Eddie

I am trying now to convert to writing in Armenian, not just reading in this beautiful language. So please treat this test generously and do not take too much offence at my appalling spelling. Having re-mastered comprehension late, it will take me a long time to master spelling.... Forgive me also for just testing out whether my fonts work¬ Միթէ սույն գրութիւնս պիտի Հայերէն տարերով արտատպուի համացանցի էջէրուն: The r seems to be a problem. I shall attend to it. Let me post this and see if it has worked...

I am commencing a little comment on this monumental, indescribably rich and rewarding epic. Does anyone know if there ever was a Turkish language variant? Among the scores of Armenian ones, has there ever been recorded a Turkish variant perhaps serving Armenian communities whose language had been suppressed by the colonisers? Best regards Eddie

I submitted this a few minutes ago in the space Ara Sanjian had generated but it seems not to have gone through. So here we go again. Here my take on Erdogan's remarks. We should not allow the issue to be buried. These are opening salvos. Let me preface my submission with my profound condolences to all the families who suffered such terrible loss in the recent Turkish mining disaster. Eddie Erdogan’s condolences to the Armenian people – fine words butter no parsnips A sideways glance at Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s 23 April 2014 statement of ‘condolences to the grandchildren’ of the Armenian dead of 1915 could be readily welcomed and applauded. Some Armenians could even feel better, less bitter, less entrenched in anti-Turkish sentiment on hearing the Prime Minister of a resurgent imperial Turkey speak so about the Armenian dead, in such an unprecedented and compassionate manner. But the deeper truth of the Turkish Prime Minister’s pronouncement reveals a disappointing pedestrianism. It lacks any novel, radical or courageous dimension. Albeit laced with touching humanist sentiment, Erdogan appears engaged in no more than an opening gambit to undermine what in 2015 will be powerful global commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. His remarks appear designed particularly to ease what will likely be huge pressure on Turkey from both Europe and America where significant Armenian lobbies are insistently urging recognition of the Genocide on its up-coming 100th anniversary. Erdogan’s statement that has been translated into numerous languages is worth examination. Its employment of fine humanist turns of phrase are significantly revealing both of denied truths and of the limits and the actual designs of his statement. ‘It is our hope and belief’ says Erdogan, ‘that the peoples of an ancient and unique geography, who share similar customs and manners, will be able to talk to each other about the past with maturity and to remember together their losses in a decent manner.’ A fine sentiment and in the context of Armenian-Turkish relations a moving and indeed unprecedented one for the explicit Turkish state/elite recognition that the Armenian people are indeed and contrary to much shameless historical fabrication, one of the ‘peoples’ of the ‘ancient and unique geography’ enclosed today within the borders of a modern Turkish Republic. But fine words butter no parsnips. Action alone, not words, can produce conditions necessary for ‘mature’ and ‘decent’ discourse between Armenian and Turk. And the fact is Turkish state/elite actions prohibit such discourse. I Erodogan’s statement contains no hint, even of the slimmest kind of any action, of any change in Turkish state policy that blocks and even punishes mature and decent discourse. And here, be clear, we do not talk of land claims or reparations for 1915. We refer only to the necessity for greater freedoms and democratic rights for all the peoples who ‘share’ ‘customs’, ‘manners’ and a ‘unique and ancient geography.’ Where are proposals to halt the widespread denigration of Armenians in Turkey? Where even a hint to root out embedded extreme nationalist Turkish hostility to Armenians that leads to the murder of a Hrant Dink or to the ugly sight of Turkish politicians insulting an opponent for allegedly having Armenian ancestry. Where a hint of a friendly invitation into the open public sphere for Armenians forcibly converted to Islam, to the tens of thousands of hidden Armenians, who fear being engulfed in tidal wave of xenophobic Turkish nationalism? The ‘compassion and mutually humane attitudes to one another’ that Erdogan expresses hopes for demands that the national rights of all the peoples of this ‘ancient and unique geography’ be protected; the right to schooling in their own languages, the freedom for their educational institutions to function without unending obstruction, the freedom of their social and welfare organizations from endless hostile pressure and threats that come often with calls to confiscate their properties. For ‘decent’ and ‘mature’ discourse and relations, due respect has to be accorded to the cultural and historical legacy of the different peoples of the region. Not words but concrete proposals for action alone can signal honest intent. Where the hint for the need to properly protect Armenian architectural and other monuments surviving within Turkish state borders, the call to reverse the systematic destruction and to properly identify the Armenian origins of those that survive? Where a suggestion that the ceaseless destruction of a rich cultural legacy, a destruction that is part of the falsification of the history of the region, where the suggestion that this will be brought to an end? Where the acknowledgement of the Armenian contribution to the cultural and economic development of this ‘unique and ancient geography’ during the era of the Ottoman Empire? Where even the faintest note of Armenian enrichment of the Turkish state’s economic, social and cultural history? Erdogan raises no sound against the ceaseless falsification and distortion of Armenian history that striving to wipe them out of the region or diminish them there a humiliate them altogether demonizing them before the Turkish masses and so strangling all prospect of ‘decent’ and ‘mature’ discourse. ‘Decency’ and ‘maturity’ be furthermore cannot be sustained in the face of the Turkish state’s blockade of Armenia and of its collaboration with a hostile and aggressive Azerbaijani elite intent on demolishing the last remaining portions of an Armenian homeland, home indeed to a large segment of the grandchildren of 1915. All these are vital ingredients for equal and humane relations in, let us not fear repetition here, this ‘shared’ ‘unique and ancient geography’. II Let us be clear! It is not the case of greedy and ungrateful Armenians seizing upon an unprecedented and generous Turkish declaration to table unreasonable extremist demands. No! All the above flows directly from Erdogan’s words that, correctly and explicitly, put an equal mark between Turk and Armenian and between ‘all ethnicities’ that ‘lost their lives’ during the period 1914-1918. But this equal sign mean nothing if there is no enlargement of national, cultural, historical and democratic space that would allow all ‘ethnicities’ who share ‘customs and manners’ and a ‘unique and ancient geography’ to walk tall and proud. Yes! Compassionate and humane relations must be mutual. Armenian pundits, intellectuals and politicians, social and national leaders and Churchmen have their obligation and responsibility to cast aside Armenian variants of chauvinist dismissal of the history of the Turkish people, so manifest in ugly everyday discourse, in the Armenian media, on the Armenian social media, discussion lists as well as text and history books. First and foremost it is beholden on Armenians to abandon claims of collective Turkish responsibility for the 1915 Genocide, to abandon claims that the Turkish common people today can be held responsible for and accountable for the historical crimes of Ottoman Empire’s elites, of the Young Turks and the Turkish state. Whilst Armenians are responsible for clearing up Augean stables of their own making, it requires stating in bold that much of their prejudice and bigotry is reaction to relentless hostile machination and denial by the Turkish state and its elite that has taken not a single step to ease the pain of a people so ‘inhumanely’ uprooted (‘relocated’ in the words of Erdogan’s mealy mouthed speech writers) and denied any right of return or compensation, even moral compensation, let alone material! III A Turkish politician does not speak as Erdogan did without calculation. He is in deep trouble and these troubles will mount in the run up to 2015. Even as his remarks may ease pressure from Europe and America, they risk raising the ire of extreme Turkish nationalism that remains a dominant force in Turkish society. But the benefits perhaps outweigh potential losses. Erdogan has to cope with the challenge of the formidable Gulenists (who have their own stand on the Armenian question), steer clear of their damaging corruption charges, resolve debilitating internal elite battles and negotiate increasingly difficult economic waters, as well deal with the Kurdish Question. Here his remarks on the Armenian Genocide can serve to dam up troubles from other sources. Erdogan can hope to at least begin to dim the chances of a potentially dangerous European and American succumbing to the Armenian lobby. Europe and the USA have of course never been concerned with the plight of Armenians, nor will they ever be. But in the run up to 2015, even a genuflection in that direction official Genocide Recognition could offer a declining Europe and America a new stick with which to meddle in the affairs of resurgent Turkey. Erdogan’s speech can begin to neutralize this stick. Erdogan can also hope to neutralize an already immobile Armenian state. In the run up to 2015 Armenian elites too will come under immense pressure to more actively take up the many existing long term consequences of the Genocide, something that it has obstinately refused to do. Hints and suggestions of conciliatory official Turkish regret will suffice to embolden these elites in their flagrant refusal to go beyond words, in their flat failure to table significant issues for discussion with the Turkish state. * * * * * * It is clear that Erdogan’s 23 April 2014 statement has no genuine intent to encourage ‘compassionate and humane’ relationships between Turk and Armenian. The existing status quo in Turkey is not conducive, by any standard, to flourishing ‘compassion and mutually humane attitudes’ between the many different nationalities inhabiting the region and the statement has nothing to indicate that this status quo is designed to change. It’s alas the same old story underlined again by the fact that Erdogan is once again advancing the notion of ‘a joint historical commission’ of scholars and researchers to establish the truth of 1915. What better way to package away all the continuing consequences of the Genocide, to store it out of sight, in the world of ivory tower academia, as far away from concrete, wide, open democratic discussion that would actually deal with historical consequences and generate the mature and good relations between us all that we all desire. Prove us wrong and we will be delighted. Orhan Dink, brother of murdered Hrant, made his own wise evaluation. Though ‘some might say’ that it came late’ Erdogan’s statement and his condolences are ‘a first step’, a ‘most basic brick’ to ‘build democracy in Turkey’. Genuine condolences are indeed a first and necessary step to democracy. Prove to us then Mr Erdogan that yours are genuine. Extend, enhance and multiply democratic rights in Turkey, rights that accord equality and respect, freedom and dignity to all national groups in within your jurisdiction. Carry through the tranche of measures indicated above, measures that have been tabled many times over the years. Then and only then, can we together begin the process that, as Orhan put it, to bring ‘both societies to normalization.’ Only then will the idea of a historical commission acquire positive quality, only that is, after taking the concrete measures to overcome the still painful legacies of 1915. Eddie Arnavoudian

The topic may appear dated, but is not so. Erdogan's remarks were an opening salvo. Here something I contributed at the time of his remarks and submit now to the forum now prefacing it with my condolences to the all the families who suffered loss from the recent mining disaster in Turkey. Erdogan’s condolences to the Armenian people – fine words butter no parsnips A sideways glance at Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s 23 April 2014 statement of ‘condolences to the grandchildren’ of the Armenian dead of 1915 could be readily welcomed and applauded. Some Armenians could even feel better, less bitter, less entrenched in anti-Turkish sentiment on hearing the Prime Minister of a resurgent imperial Turkey speak so about the Armenian dead, in such an unprecedented and compassionate manner. But the deeper truth of the Turkish Prime Minister’s pronouncement reveals a disappointing pedestrianism. It lacks any novel, radical or courageous dimension. Albeit laced with touching humanist sentiment, Erdogan appears engaged in no more than an opening gambit to undermine what in 2015 will be powerful global commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. His remarks appear designed particularly to ease what will likely be huge pressure on Turkey from both Europe and America where significant Armenian lobbies are insistently urging recognition of the Genocide on its up-coming 100th anniversary. Erdogan’s statement that has been translated into numerous languages is worth examination. Its employment of fine humanist turns of phrase are significantly revealing both of denied truths and of the limits and the actual designs of his statement. ‘It is our hope and belief’ says Erdogan, ‘that the peoples of an ancient and unique geography, who share similar customs and manners, will be able to talk to each other about the past with maturity and to remember together their losses in a decent manner.’ A fine sentiment and in the context of Armenian-Turkish relations a moving and indeed unprecedented one for the explicit Turkish state/elite recognition that the Armenian people are indeed and contrary to much shameless historical fabrication, one of the ‘peoples’ of the ‘ancient and unique geography’ enclosed today within the borders of a modern Turkish Republic. But fine words butter no parsnips. Action alone, not words, can produce conditions necessary for ‘mature’ and ‘decent’ discourse between Armenian and Turk. And the fact is Turkish state/elite actions prohibit such discourse. I Erodogan’s statement contains no hint, even of the slimmest kind of any action, of any change in Turkish state policy that blocks and even punishes mature and decent discourse. And here, be clear, we do not talk of land claims or reparations for 1915. We refer only to the necessity for greater freedoms and democratic rights for all the peoples who ‘share’ ‘customs’, ‘manners’ and a ‘unique and ancient geography.’ Where are proposals to halt the widespread denigration of Armenians in Turkey? Where even a hint to root out embedded extreme nationalist Turkish hostility to Armenians that leads to the murder of a Hrant Dink or to the ugly sight of Turkish politicians insulting an opponent for allegedly having Armenian ancestry. Where a hint of a friendly invitation into the open public sphere for Armenians forcibly converted to Islam, to the tens of thousands of hidden Armenians, who fear being engulfed in tidal wave of xenophobic Turkish nationalism? The ‘compassion and mutually humane attitudes to one another’ that Erdogan expresses hopes for demands that the national rights of all the peoples of this ‘ancient and unique geography’ be protected; the right to schooling in their own languages, the freedom for their educational institutions to function without unending obstruction, the freedom of their social and welfare organizations from endless hostile pressure and threats that come often with calls to confiscate their properties. For ‘decent’ and ‘mature’ discourse and relations, due respect has to be accorded to the cultural and historical legacy of the different peoples of the region. Not words but concrete proposals for action alone can signal honest intent. Where the hint for the need to properly protect Armenian architectural and other monuments surviving within Turkish state borders, the call to reverse the systematic destruction and to properly identify the Armenian origins of those that survive? Where a suggestion that the ceaseless destruction of a rich cultural legacy, a destruction that is part of the falsification of the history of the region, where the suggestion that this will be brought to an end? Where the acknowledgement of the Armenian contribution to the cultural and economic development of this ‘unique and ancient geography’ during the era of the Ottoman Empire? Where even the faintest note of Armenian enrichment of the Turkish state’s economic, social and cultural history? Erdogan raises no sound against the ceaseless falsification and distortion of Armenian history that striving to wipe them out of the region or diminish them there a humiliate them altogether demonizing them before the Turkish masses and so strangling all prospect of ‘decent’ and ‘mature’ discourse. ‘Decency’ and ‘maturity’ be furthermore cannot be sustained in the face of the Turkish state’s blockade of Armenia and of its collaboration with a hostile and aggressive Azerbaijani elite intent on demolishing the last remaining portions of an Armenian homeland, home indeed to a large segment of the grandchildren of 1915. All these are vital ingredients for equal and humane relations in, let us not fear repetition here, this ‘shared’ ‘unique and ancient geography’. II Let us be clear! It is not the case of greedy and ungrateful Armenians seizing upon an unprecedented and generous Turkish declaration to table unreasonable extremist demands. No! All the above flows directly from Erdogan’s words that, correctly and explicitly, put an equal mark between Turk and Armenian and between ‘all ethnicities’ that ‘lost their lives’ during the period 1914-1918. But this equal sign mean nothing if there is no enlargement of national, cultural, historical and democratic space that would allow all ‘ethnicities’ who share ‘customs and manners’ and a ‘unique and ancient geography’ to walk tall and proud. Yes! Compassionate and humane relations must be mutual. Armenian pundits, intellectuals and politicians, social and national leaders and Churchmen have their obligation and responsibility to cast aside Armenian variants of chauvinist dismissal of the history of the Turkish people, so manifest in ugly everyday discourse, in the Armenian media, on the Armenian social media, discussion lists as well as text and history books. First and foremost it is beholden on Armenians to abandon claims of collective Turkish responsibility for the 1915 Genocide, to abandon claims that the Turkish common people today can be held responsible for and accountable for the historical crimes of Ottoman Empire’s elites, of the Young Turks and the Turkish state. Whilst Armenians are responsible for clearing up Augean stables of their own making, it requires stating in bold that much of their prejudice and bigotry is reaction to relentless hostile machination and denial by the Turkish state and its elite that has taken not a single step to ease the pain of a people so ‘inhumanely’ uprooted (‘relocated’ in the words of Erdogan’s mealy mouthed speech writers) and denied any right of return or compensation, even moral compensation, let alone material! III A Turkish politician does not speak as Erdogan did without calculation. He is in deep trouble and these troubles will mount in the run up to 2015. Even as his remarks may ease pressure from Europe and America, they risk raising the ire of extreme Turkish nationalism that remains a dominant force in Turkish society. But the benefits perhaps outweigh potential losses. Erdogan has to cope with the challenge of the formidable Gulenists (who have their own stand on the Armenian question), steer clear of their damaging corruption charges, resolve debilitating internal elite battles and negotiate increasingly difficult economic waters, as well deal with the Kurdish Question. Here his remarks on the Armenian Genocide can serve to dam up troubles from other sources. Erdogan can hope to at least begin to dim the chances of a potentially dangerous European and American succumbing to the Armenian lobby. Europe and the USA have of course never been concerned with the plight of Armenians, nor will they ever be. But in the run up to 2015, even a genuflection in that direction official Genocide Recognition could offer a declining Europe and America a new stick with which to meddle in the affairs of resurgent Turkey. Erdogan’s speech can begin to neutralize this stick. Erdogan can also hope to neutralize an already immobile Armenian state. In the run up to 2015 Armenian elites too will come under immense pressure to more actively take up the many existing long term consequences of the Genocide, something that it has obstinately refused to do. Hints and suggestions of conciliatory official Turkish regret will suffice to embolden these elites in their flagrant refusal to go beyond words, in their flat failure to table significant issues for discussion with the Turkish state. * * * * * * It is clear that Erdogan’s 23 April 2014 statement has no genuine intent to encourage ‘compassionate and humane’ relationships between Turk and Armenian. The existing status quo in Turkey is not conducive, by any standard, to flourishing ‘compassion and mutually humane attitudes’ between the many different nationalities inhabiting the region and the statement has nothing to indicate that this status quo is designed to change. It’s alas the same old story underlined again by the fact that Erdogan is once again advancing the notion of ‘a joint historical commission’ of scholars and researchers to establish the truth of 1915. What better way to package away all the continuing consequences of the Genocide, to store it out of sight, in the world of ivory tower academia, as far away from concrete, wide, open democratic discussion that would actually deal with historical consequences and generate the mature and good relations between us all that we all desire. Prove us wrong and we will be delighted. Orhan Dink, brother of murdered Hrant, made his own wise evaluation. Though ‘some might say’ that it came late’ Erdogan’s statement and his condolences are ‘a first step’, a ‘most basic brick’ to ‘build democracy in Turkey’. Genuine condolences are indeed a first and necessary step to democracy. Prove to us then Mr Erdogan that yours are genuine. Extend, enhance and multiply democratic rights in Turkey, rights that accord equality and respect, freedom and dignity to all national groups in within your jurisdiction. Carry through the tranche of measures indicated above, measures that have been tabled many times over the years. Then and only then, can we together begin the process that, as Orhan put it, to bring ‘both societies to normalization.’ Only then will the idea of a historical commission acquire positive quality, only that is, after taking the concrete measures to overcome the still painful legacies of 1915. Eddie Arnavoudian

Food for deathly thought Here a question to consider: was the Soviet Armenian experience, in one particular aspect an enormous and indubitable register of cultural, social, economic and demographic attainment, a mere cosmetic edifice obscuring the truth of yet another seven decades of inexorable national shrinkage, decades during which the presence of an Armenian population in historic Armenian homelands throughout Asia Minor and the Caucuses continued to decline and brought now to the precipice of elimination. For centuries, but closest to our times from the mid-19th, one the most striking demographic and geo-political trends in Asia Minor and the Caucuses has been the steady, irreversible diminution of its Armenian communities and the equally steady shrinkage of the territorial space they inhabit. Armenian populations across historic Armenia have been systematically uprooted and removed, cleared out with all signs of their presence ruthlessly cut to pieces. Those who remain have been herded into a tiny, inhospitable territorial space – the current Republic of Armenia - that allows for no sustainable independent nationhood. Take a look at a demographic and geo-political map and you will see the shocking truth…the sure disappearance of the Armenian people from Asia Minor and the Caucuses that for thousands of years been their homeland. The Genocide finally cleansed historic western Armenia of most of its Armenian population whilst the post-Genocide Turkish Republic headed by Kemal Ataturk completed the process during the 1930s and 1940s. Besides eradicating an Armenian presence from western Armenia, Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey also reduced the once substantial Armenian presence in Istanbul to a shadow of its glorious past. Systematic discrimination against national minorities threatens to drive remaining Armenian communities to extinction. From a map of Asia Minor and the Caucuses that showed substantial Armenian communities across the region, Armenians today appear isolated to a rump, escape from which seems the sole chance of human survival. The Soviet Armenian age, despite a population growth that touched 3 million, did nothing to stem or reverse demographic and geographic collapse. On the contrary, this period appears to mark a further stage in this process, operating particularly in the Caucuses. Parallel with the Soviet Armenian cultural and demographic flourish, through the Caucuses during the same period, a long-established Armenian presence underwent a critical decline, accelerated by the assimilationist policies enforced by the nationalist elites in Georgia and Azerbaijan. Nakhichevan during the Soviet era, that has no natural borders with Azerbaijan, was attached to Azerbaijan and emptied of its Armenian population. Garabagh similarly, despite its Armenian majority was also annexed to Azerbaijan and suffered a steady decline of its Armenian population. In Armenian populated Azerbaijani regions – Baku in the main – linguistic, educational and cultural restrictions lead to enforced assimilation. Similar processes were at work in Georgian controlled territories where Armenians constituted overwhelming majorities. In Tbilisi, once a thriving centre of Armenian culture and commerce, only its ghost survives. In the post-Soviet age Armenians have been finally cleared from their homes in Azerbaijan whilst their cultural legacy has been barbarously reduced to rubble. In Georgia too Armenians are being pushed out of remaining Armenian strongholds. The Soviet era increase of the Armenian population has offered no compensation. It has indeed underlined the unsustainability of the territory as an economically viable state. Since the end of the Soviet era, without central Soviet support and as a result of the ruthless plunder of national wealth by the new elite, the Armenian state has been incapable of sustaining its 3 million Soviet era population. The Armenian Republic, the last redoubt for an Armenian community in Asia Minor is collapsing asunder in the throes of a catastrophic demographic blood-letting that continues day in day out with queues thronging foreign ambassadorial buildings. A greedy and voracious Armenian elite of looters and criminals does nothing to reverse the process. As Armenia is emptied, its increasingly thinly populated lands are eyed both by Azeri and Georgian elites, also voracious and vicious but in addition well financed and well- armed to boot. Can there be any respite or recovery? As we approach the 100th anniversary of the Genocide let us be under no illusion that Genocide recognition even by the most powerful states on the globe will alter these trends. Radical action is necessary, action for which we have the intellectual and cultural resources. But have we the political will? 31 May 2013

Sitting beneath the Armenian flag at the London Paralympics On Thursday 6 September with our two children we went off to London's main Olympic Stadium to watch an evening of athletics. It turned out to be what the press rightly described as 'Thrilling Thursday', at least for the Brits who won a few gold. My boys with their roots in England were delighted. Sat among 80,000 spectators they cheered for Britain until hoarse. But British victories were not the sole source of delight. Almost incredibly, amazingly, an hour after we had sat down Raffi shouted in great exitement pointing out that we were sitting directly beneath the flag of the Republic of Armenia, directly but high, high above. Though no Armenians were competing that night it gave us all a tremendous thrill, a sense of satisfaction and contentment. Why? For the simple reason that for my generation at least, and evidently to some extent with the younger, it was a moment of unuusal acknowledgement of our Armenian being, something ignored in everyday life. We can go through a day, a week, a month and a year with no recognition of our being Armenian. It is as if that aspect of our being is invisible, unimportant, insignificant. It is as if only half our face is visible to everyone else. Then among 80,0000 you suddenly see yourself represented by a flag, fluttering not just in your own imagination or your own home, but here among 80,000 people of all nationalities, and flutering moreover alongside the flags of all other nations, small or large. Clearly a powerful symbol. It should be salvaged from those who today are besmirching it. Eddie

Dear SAS, Forgive the delay in responding...Alas my Armenian orthography is very very weak. I haven't had a chance to study it at all. I re-learnt Armenian alone in a corner of London with no other Armenians! I agree transliteration and orthography are very important but at least even when wrong in the case of famous people, we do know who we are talking about and we can communicate something of what they have contributed to Armenian and international culture and civilisation. Best regards Eddie

Thoughts for debate on the way to the 100th anniversary of the Genocide… Thought No.1 Stop licking the corpse of the 1920 Treaty of Sevres The 1920 post-World War One Treaty of Sevres between the defeated Ottoman Empire and the triumphant Allies must forever cease to be a reference point, an instrument of policy, negotiation or a platform of appeal in the Armenian people’s 21st century efforts to construct secure and viable nationhood. Armenian-related clauses of this Treaty that shaped a substantial Armenian state over large portion of historical Armenia are, pathetically because of their stamp of Great Power approval, ceaselessly cited by Armenian commentators as a critical and irrefutable recognition of the Armenian people’s legitimate right to national self-determination on historic homelands to which the survivors of the Genocide now have no right to return. So the Treaty has become part of the package of Armenian presentations against the Turkish state that run together with the demand of Genocide recognition. Armenians however must abandon to the historians a Treaty that even at its birth stank of the cynical imperialist gamble that it was – a scheme to carve up Asia Minor and the Middle East, not for Armenians, Kurds, Arabs, Greeks or even Turks, but for European imperial powers alone. The whole of Asia Minor and the Middle East, until then Ottoman colonies, was now to be divided into British, French and Italian spheres of influence with Greeks and Armenians acting as proxy within borders that, assigned to them, would be helpless protectorates. The Allies however were neither able nor prepared to impose the Treaty, unwilling or unable to deploy the necessary militarily force required. They would rely instead on regional proxies and allies who only had a chance of triumph in the event of an utterly incapacitated, broken Turkish/Ottoman ruling class and an utterly passive Turkish nationalist ruling class that had been spawned within the Ottoman state. Greek and Armenian armed forces would be used to measure the strength of a virtually defunct Ottoman Empire, shrunk essentially to its Asia Minor and Middle East colonies. If they managed to overwhelm the disorganised forces of the once mighty and savage Empire, Britain, France and Italy would be free, at no cost to them, to impose its new colonial order designed in the Treaty of Sevres with their allies employed as instrument of regional control. The Treaty of Sevres was a gamble, a gamble that failed, rapidly undone by Kemal Ataturk’s virulent Turkish imperialist-chauvinist national movement. Inheriting the legacy of the Ottoman militarism and sustained by a substantial Turkish social base Kemal Ataturk rapidly all opponents and moved to quickly establish Turkish hegemony over all of Asia Minor, including historic Armenia and Kurdistan. As Kemal’s mastery of the area became incontestable, Europe and the USA abandoned erstwhile Armenian and Greek allies and began parleying with Ataturk. Within three years the Treaty of Sevres was dead, unceremoniously cast onto the scrap heap of international law by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne that recognised Turkish colonial rule over Asia Minor – including over the larger segment of historically colonised Armenia and Kurdistan. The European gamble at Sevres was particularly cynical where Armenia and Armenians were concerned. The Armenian people had no prospect of driving Ataturk’s forces from their western historic homelands. The Genocide had destroyed the demographic foundation for their national development in western Armenia. The surviving Armenian elites, in the Caucuses, Istanbul and beyond had in addition proved utterly indifferent or unable to take up the challenge of reaffirming Armenian national rights in their historic homelands. Between 1917 and 1920, Armenian forces had already been pushed back and out of western Armenia well before Ataturk’s own aggressive assaults. Even in the event of any early military success, a ramshackle Armenian state assembled in territory substantially denuded of Armenians would sooner or later fall before Kurdish and Turkish forces intervening to ostensibly support compatriots who would constitute a majority in a so-called Armenian state. Despite all this Armenian political elites have never been reconciled to the demise of the Imperialist Gamble of Sevres and as in the Armenian legend they endlessly lick its rotting corpse hoping to bring it back to life, tiresomely demanding that its Armenian clauses, deemed one of the finest manifestations of international justice for Armenians, be if not enforced in whole, then, at least tabled as a framework for forcing Turkey into ceding land to Armenia or cited as evidence of the historical justice of Armenian claims. But the Treaty is dead, a mere historical document testifying to European colonial appetites stirred by visions of a helpless Ottoman collapse. Efforts to resurrect the lost Gamble serve as dead weight keeping us bent in beggary. Kneeling before Europe and America hoping that today they will enforce what they failed to when truly Global Masters of the World, is worse than pathetic political delusion. The Armenian appeal to Sevres that often runs along with the campaign for imperialist genocide recognition is just another weeping wound of what has now become a near terminal Armenian disease - dependence upon foreign powers for the future of their nation and state, the same dependence that in the past has produced nothing but tragedy and disaster. It is time to stop licking. Eddie Arnavoudian 15 September 2012

Here some notes on a little article I am writing on Rouben Vorperian: travels without joy (Library of Armenian Classics, 1981, pp31-120) On the Armenian literary landscape Rouben Vorperian (1870-1931) appears as an entirely marginal figure. While contemporaries like Varoujean, Yessayan, Siamanto, Sevak and others were as if always at the centre of debate on art, literature and national emancipation, Vorperian leaves the impression of residing quietly on the edge, unnoticed, shy and remote not just metaphorically but literally, living most of his life as he did in Djibouti and then Paris where he died. Today he rests among the company of the forgotten. We have, in the poet’s words: ‘Placed upon him the stone of oblivion And left silence as guard to his tomb’ This is both mistake and loss. It was not for flattery that the poet received laurels from novelist Zabel Yessayan, singular critic Minas Teoleolian and others. Though Rouben Vorperian earned his living as a business man his first unchallenged passion was art and poetry. He did not aspire to be ‘an expert with statues’ or a ‘painter deserving of worship’, neither to be ‘an actor who overwhelms his audience’. ‘I was born a poet and let me remain so.’ Through determined dedication serviced by the that spark of creativity that is the gift of every human being Vorperian’s work contains flares, never mind that they do not reach as far or high as others. In cumulative flow Vorperian’s poetry sounds a rending cry of wounded wanderers, uprooted from their homeland and unable to cast happy anchor elsewhere. He generates no bracing, insurrectionary passions or sensibilities. Often he is tiresome, even pedestrian. But at its moments, even if these are not prolific, his poetry has a tragic cast that shapes the anguished bitterness of enforced migration and that of its Armenian manifestation particularly. It is bares the soul of exiles worldwide, of uprooted, lonely wanderers, brows etched with yearning for homeland living the estrangement, pessimism and hopelessness that is companion of social and national dislocation. Vorperian works his themes with thought provoking effect, suggesting a among other things a deeper appreciation of the essence of exile felt by men and women torn from closely knit rural communities where the collective more decidedly than today defined individual sensibility. Though not the best some poems compounding longing for homeland with the stunning of Genocide that blocked all hope of return are felt grasps of the solacing role of Soviet Armenia for a stunned Armenian intelligentsia. I. The joyless wanderer Rouben Vorperian is most striking when articulating the unending endurance that is enforced migration from homeland, when expressing the painful weariness of exile that failing to sink new roots is marked in addition by personal misfortune. For him it generated a melancholic, tired longing for his hearth and home as an elixir. ‘Oh for anyone to understand the sorrows of my soul Who could feel it scorched by longing For our homeland Oh I smolder on and fall towards the damp soil.’ (p92) But expressed in this grimness there is also a profound human truth. ‘My Village Road’ and ‘My Little Cottage’ are fine metaphorical renditions of the opposition between life in a rural homeland that was a social and collective unity and the rootless, isolated alienation of the life in exile. Alas that the former is memory, while the latter is a suffering present. Longer autobiographical verse draws the world map travelled by the poet who when still fuelled by youthful spirits reached to see the most distant wonders. None however filled the gap left by village home. Though Vorperian does not tell us why, his poetry yet affirms his life marked by pervasive personal unhappiness. It has become ‘but a door before the abyss, a door before the dark road’ where smiles are ‘but froth concealing pain.’ It was then almost inevitable that his remembrance would search out the paths that led to his childhood village and to his humble cottage. Thus ‘My Village Path, a poem that Zabel Yessayan valued for its perfection of form that is also a bitter confession of the sum of emptiness that the poet’s exile life has amounted to. Life’s boat left not a mark behind it Forgetfulness took all from me Old dreams vanish like clouds Memories vanish like a song Repeated in conclusion, this opening and a middle verse that establishes present time and space, gives the poem substances of defining oppositions. As he ambles along a stone-hewed road to an east African seaside a thousand miles from his childhood home, the ageing poet recoils against his present is devoid of his native village’s ‘youthful innocence’. Though somewhat bland and sentimental within the whole poem the term speaks clearly of disappointments, treacheries, lies, deceptions and corruptions that the poet has encountered in foreign lands despite their more ‘civilised’ ways. Descriptions of the path to the village recreate more than the just the beautiful rural landscape of his youth that is the site of ‘My Little Cottage’. Small and insignificant as it is, it is not just: A few pillars and black walls Bent but holding each other up Like the aged of ancient days The cottage is a fact of stability, of a rooted existence, of the warmth, comfort and security of home and hearth, suggesting the solidarities of collective, loving social relations of family – that in his time would be extended family. To all who occupy it, it is as a fortress and abode against misfortune and calamity. Meagre, ramshackle, almost dilapidated as it is, this cottage is yet the birthplace of youth’s dreams, the source of that flow of happiness and ease of life growing amid the love of parents and family - all now absent. This remembrance is a counterpoint to a present impaired by disappointment and concluded by regret. Memory underlines misery in the present. Nothing has replaced the lights of human solidarity, for family love that was relished in that smallest and most humble of rural village cottages in the homeland. Now even this cottage has gone and as: Fortune turned both you and me to dust. The yearning for homeland that is communicated in the sum of Vorperian poetry has of course been a pervasive feature of the Armenian national experience and of its national consciousness forming as a result also a broad beam in Armenian literature. Vorperian’s poetry inspires thought that goes some way to explain why its intensity. In traditional rural life, an individual’s sense of being was bound by existential cords to his/her collective, community relations. In contrast to the isolated individualism that today has reached its extremity in modern city life, for the rural man and woman, boy and girl, the collective and community define individual being with greater force. To be broken, rent asunder from this community was akin to personal fragmentation, to the loss of self. Yearning and longing return is at the same time yearning for recovery of the self, of the individual and not just yearning for an idyllic past. Alas for Vorperian who was also a patriotic poet animated by ambitions of national emancipation, any prospect of individual return and recovery was dealt an additional, almost fatal blow by the 1915 Genocide. The Genocide compounded individual, personal dislocation and alienation with a collective and national dimension. It had uprooted a whole people and blocked all possibility of its return. So now however: Grim days follow upon each other Like you they have no end Dawn always distant is blocked Like the fate of a hunted bird With his life on the wane, ‘with body immobile’, perhaps bedridden and feeling ‘no hope emerging from the chaos of the dark clouds’ the poet spends his time ‘living in the bosom of the past.’ In his editor’s introduction to a 1981 edition of Vorperian’s poetry, Vasken Gabrielian is tritely dismissive of his poems of longing, judging them to be, at least in part, a failure of vision, ‘a retreat to tradition’ and ‘inability to see the way out of capitalism’s alienated human relations (p6). Memory of the past, of one’s youth, can of course take on diverse functions, including as metaphors for social vision, conservative or progressive. In Hovanness Hovannissian they for example construct a utopia of social emancipation. But in Vorperian’s memory acts as neither serving rather to underline an enduring deep, distraught personal unhappiness and the alienation of his rootless, lonely existence in exile. Vorperian’s yearning for the home of his youth is a yearning for social and collective solidarity not for rural conservatism. That it did not act as a social or political vision is testified to in Vorperian’s poetic solidarity with Soviet Armenia, a fact indeed noted and applauded by Gabrielian himself! One could add also that the recollection of youth in old age is perhaps an existential inevitability pitting healthy, energetic and carefree existence in youth against the fact of later decay and decline. II. A Phoenix arises Experience buckled and bent the very core of Rouben Vorperian’s being. When young he experienced the 19th as full of promise, ‘with fires of science’ spreading ‘happiness across the earth.’ Science had ‘opened up the deep of the abysses’ in whose ‘stormy oceans of doubt’ God, a permanent Armenian ‘boyhood companion’, receded into the distance to be replaced faith in the idea of human progress. But as 19th century society became 20th, the glossy: ‘Make-up fell away from its cheeks To reveal instead of sweet smiles A hyena gaze and wolves’ claws Beneath its shiny gloves The savagery and barbarism of Genocide and World War One shattered confidence in independent human potential and left the poet bereft, utterly desolate, yearning not just for a return to homeland but for a return also of faith. Oh I am alone and endlessly pleading Return, God, as to my boyhood days Whether Divine inspiration did revisit Vorperian I am not sure. But a significant, deeply felt poem ‘Apples from the Motherland’, evidently not written for the occasion expresses the solace that Soviet Armenia, with the flourish of cultural and social life there, offered the tired exile in his frail closing years. Never mind that Soviet Armenia was a mere stump of the historical homeland, that it did not incorporate his own beloved family village and cottage. Still a gift of apples from Soviet Armenia Brought to the poet’s throbbing heart An infinite unending dawn sun They have after all been ‘touched by a breeze incensed with Etchmiadzin’s and Sevan’s aroma’. The tree from which they have been picked have ‘resonated to the song of the river Arax while ‘its roots have been fertilised by the sweat of the Armenian peasant.’ The excitement and the emotion is tremendous. On the wing of memory the poet still wanders through the towns and villages of his western Armenian homeland, through Kharpert, Malatya, Mush and Arapgir. But they are now beyond reach. In eastern, Soviet Armenia however things are different. Sevan and Etchmiadzin may not be in western Armenia but they are essential, component parts of the historic space that defined the Armenian nation in its history and moreover are component parts of an Armenian state and republic. Ambitions for nation building In the western Armenian homelands may have been shattered by the Genocide. But in its stead Soviet Armenia, Phoenix-like, as a nation saving lighthouse and port of call. Never mind part of the USSR, it provided the foundation for the flourish of culture and literature, language and music, architecture, history and art to produce a common consciousness and sense of national identity. Such were the historical-cultural co-ordinates that constituted a substance of nationality for the intelligentsia more immediately significant to them than the material and social emancipation of the mass of the peasants, the common people, who lived in the Armenian homelands and constituted the foundation of the nation. Even as they were obviously moved by the plight of the masses their object was the ideal of the nation as constructed by language, literature and culture. And here, despite the uprooting, dispossession and mass slaughter that had just been visited on the Armenian people, Soviet Armenia appeared still as powerful testimony, as incontrovertible evidence of a surviving nation. For all the tangled complications and albeit but a tiny enclave, Soviet Armenia proclaimed the fact of nationhood with such magnetism that, through the energetic efforts among others of men such as communist historian and political activist Ashot Hovannissyan, an entire battalion of Armenian intellectuals of all political persuasions were persuaded to return and participate in nation-construction. More than a fact of flourishing of nationhood, Soviet Armenia had also offered a safe territorial refuge to many western Armenian survivors of the Genocide. It also represented for them and for Armenians generally a possible bridge of hope, a stepping stone to recovery and even possibly a recovery of and return to lands lost in the wake of the Genocide. . . . . . Through Vorperian’s work one finds other poems and scores of scattered couplets that stand alone as strikes to inspiration. The almost impeccable ‘Wedding Ring’ for example is a harsh and telling reminder of the contradictory nature of marriage, particularly in a conservative Christian society, with all its potential for violence and oppression concealed by the ring, but also its sanction of free reign to love and lust in the marriage bed. ‘The Watch’ is another fine piece, a gentle contemplation of the passing of time and of ageing with intimations of mortality touched well in an image of the old poet looking unperturbed at his old broken watch as he ‘smiles before infinity’. As if in an epitaph Rouben Vorperian wrote that even as ‘time withers both rose and memory’, if his ‘songs were to speed from one heart to another’ he would rest easy never mind ‘beneath a forgotten tomb’. His songs would be immortality enough. There may not be many such ones. But there are some and it is good see Lola Koundakjian’s ‘Armenian Poetry Project (http://armenian-poetry.blogspot.co.uk) hosting Rouben Vorperian. Eddie Arnavoudian 18 June 2012

Hello Arpa, I did read but delinquently failed to respond to your point about the use of 'parasites' for Tsetser as the translation for the title of the Broshian novel. Please accept my apologies! You wrote asking: 'Is what you interpret as “Parasite”մակաբոՅծ/epiphyte refer to Proshian's novel Tsets/ՑԵՑ, the wool-cloth eating larva of the Moth?' I take you point but I felt happier with the generic 'parasite' that so readily communicates the connotation of social abuse and exploitation that defines the protagonist of Broshian's novel. I dare say that one with a more creative command of English could offer a more appropriate and equally telling rendering.

After another extended absence here a little note on Vrtanness Papazian...Ah what we lose as a result of ignorance of or because of willfully ignoring our own history and culture... Vrtanness Papazian (1866-1920) is another significant short story writer whose reputation has been cut short by reckless critics. A fine narrator, at once humorous and cutting, he has an artist’s feel for 19th century Armenian rural life whose class divisions, class exploitation and national oppression he describes in grippingly dramatic development. Grasping human relations in natural and authentic flow Papazian adequately compensates for sometimes flat and inauthentic characterization that can turn protagonists into incomprehensible strangers. The imperial Ottomans state, its courts, tax collectors and the string of sub-collectors with rights acquired to a portion of the peasants’ product appear in all their brutality, some plundering hand in hand with Armenian usurers. ‘The Armenian usurer indeed was more terrifying than any Kurdish bandit. Armed with debtor’s notes more deadly than Kurdish swords they seize and plunder and then laugh at the beggars they leave behind. Their brazenness reaches disgusting heights when in lieu of interest they demand beautiful women or village brides for a few days.’ A visible thread in many a story is contempt for the Church and its priests preaching passivity in the face of family homes burnt out, men murdered, women raped and children abducted. ‘Fair Judgment’, with its depictions of gruesome, ghastly dirt, with the mud, the grime, the urine and excrement, the dankness and the darkness of Ottoman jail cells, with descriptions of worn threadbare courthouse curtains behind which preside ‘yawning judges ready to fall asleep’, features as metaphor for the nightmare that passed for Ottoman justice. Here Papazian reminds one of Aranstar but with a difference. Arantsar also sketches the corruption of the Ottoman judicial apparatus. He does so convincingly, but through the prism of Armenian experience alone. Papazian gives these same truths enhanced authority focusing them through wider lens’ that take in besides Christians also Muslims, besides Armenians also Albanians, Arabs, Jews, Kurds and Greeks all also trapped in the fatal claws of Ottoman ‘justice’. ‘Monastic Yergo, with passages that remind one of Hrant’s ‘Letters on the Lives of Emigrants’, offers a telling analysis of the processes that drove tens of thousands of Armenians from their homelands in Van, Mush, Erzerum and elsewhere. Flooding into Istanbul’s ghettos they nourished hopes that money earned would repay voracious usurers threatening their families’ back home. Hopes alas are dashed with pittance earnings driving impoverished emigrants to despair and drink while their families at home suffer abuse and expropriation at the hands of usurers enjoying the solidarity of Ottoman ‘law’. Papazian’s worth is evident even in flawed stores. ‘Santo – from the Lives of Armenian Gypsies’, is a gripping tale and an invaluable record of a forgotten phenomenon of Armenian society, of those ‘tens of thousands’ of Armenian gypsies who traveled ‘through every (Armenian) village and every town selling goods prepared during the winter’ and who like gypsies the world over were labeled ‘shameless thieves difficult to do business with’ (p563). Set during the 1895-96 massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire when Armenian gypsy communities where also drawn into the nightmare of genocidal repression we meet the fiery Margo, whose traveling caravan is confronted by Turkish officials and she raped. Seething, she is humiliated further by a husband who having failed to defend her then turns traitor. In the figure of Margo who eventually avenges herself and her community, ‘Santo’ highlights the independence, the force and decisiveness of women and their central and sometimes dominant role in family and community life and in relations with outsiders. It was women ‘who organized meetings’ and ‘forced men to attend and to think’ about how to respond to critical situations. ‘It would be mainly women who did the trading…as well as the fortune telling and the begging, shocking one with their brazenness but also causing wonder at their moral rectitude, at the ease with which they dispersed and got rid of those who dared approach them with ill intent. (p556) Moments of scratching prose are easily exonerated in what remains both a dramatic human tale of a woman who passes into legend for her struggle against marauding Ottoman officials and soldiers. The story is also a veritable sociological mine on the life of Armenian gypsies, their internal democratic life, their role in wider Armenian community, how they earned their living, their marriage rituals and much else. In one of his apparently more generous moods, retreating from his normally caustic dismissal of Armenian prose writers, Oshagan in the same breath speaks of Vrtanness Papazian and of Maupassan, the unquestionably superb exponent of the short story. Whatever the value or validity of such comparisons, being offered by the wantonly ultra-critical Oshagan, they speak to the quality of Papazian as writer and artist. 31 May 31, 2012

Apologies but I put this in the wrong place when first trying to post it. And here after another long silence another draft item on Berj Broshian that I shall soon submit to Groong. In its own ramshackle but nevertheless impressive fashion, Berj Broshian’s ‘Parasites’ is a remarkably modern study of the relationship between money and social power in 19th century rural Armenia, manifest concretely as an account of the tyranny of early Armenian financiers and bankers, then known by their proper names of usurers and parasites. With his web extending far and wide Palasan, the novel’s protagonist and ‘chief of all parasites’, amasses huge fortunes. He boasts arrogantly that ‘there is not a village’ across the region ‘that is not indebted to me’ adding that ‘even the banks are in my debt!’ As for those in his thrall, ‘the lot of them are my serfs’ he proclaims (p69). Shadowing our own times, Broshian shows us society in which those producing nothing accumulate enormous wealth and with it power, all obtained from the sweat, suffering and toil of others. He tells of society in which ‘the pocket that sounded the loudest jingle… wielded the bludgeon’ (p18). An ominous figure, Palasan is an early sketch, a first draft of our own parasites and usurers euphemistically labelled bankers or financiers. That he exists today is testified to by the unseen but hated figure assassinated at the opening of Narine Groyan’s novel ‘Dog Star’, awarded the 2011 Armenian Orange Book Prize. ‘Parasites’, it is well to acknowledge at the outset, is shockingly unstable. It lacks any overriding plot, axis or coherent narrative that would give unity and collective punch to what are lively but relatively independent chapters. Though they are all placed upon a common social terrain and share the same protagonists, much of the relationship between them is a function not of the flow or inner development of plot or character but of a string of unexplained, forced turns that verging on the absurd stretch credulity and so make unusual demands on patience and imagination. Let no one claim however that these troubles drain the volume’s artistic or intellectual substance. They do not. I. Broshian’s story is set in a typical rural Armenian village of ‘O’ with nothing about it romantic or idyllic, a fact captured in a telling description of class structure on one ‘cold and misty evening’ when both the ‘rich and the poor have already taken refuge in their homes’: ‘The poor have long ago gathered their half-naked children beneath some ragged and worn cloths, whilst the man and woman of the house, lying to the left and the right of their innocent young, warm them with their own body heat and breath until sleep takes over. The rich on the other hand having dined upon what god has given them, gathered around their warm fire to rest in their thick and soft bedding (p158).’ Broshian does not however open his novel with issues of class, social justice or with any sketch of the vermin that will feed off the village. We are presented rather with inviting pictures of the community and its members that shall be afflicted, among them two young lovers, Sampson and Sona, the charismatic local mayor Ardem and the well to do, jocular farmer Melik Patal. Constructing his lovingly detailed context Broshian writes with wit, humour and a perception of social and psychological truths. Male conceit across the ages is caught splendidly. Despite ruling the social and the domestic roost, Ardem and Melik Patal moan of men’s lives allegedly bent to wives’ wishes and judgements and complain that men, ‘but simpleminded brothers of god’, are in actual fact ‘cleaning cloths in women’s hands (p32)’. More powerful still are passages that tell of Sampson and Sona’s love that they must keep concealed because in village society love is not to exist independent of marriage and marriage itself is to be arranged by parents with priorities other than their children’s desires or wishes. The young’s wishes are on occasion taken into account, but more often other, economic and social, calculations prevail. Sampson and Sona do not yet know if they are among the exceptions, and so we see them suffer those universal insecurities, fears and anxieties of love that in their particular circumstances must steal its way through the restrictive entanglements of rural economic calculation, village mores, religious prejudice and tradition. Particularly moving is the depiction of the guilt felt by Sona as she defies village moral imperatives (p46-47) so deeply imbedded in her own consciousness that for shame she dreads even the idea of telling her own mother of her love. However in Sona’s and Sampson’s case it is not backward tradition or custom but Palasan that represents the most dangerous threat to their love and to village life too. II. Palasan, a brutish, thuggish, manipulative and violent man exercises power with an executioner’s finality. He is truly a Darwinian jungle beast, the personification of financial capital’s utter disregard for other human lives. ‘As if the crows will wear black if ten nobodies are annihilated’ he retorts when challenged about his savage indifference to the plight of his victims. ‘If he falls into your hand, if he is weaker than you then smite him, trash him but make sure of your profit.’ This is his philosophy of life and business. Morality and Christian notions of ‘sin and punishment’ are dismissed as ‘priests’ grandchildren’ that the clergy employ ‘to net their fish and so obtain their dinner (p74)’. Palasan is not attired in the latest Gucci fashions, nor does he drive a 4x4 BMW. But even dressed in rough 19th century costume and riding horse and cart, he is immediately recognisable. Like our own bankers he has gathered into his ambit all who have influence and authority, the village clergy, members of the judiciary, local and even the regional government officials, all of whom do his bidding. With no fear of retribution he ignores custom, mores and traditions, dispensing titles, fixing elections and bribing judges and priests to accumulate yet more and to conceal misdeeds from scrutiny. The corrupt local priest Der Soukias expresses the scale and extent of money’s almost omnipotent force. ‘Let me try, in a friendly way, to make you understand this. A single worthless command from Palasan Agha is worth all of those from the whole village put together. Were he to demand that I swap my Christian robes for Muslim ones I would do so and will without protest pray in the name of Allah.’ (p109) Through the novel we see Palasan doggedly at work subverting due but of course limited democratic process as he plots to replace Ardem the mayor with his own man. Ardem is not suitable to moneyed power for he rejects the view that public officials should be ‘machines without will, moving only at the command of the influential.’(p128) Simultaneously Palasan with Kntouni, a fraudster and forger recently arrived from Van, connives to rewrite debtor’s notes in his possession and so squeeze his victims further. To reward his chief lieutenant Khuto’s loyalty, he conspires in addition to frame Sampson for murder and so leave Khuto’s son Garabed free to marry Sona. Thereafter he engineers an arson attack on Sampson’s family barn. To ensure adequate time for the plot to mature, he instructs the local priest to deny Sona and Samposon the necessary Church sanction for their engagement. Broshian completes Palasan’s portrait by etching into it a feature common to all Armenian moneyed elites. A native of the village O, after an interlude abroad, Palasan returns home and stands in opposition to his community. Now he is riddled with shame for being Armenian, everything about which he feels to be ugly or uncivilised. Equating sophistication with anything foreign, he monkeys Russian ways and adopts Russian variants of his own Armenian name so as to better mark himself off from the rough and ignorant natives. (We should note of course that whilst the elites adopted Russian ways to distance themselves from their peasant compatriots, the habit was also common among many of the well to do who deemed the affectation of things Russian as signs of culture and progress. The genial Ardem was one among these!) III. The almost serf-like conditions to which the village community is reduced as a result of Palasan’s grip over local government, judiciary and Church finds expression in an interesting, though not always entirely convincing literary device. In answer to questions from Smbat, a young investigative journalist just arrived in the village, it is none other than Palasan himself posturing as an ardent defender of the people, who holds forth in support of the ‘lower classes of our community’. The people he announces: ‘…are ceaselessly oppressed, exploited, squeezed by the usurers’ claws, insecure in their jobs, consumed by external and internal parasites, plundered and buried in ignorance. Your eyes bleed on beholding this…You must agree with me and with the local mayor that it is urgent that we consistently lash out against these national parasites, these ambitious opportunists and irresponsible officials, theses bloodsucking usurers and traitors who for personal gain strangle every positive striving among the people (130-131) As he speaks Palasan indirectly but accurately sketches the ideological standpoint of the national movement of the day that saw the key to reform and social progress in education. Broshian holds back no punches as he shows priests and lawyers to be of the same criminal brotherhood as Palasan. Der Soukias is tarred with the same brush as one Migidan Sako, the most notorious of Broshian’s usurers and protagonist in his most famous novel ‘The problem of Bread’. Clearly already Migidan Sako social twin, near the end of the novel Der Soukias turns out to be his biological one too! Broshian in addition captures well popular contempt for the legal profession in the service of power, a universal contempt we are reminded of repeatedly in world literature. ‘Curse your cheating grandfather’ exclaims Melik Patal. ‘You’ll relieve even a dead donkey of its horse shoes’. Blocking lawyers and priests together he concludes: ‘You…are all, of the same ilk. You first take from the living and then take from the dead.’ (p151) Palasan does not exploit and abuse without challenge and discovers a formidable opponent in Sissak who returning home carries with him a bag full of ideological prescriptions for social and national ills. In accord with the outlook of the times Sissak dedicates himself to the business of education and enlightenment believing this to be the best antidote to Palasan and his gang. Palasan however has dealt with such troublesome types before, silencing one through bribery and by encouraging and financing addiction to drugs – nicotine in this instance! In Sissak’s case however Palasan fails. Sissak is too stubborn and dedicated and slowly wins adherents among some of the community’s notables. (p99) ‘Parasites’ alas ends disappointingly with most of its last fifty pages, in a novel of only 200, burdened with sentimental allocations of happy endings for the virtuous and just rewards for the evil. Yet even here, as an apt reminder of the novel’s modern resonance, we come across a striking metaphor for the corruption of politics and democracy by financial power. Recalling better days better when members of the Church acted as genuine representatives of the community, an elderly priests remarks that ‘today politeness and hospitality’ have been swept aside by a flood of individualism and private greed: ‘It is painful to admit, but I know that today people become representative delegates to open wider not their doors but their wallets. They treat the Church as a source of income to fill their pockets. They (modern representatives) reserve the coldest treatment not just for their workers or for priests from beyond the parish but for the poor and needy too….To top it all in order to cover up their plunder they are wise enough to add a few decorations and silverware (to the Church), to do a few repairs and refurbishments that will then enable them to continue thieving.’ (p185) Replace the words ‘Church’ and ‘representative delegates’ with ‘Parliament’ and ‘MPs’, ‘Congress’ and ‘representative’, or with the proper name of any contemporary ‘democratic’ state institutions and we would have an honest depiction of 21st century ‘democratic politics’. IV. To properly appreciate ‘Parasites’ and all of Broshian’s novels, it repays pondering the weight and impact of its irregular structure and plot noted here by two examples alone. Kntouni’s unexpected appearance, though not warranted by the plot is not entirely incredible. Fraudsters from western Armenia regularly preyed upon villages in the relatively more prosperous east and so his presence serves to enhance the image of the times. But one cannot but be taken aback by the sudden announcement of his unexplained meteoric rise. Just a few pages from his first entrance we are five years on and told, with no account, that Kntouni now heads his own usurer’s enterprise. That his advance was made upon Palasan’s own home territory seems to cause no complications. Further, despite his now independent means Kntouni continues to behave as little more than a forging scribe for Palasan. This is not at all credible. Neither is the fact that at the end of these same five silent years in rural Armenia of all places, Sona and Sampson, now without the bloom of early youth are still to be married! Why? We are not given the slightest hint! Nevertheless, for all these and many other drawbacks, ‘Parasites’ remains eminently readable. The reason is best explained by Shirvanzade in a rigorous review of the novel when it was first published. For all his sharp criticism Shirvanzade underlines Broshian’s talent for creating authentic characters. `Broshian differs from our other writers in that he knows well that which he writes about. He grasps the common people's lives authentically. He grasps its language, traditions, sayings and turns of phrase better than any of our other authors... The characters that he depicts, whatever the flaws, are living people. They are not the author's artificially produced whimsical constructs.' The nail has truly been hit on the head. Deficiencies of plot and logical structure do limit the growth and refinement of characters, of their emotion, psychology, sensibility and so their depth and completeness. They also deny any fluent grasp of the novel as an effective totality. But even amidst the rubble of the plot Palasan survives as a genuine figure striding behemoth style through village life, bullying and buying allies and accomplices. He is convincingly human in his manipulative essence turning taps of brutishness and charm on and off as calculation and interest see fit. Indeed the entire gang of menacing rascals grouped around him, Kntouni, Khuto, their son and nephew Vassak and Garabed, the priest Der-Soukias, the lawyer and the provincial governor are all real presences united as a power unto themselves against whom the community has little avenue of appeal. Sona, Sona’s mother, Sampson and his father, Ardem and Melik Patal are all also authentic men and women with whose condition, hopes and disappointments we can identify. Broshian’s passion for salvaging the culture and folklore of his characters in addition, serve to enhance their concrete and universal humanity. These characters, even if oft out of focus, tell shocking truths of exploitation, corruption and violence born of the operations of banking and finance capital. In their very personalities they expose the structure of injustice and inhumanity that in rural Armenia sheltered behind traditions, mores, values, prejudices, customs and superstitions deemed to be Divine canon and therefore immutable. It is perhaps this ability of Broshian to so effectively bare social truths that are hidden behind public moral billboards that explains why he was so highly regarded by men such as Nalpantian and Issahakyan, Toumanian and Shirvanzade among others. Today, we too can engage with the lives of Broshian’s characters and as we read we too can happily embark upon a creative process, that by laying aside or imaginatively correcting and editing the rather too clumsy plot acquire at its end an appreciation of the novel as a compelling imaginative totality reflecting tellingly upon our own times. Eddie

And here after another long silence another draft item on Berj Broshian that I shall soon submit to Groong. In its own ramshackle but nevertheless impressive fashion, Berj Broshian’s ‘Parasites’ is a remarkably modern study of the relationship between money and social power in 19th century rural Armenia, manifest concretely as an account of the tyranny of early Armenian financiers and bankers, then known by their proper names of usurers and parasites. With his web extending far and wide Palasan, the novel’s protagonist and ‘chief of all parasites’, amasses huge fortunes. He boasts arrogantly that ‘there is not a village’ across the region ‘that is not indebted to me’ adding that ‘even the banks are in my debt!’ As for those in his thrall, ‘the lot of them are my serfs’ he proclaims (p69). Shadowing our own times, Broshian shows us society in which those producing nothing accumulate enormous wealth and with it power, all obtained from the sweat, suffering and toil of others. He tells of society in which ‘the pocket that sounded the loudest jingle… wielded the bludgeon’ (p18). An ominous figure, Palasan is an early sketch, a first draft of our own parasites and usurers euphemistically labelled bankers or financiers. That he exists today is testified to by the unseen but hated figure assassinated at the opening of Narine Groyan’s novel ‘Dog Star’, awarded the 2011 Armenian Orange Book Prize. ‘Parasites’, it is well to acknowledge at the outset, is shockingly unstable. It lacks any overriding plot, axis or coherent narrative that would give unity and collective punch to what are lively but relatively independent chapters. Though they are all placed upon a common social terrain and share the same protagonists, much of the relationship between them is a function not of the flow or inner development of plot or character but of a string of unexplained, forced turns that verging on the absurd stretch credulity and so make unusual demands on patience and imagination. Let no one claim however that these troubles drain the volume’s artistic or intellectual substance. They do not. I. Broshian’s story is set in a typical rural Armenian village of ‘O’ with nothing about it romantic or idyllic, a fact captured in a telling description of class structure on one ‘cold and misty evening’ when both the ‘rich and the poor have already taken refuge in their homes’: ‘The poor have long ago gathered their half-naked children beneath some ragged and worn cloths, whilst the man and woman of the house, lying to the left and the right of their innocent young, warm them with their own body heat and breath until sleep takes over. The rich on the other hand having dined upon what god has given them, gathered around their warm fire to rest in their thick and soft bedding (p158).’ Broshian does not however open his novel with issues of class, social justice or with any sketch of the vermin that will feed off the village. We are presented rather with inviting pictures of the community and its members that shall be afflicted, among them two young lovers, Sampson and Sona, the charismatic local mayor Ardem and the well to do, jocular farmer Melik Patal. Constructing his lovingly detailed context Broshian writes with wit, humour and a perception of social and psychological truths. Male conceit across the ages is caught splendidly. Despite ruling the social and the domestic roost, Ardem and Melik Patal moan of men’s lives allegedly bent to wives’ wishes and judgements and complain that men, ‘but simpleminded brothers of god’, are in actual fact ‘cleaning cloths in women’s hands (p32)’. More powerful still are passages that tell of Sampson and Sona’s love that they must keep concealed because in village society love is not to exist independent of marriage and marriage itself is to be arranged by parents with priorities other than their children’s desires or wishes. The young’s wishes are on occasion taken into account, but more often other, economic and social, calculations prevail. Sampson and Sona do not yet know if they are among the exceptions, and so we see them suffer those universal insecurities, fears and anxieties of love that in their particular circumstances must steal its way through the restrictive entanglements of rural economic calculation, village mores, religious prejudice and tradition. Particularly moving is the depiction of the guilt felt by Sona as she defies village moral imperatives (p46-47) so deeply imbedded in her own consciousness that for shame she dreads even the idea of telling her own mother of her love. However in Sona’s and Sampson’s case it is not backward tradition or custom but Palasan that represents the most dangerous threat to their love and to village life too. II. Palasan, a brutish, thuggish, manipulative and violent man exercises power with an executioner’s finality. He is truly a Darwinian jungle beast, the personification of financial capital’s utter disregard for other human lives. ‘As if the crows will wear black if ten nobodies are annihilated’ he retorts when challenged about his savage indifference to the plight of his victims. ‘If he falls into your hand, if he is weaker than you then smite him, trash him but make sure of your profit.’ This is his philosophy of life and business. Morality and Christian notions of ‘sin and punishment’ are dismissed as ‘priests’ grandchildren’ that the clergy employ ‘to net their fish and so obtain their dinner (p74)’. Palasan is not attired in the latest Gucci fashions, nor does he drive a 4x4 BMW. But even dressed in rough 19th century costume and riding horse and cart, he is immediately recognisable. Like our own bankers he has gathered into his ambit all who have influence and authority, the village clergy, members of the judiciary, local and even the regional government officials, all of whom do his bidding. With no fear of retribution he ignores custom, mores and traditions, dispensing titles, fixing elections and bribing judges and priests to accumulate yet more and to conceal misdeeds from scrutiny. The corrupt local priest Der Soukias expresses the scale and extent of money’s almost omnipotent force. ‘Let me try, in a friendly way, to make you understand this. A single worthless command from Palasan Agha is worth all of those from the whole village put together. Were he to demand that I swap my Christian robes for Muslim ones I would do so and will without protest pray in the name of Allah.’ (p109) Through the novel we see Palasan doggedly at work subverting due but of course limited democratic process as he plots to replace Ardem the mayor with his own man. Ardem is not suitable to moneyed power for he rejects the view that public officials should be ‘machines without will, moving only at the command of the influential.’(p128) Simultaneously Palasan with Kntouni, a fraudster and forger recently arrived from Van, connives to rewrite debtor’s notes in his possession and so squeeze his victims further. To reward his chief lieutenant Khuto’s loyalty, he conspires in addition to frame Sampson for murder and so leave Khuto’s son Garabed free to marry Sona. Thereafter he engineers an arson attack on Sampson’s family barn. To ensure adequate time for the plot to mature, he instructs the local priest to deny Sona and Samposon the necessary Church sanction for their engagement. Broshian completes Palasan’s portrait by etching into it a feature common to all Armenian moneyed elites. A native of the village O, after an interlude abroad, Palasan returns home and stands in opposition to his community. Now he is riddled with shame for being Armenian, everything about which he feels to be ugly or uncivilised. Equating sophistication with anything foreign, he monkeys Russian ways and adopts Russian variants of his own Armenian name so as to better mark himself off from the rough and ignorant natives. (We should note of course that whilst the elites adopted Russian ways to distance themselves from their peasant compatriots, the habit was also common among many of the well to do who deemed the affectation of things Russian as signs of culture and progress. The genial Ardem was one among these!) III. The almost serf-like conditions to which the village community is reduced as a result of Palasan’s grip over local government, judiciary and Church finds expression in an interesting, though not always entirely convincing literary device. In answer to questions from Smbat, a young investigative journalist just arrived in the village, it is none other than Palasan himself posturing as an ardent defender of the people, who holds forth in support of the ‘lower classes of our community’. The people he announces: ‘…are ceaselessly oppressed, exploited, squeezed by the usurers’ claws, insecure in their jobs, consumed by external and internal parasites, plundered and buried in ignorance. Your eyes bleed on beholding this…You must agree with me and with the local mayor that it is urgent that we consistently lash out against these national parasites, these ambitious opportunists and irresponsible officials, theses bloodsucking usurers and traitors who for personal gain strangle every positive striving among the people (130-131) As he speaks Palasan indirectly but accurately sketches the ideological standpoint of the national movement of the day that saw the key to reform and social progress in education. Broshian holds back no punches as he shows priests and lawyers to be of the same criminal brotherhood as Palasan. Der Soukias is tarred with the same brush as one Migidan Sako, the most notorious of Broshian’s usurers and protagonist in his most famous novel ‘The problem of Bread’. Clearly already Migidan Sako social twin, near the end of the novel Der Soukias turns out to be his biological one too! Broshian in addition captures well popular contempt for the legal profession in the service of power, a universal contempt we are reminded of repeatedly in world literature. ‘Curse your cheating grandfather’ exclaims Melik Patal. ‘You’ll relieve even a dead donkey of its horse shoes’. Blocking lawyers and priests together he concludes: ‘You…are all, of the same ilk. You first take from the living and then take from the dead.’ (p151) Palasan does not exploit and abuse without challenge and discovers a formidable opponent in Sissak who returning home carries with him a bag full of ideological prescriptions for social and national ills. In accord with the outlook of the times Sissak dedicates himself to the business of education and enlightenment believing this to be the best antidote to Palasan and his gang. Palasan however has dealt with such troublesome types before, silencing one through bribery and by encouraging and financing addiction to drugs – nicotine in this instance! In Sissak’s case however Palasan fails. Sissak is too stubborn and dedicated and slowly wins adherents among some of the community’s notables. (p99) ‘Parasites’ alas ends disappointingly with most of its last fifty pages, in a novel of only 200, burdened with sentimental allocations of happy endings for the virtuous and just rewards for the evil. Yet even here, as an apt reminder of the novel’s modern resonance, we come across a striking metaphor for the corruption of politics and democracy by financial power. Recalling better days better when members of the Church acted as genuine representatives of the community, an elderly priests remarks that ‘today politeness and hospitality’ have been swept aside by a flood of individualism and private greed: ‘It is painful to admit, but I know that today people become representative delegates to open wider not their doors but their wallets. They treat the Church as a source of income to fill their pockets. They (modern representatives) reserve the coldest treatment not just for their workers or for priests from beyond the parish but for the poor and needy too….To top it all in order to cover up their plunder they are wise enough to add a few decorations and silverware (to the Church), to do a few repairs and refurbishments that will then enable them to continue thieving.’ (p185) Replace the words ‘Church’ and ‘representative delegates’ with ‘Parliament’ and ‘MPs’, ‘Congress’ and ‘representative’, or with the proper name of any contemporary ‘democratic’ state institutions and we would have an honest depiction of 21st century ‘democratic politics’. IV. To properly appreciate ‘Parasites’ and all of Broshian’s novels, it repays pondering the weight and impact of its irregular structure and plot noted here by two examples alone. Kntouni’s unexpected appearance, though not warranted by the plot is not entirely incredible. Fraudsters from western Armenia regularly preyed upon villages in the relatively more prosperous east and so his presence serves to enhance the image of the times. But one cannot but be taken aback by the sudden announcement of his unexplained meteoric rise. Just a few pages from his first entrance we are five years on and told, with no account, that Kntouni now heads his own usurer’s enterprise. That his advance was made upon Palasan’s own home territory seems to cause no complications. Further, despite his now independent means Kntouni continues to behave as little more than a forging scribe for Palasan. This is not at all credible. Neither is the fact that at the end of these same five silent years in rural Armenia of all places, Sona and Sampson, now without the bloom of early youth are still to be married! Why? We are not given the slightest hint! Nevertheless, for all these and many other drawbacks, ‘Parasites’ remains eminently readable. The reason is best explained by Shirvanzade in a rigorous review of the novel when it was first published. For all his sharp criticism Shirvanzade underlines Broshian’s talent for creating authentic characters. `Broshian differs from our other writers in that he knows well that which he writes about. He grasps the common people's lives authentically. He grasps its language, traditions, sayings and turns of phrase better than any of our other authors... The characters that he depicts, whatever the flaws, are living people. They are not the author's artificially produced whimsical constructs.' The nail has truly been hit on the head. Deficiencies of plot and logical structure do limit the growth and refinement of characters, of their emotion, psychology, sensibility and so their depth and completeness. They also deny any fluent grasp of the novel as an effective totality. But even amidst the rubble of the plot Palasan survives as a genuine figure striding behemoth style through village life, bullying and buying allies and accomplices. He is convincingly human in his manipulative essence turning taps of brutishness and charm on and off as calculation and interest see fit. Indeed the entire gang of menacing rascals grouped around him, Kntouni, Khuto, their son and nephew Vassak and Garabed, the priest Der-Soukias, the lawyer and the provincial governor are all real presences united as a power unto themselves against whom the community has little avenue of appeal. Sona, Sona’s mother, Sampson and his father, Ardem and Melik Patal are all also authentic men and women with whose condition, hopes and disappointments we can identify. Broshian’s passion for salvaging the culture and folklore of his characters in addition, serve to enhance their concrete and universal humanity. These characters, even if oft out of focus, tell shocking truths of exploitation, corruption and violence born of the operations of banking and finance capital. In their very personalities they expose the structure of injustice and inhumanity that in rural Armenia sheltered behind traditions, mores, values, prejudices, customs and superstitions deemed to be Divine canon and therefore immutable. It is perhaps this ability of Broshian to so effectively bare social truths that are hidden behind public moral billboards that explains why he was so highly regarded by men such as Nalpantian and Issahakyan, Toumanian and Shirvanzade among others. Today, we too can engage with the lives of Broshian’s characters and as we read we too can happily embark upon a creative process, that by laying aside or imaginatively correcting and editing the rather too clumsy plot acquire at its end an appreciation of the novel as a compelling imaginative totality reflecting tellingly upon our own times. Eddie

The following quote is from Jacqueline Rose, a British intellectual and author of the 2005 'The Question of Zion'. She was not writing about Armenians but what she says fits a large swathe of modern Armenian 'intellectuals' and 'patriots' like a bespoke suit. "Victimhood is something that happens but when you turn it into an identity you're psychically and politically finished." For Armenians this cuts to the bone indeed. One consequence of 'victimhood as indentity' is the breeding of a disgusting dependency on the more powerful, a reliance on others, a complete abdicatiton of any sense of dignity, of any self sustaining will. It leads to a pleading and begging of others for a solution to your problems. The definition of Armenian identity as Genocide victims casts Armenians in that horribly helpless bleating posture with hands outstretched to imperialist passers begging for compensation. This is causing havoc for Armenians. Critically it acts as a cover for the elites currently plundering and destroying Armenia. Preoccupied with the politics of Genocide Recognition and the calls for compensation that flow from this, all expected to be kindly donated to Armenians, the bandits riding their 4X4 chariots roughshod over the lives and the future of the Armenian common people get away with murder, the murder of a nation included. Eddie

After another long silence.... I have recently returned from Armenia and can only echo the criticism made, on another page of Hyefourm, of the Church hierarchy that is letting the marvels of Armenian civilisation go to rack and ruin. I shall return to this when I write up my notes. The significant point is that once again in Armenian life corrupt Church elites unite with equally corrupt secular elites to plunder the people and their cultural legacy. But for the moment, to the subject... Among the large quantity of books I got hold of was a marvellous volume by... Nvart Toumanian, daughter of poet Hovanness Toumanian, wrote ‘Memories and Conversations’ with her father (336pp, 2009, Yerevan) inspired in part by her reading of Ekerman’s famous ‘Conversations with Goethe’. The result is a beautiful book that communicates something of the grandeur and magnanimity of the ‘Poet of all Armenians’. Toumanian earned this special knighthood and deserved it. Like no other public figure in modern Armenian history his life was a hub around which at critical times revolved an entire community and countless men and women of all classes and ages. Written as a diary enriched with subsequent recollection we have a masterpiece of its genre, an encyclopaedia of the poet’s world view, his philosophy of life and art, a true book of wisdom and an irreplaceable primary source. On colourful display are Toumanian’s exceptional charisma and magnetism, his generosity and altruism, his social solidarity and national dedication, his aesthetic sensibility and his tremendous capacity for hospitality, always ready to lay on a feast for countless and interminable guests and visitors. Of exemplary value for our own day Hovanness Toumanian’s life was and remains an unanswerable retort the decadent intellectual who lacks any sense of collective solidarity and social commitment and for whom private gain is foremost. Through his daughter’s memoirs we encounter the genuine democratic artist-intellectual, the poet who is at the same time a tireless national and social activist, the writer who is always among the people partaking of their woes and their joys, the intellectual who unconditionally sacrifices private ambition to the common good. Beyond its strictly biographical and intellectual record Nvart Toumanian’s ‘Memories and Conversations’ with its rich grasp of life can be read as drama of human struggle and creativity, as a drama of frustrated ambitions and truncated potential, of unrealised dreams, but also of hope and of human love and generosity. At points it imposes itself as a moving tragedy of the spirit harassed by dark clouds, of the grieving father, of inconsolable regret at the wastage of creative human potential, of the painful withering candle of life and the loneliness of an end sapped by a cancer that killed the poet when but 54. For the moment regards to all