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nagorno-karabakh
How Can Americans Support Peace in Nagorno-Karabakh?
The U.S. should support a ceasefire and a lasting and stable negotiated peace that respects the human rights and self-determination of all the people of Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Oct 10, 2020
Americans are dealing with an upcoming general election, a pandemic that has killed over 200,000 of us, and corporate news media whose business model has degenerated to selling different versions of "The Trump Show" to their advertisers. So who has time to pay attention to a new war halfway around the world? But with so much of the world afflicted by 20 years of U.S.-led wars and the resulting political, humanitarian and refugee crises, we can't afford not to pay attention to the dangerous new outbreak of war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.
Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a bloody war over Nagorno-Karabakh from 1988 to 1994, by the end of which at least 30,000 people had been killed and a million or more had fled or been driven out of their homes. By 1994, Armenian forces had occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding districts, all internationally recognized as parts of Azerbaijan. But now the war has flared up again, hundreds of people have been killed, and both sides are shelling civilian targets and terrorizing each other's civilian populations.
Nagorno-Karabakh has been an ethnically Armenian region for centuries. After the Persian Empire ceded this part of the Caucasus to Russia in the Treaty of Gulistan in 1813, the first census ten years later identified Nagorno-Karabakh's population as 91% Armenian. The USSR's decision to assign Nagorno-Karabakh to the Azerbaijan SSR in 1923, like its decision to assign Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, was an administrative decision whose dangerous consequences only became clear when the U.S.S.R. began to disintegrate in the late 1980s.
In 1988, responding to mass protests, the local parliament in Nagorno-Karabakh voted by 110-17 to request its transfer from the Azerbaijan SSR to the Armenian SSR, but the Soviet government rejected the request and inter-ethnic violence escalated. In 1991, Nagorno-Karabakh and the neighboring Armenian-majority Shahumian region, held an independence referendum and declared independence from Azerbaijan as the Republic of Artsakh, its historic Armenian name. When the war ended in 1994, Nagorno-Karabakh and most of the territory around it were in Armenian hands, and hundreds of thousands of refugees had fled in both directions.
There have been clashes since 1994, but the present conflict is the most dangerous and deadly. Since 1992, diplomatic negotiations to resolve the conflict have been led by the "Minsk Group," formed by the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE) and led by the United States, Russia and France. In 2007, the Minsk Group met with Armenian and Azerbaijani officials in Madrid and proposed a framework for a political solution, known as the Madrid Principles.
The Madrid Principles would return five of the twelve districts of Shahumyan province to Azerbaijan, while the five districts of Naborno-Karabakh and two districts between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia would vote in a referendum to decide their future, which both parties would commit to accept the results of. All refugees would have the right to return to their old homes.
Ironically, one of the most vocal opponents of the Madrid Principles is the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), a lobby group for the Armenian diaspora in the United States. It supports Armenian claims to the entire disputed territory and does not trust Azerbaijan to respect the results of a referendum. It also wants the de facto government of the Republic of Artsakh to be allowed to join international negotiations on its future, which is probably a good idea.
On the other side, the Azerbaijani government of President Ilham Aliyev now has the full backing of Turkey for its demand that all Armenian forces must disarm or withdraw from the disputed region, which is still internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan. Turkey is reportedly paying jihadi mercenaries from Turkish-occupied northern Syria to go and fight for Azerbaijan, raising the specter of Sunni extremists exacerbating a conflict between Christian Armenians and mostly Shiite Muslim Azeris.
On the face of it, despite these hard-line positions, this brutal raging conflict should be possible to resolve by dividing the disputed territories between the two sides, as the Madrid Principles attempted to do. Meetings in Geneva and now Moscow seems to be making progress toward a ceasefire and a renewal of diplomacy. On Friday, October 9th, the two opposing foreign ministers met for the first time in Moscow, in a meeting mediated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and on Saturday they agreed to a temporary truce to recover bodies and exchange prisoners.
The greatest danger is that either Turkey, Russia, the U.S. or Iran should see some geopolitical advantage in escalating or becoming more involved in this conflict. Azerbaijan launched its current offensive with the full backing of Turkey's President Erdogan, who appears to be using it to demonstrate Turkey's renewed power in the region and strengthen its position in conflicts and disputes over Syria, Libya, Cyprus, oil exploration in the Eastern Mediterranean and the region in general. If that is the case, how long must this go on before Erdogan has made his point, and can Turkey control the violence it is unleashing, as it has so tragically failed to do in Syria?
Russia and Iran have nothing to gain and everything to lose from an escalating war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and are both calling for peace. Armenia's popular Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan came to power after Armenia's 2018 "Velvet Revolution" and has followed a policy of non-alignment between Russia and the West, even though Armenia is part of Russia's CSTO military alliance. Russia is committed to defend Armenia if it is attacked by Azerbaijan or Turkey, but has made it clear that that commitment does not extend to Nagorno-Karabakh. Iran is also more closely aligned with Armenia than Azerbaijan, but now its own large Azeri population has taken to the streets to support Azerbaijan and protest their government's bias toward Armenia.
As for the destructive and destabilizing role the United States habitually plays in the greater Middle East, Americans should beware of any U.S. effort to exploit this conflict for self-serving U.S. ends. That could include fueling the conflict to undermine Armenia's confidence in its alliance with Russia, to draw Armenia into a more Western, pro-NATO alignment. Or the U.S. could exacerbate and exploit unrest in Iran's Azeri community as part of its "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran.
At any suggestion that the U.S. is exploiting or planning to exploit this conflict for its own ends, Americans should remember the people of Armenia and Azerbaijan whose lives are being lost or destroyed every day that this war rages on, and should condemn and oppose any effort to prolong or worsen their pain and suffering for U.S. geopolitical advantage.
Instead the U.S. should fully cooperate with its partners in the OSCE's Minsk Group to support a ceasefire and a lasting and stable negotiated peace that respects the human rights and self-determination of all the people of Armenia and Azerbaijan.
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Last US Cluster Bomb Maker Shuts Down, But the Munitions Still in Use Worldwide
Cluster bombs in Yemen and Syria are causing 'unacceptable human suffering and deserve a strong response,' new report says
Sep 01, 2016
The last remaining U.S. cluster bomb maker has closed up shop, citing "regulatory scrutiny and reduced orders for the internationally banned munition," Foreign Policy reports.
Rhode Island-based Textron Systems made the announcement just months after the Obama administration blocked the transfer of a CBU-105 shipment to Saudi Arabia. Human rights groups had been pressuring the U.S. government to take action amid evidence that the Saudi-led coalition had used cluster bombs in Yemen, possibly hurting and killing civilians.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) spokesperson Mary Wareham told Foreign Policy, "Textron was the last U.S. manufacturer of cluster munitions, so this decision now clears the path for the administration and Congress to work together to permanently end U.S. production, transfer, and use of cluster munitions."
Now there is even more support for that call. On Thursday, a coalition of human rights groups known as the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC), founded by HRW, published a report which found that cluster bombs in Yemen and Syria are causing "unacceptable human suffering and deserve a strong response."
"More countries are endorsing the ban on cluster munition use enshrined in the Convention on Cluster Munitions," Wareham said in a press release (pdf) for the report. "All countries concerned by the near-daily reports of cluster munition attacks in Syria should call for an immediate end to the use and encourage the users to embrace the international ban on these weapons."
Casualties from cluster bomb use in 2015 were recorded in Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine, while casualties from the remains of the weapons--which operate by splintering into mini-bombs, or "bomblets," that can detonate long after a battle has ceased, much like landmines--were recorded in those three countries as well as Afghanistan, Cambodia, Chad, Lebanon, Laos, and the regions of Nagorno-Karabakh and Western Sahara.
Of those casualties, the report found, 97 percent were civilians.
Although the Obama administration banned the transfer of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia this year, the U.S. has not signed the 2008 convention, which prohibits the use, sale, and transfer of the weapons and requires provision of victim assistance and the destruction of cluster bomb stockpiles within eight years.
"Countries that have yet to ban cluster munitions should revisit their position and stand in solidarity with victims of these weapons by making a commitment to join the international treaty," Wareham continued. "The question is not why, but why not join the sole international instrument specifically dedicated to ending the suffering caused by these weapons."
Jeff Abramson, coordinator of the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor initiative, added that "countries are making progress" in implementing the convention, but that "more resources and better use of existing ones are needed" to ensure safety for residents and aid to survivors.
And while the U.S. may have officially stopped cluster bomb production, American banks are still major financiers of companies that manufacture them.
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To End No Wars
In a world awash with weak states, powerful weapons, and crumbling institutions, conflicts can easily continue for generations — and perhaps never end.
Mar 10, 2016
Jason Smith was both very unlucky and very lucky.
His bad luck began on February 20, 2015, when he was walking back to his home in McAdoo, Pennsylvania on a very cold evening. He doesn't quite remember what happened, but he thinks that he tripped and fell face down into the snow. He lost consciousness and remained that way for the next 12 hours. He stopped breathing. His heart stopped pumping blood. When paramedics pulled him from the snow, they declared him dead.
Here's where the luck comes in. Jason Smith's body temperature dropped below 68 degrees, which put him into a state of hibernation. The emergency personnel transported Smith to a nearby hospital where the staff performed CPR. After another couple hours, doctors filled him up with new, oxygenated blood. His heart resumed beating. After a two-week coma, Smith woke up. He'd lost his toes and his pinkies to frostbite, but his brain had miraculously survived intact.
Or perhaps it was not a miracle. After all, hypothermia is now frequently used in hospitals in the treatment of heart attacks. Doctors have known for some time that lowering the body's temperature can help it recover from trauma.
Many countries today find themselves in Jason Smith's face-down-in-the-snow predicament. Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia are all suffering massive trauma, in this case as a result of armed conflict and outside intervention. Having fallen into the category of "failed states," they are all practically DOA, at least as functioning entities.
It's always possible that a miracle cure -- a robust peace treaty followed by some form of nation-building -- will end the bloodshed in these countries and gradually knit their disparate parts back together.
But I wouldn't count on it.
In some cases, the wars will just continue, as they have in Afghanistan and Iraq ever since the celebrated application of U.S. shock-and-awe tactics. Missions can be declared accomplished, and expeditionary forces withdrawn. But Pandora's horrors cannot be so easily reboxed. We've gotten accustomed to wars that have finite terms, like the American Civil War or World War I. But at one time conflicts stretched across generations, like the Hundred Years' War between England and France. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could conceivably last that long as well.
If they're lucky, such conflict-ridden states might endure the same intermission that Jason Smith experienced. The wars won't end. They will just be frozen, the temperature of the conflict brought down through a succession of ceasefires. At some point in the future, these failed states might be brought back to life, perhaps when some of the trauma has healed or the infections of hatred have subsided. In this best-case scenario, the countries involved might lose some extremities -- a Crimean pinkie, for instance -- but they will be fortunate to have pulled through the worst of it. On the other hand, these countries might fall apart no matter how long their deep freeze lasts, just as all those hopeful immortals who've opted to bury their dead bodies in tanks of liquid nitrogen will never likely thaw back to life.
This raises a fundamental question about the current world situation. It's become commonplace to speak of the global war on terror as a "forever war." But perhaps the problem runs a great deal deeper.
Perhaps we are no longer able to end any wars.
The Elusive Peace
The quintessential frozen conflict of our era is over 60 years old.
The Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice. No peace treaty marked the end of combat.
In other words, for more than 60 years, the war between the two Koreans has been in a state of suspended animation. North and South have exchanged artillery fire, clashed at sea, and maintained a nearly non-stop war of words during that period. At any point, up to and including the current period of deteriorating relations, the war could have turned hot. Yet for the most part, Koreans in North and South have gone about their separate business, often inured to the trauma of having their peninsula torn in two.
Frozen wars are not the same as cold wars. After all, the United States and Soviet Union never actually fought against each other, not directly at least. A frozen conflict, meanwhile, is one that was once hot and has since iced over.
The term "frozen conflict" has been most often used in conjunction with wars on the Russian periphery -- in Moldova, Georgia, and now in Ukraine. In all three cases, separatists backed by Moscow carved out their own semi-autonomous regions -- in Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and now the Donbass. The fighting has largely tapered off. The separatist regions have been recognized by only a handful of other states. These are stand-offs with no easy solutions in sight.
It's not just a post-Soviet problem. Look at the map through this lens of "frozen conflicts" and you see that much of the world has fallen into this crevasse. Many of the world's hotspots are in fact in a deep freeze: Kashmir, Israel-Palestine, the Taiwan Strait, Burma, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Sudan, southern Thailand, northwest Pakistan, eastern Congo, eastern Saudi Arabia.
In fact, it's very difficult to find a peace that is as clear-cut and durable as the one that prevailed between France and Germany after World War II or that exists today between the United States and Vietnam. The war in Bosnia ended in 1995 with the Dayton Accords. Angola ended a 27-year conflict in 2002. The conflict in Aceh ended in 2005. The Sri Lankan government brought an end to the civil war in that country (though largely through brutality rather than diplomacy).
Elsewhere, peace has been elusive. Ethiopia and Eritrea still squabble over disputed territory. The Turkish government and Kurdish separatists, after having apparently achieved a peaceful rapprochement, are now renewing hostilities. The Colombian government and the major rebel group FARC were supposed to sign a peace agreement this month, but it now looks like that won't happen. Virtually everywhere else that conflict is ongoing, diplomats have failed to cajole the warring factions into signing peace treaties.
Steven Pinker may well be right about the declining levels of violence in the world. But there hasn't been a corresponding increase in sustainable peace. We've frozen our devils in place in the hopes that the better angels of our nature will one day wing into sight to save us from ourselves.
Exhibit A: Syria.
Syria and Beyond
It would be premature to list Syria as a frozen conflict.
The ceasefire brokered by the United States and Russia has only been in place for about two weeks -- since February 27. It doesn't apply to areas under the control of the Islamic State or the al-Nusra Front. And since Turkey considers the Kurdish rebels in Syria to be terrorists and Russia often classifies any group opposed to the government of Bashar al-Assad in similar terms, the very term "ceasefire" lacks substantive meaning. According to some estimates, 135 of people have died during this period of suspended hostilities -- and that's only people in the area covered by the ceasefire. Elsewhere in Syria, another 552 people have been killed. And the number of civilian casualties has increased in the last couple days.
At several points during the Syrian conflict, it seemed as if Assad was on his way out, defeated by anti-government rebels and the Salafists of the Islamic State. When Russia intervened on the government's side, it managed to achieve exactly the same outcome as in Ukraine, bolstering a beleaguered minority determined to dig in its heels. Stalemate is a key ingredient of a frozen conflict.
Of course there was no guarantee that Syria could have avoided a frozen outcome if Russia had stayed out of the conflict. The divisions in the country -- ethnic, confessional, ideological -- ensure that it will be very difficult to recreate any version of the old Syria in the future. The hatreds run deep, violence has become endemic, and outside actors have too many contradictory objectives to find a satisfactory resolution.
The situation in Syria demonstrates the sheer difficulty of reaching peace in today's world. There are five main reasons why peace is so often beyond our grasp.
The world is awash in weapons. The volume of major weapons transfers went up 16 percent between 2010 and 2014 compared to the previous four-year period, and the United States is the leading driver of the $76 billion industry. Arms supplied to one faction often end up in the hands of its enemies, making arms embargos and targeted weapons transfers nearly impossible. And just as we have an explosion of shootings in the United States because of the availability of handguns, wars are much more likely to start, continue, and resist resolution because young men continue to have access to truckloads of sophisticated weaponry.
Both international and regional institutions are weak. The United Nations and regional bodies like the African Union are too weak to force combatants to lay down their weapons, too weak to provide enough peacekeepers to enforce a ceasefire, too weak to provide sufficient funds to rebuild conflict zones and ensure that strife doesn't return. Such institutions remain weak in part because:
Superpowers like the United States and would-be superpowers like Russia and Turkey are determined to achieve their goals by force. The United States continues to practice a la carte multilateralism, supporting only those international efforts that intersect with its national interests. As long as Washington continues to rule by drone, forget about a robust international rule of law and the institutions required to uphold it. And don't expect other countries to do anything other than follow the leader.
States are weaker too. Thanks to the prevailing orthodoxy of neoliberalism -- and its requirements to privatize, restrict government "interference" in the economy, and cut back on welfare provisions -- states have fewer nation-building levers at their disposal and therefore command less loyalty from their citizens. Consequently,
Particularism is flourishing. Ethnic nationalism and religious fundamentalism have greater appeal in the absence of strong consolidating ideologies. In many countries, ideologies such as Arab nationalism, Marxism, and liberal democracy have all failed to secure peace and prosperity. It's no surprise, then, that people are turning to ideologies that are far narrower in scope and audience.
Twenty-five years ago, the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thereafter, we were supposed to embark on a path of peace and prosperity. But somehow, we lost our way. We tripped. We fell. And now we find ourselves, like Jason Smith, face down in the snow. If we're lucky, we'll get pulled out in the nick of time, our various traumas frozen in suspended animation. We will have lost something in the process, but we will survive.
But we may not be lucky. Despite our fine words and the efforts of hardworking diplomats, we may no longer be able to end wars. Live by the sword, die by the sword -- and there are no medical miracles that can save us from that terminal illness.
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A "War Process" Not a "Peace Process": On US Military Aid to Israel
We Americans have funny notions about foreign aid.
Feb 10, 2014
In this case, however, truth is at least as strange as fiction. Consider that the top recipient of U.S. foreign aid over the past three decades isn't some impoverished land filled with starving kids, but a wealthy nation with a per-head gross domestic product on par with the European Union average, and higher than that of Italy, Spain, or South Korea.
Consider also that this top recipient of such aid -- nearly all of it military since 2008 -- has been busily engaged in what looks like a nineteenth-century-style colonization project. In the late 1940s, our beneficiary expelled some 700,000 indigenous people from the land it was claiming. In 1967, our client seized some contiguous pieces of real estate and ever since has been colonizing these territories with nearly 650,000 of its own people. It has divided the conquered lands with myriad checkpoints and roads accessible only to the colonizers and is building a 440-mile wall around (and cutting into) the conquered territory, creating a geography of control that violates international law.
" Ethnic cleansing" is a harsh term, but apt for a situation in which people are driven out of their homes and lands because they are not of the right tribe. Though many will balk at leveling this charge against Israel -- for that country is, of course, the top recipient of American aid and especially military largesse -- who would hesitate to use the term if, in a mirror-image world, all of this were being inflicted on Israeli Jews?
Military Aid to Israel
Arming and bankrolling a wealthy nation acting in this way may, on its face, seem like terrible policy. Yet American aid has been flowing to Israel in ever greater quantities. Over the past 60 years, in fact, Israel has absorbed close to a quarter-trillion dollars in such aid. Last year alone, Washington sent some $3.1 billion in military aid, supplemented by allocations for collaborative military research and joint training exercises.
Overall, the United States covers nearly one quarter of Israel's defense budget -- from tear gas canisters to F-16 fighter jets. In their 2008-2009 assault on Gaza, the Israeli Defense Forces made use of M-92 and M-84 "dumb bombs," Paveway II and JDAM guided "smart bombs," AH-64 Apache attack helicopters equipped with AGM-114 Hellfire guided missiles, M141 "bunker defeat" munitions, and special weapons like M825A1 155mm white phosphorous munitions -- all supplied as American foreign aid. (Uniquely among Washington's aid recipients, Israel is also permitted to spend 25% of the military funding from Washington on weapons made by its own weapons industry.)
Why is Washington doing this? The most common answer is the simplest: Israel is Washington's "ally." But the United States has dozens of allies around the world, none of which are subsidized in anything like this fashion by American taxpayer dollars. As there is no formal treaty alliance between the two nations and given the lopsided nature of the costs and benefits of this relationship, a far more accurate term for Israel's tie to Washington might be "client state."
And not a particularly loyal client either. If massive military aid is supposed to give Washington leverage over Israel (as it normally does in client-state relationships), it is difficult to detect. In case you hadn't noticed, rare is the American diplomatic visit to Israel that is not greeted with an in-your-face announcement of intensified colonization of Palestinian territory, euphemistically called "settlement expansion."
Washington also provides aid to Palestine totaling, on average, $875 million annually in Obama's first term (more than double what George W. Bush gave in his second term). That's a little more than a quarter of what Israel gets. Much of it goes to projects of dubious net value like the development of irrigation networks at a moment when the Israelis are destroying Palestinian cisterns and wells elsewhere in the West Bank. Another significant part of that funding goes toward training the Palestinian security forces. Known as "Dayton forces" (after the American general, Keith Dayton, who led their training from 2005 to 2010), these troops have a grim human rights record that includes acts of torture, as Dayton himself has admitted. One former Dayton deputy, an American colonel, described these security forces to al-Jazeera as an outsourced "third Israeli security arm." According to Josh Ruebner, national advocacy director for the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation and author of Shattered Hopes: Obama's Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace, American aid to Palestine serves mainly to entrench the Israeli occupation.
A Dishonest Broker
Nothing is equal when it comes to Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip -- and the numbers say it all. To offer just one example, the death toll from Operation Cast Lead, Israel's 2008-2009 assault on the Gaza Strip, was 1,385 Palestinians (the majority of them civilians) and 13 Israelis, three of them civilians.
"Nothing is equal when it comes to Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip -- and the numbers say it all."
And yet mainstream opinion in the U.S. insists on seeing the two parties as essentially equal. Harold Koh, former dean of the Yale Law School and until recently the top lawyer at the State Department, has been typical in comparing Washington's role to "adult supervision" of "a playground populated by warring switchblade gangs." It was a particularly odd choice of metaphors, given that one side is equipped with small arms and rockets of varying sophistication, the other with nuclear weapons and a state-of-the-art modern military subsidized by the world's only superpower.
Washington's active role in all of this is not lost on anyone on the world stage -- except Americans, who have declared themselves to be the even-handed arbiters of a conflict involving endless failed efforts at brokering a "peace process." Globally, fewer and fewer observers believe in this fiction of Washington as a benevolent bystander rather than a participant heavily implicated in a humanitarian crisis. In 2012, the widely respected International Crisis Group described the "peace process" as "a collective addiction that serves all manner of needs, reaching an agreement no longer being the main one."
The contradiction between military and diplomatic support for one party in the conflict and the pretense of neutrality cannot be explained away. "Looked at objectively, it can be argued that American diplomatic efforts in the Middle East have, if anything, made achieving peace between Palestinians and Israelis more difficult," writes Rashid Khalidi, a historian at Columbia University, and author of Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East.
Evasive Silence
American policy elites are unable or unwilling to talk about Washington's destructive role in this situation. There is plenty of discussion about a one-state versus a two-state solution, constant disapproval of Palestinian violence, occasional mild criticism ("not helpful") of the Israeli settlements, and lately, a lively debate about the global boycott, divestment, and sanction movement (BDS) led by Palestinian civil society to pressure Israel into a "just and lasting" peace. But when it comes to what Americans are most responsible for -- all that lavish military aid and diplomatic cover for one side only -- what you get is either euphemism or an evasive silence.
In general, the American media tends to treat our arming of Israel as part of the natural order of the universe, as beyond question as the force of gravity. Even the "quality" media shies away from any discussion of Washington's real role in fueling the Israel-Palestine conflict. Last month, for instance, the New York Times ran an article about a prospective "post-American" Middle East without any mention of Washington's aid to Israel, or for that matter to Egypt, or the Fifth Fleet parked in Bahrain.
You might think that the progressive hosts of MSNBC's news programs would be all over the story of what American taxpayers are subsidizing, but the topic barely flickers across the chat shows of Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, and others. Given this across-the-board selective reticence, American coverage of Israel and Palestine, and particularly of American military aid to Israel, resembles the Agatha Christie novel in which the first-person narrator, observing and commenting on the action in calm semi-detachment, turns out to be the murderer.
Strategic Self-Interest and Unconditional Military Aid
On the activist front, American military patronage of Israel is not much discussed either, in large part because the aid package is so deeply entrenched that no attempt to cut it back could succeed in the near future. Hence, the global BDS campaign has focused on smaller, more achievable targets, though as Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the Jerusalem Fund, an advocacy group, told me, the BDS movement does envision an end to Washington's military transfers in the long term. This makes tactical sense, and both the Jerusalem Fund and the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation are engaged in ongoing campaigns to inform the public about American military aid to Israel.
Less understandable are the lobbying groups that advertise themselves as "pro-peace," champions of "dialogue" and "conversation," but share the same bottom line on military aid for Israel as their overtly hawkish counterparts. For instance, J Street ("pro-Israel and pro-peace"), a Washington-based nonprofit which bills itself as a moderate alternative to the powerhouse lobbying outfit, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), supports both "robust" military aid and any supplemental disbursements on offer from Washington to the Israeli Defense Forces. Americans for Peace Now similarly takes the position that Washington should provide "robust assistance" to ensure Israel's "qualitative military edge." At the risk of sounding literal-minded, any group plumping for enormous military aid packages to a country acting as Israel has is emphatically not "pro-peace." It's almost as if the Central America solidarity groups from the 1980s had demanded peace, while lobbying Washington to keep funding the Contras and the Salvadoran military.
Outside the various factions of the Israel lobby, the landscape is just as flat. The Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank close to the Democratic Party, regularly issues pious statements about new hopes for the "peace process" -- with never a mention of how our unconditional flow of advanced weaponry might be a disincentive to any just resolution of the situation.
There is, by the way, a similar dynamic at work when it comes to Washington's second biggest recipient of foreign aid, Egypt. Washington's expenditure of more than $60 billion over the past 30 years ensured both peace with Israel and Cold War loyalty, while propping up an authoritarian government with a ghastly human rights record. As the post-Mubarak military restores its grip on Egypt, official Washington is currently at work finding ways to keep the military aid flowing despite a congressional ban on arming regimes that overthrow elected governments. There is, however, at least some mainstream public debate in the U.S. about ending aid to the Egyptian generals who have violently reclaimed power. Investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica has even drafted a handy "explainer" about U.S. military aid to Egypt -- though they have not tried to explain aid to Israel.
Silence about U.S.-Israel relations is, to a large degree, hardwired into Beltway culture. As George Perkovich, director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told the Washington Post, "It's like all things having to do with Israel and the United States. If you want to get ahead, you don't talk about it; you don't criticize Israel, you protect Israel."
"Silence about U.S.-Israel relations is, to a large degree, hardwired into Beltway culture."
This is regrettable, as Washington's politically invisible military aid to Israel is not just an impediment to lasting peace, but also a strategic and security liability. As General David Petraeus, then head of U.S. Central Command, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2010, the failure to reach a lasting resolution to the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians makes Washington's other foreign policy objectives in the region more difficult to achieve. It also, he pointed out, foments anti-American hatred and fuels al-Qaeda and other violent groups. Petraeus's successor at CENTCOM, General James Mattis, echoed this list of liabilities in a public dialogue with Wolf Blitzer last July:
"I paid a military security price every day as a commander of CENTCOM because the Americans were seen as biased in support of Israel, and that [alienates] all the moderate Arabs who want to be with us because they can't come out publicly in support of people who don't show respect for the Arab Palestinians."
Don't believe the generals? Ask a terrorist. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks now imprisoned at Guantanamo, told interrogators that he was motivated to attack the United States in large part because of Washington's leading role in assisting Israel's repeated invasions of Lebanon and the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians.
The Israel lobby wheels out a battery of arguments in favor of arming and funding Israel, including the assertion that a step back from such aid for Israel would signify a "retreat" into "isolationism." But would the United States, a global hegemon busily engaged in nearly every aspect world affairs, be "isolated" if it ceased giving lavish military aid to Israel? Was the United States "isolated" before 1967 when it expanded that aid in a major way? These questions answer themselves.
Sometimes the mere act of pointing out the degree of U.S. aid to Israel provokes accusations of having a special antipathy for Israel. This may work as emotional blackmail, but if someone proposed that Washington start shipping Armenia $3.1 billion worth of armaments annually so that it could begin the conquest of its ancestral province of Nagorno-Karabakh in neighboring Azerbaijan, the plan would be considered ludicrous -- and not because of a visceral dislike for Armenians. Yet somehow the assumption that Washington is required to generously arm the Israeli military has become deeply institutionalized in this country.
Fake Peace Process, Real War Process
Today, Secretary of State John Kerry is leading a push for a renewed round of the interminable American-led peace process in the region that has been underway since the mid-1970s. It's hardly a bold prediction to suggest that this round, too, will fail. The Israeli minister of defense, Moshe Ya'alon, has already publicly mocked Kerry in his quest for peace as "obsessive and messianic" and added that the newly proposed framework for this round of negotiations is "not worth the paper it's printed on." Other Israeli high officials blasted Kerry for his mere mention of the potential negative consequences to Israel of a global boycott if peace is not achieved.
But why shouldn't Ya'alon and other Israeli officials tee off on the hapless Kerry? After all, the defense minister knows that Washington will wield no stick and that bushels of carrots are in the offing, whether Israel rolls back or redoubles its land seizures and colonization efforts. President Obama has boasted that the U.S. has never given so much military aid to Israel as under his presidency. On January 29th, the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted unanimously to upgrade Israel's status to "major strategic partner." With Congress and the president guaranteeing that unprecedented levels of military aid will continue to flow, Israel has no real incentive to change its behavior.
Usually such diplomatic impasses are blamed on the Palestinians, but given how little is left to squeeze out of them, doing so this time will test the creativity of official Washington. Whatever happens, in the post-mortems to come there will be no discussion in Washington about the role its own policies played in undermining a just and lasting agreement.
How much longer will this silence last? The arming and bankrolling of a wealthy nation committing ethnic cleansing has something to offend conservatives, progressives, and just about every other political grouping in America. After all, how often in foreign policy does strategic self-interest align so neatly with human rights and common decency?
Intelligent people can and do disagree about a one-state versus a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. People of goodwill disagree about the global BDS campaign. But it is hard to imagine what kind of progress can ever be made toward a just and lasting settlement between Israel and Palestine until Washington quits arming one side to the teeth.
"If it weren't for U.S. support for Israel, this conflict would have been resolved a long time ago," says Josh Ruebner. Will we Americans ever acknowledge our government's active role in destroying the chances for a just and lasting peace between Palestine and Israel?
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Dangerous Games in Syria
NEW YORK - America's most vital national security concern is to maintain calm, productive relations with Russia.
The reason is obvious: Russia and the United States have thousands of nuclear warheads targeted on each other. Many are ready to launch in minutes. Compared to this threat, all of America's other security issues are minor.
Avoiding confrontations with a major nuclear power is obvious. Yet the United States and Russia are ignoring such common sense in their increasingly heated war of words over Syria's civil war.
Jun 17, 2012
NEW YORK - America's most vital national security concern is to maintain calm, productive relations with Russia.
The reason is obvious: Russia and the United States have thousands of nuclear warheads targeted on each other. Many are ready to launch in minutes. Compared to this threat, all of America's other security issues are minor.
Avoiding confrontations with a major nuclear power is obvious. Yet the United States and Russia are ignoring such common sense in their increasingly heated war of words over Syria's civil war.
The US and its allies have been actively trying to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria for over a year. They have been pouring arms, money, communications gear and fighters into Syria to take advantage of a popular Sunni uprising against the Alawite-dominated regime.
Washington's intervention in Syria is driven by its obsession to undermine Iran by bringing down its most important Arab ally. Israel, which exerts enormous political pressure over US Mideast policy in an election year, sees destabilizing Syria as a triple win: a blow to its arch enemy Iran; a blow to Syria's efforts to regain its strategic Golan Heights that Israel captured in 1967, then annexed; and wrecking the key backer of Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Palestinians.
Last week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose presidential ambitions are increasingly evident, accused Russia of selling MI-24 helicopter gunships to Syria. Russia angrily denied the charge and asserted that US anti-riot gear was being used against demonstrators across the Mideast.
Washington scourged Syria for attacking civilian targets. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. The same week, the US-installed president of Afghanistan pleaded with Washington to stop its air strikes that are killing many civilians. Pakistan's feeble government begged Washington to halt its drone attacks.
The angry Russians could have added that the US has been buying rocket-armed Russian-made MI-17 combat helicopters from them for use by Afghan government forces, and using helicopter and AC-130 gunships in Afghanistan. Or citing US sales of advanced Apache attack helicopters to Israel that were used to attack civilian targets in Gaza.
Syria has long been a close ally of Moscow. US attempts to overthrow the Assad regime were sure to infuriate and alarm Moscow, which sees US plots everywhere to undermine Russia. The Kremlin must find a way to answer the US challenge or lose face.
Meanwhile, another US-Russia fracas is brewing up in the Caucasus. Relations between the two great powers are still raw due to the 2008 mini-war between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia. Washington helped overthrow the former Georgian government of Eduard Shevardnadze in the so-called "Rose Revolution," replacing him with close US ally, Mikhail Shakashvilli.
The new Georgian leader quickly turned his small Caucasian nation into a base for US and Israel intelligence and military operations. In 2008, Shakashvilli foolishly picked a fight with Russia. US warships were moved into the Black Sea, setting of a war scare in the region before tempers cooled.
Now, the US is back playing the Great Game in the Caucasus while the Georgia feud still simmers. This time it's in oil-rich Azerbaijan, which has become a key American and Israeli ally. The Baku regime just bought $1.6 billion worth of Israeli arms.
Azerbaijan and Armenia, a close Russian ally, have been warring for a decade over disputed Nagorno-Karabakh. This obscure conflict is heating up again as Russia and the US back opposite sides.
CIA has been busy for some time trying to stir up Azeri separatists in northern Iran. The US and Israel might use Azerbaijan as a base to attack Iran.
As if Russo-American relations were not bad enough, US Republicans demand President Barack Obama "get tough" with Moscow. Threats fly back and forth over the planned US missile defense shield in Eastern Europe that enrages the Kremlin.
Provoking or antagonizing Russia over areas that are of no vital US strategic interest is dangerous and childish. Moscow and Washington should be seeking peaceful resolutions in Syria and the Caucasus, not playing silly Cold War games.
Hopefully, Presidents Obama and Vladimir Putin will sit down and talk some grown-up sense when they meet at a summit this week in Mexico.
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Stealth Superpower: How Turkey Is Chasing China to Become the Next Big Thing
The future is no longer in plastics, as the businessman in the 1967 film The Graduate insisted. Rather, the future is in China.
Jun 14, 2010
The future is no longer in plastics, as the businessman in the 1967 film The Graduate insisted. Rather, the future is in China.
If a multinational corporation doesn't shoehorn China into its business plan, it courts the ridicule of its peers and the outrage of its shareholders. The language of choice for ambitious undergraduates is Mandarin. Apocalyptic futurologists are fixated on an eventual global war between China and the United States. China even occupies valuable real estate in the imaginations of our fabulists. Much of the action of Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age, for example, takes place in a future neo-Confucian China, while the crew members of the space ship on the cult TV show Firefly mix Chinese curse words into their dialogue.
Why doesn't Turkey have a comparable grip on American visions of the future? Characters in science fiction novels don't speak Turkish. Turkish-language programs are as scarce as hen's teeth on college campuses. Turkey doesn't even qualify as part of everyone's favorite group of up-and-comers, that swinging BRIC quartet of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Turkey remains stubbornly fixed in Western culture as a backward-looking land of doner kebabs, bazaars, and guest workers.
But take population out of the equation -- an admittedly big variable -- and Turkey promptly becomes a likely candidate for future superpower. It possesses the 17th top economy in the world and, according to Goldman Sachs, has a good shot at breaking into the top 10 by 2050. Its economic muscle is also well defended: after decades of NATO assistance, the Turkish military is now a regional powerhouse.
Perhaps most importantly, Turkey occupies a vital crossroads between Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia. A predominantly Muslim democracy atop the ruins of Byzantium, it bridges the Islamic and Judeo-Christian traditions, even as it sits perched at the nexus of energy politics. All roads once led to Rome; today all pipelines seem to lead to Turkey. If superpower status followed the rules of real estate -- location, location, location -- then Turkey would already be near the top of the heap.
As a quintessential rising middle power, Turkey no longer hesitates to put itself in the middle of major controversies. In the last month alone, Turkish mediation efforts nearly heralded a breakthrough in the Iran nuclear crisis, and Ankara supported the flotilla that recently tried to break Israel's blockade of Gaza. With these and other less high-profile interventions, Turkey has stepped out of the shadows and now threatens to settle into the prominent place on the world stage once held by its predecessor. In the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire was a force to be reckoned with, spreading through the Balkans to the gates of Vienna before devolving over the next 200 years into "the sick man of Europe."
Today, a dynamic neo-Ottoman spirit animates Turkey. Once rigidly secular, it has begun to fashion a moderate Islamic democracy. Once dominated by the military, it is in the process of containing the army within the rule of law. Once intolerant of ethnic diversity, it has begun to reexamine what it means to be Turkish. Once a sleepy economy, it is becoming a nation of Islamic Calvinists. Most critically of all, it is fashioning a new foreign policy. Having broken with its more than half-century-long subservience to the United States, it is now carving out a geopolitical role all its own.
The rise of Turkey has by no means been smooth. Secular Turks have been uncomfortable with recent more assertive expressions of Muslim identity, particularly when backed by state power. The country's Kurds are still second-class citizens, and although the military has lost some of its teeth, it still has a bite to go along with its bark.
Nonetheless, Turkey is remaking the politics of the Middle East and challenging Washington's traditional notion of itself as the mediator of last resort in the region. In the twenty-first century, the Turkish model of transitioning out of authoritarian rule while focusing on economic growth and conservative social values has considerable appeal to countries in the developing world. This "Ankara consensus" could someday compete favorably with Beijing's and Washington's versions of political and economic development. The Turkish model has, however, also spurred right-wing charges that a new Islamic fundamentalist threat is emerging on the edges of Europe. Neocon pundit Liz Cheney has even created a new version of George W. Bush's "axis of evil" in which Turkey, Iran, and Syria have become the dark trinity.
These are all signs that Turkey has indeed begun to wake from its centuries-long slumber. And when Turkey wakes, as Napoleon said of China, the world will shake.
Out of Ottomanism
Constantinople was once an Orientalist's dream. In his otherwise perceptive 1877 guide to the city, the Italian author Edmondo de Amicis typically wrote that old Istanbul "is not a city; she neither labors, nor thinks, nor creates; civilization beats at her gates and assaults her in her streets, but she dreams and slumbers on in the shadow of her mosques, and takes no heed."
Turkey's first wake-up call came from Kemal Ataturk, the modernizing military officer from Salonika who created a new country out of the unpromising materials left behind by the collapsed Ottoman Empire. Decisively ending the caliphate in 1924, Ataturk patterned his new secular state on the French model: strong central power, a modern army, and a strict division between public and private spheres. This was no easy process: Ataturk brought Turkey kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.
In many ways, that kicking and screaming continued throughout the rest of that century. The Turkish military never quite got used to civilian rule. It's seized power four times since 1960. In the 1980s and 1990s, Turkish security forces killed thousands of its own citizens in a dirty war against the Kurds and the Turkish left, and subjected many more to beatings, torture, and imprisonment. The country's leadership maintained a garrison mentality based on a fear that outsiders, aided by a fifth column, were bent on dismembering the country (as outside powers had indeed attempted to do in 1920 with the Treaty of Sevres).
In the 1980s, however, economic globalization began to eat away at this garrison mentality as then-President Turgut Ozal attempted to reconnect Turkey to the world through export-oriented reforms and a policy of building economic bridges rather than erecting suspicious walls. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, for instance, Turkey refused to choose sides, remaining a friend to both countries.
In the process, Istanbul was transformed. It became the center of a laboring, thinking, and creating class that faced both westward toward Europe and the United States and eastward toward the Middle East and Central Asia. Even Central Anatolia and its key city, Kayseri, once considered a Turkish backwater, was emerging as a vital center of manufacturing. "While Anatolia remains a socially conservative and religious society, it is also undergoing what some have called a 'Silent Islamic Reformation,'" went the European Stability Initiative's influential 2005 report on Turkey's new Islamic Calvinists. "Many of Kayseri's business leaders even attribute their economic success to their 'protestant work ethic.'"
By the 1990s, the "star of Islam" -- as The Economist dubbed Turkey -- had gone about as far as it could within the confines of the existing Ataturk model. In 1997, the military once again swatted aside the civilian leadership in a "stealth coup," and the country seemed to be slipping back into aggressive paranoia. The Kurdish war flared; tensions with Russia over Chechnya rose; a war of words broke out with Greece over maritime territorial disputes. And Turkey nearly went to war with Syria for harboring the Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan.
But that stealth coup proved a last gasp attempt to place the uncontainable new political and economic developments in Turkish society under tighter controls. Soon enough, the military gave way again and the Islam-influenced Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, only enlarging its political base after the 2007 elections.
Zero Problems?
Throughout the twentieth century, geography had proved a liability for Turkey. It found itself beset on all sides by former Ottoman lands which held grudges against the successor state. The magic trick the AKP performed was to transform this liability into an asset. Turkey in the twenty-first century turned on the charm. Like China, it discovered the advantages of soft power and the inescapable virtues of a "soft rise" during an era of American military and economic dominance.
Led by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, a former academic who provided a blueprint for the country's new good-neighbor policy in his 2001 book Strategic Depth, Turkey pledged "zero problems with neighbors." In foreign policy terminology, Davutoglu proposed the carving out of a Turkish sphere of influence via canny balance-of-power politics. Like China, it promised not to interfere in the domestic affairs of its partners. It also made a major effort to repair relations with those near at hand and struck new friendships with those far away. Indeed, like Beijing, Ankara has global aspirations.
Perhaps the most dramatic reversal in Turkish policy involves the Kurdish region of Iraq. The detente orchestrated by the AKP could be compared to President Richard Nixon's startling policy of rapprochement with China in the 1970s, which rapidly turned an enemy into something like an ally. In March, Turkey sent its first diplomat to Arbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, to staff a new consulate there. Today, as journalist Jonathan Head has written, "70% of investment and 80% of the products sold in the Kurdish region [of Iraq] are Turkish." Realizing that when U.S. troops leave Iraq, its Kurdish regions are bound to feel vulnerable and thus open to economic and political influence, Ankara established a "strategic cooperation council" to sort things out with the Iraqis in 2009, and this has served as a model for similar arrangements with Syria, Bulgaria, Greece, and Russia.
Detente with Iraqi Kurdistan has gone hand in hand with a relaxation of tensions between Ankara and its own Kurdish population with which it had been warring for decades. Until the early 1990s, the Turkish government pretended that the Kurdish language didn't exist. Now, there is a new 24-hour Kurdish-language national TV station, and new faculty at Mardin Artuklu University will teach Kurdish. The government began to accept returning Kurdish refugees from northern Iraq, as well as a handful of Kurdish guerrillas from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
This hasn't been an easy sell for Turkish nationalists. In December, a Turkish court banned the main Kurdish political party, and this spring the military launched repeated attacks against PKK targets inside Iraq. But the AKP is continuing to push reforms, including proposed changes in the country's constitution that would allow military commanders for the first time to be tried in civilian court for any crimes they commit.
The elimination of this demonizing of "internal enemies" is crucial to the AKP's project, helping as it does to reduce the military's power in internal affairs. Reining in the military is a top objective for party leaders who believe it will strengthen political stability, improve prospects for future integration into the European Union (EU), and remove a powerful opponent to domestic reforms -- and to the party itself.
Only a little less startling than the government's gestures toward the Kurds has been its program to transform Turkish-Greek relations. The two countries have long been at each other's throats, their conflict over the divided island of Cyprus being only the most visible of their disagreements. The current Greek economic crisis, however, may prove a blessing in disguise when it comes to bilateral relations.
The Greek government -- its finances disastrous and economic pressure from the European Union mounting -- needs a way to make military budget reductions defensible. In May, Turkish president Erdogan visited Greece and, while signing 21 agreements on migration, environment, culture, and the like, began to explore the previously inconceivable possibility of mutual military reductions. "Both countries have huge defense expenses," Erdogan told Greek television, "and they will achieve a lot of savings this way."
If Turkey manages a rapprochement with Armenia, it will achieve a diplomatic trifecta. The two countries disagree over the fate of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, which is also at the center of a dispute between Armenia and Turkish ally Azerbaijan. Complicating this territorial issue is a long-standing historical controversy. Armenia wants acknowledgement of the Ottoman Empire's 1915 extermination campaign that killed more than a million Armenians. The Turkish government today disputes the numbers and refuses to recognize the killings as "genocide." Nevertheless, Turkey and Armenia began direct negotiations last year to reopen their border and establish diplomatic relations. Although officially stalled, secret talks between the two are continuing.
Other diplomatic efforts are no less dramatic. When Bashar Assad arrived in Ankara in 2004, it was the first visit by a Syrian leader in 57 years. Meanwhile, Turkey has cemented its relations with Russia, remains close to Iran, and has reconnected to the Balkans. This charm offensive makes Chinese efforts in Asia look bumbling.
Mediation Central
A friend to all sides, Turkey is offering its services as a diplomatic middleman, even in places where it was persona non grata not long ago. "Not many people would imagine that the Serbians would ask for the mediation of Turkey between different Bosniak groups in the Sandjak region of Serbia," observes Sule Kut, a Balkans expert at Bilge University in Istanbul. "Turks were the bad guys in Serbian history. So what is happening? Turkey has established itself as a credible and powerful player in the region."
It's not just the Balkans. The new Turkey is establishing itself as Mediation Central. Teaming up with Brazil, Turkey fashioned a surprise compromise meant to head off confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program (which the Obama administration managed to shoot down). Along with Spain, it initiated the Alliance of Civilizations, a U.N. effort to bridge the divide between Islam and the West. It also tried to work its magic in negotiating an end to the blockade of Gaza, removing obstacles to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, bringing Syria and Israel together, resolving the brouhaha around the cartoon depiction of Mohammed, and hosting U.N. meetings on Somalia.
"Zero problems with neighbors" is a great slogan. But it's also a logical impossibility. Turkey can't embrace Hamas without angering Egypt and Israel. It can move closer to Russia only at the potential expense of good relations with Georgia. Rapprochement with Armenia angers Azerbaijan.
Nor was Ankara's attempt to transcend zero-sum thinking an easy task during the "with us or against us" years of the Bush administration. In addition, there are the periodic tensions that arise around U.S. congressional resolutions on the Armenian genocide, still a touchy issue in Turkey. Washington has indicated its growing unhappiness with Turkey's increasingly active role in the Middle East, particularly its overtures to Syria. As a result, Turkey has had to finesse its relationship with the U.S. in order to remain a key NATO ally and a challenger to American power in the region.
As with China, the United States is willing to work with Turkey on some diplomatic issues even as it finds the country's growing influence in the region a problem. In turn, Ankara, like Beijing, is trying to figure out how it can best take advantage of the relative decline in U.S. global influence even as it works closely with Washington on an issue-by-issue basis.
The greatest challenge to Turkey's zero-problems paradigm, however, is its ever more troubled relationship with Israel. The U.S.-Turkey-Israel troika was once a solid verity of Middle Eastern politics. A considerable amount of bilateral trade, including military deals, has linked Turkey and Israel, and that trade increased dramatically during the AKP era.
But Israel's 2008 invasion of Gaza -- and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's subsequent excoriation of then-Israeli president Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum in Davos -- began a process that is tearing these former allies apart, while boosting support for Turkey in the Arab world. In October, Turkey cancelled Israel's participation in a military exercise, throwing lucrative military contracts between the two countries in jeopardy. In the wake of the recent Gaza-aid debacle in international waters, the rift threatens to become irreparable. When Israeli commandos seized a flotilla of ships attempting to break the Gaza embargo, killing nine Turkish citizens, Turkey spoke of severing diplomatic relations.
With Israel increasingly isolated and American mediation efforts seriously compromised, only Turkey is emerging stronger from what can now only be seen as the beginning of a regional realignment of power. Once viewed with suspicion throughout the area where the Ottomans ruled, Turkey may now be the only power that has even a remote chance of one day brokering peace in the Middle East.
Return to Ottomanism?
Neo-Ottomanism is not exactly a popular phrase in Turkey today. The leadership in Ankara wants to be clear: they have no intention of projecting imperial power or reestablishing the modern equivalent of the Ottoman caliphate. However, if you look at the friendships that Turkey has cultivated and the trade relations it has emphasized -- Syria, Armenia, Greece, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, the Balkans -- you can see a map of the old Ottoman empire reassembling itself.
In other words, just as the AKP has turned geography to its advantage, so it is transforming an imperial albatross into the goose that lays golden eggs (in the form of lucrative trade deals). In a similar way, China has tried to revive its old Sinocentric imperial system without stirring up fears of the Chinese army marching into India or the Chinese navy taking over the South China Sea, even as it -- like Turkey -- also establishes friendly relations with old adversaries (including Russia).
Still, even this amiable version of neo-Ottomanism can raise hackles. "We want a new Balkan region based on political values, economic interdependence, and cooperation and cultural harmony," Foreign Minister Davutoglu said nostalgically at a conference in Sarajevo in October. "That is what the Ottoman Balkans was like. We shall revive such a Balkan region... The Ottoman centuries were a success story, and this should be revived." A furor followed among some Serb commentators, who viewed this romanticized version of history as evidence of a Turkish desire to Islamicize the Balkans.
What Turkey means by its vision of Balkan harmony may prove critical in the context of European integration. The Ottomans and Western Europe fought a succession of wars over control of the Balkans. Today, the E.U. and Turkey compete for influence in the region, and much hangs on Turkey's prospects for joining the 27-member European organization. Although Turkey began the process of meeting requirements for joining the Union, the talks stalled long ago. In the meantime, some European leaders like French Prime Minister Nicholas Sarkozy have spoken out against Turkish membership, while the spread of Islamophobia throughout Europe has dimmed what enthusiasm may still exist for bringing Turkey on board.
In Turkey as well, public support for membership has declined from 70% in 2002 to just over 50% today. In fact, Turkey's turn toward the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa has in part been a reaction to the fading of the E.U. option. Fine, the Turks are saying, if you don't want us, we can play with others.
And play they have, particularly when it comes to the energy game. If oil had been discovered in its territory just a little sooner, some form of the Ottoman Empire might have survived as the wealthiest energy player in history. The riches of Iraq, Kuwait, and Libya all once fell within the territorial limits of its empire.
Today, Turkey lacks energy wealth, but has worked assiduously to ensure that a maximum number of oil and natural gas pipelines flow through the country. Europe and the United States have funded a series of pipelines (like the Nabucco pipeline from the Caspian Sea) that use Turkish territory to bypass Russia and lessen Moscow's ability to blackmail Western Europe by threatening to withhold energy supplies. Turkey hasn't stopped there, however. It negotiated directly with Russia for another set of pipelines -- the South Stream, which goes from Russia to Bulgaria through Turkish territorial waters, and the Samsun-Ceyhan pipeline that would transport Russian and Kazakh oil from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean through Turkey.
Turkey now relies on Russia for 60% of its energy imports and Iran for another 30%. In this sense, "zero problems with neighbors" could just as easily be understood as "zero problems with energy suppliers."
Turkey is also a builder. Of the top 225 international contractors, 35 are Turkish, second only to China. Like China, Turkey asks no difficult questions about the political environment in other countries, and so Turkish construction companies are building airports in Kurdistan and shopping malls in Libya. Despite political tensions, in 2009 they were even involved in nine projects worth more than $60 million in Israel.
Finally, there is culture. Like the Confucian institutes China is establishing all over the world to spread its language, culture, and values, Turkey established the Yunus Emre Foundation in May 2009 to administer cultural centers in Germany, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Egypt, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Israel. Turkish schools have sprung up in more than 80 countries. Turkish culture has also infiltrated Middle Eastern life through television, as Turkish soap operas spread the liberal cultural values of moderate Islam. "The Turkish soaps have been daring and candid when it comes to gender equality, premarital sex, infidelity, passionate love, and even children born out of wedlock," writes journalist Nadia Bilbassy-Charters.
Beyond Ottomanism
Turkey's leaders may not themselves be comfortable with the neo-Ottoman label -- in part because their ambitions are actually much larger. Their developing version of a peaceful, trade-oriented Pax Ottomanica takes in Turkey's improved relations with sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific. Turkey declared 2005 the "year of Africa" and accepted observer status in the African Union. In 2010, it has already opened eight embassies in African countries and plans to open another 11 next year.
At the pan-Islamic level -- and a Turk, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, now heads up the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference, the leading international voice of Islamic states -- Turkish leaders think in terms of the ummah, the global Muslim community. For some critics, Turkey's Islamic character and its ruling Islam-influenced party -- as well as its recent attacks on Israel -- suggest that the country is on a mission to reestablish, if only informally, the Islamic caliphate. In the most extreme version of this argument, historian of the Middle East Bernard Lewis has argued that Turkey's fundamentalism will strengthen to such an extent that, in a decade's time, it will resemble Iran, even as the Islamic Republic moves in the opposite direction.
This is, however, a fundamental misunderstanding of the AKP and its intentions. Islamism has about as much influence in modern-day Turkey as communism does in China. In both cases, what matters most is not ideology, but the political power of the ruling parties. Economic growth, political stability, and soft-power diplomacy regularly trump ideological consistency. Turkey is becoming more nationalist and more assertive, and flexibility, not fundamentalism, has been the hallmark of its new foreign policy.
In 1999, Bill Clinton suggested that if Ankara launched a reformist movement, the twenty-first century could be "Turkey's century." Turkey has indeed heeded Clinton's advice. Now, Europe and the United States face a choice. If Washington works with Turkey as a partner, it has a far greater chance of resolving outstanding conflicts with Iran, inside Iraq, and between the Palestinians and Israelis, not to mention simmering disputes elsewhere in the Islamic world. If the European Union accepts Turkey as a member, its economic dynamism and new credibility in the Muslim world could help jolt Europe out of its current sclerosis. Spurned by one or both, Turkey's global influence will still grow.
By all means, get that Lenovo computer, buy stock in Haier, and encourage your child to study Mandarin. China can't help but be a twenty-first-century superpower. But if you want to really be ahead of the curve, pay close attention to that vital crossroads between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. It won't be long before we'll all be talking Turkey.
John Feffer would like to thank Alexander Atanasov, Rebecca Azhdam, and Noor Iqbal for research assistance.
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Despite Recession, Global Arms Race Spirals
Mar 16, 2010
UNITED NATIONS - The global
financial crisis has not deterred some of the world's developed and
developing nations from bolstering their military arsenals with
expensive new weapons systems, including sophisticated fighter planes,
combat helicopters, submarines, armored vehicles and air defence
systems.
The five largest arms purchasers during 2005-2009
were China, India, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and
Greece, according to the latest figures released Monday by the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
The extended list of prolific arms buyers also includes
Turkey, Singapore, Pakistan, Malaysia, Israel, Algeria, Morocco, Libya,
Egypt, Iran, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Sudan, Chile and
Venezuela.
"I think one should stress that political leaders in different
regions of the world have expressed concerns their region is on the
verge of an arms race," Dr. Paul Holtom, director of SIPRI's arms
transfer program, told IPS.
SIPRI data on deliveries and orders shows signs that these
concerns may have grounds as in several regions of tension there is
evidence of reactive acquisitions - for example, it is reasonable to
assume that the Moroccan order for U.S.-made F-16 combat aircraft is
related to the orders and deliveries of Russian-made Su-30MK to neighboring Algeria, he added.
Fighter aircraft accounted for 27 percent of international arms transfers during 2005-2009.
These include 72 F-16E fighter planes to UAE, 52 F-16I to Israel and 40
F-15K to South Korea, collectively costing billions of dollars.
Russian exports of fighter planes include 82 Su-30s to India, 28 to Algeria, and 18 to Malaysia.
The Russians are also hoping to clinch a massive Indian
contract for 126 combat aircraft, ahead of European and U.S. suppliers,
in 2010.
And orders and deliveries of these "potentially destabilizing
weapons systems have led to arms race concerns in the following regions
of tensions: the Middle East, North Africa, South America, South Asia
and South-east Asia," according to SIPRI, one of the world's leading
research institutes on arms control and disarmament.
Since the volume of arms deliveries can fluctuate
significantly from one year to the next, SIPRI uses a five-year moving
average, with arms transfers for 2005-2009 being 22 percent higher than
in 2000-2004.
Dr. Holtom said that SIPRI data show that resource-rich states
have purchased a considerable quantity of expensive combat aircraft.
"Neighboring rivals have reacted to these acquisitions with
orders of their own. One can question whether this is an appropriate
allocation of resources in regions with high levels of poverty," he
added.
According to SIPRI, the five largest arms suppliers during
2005-2009 were the United States, Russia, Germany, France and Britain
accounting for more than 75 percent of all exports of major
conventional weapons,
The United States and Russia remained by far the largest exporters,
accounting for 30 percent and 24 percent of all exports, respectively.
Dan Darling, Europe & Middle East Military Markets Analyst
at the U.S.-based Forecast International Inc., told IPS it might be
rash to predict a continuing upward trend in military spending
worldwide with so many lingering economic uncertainties.
But as the SIPRI figures show, he said, there has been a
consistent rise in defence spending and arms acquisitions in the past
five years.
There are myriad reasons for this, including regional rivalries
(Colombia-Venezuela, India-Pakistan, Turkey-Greece, China-Taiwan, etc);
surplus state revenues; the need for militaries to replace aging
equipment, etc.
Whatever the reasons, arms suppliers such as the U.S., Russia, Western
Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Britain) and China will position
themselves to reap the benefits of this upward trend, Darling said.
Certainly defence expenditure is not going to rise significantly in
Europe anytime soon, largely due to the budget deficit and public debt
troubles weighing on many of the countries there, but also because of
the lack of a direct strategic threat facing the continent.
Selling the public on greater defence expenditure isn't a winning political formula in many European countries, he argued.
"Swimming in its own tide of debt, the U.S., too, may soon be forced to
restrain baseline Pentagon budgets to just above the rate of inflation
in the coming years," he noted.
The regional breakdown of arms deliveries has remained relatively stable over the past 10 years, according to SIPRI.
The major recipient region during 2005-2009 remained Asia and
Oceania (41 percent), followed by Europe (24 percent), the Middle East
17 percent), the Americas (11 percent) and Africa (seven percent).
Asked how best one could interpret the growing arms race in a
recession-struck world, Dr. Holtom told IPS that acquisitions by
regional rivals and states "perceived to be" potential threats
obviously influences procurement decisions and can unfortunately lead
to dangerous spirals, as states seek to keep up with their neighbors'
acquisitions.
However, at present, and despite tense relationships, it has proven
difficult to conclude that sizable arms acquisitions alone lead to
conflict - although this factor can certainly influence decision-making
and make the option of using military force to resolve a political
conflict more attractive if your armed forces at the time appear to be
significantly stronger than those of a rival/opponent.
For example, he said, Azerbaijan has been saber-rattling regarding the
frozen conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia, following a period
in which it has sought to outspend Armenia with regard to military
spending and acquire more weapons.
Darling of Forecast International Inc pointed out that Latin America is a defence-spending region that continues to grow.
Led by Brazil, many of the countries in the region are undertaking
broad military modernization programs aimed at upgrading aging
arsenals.
The countries of northern Africa (Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia) are
also continuing to put more and more money into defence investment.
But it is in Asia that major defence growth will take place, and which
will serve as the leading market for arms sales, thanks to internal
security concerns and - like Latin America - a region-wide military
re-equipment cycle, he noted.
So while the defence investment of members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) may be held in relative check (at, or slightly
above, inflation rates) over the next few years, other regions across
the globe should continue to experience growing military expenditures
resulting in more arms purchases, Darling predicted.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Liquid War: Postcard from Pipelineistan
Mar 25, 2009
What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of Eurasia will
provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush towards a new,
polycentric world order, also known as the New Great Game.
Our good ol' friend the nonsensical "Global War on Terror," which
the Pentagon has slyly rebranded "the Long War," sports a far more
important, if half-hidden, twin -- a global energy war. I like to think
of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is the pipelines that
crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet. Put
another way, if its crucial embattled frontier these days is the
Caspian Basin, the whole of Eurasia is its chessboard. Think of it,
geographically, as Pipelineistan.
All geopolitical junkies need a fix. Since the second half of the
1990s, I've been hooked on pipelines. I've crossed the Caspian in an
Azeri cargo ship just to follow the $4 billion Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan
pipeline, better known in this chess game by its acronym, BTC, through
the Caucasus. (Oh, by the way, the map of Pipelineistan is
chicken-scratched with acronyms, so get used to them!)
I've also trekked various of the overlapping modern Silk Roads, or
perhaps Silk Pipelines, of possible future energy flows from Shanghai
to Istanbul, annotating my own DIY routes for LNG (liquefied natural
gas). I used to avidly follow the adventures of that
once-but-not-future Sun-King of Central Asia, the now deceased
Turkmenbashi or "leader of the Turkmen," Saparmurat Niyazov, head of
the immensely gas-rich Republic of Turkmenistan, as if he were a
Conradian hero.
In Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan (before it was moved to
Astana, in the middle of the middle of nowhere) the locals were puzzled
when I expressed an overwhelming urge to drive to that country's oil
boomtown Aktau. ("Why? There's nothing there.") Entering the Space
Odyssey-style map room at the Russian energy giant Gazprom's
headquarters in Moscow -- which digitally details every single pipeline
in Eurasia -- or the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC)'s corporate HQ
in Tehran, with its neat rows of female experts in full chador,
was my equivalent of entering Aladdin's cave. And never reading the
words "Afghanistan" and "oil" in the same sentence is still a source of
endless amusement for me.
Last year, oil cost a king's ransom. This year, it's relatively cheap.
But don't be fooled. Price isn't the point here. Like it or not, energy
is still what everyone who's anyone wants to get their hands on. So
consider this dispatch just the first installment in a long, long tale
of some of the moves that have been, or will be, made in the
maddeningly complex New Great Game, which goes on unceasingly, no
matter what else muscles into the headlines this week.
Forget the mainstream media's obsession with al-Qaeda, Osama "dead or
alive" bin Laden, the Taliban -- neo, light or classic -- or that "war
on terror," whatever name it goes by. These are diversions compared to
the high-stakes, hardcore geopolitical game that follows what flows
along the pipelines of the planet.
Who said Pipelineistan couldn't be fun?
Calling Dr. Zbig
In his 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew
Brzezinski -- realpolitik practitioner extraordinaire and former
national security advisor to Jimmy Carter, the president who launched
the U.S. on its modern energy wars -- laid out in some detail just how
to hang on to American "global primacy." Later, his master plan would
be duly copied by that lethal bunch of Dr. No's congregated at Bill
Kristol's Project for a New American Century (PNAC, in case you'd
forgotten the acronym since its website and its followers went down).
For Dr. Zbig, who, like me, gets his fix from Eurasia -- from, that is,
thinking big -- it all boils down to fostering the emergence of just
the right set of "strategically compatible partners" for Washington in
places where energy flows are strongest. This, as he so politely put it
back then, should be done to shape "a more cooperative trans-Eurasian
security system."
By now, Dr. Zbig -- among whose fans is evidently President Barack
Obama -- must have noticed that the Eurasian train which was to deliver
the energy goods has been slightly derailed. The Asian part of Eurasia,
it seems, begs to differ.
Global financial crisis or not, oil and natural gas are the long-term
keys to an inexorable transfer of economic power from the West to Asia.
Those who control Pipelineistan -- and despite all the dreaming and
planning that's gone on there, it's unlikely to be Washington -- will
have the upper hand in whatever's to come, and there's not a terrorist
in the world, or even a long war, that can change that.
Energy
expert Michael Klare has been instrumental in identifying the key
vectors in the wild, ongoing global scramble for power over
Pipelineistan. These range from the increasing scarcity (and difficulty
of reaching) primary energy supplies to "the painfully slow development
of energy alternatives." Though you may not have noticed, the first
skirmishes in Pipelineistan's Liquid War are already on, and even in
the worst of economic times, the risk mounts constantly, given the
relentless competition between the West and Asia, be it in the Middle
East, in the Caspian theater, or in African oil-rich states like
Angola, Nigeria and Sudan.
In these early skirmishes of the twenty-first century, China reacted
swiftly indeed. Even before the attacks of 9/11, its leaders were
formulating a response to what they saw as the reptilian encroachment
of the West on the oil and gas lands of Central Asia, especially in the
Caspian Sea region. To be specific, in June 2001, its leaders joined
with Russia's to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It's known
as the SCO and that's an acronym you should memorize. It's going to be
around for a while.
Back then, the SCO's junior members were, tellingly enough, the Stans,
the energy-rich former SSRs of the Soviet Union -- Kyrgyzstan,
Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan -- which the Clinton
administration and then the new Bush administration, run by those
former energy men, had been eyeing covetously. The organization was to
be a multi-layered economic and military regional cooperation society
that, as both the Chinese and the Russians saw it, would function as a
kind of security blanket around the upper rim of Afghanistan.
Iran is, of course, a crucial energy node of West Asia and that
country's leaders, too, would prove no slouches when it came to the New
Great Game. It needs at least $200 billion in foreign investment to
truly modernize its fabulous oil and gas reserves -- and thus sell much
more to the West than U.S.-imposed sanctions now allow. No wonder Iran
soon became a target in Washington. No wonder an air assault on that
country remains the ultimate wet dream of assorted Likudniks as well as
Dick ("Angler") Cheney and his neocon chamberlains and
comrades-in-arms. As seen by the elite from Tehran and Delhi to Beijing
and Moscow, such a U.S. attack, now likely off the radar screen until
at least 2012, would be a war not only against Russia and China, but
against the whole project of Asian integration that the SCO is coming
to represent.
Global BRIC-a-brac
Meanwhile, as the Obama administration tries to sort out its Iranian,
Afghan, and Central Asian policies, Beijing continues to dream of a
secure, fast-flowing, energy version of the old Silk Road, extending
from the Caspian Basin (the energy-rich Stans plus Iran and Russia) to
Xinjiang Province, its Far West.
The SCO has expanded its aims and scope since 2001. Today, Iran, India,
and Pakistan enjoy "observer status" in an organization that
increasingly aims to control and protect not just regional energy
supplies, but Pipelineistan in every direction. This is, of course, the
role the Washington ruling elite would like NATO to play across
Eurasia. Given that Russia and China expect the SCO to play a similar
role across Asia, clashes of various sorts are inevitable.
Ask any relevant expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in
Beijing and he will tell you that the SCO should be understood as a
historically unique alliance of five non-Western civilizations --
Russian, Chinese, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist -- and, because of that,
capable of evolving into the basis for a collective security system in
Eurasia. That's a thought sure to discomfort classic inside-the-Beltway
global strategists like Dr. Zbig and President George H. W. Bush's
national security advisor Brent Scowcroft.
According to the view from Beijing, the rising world order of the
twenty-first century will be significantly determined by a quadrangle
of BRIC countries -- for those of you by now collecting Great Game
acronyms, that stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- plus the
future Islamic triangle of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Add in a
unified South America, no longer in thrall to Washington, and you have
a global SCO-plus. On the drawing boards, at least, it's a high octane
dream.
The key to any of this is a continuing Sino-Russian entente cordiale.
Already in 1999, watching NATO and the United States aggressively
expand into the distant Balkans, Beijing identified this new game for
what it was: a developing energy war. And at stake were the oil and
natural gas reserves of what Americans would soon be calling the "arc
of instability," a vast span of lands extending from North Africa to
the Chinese border. No less important would be the routes pipelines
would take in bringing the energy buried in those lands to the West.
Where they would be built, the countries they would cross, would
determine much in the world to come. And this was where the empire of
U.S. military bases (think, for instance, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo) met
Pipelineistan (represented, way back in 1999, by the AMBO pipeline).
AMBO, short for Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corporation, an
entity registered in the U.S., is building a $1.1 billion pipeline, aka
"the Trans-Balkan," slated to be finished by 2011. It will bring
Caspian oil to the West without taking it through either Russia or
Iran. As a pipeline, AMBO fit well into a geopolitical strategy of
creating a U.S.-controlled energy-security grid that was first
developed by President Bill Clinton's Energy Secretary Bill Richardson
and later by Vice President Dick Cheney.
Behind the idea of that "grid" lay a go-for-broke militarization of an
energy corridor that would stretch from the Caspian Sea in Central Asia
through a series of now independent former SSRs of the Soviet Union to
Turkey, and from there into the Balkans (thence on to Europe). It was
meant to sabotage the larger energy plans of both Russia and Iran. AMBO
itself would bring oil from the Caspian basin to a terminal in the
former SSR of Georgia in the Caucasus, and then transport it by tanker
through the Black Sea to the Bulgarian port of Burgas, where another
pipeline would connect to Macedonia and then to the Albanian port of
Vlora.
As for Camp Bondsteel, it was the "enduring" military base that
Washington gained from the wars for the remains of Yugoslavia. It would
be the largest overseas base the U.S. had built since the Vietnam War.
Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) would, with the
Army Corps of Engineers, put it up on 400 hectares of farmland near the
Macedonian border in southern Kosovo. Think of it as a user-friendly,
five-star version of Guantanamo with perks for those stationed there
that included Thai massage and loads of junk food. Bondsteel is the
Balkan equivalent of a giant immobile aircraft carrier, capable of
exercising surveillance not only over the Balkans but also over Turkey
and the Black Sea region (considered in the neocon-speak of the Bush
years "the new interface" between the "Euro-Atlantic community" and the
"Greater Middle East").
How could Russia, China, and Iran not interpret the war in
Kosovo, then the invasion of Afghanistan (where Washington had
previously tried to pair with the Taliban and encourage the building of
another of those avoid-Iran, avoid-Russia pipelines), followed by the
invasion of Iraq (that country of vast oil reserves), and finally the
recent clash in Georgia (that crucial energy transportation junction)
as straightforward wars for Pipelineistan? Though seldom imagined this
way in our mainstream media, the Russian and Chinese leaderships saw a
stark "continuity" of policy stretching from Bill Clinton's
humanitarian imperialism to Bush's Global War on Terror. Blowback, as
then Russian President Vladimir Putin himself warned publicly, was
inevitable -- but that's another magic-carpet story, another cave to
enter another time.
Rainy Night in Georgia
If you want to understand Washington's version of Pipelineistan, you
have to start with Mafia-ridden Georgia. Though its army was crushed in
its recent war with Russia, Georgia remains crucial to Washington's
energy policy in what, by now, has become a genuine arc of instability
-- in part because of a continuing obsession with cutting Iran out of
the energy flow.
It was around the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, as I pointed out in my book Globalistan
in 2007, that American policy congealed. Zbig Brzezinski himself flew
into Baku in 1995 as an "energy consultant," less than four years after
Azerbaijan became independent, and sold the idea to the Azerbaijani
elite. The BTC was to run from the Sangachal Terminal, half-an-hour
south of Baku, across neighboring Georgia to the Marine Terminal in the
Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. Now operational, that
1,767-kilometer-long, 44-meter-wide steel serpent straddles no less
than six war zones, ongoing or potential: Nagorno-Karabakh (an Armenian
enclave in Azerbaijan), Chechnya and Dagestan (both embattled regions
of Russia), South Ossetia and Abkhazia (on which the 2008
Russia-Georgia war pivoted), and Turkish Kurdistan.
From a purely economic point of view, the BTC made no sense. A "BTK"
pipeline, running from Baku through Tehran to Iran's Kharg Island,
could have been built for, relatively speaking, next to nothing -- and
it would have had the added advantage of bypassing both mafia-corroded
Georgia and wobbly Kurdish-populated Eastern Anatolia. That would have
been the really cheap way to bring Caspian oil and gas to Europe.
The New Great Game ensured that that was not to be, and much followed
from that decision. Even though Moscow never planned to occupy Georgia
long-term in its 2008 war, or take over the BTC pipeline that now runs
through its territory, Alfa Bank oil and gas analyst Konstantin Batunin
pointed out the obvious: by briefly cutting off the BTC oil flow,
Russian troops made it all too clear to global investors that Georgia
wasn't a reliable energy transit country. In other words, the Russians
made a mockery of Zbig's world.
For its part, Azerbaijan was, until recently, the real success story in
the U.S. version of Pipelineistan. Advised by Zbig, Bill Clinton
literally "stole" Baku from Russia's "near abroad" by promoting the BTC
and the wealth that would flow from it. Now, however, with the message
of the Russia-Georgia War sinking in, Baku is again allowing itself to
be seduced by Russia. To top it off, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev
can't stand Georgia's brash President Mikhail Saakashvili. That's
hardly surprising. After all, Saakashvili's rash military moves caused
Azerbaijan to lose at least $500 million when the BTC was shut down
during the war.
Russia's energy seduction blitzkrieg is focused like a laser on
Central Asia as well. (We'll talk about it more in the next
Pipelineistan installment.) It revolves around offering to buy Kazakh,
Uzbek, and Turkmen gas at European prices instead of previous, much
lower Russian prices. The Russians, in fact, have offered the same deal
to the Azeris: so now, Baku is negotiating a deal involving more
capacity for the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline, which makes its way to the
Russian borders of the Black Sea, while considering pumping less oil
for the BTC.
President Obama needs to understand the dire implications of this. Less
Azeri oil on the BTC -- its full capacity is 1 million barrels a day,
mostly shipped to Europe -- means the pipeline may go broke, which is
exactly what Russia wants.
In Central Asia, some of the biggest stakes revolve around the
monster Kashagan oil field in "snow leopard" Kazakhstan, the absolute
jewel in the Caspian crown with reserves of as many as 9 billion
barrels. As usual in Pipelineistan, it all comes down to which routes
will deliver Kashagan's oil to the world after production starts in
2013. This spells, of course, Liquid War. Wily Kazakh President
Nursultan Nazarbayev would like to use the Russian-controlled Caspian
Pipeline Consortium (CPC) to pump Kashagan crude to the Black Sea.
In this case, the Kazakhs hold all the cards. How oil will flow from
Kashagan will decide whether the BTC -- once hyped by Washington as the
ultimate Western escape route from dependence on Persian Gulf oil --
lives or dies.
Welcome, then, to Pipelineistan! Whether we like it or not, in good
times and bad, it's a reasonable bet that we're all going to be
Pipeline tourists. So, go with the flow. Learn the crucial acronyms,
keep an eye out for what happens to all those U.S. bases across the oil
heartlands of the planet, watch where the pipelines are being built,
and do your best to keep tabs on the next set of monster Chinese energy
deals and fabulous coups by Russia's Gazprom.
And, while you're at it, consider this just the first postcard sent
off from our tour of Pipelineistan. We'll be back (to slightly adapt a
quote from the Terminator). Think of this as a door opening onto a
future in which what flows where and to whom may turn out to be the
most important question on the planet.
Keep ReadingShow Less
US Role in Georgia Crisis
Aug 15, 2008
The international condemnation of Russian aggression against Georgia - and the concomitant assaults by Abkhazians and South Ossetians against ethnic Georgians within their territories - is in large part appropriate. But the self-righteous posturing coming out of Washington should be tempered by a sober recognition of the ways in which the United States has contributed to the crisis.
It has been nearly impossible to even broach this subject of the U.S. role. Much of the mainstream media coverage and statements by American political leaders of both major parties has in many respects resembled the anti-Russian hysterics of the Cold War. It is striking how quickly forgotten is the fact that the U.S.-backed Georgian military started the war when it brutally assaulted the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali in an attempt to regain direct control of the autonomous region. This attack prompted the disproportionate and illegitimate Russian military response, which soon went beyond simply ousting invading Georgian forces from South Ossetia to invading and occupying large segments of Georgia itself.
The South Ossetians themselves did much to provoke Georgia as well by shelling villages populated by ethnic Georgians earlier this month. However, Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili ruled out signing a non-aggression pact and repeatedly refused to rejoin talks of the Joint Control Commission to prevent an escalation of the violence. Furthermore, according to Reuters, a draft UN Security Council statement calling for an immediate cease fire was blocked when the United States objected to "a phrase in the three-sentence draft statement that would have required both sides aEUR~to renounce the use of force.'"
Borders and Boundaries
In the Caucuses and Central Asia, the Russian empire and its Soviet successors, like the Western European colonialists in Africa, often drew state boundaries arbitrarily and, in some cases, not so arbitrarily as part of a divide-and-rule strategy. The small and ethnically distinct regions of South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Ajaria were incorporated into the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic and - on the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 - remained as autonomous regions within the state of Georgia. Not one of the regions was ethnically pure. They all included sizable ethnic Georgian minorities, among others. Despite cultural and linguistic differences, there was not much in the way of ethnic tension during most of the Soviet period and inter-marriage was not uncommon.
As the USSR fell apart in the late 1980s, however, nationalist sentiments increased dramatically throughout the Caucuses region in such ethnic enclaves as Chechnya in Russia, Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, as well as among those within Georgia. Compounding these nationalist and ethnic tensions was the rise of the ultra-nationalist Georgian president Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who assumed power when the country declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. With the possible exception of the Baltic states, Georgia had maintained the strongest sense of nationalism of any of the former Soviet republics, tracing its national identity as far back as the 4th century BC as one of most advanced states of its time. This resurgent nationalism led the newly re-emerged independent Georgia to attempt to assert its sovereignty over its autonomous regions by force.
A series of civil conflicts raged in Georgia in subsequent years, both between competing political factions within Georgia itself as well as in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, resulting in widespread ethnic cleansing. Backed by Russian forces, these two regions achieved de facto independence while, within Georgia proper, former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze emerged as president and brought some semblance of stability to the country, despite a weak economy and widespread corruption.
Russian troops, nominally in a peacekeeping role but clearly aligned with nationalist elements within the two ethnic enclaves, effectively prevented any subsequent exercise of Georgian government authority over most of these territories. Meanwhile, the United States became the biggest foreign backer of the Shevardnadze regime, pouring in over $1 billion in aid during the decade of his corrupt and semi-authoritarian rule.
The Rose Revolution
Though strongly supported by Washington, Shevardnadze was less well-respected at home. For example, The New York Times reported how "Georgians have a different perspective" than the generous pro-government view from Washington, citing the observation in the Georgian daily newspaper The Messenger that, "Despite the fact that he is adored in the West as an aEUR~architect of democracy' and credited with ending the Cold War, Georgians cannot bear their president." Though critical of the rampant corruption and rigged elections, the Bush administration stood by the Georgian regime, as they had the post-Communist dictatorships in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and most of the other former Soviet republics.
Georgia enjoyed relatively more political freedom and civil society institutions than most other post-Soviet states. Nevertheless, high unemployment, a breakdown in the allocation of energy for heating and other needs, a deteriorating infrastructure, widespread corruption, and inept governance led to growing dissatisfaction with the government. By 2003, Shevardnadze had lost support from virtually every social class, ethnic group, and geographical region of the country. Heavy losses by his supporters in parliamentary elections early that November were widely anticipated. Still, Shevardnadze continued to receive the strong support of President George W. Bush due to his close personal relationship with high-ranking administration officials. Contributing to this relationship were his pro-Western policies, such as embarking upon ambitious free market reforms under the tutelage of the International Monetary Fund, agreeing to deploy 300 Georgian troops to Iraq following the U.S. invasion, and sending Georgian troops trained by U.S. Special Forces to the Pankisi Gorge on the border of Chechnya to fight Chechen rebels. Opposition leaders Zurab Zhvania and Mikheil Saakashvilli strongly criticized the United States for its continued support of the Georgian president.
In addition to the electoral opposition, a decentralized student-led grass roots movement known as Kmara emerged, calling for an end to corruption and more democratic and accountable government as well as free and fair elections. Though not directly supported by the Bush administration, a number of Western NGOs, including the Open Society Institute (backed by Hungarian-American financier George Soros) and the National Democratic Institute (supported, ironically, by U.S. congressional funding) provided funding for election-monitoring and helped facilitate workshops for both the young Kmara activists and mainstream opposition leaders. This led to some serious tension between these non-governmental organizations and the U.S. embassy in Georgian capital.
For example, when U.S. ambassador to Georgia Richard Miles learned that some leaders from the successful student-led nonviolent civil insurrection in Serbia three years earlier were in Tbilisi to give trainings to Kmara activists there, he tried to discourage them by telling them that "Shevardnadze is the guarantee for the peace and stability of the region." Noting that the United States was providing training and equipment of the Georgian army that anti-government demonstrators would soon be facing down in the streets, he referred to the Kmara as "troublemakers." Similarly, Miles discouraged Kmara leaders from working with the Serb activists, whom he had known from his prior post as chief of mission in Belgrade, insisting that "Georgia is not the same as Serbia." (Despite these efforts, the scheduled trainings in strategic nonviolent action went forward anyway.)
The parliamentary elections that November were marred by a series of irregularities. These included widespread ballot-stuffing, multiple voting by government supporters, late poll openings, missing ballots, and missing voter lists in opposition strongholds. These attempts to steal the election elicited little more than finger-wagging from the Bush administration.
The Georgians themselves did not take the situation so lightly, however. They launched general strikes and massive street protests against what they saw as illegitimate government authority. This effort was soon dubbed the "Rose Revolution." Gaining support from the United States only after the success of the nonviolent civil insurrection appeared inevitable, this popular uprising forced Shevardnadze to resign.
Presidential elections, certified as free and fair by international observers, were held two months later, in which opposition leader Mikheil Saakashvili emerged victorious. Four months later, the authoritarian ruler of the autonomous region of Ajaria, a Shevardnadze ally, was ousted in a similar nonviolent civil insurrection.
Though not responsible for the change of government itself, the Bush administration soon moved to take advantage of the change the Georgian people brought about after the fact.
U.S. Embrace of Saakashvili
Despite its longstanding support for Shevardnadze, the Bush administration quickly embraced Georgia's new president. Taking advantage of Georgia's desperate economic situation, the United States successfully lobbied for a series of additional free market reforms and other neoliberal economic measures on the country, including a flat tax of 14%. Though official corruption declined, tax collection rates improved, and the rate of economic growth increased, high unemployment remained and social inequality grew.
With strong encouragement from Washington, Saakashvili's government reduced domestic spending but dramatically increased military spending, with the armed forces expanding to more than 45,000 personnel over the next four years, more than 12,000 of whom were trained by the United States. Congress approved hundreds of millions of dollars of military assistance to Georgia, a small country of less than five million people. In addition, the United States successfully encouraged Israel to send advisors and trainers to support the rapidly-expanding Georgian armed forces.
Although facing growing security concerns at home, the Bush administration also successfully pushed Saakashvili to send an additional 1,700 troops to Iraq. Thus, Georgia increased its troop strength in Iraq by more than 500% even as other countries in the U.S.-led multinational force were pulling out.
Though Georgia is located in a region well within Russia's historic sphere of influence and is more than 3,000 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, Bush nevertheless launched an ambitious campaign to bring Georgia into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Russians, who had already seen previous U.S. assurances to Gorbachev that NATO would not extend eastward ignored, found the prospects of NATO expansion to the strategically important and volatile Caucasus region particularly provocative. This inflamed Russian nationalists and Russian military leaders and no doubt strengthened their resolve to maintain their military presence in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Washington's embrace of Saakashvili, like its earlier embrace of Shevardnadze, appears to have been based in large part on oil. The United States has helped establish Georgia as a major energy transit corridor, building an oil pipeline from the Caspian region known as the BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceylan) and a parallel natural gas pipeline, both designed to avoid the more logical geographical routes through Russia or Iran. The Russians, meanwhile, in an effort to maintain as much control over the westbound oil from the region, have responded by pressuring the governments of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan to sign exclusive export agreements and to construct natural gas pipelines through Russia. (See Michael Klare's Russia and Georgia: All About Oil.)
Amid accusations of widespread corruption and not adequately addressing the country's growing poverty, Saakashvili himself faced widespread protests in November 2007, to which he responded with severe repression, shutting down independent media, detaining opposition leaders, and sending his security forces to assault largely nonviolent demonstrators with tear gas, truncheons, rubber bullets, water cannons, and sonic equipment. Human Rights Watch criticized the government for using "excessive" force against protesters and the International Crisis Group warned of growing authoritarianism in the country. Despite this, Saakashvili continued to receive strong support from Washington and still appeared to have majority support within Georgia, winning a snap election in January by a solid majority which - despite some irregularities - was generally thought to be free and fair.
Lead-up to the Current Crisis
A number of misguided U.S. policies appear to have played an important role in encouraging Georgia to launch its August 6 assault on South Ossetia.
The first had to do with the U.S.-led militarization of Georgia, which likely emboldened Saakashvili to try to resolve the conflict over South Ossetia by military means. Just last month, the United States held a military exercise in Georgia with more than 1,000 American troops while the Bush administration, according to The New York Times, was "loudly proclaiming its support for Georgia's territorial integrity in the battle with Russia over Georgia's separatist enclaves." As the situation was deteriorating last month, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a high-profile visit to Saakashvili in Tbilisi, where she reiterated the strong strategic relationship between the two countries.
Radio Liberty speculates that Saakashvili "may have felt that his military, after several years of U.S.-sponsored training and rearmament, was now capable of routing the Ossetian separatists ("bandits," in the official parlance) and neutralizing the Russian peacekeepers." Furthermore, Saakashvili apparently hoped that the anticipated Russian reaction would "immediately transform the conflict into a direct confrontation between a democratic David and an autocratic Goliath, making sure the sympathy of the Western world would be mobilized for Georgia."
According to Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations, the United States may have caused Saakashvili to "miscalculate" and "overreach" by making him feel that "at the end of the day that the West would come to his assistance if he got into trouble."
Another factor undoubtedly involved the U.S. push for Georgia to join NATO. The efforts by some prominent Kremlin lawmakers for formal recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia coincided with the escalated efforts for NATO's inclusion of Georgia this spring, as well as an awareness that any potential Russian military move against Georgia would need to come sooner rather than later.
And, as a number of us predicted last March, Western support for the unilateral declaration of independence by the autonomous Serbian region of Kosovo emboldened nationalist leaders in the autonomous Georgian regions, along with their Russian supporters, to press for the independence of these nations as well. Despite the pro-American sympathies of many in that country, Georgians were notably alarmed by the quick and precedent-setting U.S. recognition of Kosovo.
No Standing to Challenge Russian Aggression
Russia's massive and brutal military counter-offensive, while immediately provoked by Georgia's attack on South Ossetia, had clearly been planned well in advance. It also went well beyond defending the enclave to illegally sending forces deep into Georgia itself and inflicting widespread civilian casualties. It has had nothing to do with solidarity with an oppressed people struggling for self-determination and everything to do with geopolitics and the assertion of militaristic Russian nationalism.
While the international community has solid grounds to challenge Russian aggression, however, the United States has lost virtually all moral standing to take a principled stance.
For example, the brutally punitive and disproportionate response by the Russian armed forces pales in comparison to that of Israel's 2006 attacks on Lebanon, which were strongly defended not only by the Bush administration, but leading Democrats in Congress, including presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.
Russia's use of large-scale militarily force to defend the autonomy of South Ossetia by massively attacking Georgia has been significantly less destructive than the U.S.-led NATO assault on Serbia to defend Kosovo's autonomy in 1999, an action that received broad bipartisan American support.
And the Russian ground invasion of Georgia, while a clear violation of international legal norms, is far less significant a breach of international law as the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, authorized by a large majority in Congress.
This doesn't mean that the Russia's military offensive should not be rigorously opposed. However, the U.S. contribution to this unfolding tragedy and the absence of any moral authority to challenge it must not be ignored.
Stephen Zunes is a senior analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus and serves as a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco.
Copyright (c) 2008, Institute for Policy Studies
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The Forgotten Holocaust
Aug 28, 2007
The killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War remains one of the bloodiest and most contentious episodes of the 20th century. Robert Fisk visits Yerevan, and unearths hitherto unpublished images of the first modern genocide.
The photographs, never before published, capture the horrors of the first Holocaust of the 20th century. They show a frightened people on the move - men, women and children, some with animals, others on foot, walking over open ground outside the city of Erzerum in 1915, at the beginning of their death march. We know that none of the Armenians sent from Erzerum - in what is today north-eastern Turkey - survived. Most of the men were shot, the children - including, no doubt, the young boy or girl with a headscarf in the close-up photograph - died of starvation or disease. The young women were almost all raped, the older women beaten to death, the sick and babies left by the road to die.
The unique photographs are a stunning witness to one of the most terrible events of our times. Their poor quality - the failure of the camera to cope with the swirl and movement of the Armenian deportees in the close-up picture, the fingerprint on the top of the second - lend them an undeniable authenticity. They come from the archives of the German Deutsche Bank, which was in 1915 providing finance for the maintenance and extension of the Turkish railway system. One incredible photograph - so far published in only two specialist magazines, in Germany and in modern-day Armenia - actually shows dozens of doomed Armenians, including children, crammed into cattle trucks for their deportation. The Turks stuffed 90 Armenians into each of these wagons - the same average the Nazis achieved in their transports to the death camps of Eastern Europe during the Jewish Holocaust.
Hayk Demoyan, director of the grey-stone Museum of the Armenian Genocide in the foothills just outside Yerevan, the capital of present-day Armenia, stares at the photographs on his computer screen in bleak silence. A university lecturer in modern Turkish history, he is one of the most dynamic Armenian genocide researchers inside the remains of Armenia, which is all that was left after the Turkish slaughter; it suffered a further 70 years of terror as part of the Soviet Union. "Yes, you can have these pictures, he says. "We are still discovering more. The Germans took photographs and these pictures even survived the Second World War. Today, we want our museum to be a place of collective memory, a memorisation of trauma. Our museum is for Turks as well as Armenians. This is also [the Turks'] history."
The story of the last century's first Holocaust - Winston Churchill used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of six million Jews - is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews idle ones. Turkey's reign of terror against the Armenian people was an attempt to destroy the Armenian race. While the Turks spoke publicly of the need to "resettle" their Armenian population - as the Germans were to speak later of the Jews of Europe - the true intentions of Enver Pasha's Committee of Union and Progress in Constantinople were quite
clear. On 15 September 1915, for example (and a carbon of this document exists) Talaat Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an instruction to his prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the tens of thousands of Armenians in his city. "You have already been informed that the government... has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey... Their existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience." These words are almost identical to those used by Himmler to his SS killers in 1941.
Taner Akcam, a prominent - and extremely brave - Turkish scholar who has visited the Yerevan museum, has used original Ottoman Turkish documents to authenticate the act of genocide. Now under fierce attack for doing so from his own government, he discovered in Turkish archives that individual Turkish officers often wrote "doubles" of their mass death-sentence orders, telegrams sent at precisely the same time that asked their subordinates to ensure there was sufficient protection and food for the Armenians during their "resettlement". This weirdly parallels the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, where officials were dispatching hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers while assuring International Red Cross officials in Geneva that they were being well cared for and well fed.
Ottoman Turkey's attempt to exterminate an entire Christian race in the Middle East - the Armenians, descended from the residents of ancient Urartu, became the first Christian nation when their king Drtad converted from paganism in AD301 - is a history of almost unrelieved horror at the hands of Turkish policemen and soldiers, and Kurdish tribesmen.
In 1915, Turkey claimed that its Armenian population was supporting Turkey's Christian enemies in Britain, France and Russia. Several historians - including Churchill, who was responsible for the doomed venture at Gallipoli - have asked whether the Turkish victory there did not give them the excuse to turn against the Christian Armenians of Asia Minor, a people of mixed Persian, Roman and Byzantine blood, with what Churchill called "merciless fury". Armenian scholars have compiled a map of their people's persecution and deportation, a document that is as detailed as the maps of Europe that show the railway lines to Auschwitz and Treblinka; the Armenians of Erzerum, for example, were sent on their death march to Terjan and then to Erzinjan and on to Sivas province. The men would be executed by firing squad or hacked to death with axes outside villages, the women and children then driven on into the desert to die of thirst or disease or exhaustion or gang-rape. In one mass grave I myself discovered on a hillside at Hurgada in present-day Syria, there were thousands of skeletons, mostly of young people - their teeth were perfect. I even found a 100-year-old Armenian woman who had escaped the slaughter there and identified the hillside for me.
Hayk Demoyan sits in his air-conditioned museum office, his computer purring softly on the desk, and talks of the need to memorialise this huge suffering. "You can see it in the writing of each survivor," he says. "When visitors come here from the diaspora - from America and Europe, Lebanon and Syria, people whose parents or grandparents died in our genocide - our staff feel with these people. They see these people become very upset, there are tears and some get a bit crazy after seeing the exhibition. This can be very difficult for us, psychologically. The stance of the current Turkish government [in denying the genocide] is proving they are proud of what their ancestors did. They are saying they are pleased with what the Ottomans did. Yet today, we are hearing that a lot of places in the world are like goldmines of archive materials to continue our work - even here in Yerevan. Every day, we are coming across new photographs or documents."
The pictures Demoyan gives to The Independent were taken by employees of Deutsche Bank in 1915 to send to their head office in Berlin as proof of their claims that the Turks were massacring their Armenian population. They can be found in the Deutsche Bank Historical Institute - Oriental Section (the photograph of the Armenian deportees across the desert published in The Independent today, for example, is registered photo number 1704 and the 1915 caption reads: "Deportation Camp near Erzerum.")
A German engineer in Kharput sent back a now-famous photogaph of Armenian men being led to their execution by armed Turkish police officers. The banking officials were appalled that the Ottoman Turks were using - in effect - German money to send Armenians to their death by rail. The new transportation system was supposed to be used for military purposes, not for genocide.
German soldiers sent to Turkey to reorganise the Ottoman army also witnessed these atrocities. Armin Wegner, an especially courageous German second lieutenant in the retinue of Field Marshal von der Goltz, took a series of photographs of dead and dying Armenian women and children. Other German officers regarded the genocide with more sinister interest. Some of these men, as Armenian scholar Vahakn Dadrian discovered, turn up 26 years later as more senior officers conducting the mass killing of Jews in German-occupied Russia.
Computers have transformed the research of institutions like the Yerevan museum. Poorly funded scholarship has been replaced by a treasure-house of information that Demoyan is going to publish in scholarly magazines. "We have information that some Germans who were in Armenia in 1915 started selling genocide pictures for personal collections when they returned home... In Russia, a man from St Petersburg also informed us that he had seen handwritten memoirs from 1940 in which the writer spoke of Russian photographs of Armenian bodies in Van and Marash in 1915 and 1916." Russian Tsarist troops marched into the eastern Turkish city of Van and briefly liberated its doomed Armenian inhabitants. Then the Russians retreated after apparently taking these pictures of dead Armenians in outlying villages.
Stalin also did his bit to erase the memory of the massacres. The Armenian Tashnag party, so prominent in Armenian politics in the Ottoman empire, was banned by the Soviets. "In the 1930s," Demoyan says, "everyone destroyed handwritten memoirs of the genocide, photographs, land deeds - otherwise they could have been associated by the Soviet secret police with Tashnag material." He shakes his head at this immeasurable loss. "But now we are finding new material in France and new pictures taken by humanitarian workers of the time. We know there were two or three documentary films from 1915, one shot approvingly by a Kurdish leader to show how the Turks "dealt" with Armenians. There is huge new material in Norway of the deportations in Mush from a Norwegian missionary who was there in 1915."
There is, too, a need to archive memoirs and books that were published in the aftermath of the genocide but discarded or forgotten in the decades that followed. In 1929, for example, a small-circulation book was published in Boston entitled From Dardanelles to Palestine by Captain Sarkis Torossian. The author was a highly decorated officer in the Turkish army who fought with distinction and was wounded at Gallipoli. He went on to fight the Allies in Palestine but was appalled to find thousands of dying Armenian refugees in the deserts of northern Syria. In passages of great pain, he discovers his sister living in rags and tells how his fiancAf(c)e Jemileh died in his arms. "I raised Jemileh in my arms, the pain and terror in her eyes melted until they were bright as stars again, stars in an oriental night... and so she died, as a dream passing." Torossian changed sides, fought with the Arabs, and even briefly met Lawrence of Arabia - who did not impress him.
"The day following my entry into Damascus, the remainder of the Arab army entered along with their loads and behind them on a camel came one they called... the paymaster. This camel rider I learned was Captain Lawrence... Captain Lawrence to my knowledge did nothing to foment the Arab revolution, nor did he play any part in the Arab military tactics. When first I heard of him he was a paymaster, nothing more. And so he was to Prince Emir Abdulah (sic), brother of King Feisal, whom I knew. I do not write in disparagement. I write as a fighting man. Some must fight and others pay." Bitterness, it seems, runs deep. Torossian eventually re-entered Ottoman Turkey as an Armenian officer with the French army of occupation in the Cilicia region. But Kemalist guerrillas attacked the French, who then, Torossian suspects, gave weapons and ammunition to the Turks to allow the French army safe passage out of Cilicia. Betrayed, Torossian fled to relatives in America.
There is debate in Yerevan today as to why the diaspora Armenians appea r to care more about the genocide than the citizens of modern-day Armenia. Indeed, the Foreign minister of Armenia, Vardan Oskanian, actually told me that "days, weeks, even months go by" when he does not think of the genocide. One powerful argument put to me by an Armenian friend is that 70 years of Stalinism and official Soviet silence on the genocide deleted the historical memory in eastern Armenia - the present-day state of Armenia. Another argument suggests that the survivors of western Armenia - in what is now Turkey - lost their families and lands and still seek acknowledgement and maybe even restitution, while eastern Armenians did not lose their lands. Demoyan disputes all this.
"The fundamental problem, I think, is that in the diaspora many don't want to recognise our statehood," he says. "We are surrounded by two countries - Turkey and Azerbaijan - and we have to take our security into account; but not to the extent of damaging memory. Here we must be accurate. I have changed things in this museum. There were inappropriate things, comments about 'hot-bloodied'people, all the old clichAf(c)s about Turks - they have now gone. The diaspora want to be the holders of our memories - but 60 per cent of the citizens of the Armenian state are "repatriates" - Armenians originally from the diaspora, people whose grandparents originally came from western Armenia. And remember that Turkish forces swept though part of Armenia after the 1915 genocide - right through Yerevan on their way to Baku. According to Soviet documentation in 1920, 200,000 Armenians died in this part of Armenia, 180,000 of them between 1918 and 1920." Indeed, there were further mass executions by the Turks in what is now the Armenian state. At Ghumri - near the centre of the devastating earthquake that preceded final liberation from the Soviet Union - there is a place known as the "Gorge of Slaughter", where in 1918 a whole village was massacred.
But I sensed some political problems up at the Yerevan museum - international as well as internal. While many Armenians acknowledge that their countrymen did commit individual revenge atrocities - around Van, for example - at the time of the genocide, a heavy burden of more modern responsibility lies with those who fought for Armenia against the Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s. This mountainous region east of the Armenian state saw fierce and sometimes cruel fighting in which Armenians massacred Turkish Azeri villagers. The Independent was one of the newspapers that exposed this.
Yet when I arrive at the massive genocide memorial next to the museum, I find the graves of five "heroes" of the Karabakh war. Here lies, for instance, Musher "Vosht" Mikhoyan, who was killed in 1991, and the remains of Samuel "Samo" Kevorkian, who died in action in 1992. However upright these warriors may have been, should those involved in the ghastly war in Kharabakh be associated with the integrity and truth of 1915? Do they not demean the history of Armenia's greatest suffering? Or were they - as I suspect - intended to suggest that the Karabakh war, which Armenia won, was revenge for the 1915 genocide? It's as if the Israelis placed the graves of the 1948 Irgun fighters - responsible for the massacres of Palestinians at Deir Yassin and other Arab villages - outside the Jewish Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem near Jerusalem.
Officials later explain to me that these Kharabakh grave-sites were established at a moment of great emotion after the war and that today - while they might be inappropriate - it is difficult to ask the families of "Vosht" and "Samo" and the others to remove them to a more suitable location. Once buried, it is difficult to dig up the dead. Similarly, among the memorials left in a small park by visiting statesmen and politicians, there is a distinct difference in tone. Arab leaders have placed plaques in memory of the "genocide". Less courageous American congressman - who do not want to offend their Turkish allies - have placed plaques stating merely that they "planted this tree". The pro-American Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri left his own memorial less than a year before he was assassinated in 2005. "Tree of Peace," it says. Which rather misses the point.
And yet it is the work of archivists that will continue to establish the truth. In Yerevan you can now buy excellent witness testimonies of the genocide by Westerners who were present during the Armenian Holocaust. One of them is by Tacy Atkinson, an American missionary who witnessed the deportation of her Armenian friends from the town of Kharput. On 16 July 1915, she recorded in her secret diary how "a boy has arrived in Mezreh in a bad state nervously. As I understand it he was with a crowd of women and children from some village... who joined our prisoners who went out June 23... The boy says that in the gorge this side of Bakir Maden the men and women were all shot and the leading men had their heads cut off afterwards... He escaped... and came here. His own mother was stripped and robbed and then shot... He says the valley smells so awful that one can hardly pass by now."
For fear the Turkish authorities might discover her diaries, Atkinson sometimes omitted events. In 1924 - when her diary, enclosed in a sealed trunk, at last returned to the United States, she wrote about a trip made to Kharput by her fellow missionaries. "The story of this trip I did not dare write," she scribbled in the margin. "They saw about 10,000 bodies."
Anatomy of a massacre: How the genocide unfolded
By Simon Usborne
An estimated 1.5 million Armenians died between 1915 and 1917, either at the hands of Turkish forces or of starvation. Exact figures are unknown, but each larger blob - at the site of a concentration camp or massacre - potentially represents the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
The trail of extermination, and dispute about exactly what happened, stretches back more than 90 years to the opening months of the First World War, when some of the Armenian minority in the east of the beleaguered Ottoman Empire enraged the ruling Young Turks coalition by siding with Russia.
On 24 April 1915, Turkish troops rounded up and killed hundreds of Armenian intellectuals. Weeks later, three million Armenians were marched from their homes - the majority towards Syria and modern-day Iraq - via an estimated 25 concentration camps.
In 1915, The New York Times reported that "the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles... It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people." Winston Churchill would later call the forced exodus an "administrative holocaust".
Yet Turkey, while acknowledging that many Armenians died, disputes the 1.5 million toll and insists that the acts of 1915-17 did not constitute what is now termed genocide - defined by the UN as a state-sponsored attempt to "destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group". Instead, Ankara claims the deaths were part of the wider war, and that massacres were committed by both sides.
Several countries have formally recognised genocide against the Armenians (and, in the case of France, outlawed its denial), but it remains illegal in Turkey to call for recognition. As recently as last year, the Turkish foreign ministry dismissed genocide allegations as "unfounded".
One authority on extermination who did recognise the Armenian genocide was Adolf Hitler. In a 1939 speech, in which he ordered the killing, "mercilessly and without compassion", of Polish men, women and children, he concluded: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
(c) 2007 The Independent
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