Dilip Simeon's blog

April 24, 2015, marks the centenary of the Armenian genocide: how many of us remember? The Ghosts of Ararat After all, who today talks about the murderous dispersal of the Armenians?   Adolf Hitler, 1939 Hitler is believed to have said this whilst commenting on the genocide of Armenian residents of the Ottoman Empire during the period overlapping the end of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. History is witness to the inspiration this might have given him in his murderous attitude towards his enemies, and the Jews of Europe. To this day, the mere mention of Hitler’s name causes a shiver to run down our spines - but what of Armenia? It is indeed an irony that in India, nay, even the world at large, so little is spoken about what by all accounts is accepted as the twentieth century’s first act of genocide. Prior to the Great War of 1914-8, there were approximately 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Between 1915 and 1923 about ...

The Armenian genocide – the Guardian briefing Turkey has never accepted the term genocide, even though historians have demolished its denial of responsibility for up to 1.5 million deaths.   Turkish authors, including  Orhan Pamuk, have recently faced jail on treason charges for alluding to the genocide .  Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian editor, journalist and peace campaigner was murdered in 2007 for writing about the genocide. What happened to the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 was a major thing that was hidden from the Turkish nation; it was a taboo. But we have to be able to talk about the past Orhan Pamuk What’s the story? On 24 April, Armenians in Yerevan and around the world will mark the centenary of the genocide of 1915. That is the date when Ottoman authorities began arresting the leaders of the 2 million-strong minority Christian community. It is widely accepted that 1 million to 1.5 million Armenians died in the ensuing years until 1922, though th...

An Armenian Sketchbook ;  by Vasily Grossman, reviewed by Robert Chandler Armenia is a stony country, and one of the arts in which Armenians have most excelled is architecture. Few places illustrate this better than the monastery of Geghard, where two of the three adjacent churches have – literally – been gouged out of the mountainside. In one there is a spring. The water forms a large pool in a corner, then streams down a shallow channel across the centre of the church. Stone, of course, is everywhere – rough and smooth, plain and exuberantly carved. Last October, I attended Sunday mass in the third of these churches, which stands just clear of the mountainside. A tall narrow window on the southern wall let in a slanting band of almost solid sunlight. Standing in the raised east end, close to the altar, were six priests, four wearing blue robes, one in white and gold, and one, a novice, in black. Sometimes they faced the altar, sometimes the congregation. The acoustics of th...

Tamrazyan family, facing return to Armenia, hide out in church protected by medieval law The pastors and volunteers at Bethel church, a small Protestant chapel tucked away on a quiet street in a residential district of The Hague, are preparing for what looks likely to be an unusually busy and anxious Christmas. They worry that they will need to turn away some of the faithful at the door, and there are even putative plans to live-stream the services on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, such is the expected level of interest. The main concern, though, is to keep a flicker of hope alive among the Tamrazyan family – Sasun, his wife Anousche and their children Hayarpi, 21, Warduhi, 19, and Seyran, 15 – who have been holed up in the church for nearly two months, protected by a medieval law that says immigration authorities cannot enter while a religious service is ongoing.

There are some positive dimensions to the current situation. While we see democratic declines, including inside the EU, we also see  very high levels of protests globally . These are motivated by all kinds of issues, but corruption remains an important factor. For me, what’s important here is that people are recognising and acquiring ownership of their power and are becoming important political players - reclaiming democratic processes of contestation, political conflict resolution. This parallel trend of protests, whether beautifully expressed in Belarus right now, or Armenia’s 2018 Velvet Revolution is important. Both of these cases demonstrate that there is significant grassroots capacity and willingness of people to demand participation. The challenge is how to translate this mass-scale political activity through institutions. Essentially, what we're learning, once again, is that the ability of institutions to manage this democratic breakthrough, or people power, is key....

Stephen Kotkin’s meticulous biography of Joseph Stalin dispenses with the myth that he was an intellectual dullard, showing that he was quite shrewd as well as forceful.  Stephen Kotkin ,  Stalin: Volume 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 Reviewed by Jack Matlock, Jr ANYONE UNFAMILIAR with the quality of Stephen Kotkin’s four earlier books on the Soviet Union might well question whether we need a new, voluminous tome about the first fifty years of Joseph Stalin’s life. Stalin, like Hitler, has been the subject of numerous biographies, ranging from Boris Souvarine’s pioneering work to Robert C. Tucker’s multivolume study. Is there anything important to add? The answer is an emphatic yes, and not just because Kotkin’s  Stalin  is the product of a careful review of how a tyrant gained control of a country and exercised power. It dispenses with the myth that he was an intellectual dullard, showing that he was quite shrewd as well as forceful. What’s m...

Thousands of people have marched around the world to commemorate the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million  Armenians  by Ottoman Turks & demand recognition for the atrocity as a  genocide . Armenians and many historians consider the killings during the First World War to be a genocide. Although  Turkey , a successor to the  Ottoman Empire , accepts many Christian Armenians were killed in fighting during the war, the Muslim-majority country vehemently denies the killings in 1915 amounted to a genocide. Suman Keshari: The Ghosts of Ararat Robert Fisk: In the cases of two separate holocausts, Israel and Poland find it difficult to acknowledge the facts of history On Tuesday, thousands of Armenian-Americans took to the streets of  Los Angeles , waving Armenian and American flags and carrying signs reading “1915 never again” and “Turkish denial must end.” The city’s mayor, Eric Garcetti, marched alongside the demonstrators, saying in a speech ...

How many times must the dead die all over again for nations to accept the facts of history? While Poland has decided to outlaw any claims that their countrymen participated in the extermination of the Jews, Israel continues to ignore the Armenian genocide.  Poland punishes anyone who speaks of Polish participation in the Jewish Holocaust, but accepts the Armenian Holocaust. Israel insists that all must acknowledge the Jewish Holocaust – and Poland’s peripheral guilt – but will not acknowledge the Armenian Holocaust. The Israelis have been mighty pissed off with the Polish government these past few days. I don’t blame them. In fact – and I’m not referring to the racist, extremist military occupation government of Benjamin Netanyahu – the Israeli people and Jews around the world are quite right to be enraged at Poland’s latest Holocaust denialism. The Polish decision to criminalise any accusation of Polish complicity in the Holocaust, passing a law which effectively prevents...

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned over the weekend that an Israeli strike on Iran would have "disastrous" consequences for the Middle East, likely sparking a regional war, Turkish newspapers reported on Sunday. Turkey is a major U.S. ally in the region and Erdogan indicated that he had expressed his concerns to President Barack Obama.  Erdogan was quoted by the Turkish daily Hurriyet as warning against the "disastrous" outcome of a possible Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, saying: "The entire region would be devastated if Israel strikes Iran." Erdogan also criticized the international community for keeping mum on Israel's alleged nuclear weapons, while threatening Iran over what he said was a peaceful nuclear program., "Israel has between 250 to 300 nuclear warheads. Nobody is discussing that," Erdogan said, adding: "Iran says they would not produce nuclear weapons. They are saying that they would pr...

  In 1976, on the birth centenary of the founder of Pakistan, Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, one paper submitted at a seminar in Islamabad probed the reason behind Czechoslovakia’s abstention at the vote admitting Pakistan into the United Nations. (There was only one negative vote, from Afghanistan.) The reason given much later by historians was — the “Sudeten question”. A great recent book,  Creating a New Medina:State Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India  by Venkat Dhulipala, assistant professor of history, University of North Carolina, US, explains the pre-1940 opinion of the All-India Muslim League about a community of Germans living in Czechoslovakia. The Muslim leadership had decided, probably after watching the trend in Europe and the September 1938 Munich Agreement, to side with the British position appeasing Adolf Hitler. In October 1938, wr...

More than 100 years before militant Islamist gunmen murdered journalists at France's satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, another magazine very similar in style was playing an important role among the Muslim populations of both the Russian and Persian empires. (See cartoons ) Azerbaijani weekly magazine Molla Nasreddin was revolutionary for its time, bravely ridiculing clerics and criticising the political elite as well as the Russian Tsar and the Shah of Persia. Founded in 1906, it pulled no punches in tackling geopolitical events and also promoted women's rights and Westernisation. The editor-in-chief of the magazine was Jalil Mammadguluzadeh (known as Mirza Jalil), a famous Azerbaijani writer, who was also a well-known novelist. In his book, The Dead, the main protagonist is a drunken atheist, treated as a madman for telling the truth about his backward society, where girls as young as nine are forced to marry 50-year-old men. The magazine's title, Molla Nasreddin, c...