying it. The most recent example is the medieval Armenian cemetery at Julfa, which they called an Albanian cemetery, and then they destroyed it in front of the eyes of the world. It has been filmed. The DVD is included in the book. If it's your heritage, why do you destroy it?

In 2005 the Armenian Catholicos wrote to the Sheikh-ul-Islam, saying that we've heard that this destruction is going on; the khachkars are destroyed. The Sheikh-ul-Islam said, No, the cemetery is protected; the information given to you is wrong. So he admitted there was a cemetery.

And also the Azerbaijani ambassador in Germany, replying to a question of the assistant foreign minister of Germany, said that these tombstones had been standing in an earthquake-prone area, and the reason they have fallen is seismic movements. In other words, he too says there was a cemetery.

If you ask the Azerbaijani authorities now, everybody will say there has never been a cemetery. So within a few years, their stories have changed with their political agenda.
The Aliyev Foundation

But the main reason for me to write the book is that during the last few years the Aliyev Foundation is spending millions publishing literature and books with the information that there were no Armenians in the Caucasus. They say all monuments belong to Caucasian Albanians, Azerbaijanis are the Caucasian Albanians, and therefore, by default, they belong to Azerbaijanis.

They are distributing these books to all libraries, to political think tanks, embassies, etc. I tried to obtain one of the books, and hearing an Armenian surname, they said it was not available. End of story.

AR: Have you seen the book?

RG: I eventually found a way of getting the book. On one of the books, the cover shows a map of Armenia and says, "Western Azerbaijan."

Now if you want to go into more detail, Etchmiadzin is called an Armeno-Turkic temple. Urartian fortresses [14th to 6th century B.C.E.] are called Turkic fortresses. Khor Virap [where according to tradition, Saint Gregory the Illuminator was imprisoned] is called a Turkish temple. All the monuments in Armenia are Turkish or Turkic.

AR: But it sounds so outrageous, so ahistorical when you talk about something like Urartu that predates the Turks [and Armenians, for that matter] to call it a Turkic temple. It's hard to take it seriously. Does anyone take this kind of literature seriously?

[...continuation in next post]

[Federate]

Re: Armenia and the information war

Dreams of a greater Azerbaijan

RG: Anybody who knows anything of the history will not take it seriously. The case was proven to me in the European Union, when I was discussing my book with European commissioners. But if you're a student, you enter a library in 50 years' time, and there are 50 books on Azerbaijani history, dating it back to the Urartian era, and there's nothing correcting the record, because Armenians hadn't taken the time to reply to this book, to write something against this policy, would you start believing that this is the truth? If you're a layperson, not a specialist?

AR: Let me go back to the beginning for a minute, when you were talking about the historicity of Azerbaijan, and try to bring up a contemporary question.

In the West sometimes the idea is put forth of the secession of the Iranian provinces of Azerbaijan from Iran and the creation of a joint republic north and south of the Araks. To me this sounds very farfetched because Iranian Azerbaijanis are so fully integrated into the fabric of Iranian society that it would be completely against their interests to secede from Iran.

RG: In 1945–46, when the Turkish Democratic Party had some power in Tabriz during the last days of the war and after the war—

AR: You were there. This is in your memory from Tabriz.

RG: I was a small boy. I remember the gunfights, etc., but not the politics of it. I read about that later on.

They tried to join Iranian Azerbaijan with Soviet Azerbaijan. And if you recall [Azerbaijani President] Abülfaz Elçibay in 1992, I believe, claimed that it's time for "Our southern brethren to join us and create a unified Azerbaijan." It's always in their minds.

AR: In the south as well as the north?

RG: Foreign powers have instigated riots in Iranian Azerbaijan. Only three–four days ago, there was a riot in Tabriz, where they wanted more autonomy. These are all based on the Azerbaijan republic's propaganda that they are separated as two countries, whereas they are one in fact.

In fact, they are not one.

The language of the Iranian Azerbaijanis was a Pahlavi dialect until the 14th–15th century. During that time, under the Mongol yoke, they were forced to change their language. And there are still words left, and villages in that part of the world that speak the old Pahlavi dialect. The population of the area that is now the Republic of Azerbaijan, meanwhile, was Albanian-speaking, and when they disappeared, the Turkish language came to dominate because they were overrun by the Mongols and the Tatars and the various Oghuz tribes.
A Canadian parallel

AR: A parallel might be Quebec. On the one hand you have the prime minister of Canada being Quebecois. On the other hand you have people trying to see Quebec secede from the country in which they are so integrated and powerful that one of them is prime minister. In Iran, where Azerbaijanis are on every level of government, commerce, and everything else in the country, you would think it would be ridiculous to think of losing your access to the oil wealth and the strength of Iran for the sake of seceding. But that kind of sentiment can exist.

RG: You are right. Azerbaijanis are on all levels of politics and running the country in Iran. They have high positions, but that doesn't stop the Republic of Azerbaijan from trying to join the Iranian Azerbaijanis with them, saying that they are separated brothers who should reunite.

In the case of Quebec, Canada is a new country. Everyone knows this country is very new. So it doesn't go back to the historical background so much.

AR: And how important is history here in the Caucasus? There are always academics debating these issues. But how much are the facts on the ground, in terms of Karabakh, and the territories around Karabakh, influenced by perceptions of history?

RG: History is never far from anybody's mind. If we don't learn from history, we're bound to repeat it. This is not what I am saying; this is a well-known fact. You always have to look back in history to know what to expect in the future and what not to do in the future.
Sowing hatred

There are two historians who have written the history of Karabakh in the Persian language. One book is from 1770; the other is from 1840. They're both written about the Armenian towns of Karabakh, where all of the population was Armenian. They're about the Five Principalities of Karabakh, where the meliks used to rule. When the Azerbaijani authorities today translate them into the Azerbaijani language, any reference to Armenians is changed to Albanian or Caucasian or whatever, and any chapter dealing purely with Armenians is removed.

It is the falsification of history on the one hand and the invention of history on the other. Everything is based on history. Their claims are based on history, untruthfully. Those things can be proven from their own literature....

AR: Is part of your concern that the young generation is Azerbaijan would end up being more radicalized—

RG: It's not "would end up being."

In Brussels, in April, when I was presenting the book, there were five Azerbaijani political activists of the younger generation, between 25 and 35 years old. They truly believed what had been preached to them was true.

It's not too far from the Soviet historical model. Thirty years ago, anybody in Armenia would know the Soviet version of history and would think it was the gospel truth. The same has happened and is happening in Azerbaijan.

The Azerbaijani authorities claim to be following the line of the European Union: the European Union preached being friends with your neighbors, trying to develop friendly relationships; Azerbaijan concurs and says, "We are trying." But at the same time, they are printing these books daily and distributing them, and they are full of propaganda, anti-Armenian propaganda.

More here http://www.reporter.am/index.cfm?fur...s-history&pg=1