UK Parliament - Hrant Dink's Memorial at the House of Commons

Event at Britain’s Parliament -Hrant Dink’s Memorial at the House of Commons by Edwina Charles [Exclusive to GIBRAHAYER.cyprusnewlsetter.com] On January 30th 2007, at the House of Commons, the Great old Britain’s neo-gothic Parliament building, a most prestigious commemoration was held for Hrant Dink’s untimely death. The event was organised by Eilian Williams of Armenia Solidarity and supported by the London Nor Serount Cultural Association. A select group of people including Lord Avebury, gathered at 1 pm (London time) for a vigil at Parliament Square, led by the famous defender of Human Rights from the House of Lords. The proceedings inside the Commons (committee room 8) opened, with the reading of a special message sent by Tony Simpson, an Editor of the Quarterly The Spokesman, from Professor Ken Coates, Chairman of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, answering a call from his cherished friend, Professor Khatchatur Pilikian, who took the floor to pay his tribute to Hrant Dink, with consummate dramatic skill and poetic panache, holding the audience in spiritual turmoil. An original poem dedicated to Hrant Dink followed, written and read by the authoress herself, Ms Seta Cox. The second main Speaker was Professor Hovhannes I. Pilikian. He captivated the guests with his biting humour, and scholarly references. With the cold eye of an historian, Professor Pilikian made plain that there were harsh lessons to be learnt from what he saw as the cold blooded political murder of Hrant Dink, his personal friend. He spoke fondly of the memories of his friend sitting behind his dingy desk in a dark and dank newspaper-office (of the AGOS Hrant published) in the European section of Istanbul … Unlike a post-modern Western news-media Mogul, Hrant hadn’t made a penny out of his popular newspaper, still on shoe-strings, after a decade of existence! Respectfully, Pilikian described Hrant as the pure ‘poor’ traditional intellectual, totally disinterested in sordid money-making; Hrant was a pioneer of Armenian Turkish reconciliation and it is for this reason that Pilikian found his assassination an act of impure politics and sheer stupidity. Pilikian spoke movingly and passionately, wanting his captive audience to understand that Hrant’s unlawful death need not be in vain. “There are four important lessons to be learnt from this” said the Professor addressing the audience directly. As Lesson No.1, Professor Pilikian mourned the waste and sheer stupidity of political assassinations – he drew a parallel with the ex-Israeli PM Ariel Sharon’s self-declared assassination – with approval from the American government – of the Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, who throughout his life had made every possible concession to … Israel, finally delivering the much derided Oslo Agreement … securing Israel’s interests for good! In Lesson No. 2 we learnt of the abuse of the Armenian question from the moment of its invention by the Western imperialist powers – Britain, Germany, Tsarist Russia etc. In their need to control their Muslim populations, they used the stick of the Christianity of the Armenian people to beat the Ottoman Sultanate with, to plunder its economy and finally divide up its vast colonial spoils. Professor Pilikian proved exhaustively that the genocide of the Armenians was never caused by a religious war, as even the German Kaiser, Queen Victoria’s grandson and a prime culprit of the First World War, had intended. A pamphlet in Arabic published by the German Embassy in Syria had survived calling on the Muslim Arabs (the co-religionists of the Ottoman Turks) to declare jihad=Holy War upon the Armenians. Not only the true Muslims, the Arab peoples of the Middle East failed the Imperial German efforts, they moreover ultimately rebelled against them (the Arab Revolution led by Shariff Hussein), and received the Armenian survivors of the Ottoman genocide with open arms in the Middle East. Today, Euro Christian fundamentalists (perhaps led by the Vatican itself) endanger the safety of the Armenian communities in the Arab countries by cynically exploiting the “Christian Armenian” card to keep Turkey out of the European Union, not because it is ruled by a fascist military political elite, but because it is a … Muslim country! Professor Pilikian labelled this “the racist pornography of genocidal politics”. Lesson No. 3 consisted of the similitude between the Jewish Holocaust and the Genocide of the Armenians, which served as the paradigm for the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Referring to the pioneering work of the Sociologist Professor Vahakn Dadrian, Professor Pilikian emphasized the fact that the national archives (in Bonn) of the German governments is awash with the eye witness reports of the German imperial functionaries in Istanbul at the time of the genocid, some, with notes on the margins by the hand of the Kaiser himself! Two thousand officers of the German imperial army commanded the Ottoman armies in situ … and later became the Nazi hierarchy, including Hoss, the Commandant of Auschwitz. The Jewish- American Ambassador in Istanbul, Morgenthau frequently made the point in his famous Memoires, that if the German Imperial Government wanted to, could have instantly stopped the genocide of the Armenians let alone guide its execution. The audience sat in hushed silence awaiting for the final Lesson No. 4; the revelation of what Professor Hovhanness Pilikian labelled as “the grand secret of the British Empire” – complex socio-economic ideological factors that resulted in setting the British imperialist mindset, secretly provoking genocides, for world-domination. Similar views are well-established by the work of the American Professor Noam Chomsky, concerning the attempts at world-domination by the American political elite. What was highly original in Professor Pilikian’s own theorizing was the extraordinary fusion of well-rehearsed historical facts – the Malthusianism of British politics still active today in the Thatcherism of the New Labour – blaming the poor for their lot, and wishing to control their fertility ; The birth of the grotesque Eugenic movement in Britain, with modern echoes in the US perpetrated by Ku Klux Clan-type organizations ; He spoke about Social Darwinism which advocated the Superiority of the Western Christian race – meaning of course, the Victorian British – entirely grounded on Darwin’s pseudo-scientific Origin of the Species, the original First Edition (1859) title of which is nevermore published (thank god!). It reads (incredibly for modern tastes) – “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the preservation of favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”. In that use of the conjunctive “or” – Professor Pilikian pointed out, hangs a genocidal tale … It manifested the British imperialist Establishment’s ‘secret’ intention to find a respectable ‘scientific’ theory to justify causing global wars (and two world wars did follow… in obscene frequency) for ‘the survival of the fittest’ “Favoured Race” to emerge as a ‘naturally selected’ ruler of the world … Professor Pilikian’s contention was that the Industrial economic Revolution created in Britain was evolving (in a Darwinist manner) into the 19th c British imperialism, with voracious appetites for global markets – very much the case, he felt, of present so-said Globalization. Britain let rip the First World War led by Queen Victoria’s grandson, the German Kaiser who considered himself to be the better … British! And the trigger for this murderous Darwinian “laboratory”exercise was the genocide of the Armenians in 1915! Siegfried Sassoon, an Establishment figure (like Darwin), but an active war-poet, had “almost” worked this secret out, when he had accused the British government of deliberately prolonging the first world war for imperialist greed. As a punishment, the British Establishment disgraced Sassoon labelling him as mentally ill. Professor Pilikian concluded his historical analyses with an astounding conclusion; that these ideas were not in the past, but in fact very active today in Anglo-American global politics. He referred to British Prime Minister, Tony Blair’s recent much-trumpeted speech advocating global warmongering. Mr Blair had successfully destroyed all the distinctive Socialist traditions of the Labour Party, except one – its Pacifism. The Prime Minister now wanted to ensure that before he resigned, he “could genocide” that last Socialist survivor of Old Labour… The stunned silence of the distinguished audience was broken by the woman MP Nia Griffith, fixing Professor Pilikian with a warm stare and thanking him for all she had learnt today. Turning to the guests, she added that the stream of information passing through an MP’s office is unimaginable, and that the process of learning is slow but worth it, when it is properly organized by constituents as effectively as today. Ms Griffith herself had put down a Parliamentary Motion recording Hrant Dink as a campaigner for the Recognition of the Genocide of the Armenians by Britain. Among the guests were Lord Rea (with Lord Avebury) very well-known for his defence of Human Rights issues in the House of Lords; Dr. Fariudin Hilmi, ex Cabinet Minister of the first government of Kurdistan in Iraq, who was invited by the Chair Eilian Thomas to pay his own personal tribute ; Paddy Tipping , MP, member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Armenia ; David Howard, Liberal Democrat MP ; Martin Short, famous author and documentary film-maker (Inside the Brotherhood on modern Freemasonry, Crime Inc. on the US Mafia etc.) ; Vaughan Pilikian, award-winning film-maker, Sanskrittist Editor and Translator of Clay Sanskrit Library (of a Hundred Volumes) ; Artour Oshakantsi – the renowned Painter from Armenia, regarded as the Founder of ‘Abstract Naturalism’; Ms Estella Schmid, an excellent orator, the very well-known London activist and the long-battling fighter for Kurdish Rights ; the distinguished Turkish human Rights journalists Koray Duzgoran, his wife Arman, and Mustafa Yasacan, who paid tribute in the name of progressive Turkish journalists, and spoke movingly of his personal prediction of the murder a whole year before it happened … The guests parted company on an intellectual high … while congratulating Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian for his radical insight into the genocidal politics of the British Empire framing the genocide of the Armenians as the first of its kind, urged him to write down his speech, and dispatch copies by e-mail … for further circulation on the world-wide Net.

The full text of this report, as quoted above, is taken with thanks from Professor Hovhannes Pilikian's Blog .