Armenian-Turkish Relations

[Federate]

Re: Armenian-Turkish Relations

Artsakh war hero Samvel Babayan joining protests
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ARF to consolidate nation: Babayan


Samvel Babayan will join the protest action organized by ARF Dashnaktsutyun.

Presently, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) Dashnaktsutyun has no alternative but consolidate the Armenian nation against the Armenia-Turkey Protocols, Samvel Babayan, the former Commander of Nagorno-Karabakh Army, stated at the press conference. “I have to help them,” he said.

On the other hand, Babayan considers ARF’s actions, namely, its demand for RA Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandyan’s resignation wrong. According to him, the Foreign Minister does everything he is ordered to do.

http://news.am/en/news/6215.html

[Federate]

Re: Armenian-Turkish Relations

Baku reduces Baku-Tbilisi-Kars financing


The State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan will reduce the financing of Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway construction project from AZN 80m to AZN 30m as part of a state credit. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree on budget restructuring October 7. The funds will be allocated to internal projects, Azerbaijani President’s website reported. The expenses on improving the social conditions of refugees and internally displaced people will be increased from AZN 80m to 90m.

The decision aroused a kickback by local experts. Thus, commenting on the President’s decision, the Chairman of Center for Social and Economic Development Vugar Bayramov told Echo (Russian-language daily) that the fact indicates that Azerbaijan is not so interested in developing the initiative.

According to him, the project’s financing probably was reduced in the context of Armenia-Turkey reconciliation. Simultaneously, according to some statements, the budget of the State Oil Fund can be cut next year. “Under the 2010 state budget, the oil price is to total U.S. $45/per barrel, which is indicative of an expected reduction in oil revenues in 2010.” Thus, the reduction in oil revenues is inevitable.

Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway transport corridor involves the construction of 98-km Kars- Akhalkalaki railway, with 68 km in Turkish and 30 km Georgian territory. The reconstruction of Akhalkalaki-Tbilisi section is also required. The preliminary estimate of the project is U.S. $ 422m with U.S. $ 202m for the Georgian part and U.S. $ 220 for Turkish one. The project is aimed at communication bypass of Armenia.

http://news.am/en/news/6223.html

[Federate]

Re: Armenian-Turkish Relations

More Than 60,000 Protest Protocols in Yerevan

YEREVAN (Yerkir Media)—Chanting “No,” “No Compromise to the Turks,” and “Mr. President do not Compromise,” more than 60,000 protesters took to the streets of the capital and began marching from Republic Square at the center of the city to the Presidential Palace.

At the presidential palace, an statement from the protesters and signed by 12 political parties and 60 organizations was delivered to the presidential staff.

From there, the protesters, whose number was growing as the procession walked by different streets and neighborhoods around Yerevan, headed to the Dzidzernagapert Memorial Monument, where a political rally is expected to take place.

The protest is organized by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation and is joined by other political parties, including the Heritage Party.

Asbarez will provide continuous coverage as events unfold in Yerevan, a day before the foreign ministers of Armenia and Turkey are expected to sign the protocols in Zurich. Attending the ceremony will be Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

http://www.asbarez.com/2009/10/09/more-than-60000-protest-protocols-in-yerevan/

[Illuminati]

Armenians horrified by treaty with Turkey

Robert Fisk: Genocide forgotten: Armenians horrified by treaty with Turkey A new trade deal is set to gloss over the murder of 1.5 million people.

Thursday, 8 October 2009

In the autumn of 1915, an Austrian engineer called Litzmayer, who was helping build the Constantinople-Baghdad railway, saw what he thought was a large Turkish army heading for Mesopotamia. But as the crowd came closer, he realised it was a huge caravan of women, moving forward under the supervision of soldiers.


The 40,000 or so women were all Armenians, separated from their men – most of whom had already had their throats cut by Turkish gendarmerie – and deported on a genocidal death march during which up to 1.5 million Armenians died.

Subjected to constant rape and beatings, some had already swallowed poison on their way from their homes in Erzerum, Serena, Sivas, Bitlis and other cities in Turkish western Armenia. "Some of them," Bishop Grigoris Balakian, one of Litzmayer's contemporaries, recorded, "had been driven to such a state that they were mere skeletons enveloped in rags, with skin that had turned leathery, burned from the sun, cold, and wind. Many pregnant women, having become numb, had left their newborns on the side of the road as a protest against mankind and God." Every year, new evidence emerges about this mass ethnic cleansing, the first holocaust of the last century; and every year, Turkey denies that it ever committed genocide. Yet on Saturday – to the horror of millions of descendants of Armenian survivors – the President of Armenia, Serg Sarkissian, plans to agree to a protocol with Turkey to re-open diplomatic relations, which should allow for new trade concessions and oil interests. And he proposes to do this without honouring his most important promise to Armenians abroad – to demand that Turkey admit it carried out the Armenian genocide in 1915.
In Beirut yesterday, outside Mr Sarkissian's hotel, thousands of Armenians protested against this trade-for-denial treaty. "We will not forget," their banners read. "Armenian history is not for sale." They called the President a traitor. "Why should our million and a half martyrs be put up for sale?" one of them asked. "And what about our Armenian lands in Turkey, the homes our grandparents left behind? Sarkissian is selling them too."

The sad truth is that the 5.7 million Armenian diaspora, scattered across Russia, the US, France, Lebanon and many other countries, are the descendants of the western Armenians who bore the brunt of Turkish Ottoman brutality in 1915.

Tiny, landlocked, modern-day Armenia – its population a mere 3.2 million, living in what was once called eastern Armenia – is poor, flaunts a dubious version of democracy and is deeply corrupt. It relies on remittances from its wealthier cousins overseas; hence Mr Sarkissian's hopeless mission to New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Beirut and Rostov-on-Don to persuade them to support the treaty, to be signed by the Armenian and Turkish Foreign Ministers in Switzerland.

The Turks have also been trumpeting a possible settlement to the territory of Nagorno-Karabagh, part of historic Armenia seized from Azerbaijan by Armenian militias almost two decades ago – not without a little ethnic cleansing by Armenians, it should be added. But it is the refusal of the Yerevan government to make Turkey's acknowledgement of the genocide a condition of talks that has infuriated the diaspora.

"The Armenian government is trying to sweeten the taste for us by suggesting that Turkish and Armenian historians sit down to decide what happened in 1915," one of the Armenians protesting in Beirut said.

"But would the Israelis maintain diplomatic relations if the German government suddenly called the xxxish Holocaust into question and suggested it all be mulled over by historians?"

Betrayal has always been in the air. Barack Obama was the third successive US President to promise Armenian electors that he would acknowledge the genocide if he won office – and then to betray them, once elected, by refusing even to use the word. Despite thunderous denunciations in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide by Lloyd George and Churchill – the first British politician to call it a holocaust – the Foreign Office also now meekly claims that the "details" of the 1915 massacres are still in question. Yet still the evidence comes in, even from this newspaper's readers. In a letter to me, an Australian, Robert Davidson, said his grandfather, John "Jock" Davidson, a First World War veteran of the Australian Light Horse, had witnessed the Armenian genocide: "He wrote of the hundreds of Armenian carcasses outside the walls of Homs. They were men, women and children and were all naked and had been left to rot or be devoured by dogs.

"The Australian Light Horsemen were appalled at the brutality done to these people. In another instance his company came upon an Armenian woman and two children in skeletal condition. She signed to them that the Turks had cut the throats of her husband and two elder children."

In his new book on Bishop Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, the historian Peter Balakian (the bishop's great-nephew) records how British soldiers who had surrendered to the Turks at Kut al-Amara in present-day Iraq and were sent on their own death march north – of 13,000 British and Indian soldiers, only 1,600 would survive – had spoken of frightful scenes of Armenian carnage near Deir ez-Zour, not far from Homs in Syria. "In those vast deserts," the Bishop said, "they had come upon piles of human bones, crushed skulls, and skeletons stretched out everywhere, and heaps of skeletons of murdered children."

When the foreign ministers sit down to sign their protocol in Switzerland on Saturday, they must hope that blood does not run out of their pens.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion...y-1799302.html

[Davo88]

Re: Armenian-Turkish Relations

I think we should be reminded of this simple fact : it was your friendly neighborhood Turkey that went on the offensive by illegally closing the Turkish-Armenian border back in 1993, not Armenia. Why the should we accept such conditions today?! We should not concede our rights and put a question mark on the Armenian genocide, it is Turkey that has to be punished for creating such hardships.

[Gavur]

Re: Armenian-Turkish Relations

No its not, if the people of Armenia were as convinced as the diaspora of the eviles of this agreement, it would have been much harder if not impossible to ratify it. As imperfect a government Armenia has it does atleast to some degree represent its people.

Your dead wrong, public opinion in Armenia on the opening with Turkey is difficult to gauge, as no public opinion polls on the subject have been released. Please stop your covering up for this act of high crimes and misdemeanors, possible high treason.

[Gavur]

Re: Armenian-Turkish Relations

No, we apologize for making you explain to us "facts" while we are in a dream state.I just hope blood doesn't spew out of the pen they will use, to get the blood money Saturday.

[Haykakan]

Re: Armenian-Turkish Relations

Well the problem is still the Armenian government's decision regardless.

No its not, if the people of Armenia were as convinced as the diaspora of the eviles of this agreement, it would have been much harder if not impossible to ratify it. As imperfect a government Armenia has it does atleast to some degree represent its people. I have to go teach algebra to a bunch of college kids in the morning so i bid you all a good night. If you guys are gona be up for a while please go read some of my previous threads where you will discover that i am not a xxx, and i consider the rift between our people the most dangerous thing for our nation, and i make suggestions of how to fix this rift.....

[Catharsis]

Re: Armenian-Turkish Relations

As far as I know, the Treaty of Lausanne does not mention the word "Armenia" or "Soviet Armenia", and there is no section of the treaty which defines Turkey's eastern border, while it defines Turkey's border with all its other neighbors. Look at the treaty for yourself, it contains no information on the Turkish-Armenian border, and it does not say anything about terminating the Wilson Arbitration or the Treaty of Sevres.

Quite correct, Armenia was not a signitory of Lausanne that 'fixed' the 'modern' border of the Republic of Turkey. Hence the Turks (along with other 'great powers') have crafted the protocols that under the pretext of 'border opening' the Republic of Armenia is acknowledged to recognize the existing border. And now we know this is not speculation, Foreign Minister Davutoglu, who will be signing the international document in Zurich on behalf of Turkey, himself affirmed this Turkish goal. This is a great diplomatic blunder for Armenia, which of its own "free will" does what the Turks have always wanted Armenia to do. Several of the previous disastrous treaties (including Kars) were signed when there was no independent Republic of Armenia and as such are not legally valid. The protocols solve this problem for the Turkish side through a legally binding internationally affirmed legal document that will be signed by the independent Republic of Armenia.

[Gavur]

Re: Armenian-Turkish Relations

Is not the armenian government composed of caucasion armenians? Plus didnt davo just say his friends had trouble with them?

But, he didn't say by whom, lets not jump to unwarranted conclusions, just because we want to lead the conversation a certain way.Now that would be wishful thinking, which by the decree of the Caucasian Armenian government all Armenians are to seize to be .