You Consider This "Balanced?"

Submitted by Greg Chopoorian (United States), May 18, 2002 at 14:37

We Armenians, based on this article, are portrayed as unprincipled aggressors who are benefitting from Turkish "patience" towards our country. It is painfully clear that the writer views national unity, self determination and other lofty principles as the prerogotives of the Turcophones. It is, in fact, Turkey's stuborn refusal to come to terms with its legacy of genocide that virtually ensures the climate for Turkish Armenian cooperation to go from bad to worse. Turkey has written a line in the sand for the Armenian people by insisting on the following pre-conditions for normal relations:

1. "Recant'" claims of genocide. In other words, pretend more than half the world's Armenian population just disappeared into thin air between 1915-22.

2. Pretend we have no land claims against a counrty(Turkey) which signed with a briefly independent Armenia (1818-1920) the Treaty of Sevres which recognized the rights to some kind of national home in Eastern Anatolia, particularly in the vicinity of Lake Van, which until the 1915 events, had retained its Armenian plurality over Turks and Kurds.

3. Return the Stalin engineered "gift" of Armenian Karabakh back to the tender mercies of Azeri rule.

4. Cede the southern tip of Armenia's border with Iran, to give the Azeris access to another formerly Armenian region (Nathichevan) long since "cleansed" of its Armenian population.

These terms are based on a concept, apparently shared by the author of the aforementioned article, that Armenians are somehow alien intruders from another planet, and not, in fact, the oldest surviving ethnocultural unit of the Armenia/Anatolian Highlands. Does Armenia's Christianity deny it the right to persue its own national agenda as strongly as Turcophone nations?

Given the choice of submitting to such humiliating terms as Turkey has sought to force upon the Armenians, I should think we would much prefer to be miscast as the villians in the misinformation and sophistry in said article, than to ever again be marched like sheep to our deaths.


Gregory Aslan Chopoorian

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