K I Pilikian's response to Robert Fisk publication

Sir: I read Fisk's latest on Saturday 4^th[Copy of which is published below] in The Independent entitled Bravery, tears and broken dreams. I found it silly, arrogant and obnoxious. Most surprising is the lip service it pays to certain vehement anti-Marxist Armenian intellectuals and to the latter-day apologist for Globalisation. It is sad to find Fisk luxuriating in his misled and misleading ruminations. And I felt sorry for him, despite my anger at the facile and inaccurate juxtapositions of this most recent piece, because I respect his decades of valiant journalism and have long admired his courageous stance on the tragedies of the contemporary world.

Fisk's chronological errors and outlandish sketches are simply unbecoming of any decent journalist let alone one as distinguished as he. Alexander Tamanian, the visionary architect who designed modern Yerevan died at the age of 58, on February 20th, 1936. A year later his design of Armenia's first Opera & Ballet Theatre was awarded the Gold Medal at the Paris International Exhibition of 1937. Fisk wonders whether Tamanian's death was a murder or suicide, having decided that it was Tamanian who 'denounced' Yeghishe Charents, ‘one of the nation’s favourite poets’ and hence, he writes, Charents ‘was disappeared by the NKD in 1937’. But the poet was arrested in July 26th 1937, more than a year after Tamanian’s death. The poet was then tortured and murdered in his prison cell on November 27th, 1937, the year Fisk asserts that Tamanian was ‘hard at work building Yerevan’s new Stalinist opera house.’ We have then Armenia’s celebrated architect toiling beyond the grave and presumably happily receiving the laurels of his posthumous glory in Paris in the same year that Armenia’s beloved poet is murdered by the NKD. A perfect phantasmagoria.

Fisk presents Charents as praising Uncle Joe in his 'schoolboy prank.' In fact Charents wrote Message in praise of ‘new light/sun’ in 1933, when he was 36 years old. Moreover Charents had written hundreds of poems, before and after Stalin's rise, in praise of the Sun, Fire, Agni, Soma and so forth, each time as a poetic metaphor for a certain political or aesthetic idea of freedom. The poet genuinely believed that the struggle for a decent life and human warmth that genuine socialism might bring was worthwhile, despite the numerous obstacles it might encounter along the way. He envisaged just such a cataclysmic struggle when only 21, in his epic poem of 1918 that begins 'Out of their minds, the mobs in rage / Are advancing towards the rising sun...’ and embellished these themes in his 1919 collection Holocausted Flame. Charents indeed visualised the flame itself being ‘holocausted’: he himself was born in Kars, in Western/Turkish Armenia in 1897, and after witnessing the Genocide of the Armenians in 1915 he volunteered to fight the Ottoman armies during the First World War to liberate his people and his homeland.

Fisk goes on to praise ‘the individualism of the descendants of Tigran the Great whose empire stretched from the Caspian to Beirut’ because they ‘resisted even Stalin’s oppression’. Tigran the Great ruled in 95-55 BC. To link the ‘individualism’ of the people of present-day Armenia to its bygone Emperor is itself little more than a colonialist 'schoolboy prank.' Charents would now be turning, yet again, in his anonymous grave.

In essence, Charents was a Turner of a poet. The Sun was God for Turner and Charents. As for the Armenian poet being ‘a famous philanderer’: well, Charents loved women and one must assume that many of his beautiful love poems were inspired by some of those he knew. Imagine presenting Shakespeare, Marlowe, Shelley, James Joyce, Dylan Thomas or Oscar Wilde as mere philanderers, homosexuals, drunkards and the like just to make a silly misguided observation. Funny what a cognac on the balcony of a luxury hotel can do to such a rightly esteemed speaker of truths. What a shame...

Khatchatur I. Pilikian

24 Bulstrode Avenue Hounslow, Middx. London, TW3 3AB

Tel: 0208 570 6042

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Robert Fisk: Bravery, tears and broken dreams

Mount Ararat, towering symbol of Armenia, is an awful reminder of wrongs unrighted

The Independent/UK
Published: 04 August 2007

There is nothing so infinitely sad - so pitiful and yet so courageous - as a people who yearn to return to a land for ever denied them;

the Poles to Brest Litovsk, the Germans to Silesia, the Palestinians to that part of Palestine that is now Israel. When a people claim to have settled again in their ancestral lands - the Israelis, for example, at the cost of "cleansing" 750,000 Arabs who had perfectly legitimate rights to their homes - the world becomes misty eyed. But could any nation be more miserably bereft than one which sees, each day, the towering symbol of its own land in the hands of another?

Mount Ararat will never return to Armenia - not to the rump state which the Soviets created in 1920 after the Turkish genocide of one and a half million Armenians - and its presence to the west of the capital, Yerevan, is a desperate, awful, permanent reminder of wrongs unrighted, of atrocities unacknowledged, of dreams never to be fulfilled. I watched it all last week, cloud-shuffled in the morning, blue-hazed through the afternoon, ominous, oppressive, inspiring, magnificent, ludicrous in a way - for the freedom which it encourages can never be used to snatch it back from the Turks - capable of inspiring the loftiest verse and the most execrable commercialism.

There is a long-established Ararat cognac factory in Yerevan, Ararat gift shops - largely tatty affairs of ghastly local art and far too many models of Armenian churches - and even the Marriott Ararat Hotel, which is more than a rung up from the old Armenia Two Hotel wherein Fisk stayed 15 years ago, an ex-Soviet Intourist joint whose chief properties included the all-night rustling of cockroach armies between the plaster and the wallpaper beside my pillow.

Back in the Stalinist 1930s, Aleksander Tamanian built an almost fascistic triumphal arch at one side of Republic Square through which the heights of Ararat, bathed in eternal snow, would for ever be framed to remind Armenians of their mountain of tears. But the individualism of the descendants of Tigran the Great, whose empire stretched from the Caspian to Beirut, resisted even Stalin's oppression. Yeghishe Charents, one of the nation's favourite poets – a famous philanderer who apparently sought the Kremlin's favours - produced a now famous poem called "The Message". Its praise of Uncle Joe might grind the average set of teeth down to the gum; it included the following: "A new light shone on the world./Who brought this sun?/... It is only this sunlight/Which for centuries will stay alive." And more of the same.

Undiscovered by the Kremlin's censors for many months, however, Charents had used the first letter of each line to frame a quite different "message", which read: "O Armenian people, your only salvation is in the power of your unity." Whoops! Like the distant Mount Ararat, it was a brave, hopeless symbol, as doomed as it was impressive. Charents was "disappeared" by the NKVD in 1937 after being denounced by the architect Tamanian - now hard at work building
Yerevan's new Stalinist opera house - the moment Charents' schoolboy prank was spotted. Then Tamanian fell from the roof of his still unfinished opera house, and even today Armenians - with their Arab-like desire to believe in "the plot" - ask the obvious questions. Did the architect throw himself to his death in remorse? Or was he pushed?

Plots live on in the country that enjoyed only two years of post-genocide independence until its 1991 "freedom" from the decaying Soviet Union. Its drearily re-elected prime minister, Serzh Sargsyan, permits "neutral" opposition but no real political debate – serious opponents would have their parties and newspapers closed down - and he recently told the local press that "the economy is more important than democracy". Not surprising, I suppose, when the corrupt first
president of free Armenia, Petrossyan, is rumoured to be plotting a comeback. Sargsyan even tried to throw the American Radio Liberty/Free Europe station out of Armenia - though I suppose that's not necessarily an undemocratic gesture.

Nonetheless, interviewed by Vartan Makarian on an Armenian TV show this week, I found it a bit hard to take when Vartan suggested that my Turkish publisher's fear of bringing out my book on the Middle East - complete with a chapter on the 1915 Armenian genocide - was a symbol of Turkey's "lack of democratisation". What about Armenia's pliant press, I asked? And why was it that present-day Armenia seemed to protest much less about the 20th century's first holocaust than the millions of Armenians in the diaspora, in the US, Canada, France, Britain, even Turkish intellectuals in Turkey itself? The TV production crew burst into laughter behind their glass screen. Guests on Armenian television are supposed to answer questions, not ask them. Long live the Soviet Union.

But you have to hand it to the journalists of Yerevan. Each August, they all go on holiday. At the same time. Yup. Every editor, reporter, book reviewer, columnist and printer packs up for the month and heads off to Lake Sevan or Karabakh for what is still called, Soviet-style, a "rest". "We wish all our readers a happy rest-time and we'll be back on August 17th," the newspaper Margin announced this week. And that was that. No poet may die, no Patriotic War hero expire, no minister may speak, no man may be imprisoned, lest his passing or his words or incarceration disappear from written history. I encourage the management of The Independent to consider this idea; if only we had operated such a system during the rule of the late Tony Blair... But no doubt a civil servant would have emailed him that this was a "good time" to announce bad news.

In any event, a gloomy portrait of the poet-martyr Charents now adorns Armenia's 1,000 dram note and Tamanian's massive arch still dominates Republic Square. But the dying Soviet Union constructed high-rise buildings beyond the arch and so today, Ararat - like Charents – has been "disappeared", obliterated beyond the grey walls of post-Stalinist construction, the final indignity to such cloud-topped, vain hopes of return. Better by far to sip an Ararat cognac at the Marriott Ararat Hotel from which, at least, Noah's old monster can still be seen.