Final Reminder & Background Material to Historic Khatchkar Event in Cardiff - 3 November 2007‏

Dreams are about to come true

How does a Welsh hill farmer breeding flocks of sheep in a beautiful but sparse area of the country reconcile his job with a passion for a positive resolution of the Armenian Genocide? Well, shepherding gives you “time to dream”. The fruit of this dreaming is lots of creative ideas, dogged enthusiasm and the ability to inspire even the dedicated to new heights.

With a hairstyle reminiscent of his flock, there’s not a drop of Armenian blood in his body that is nevertheless infused by a deep Armenian-centric spirit developed over a lifetime. Brought up in Snowdonia, arguably the most Welsh part of Wales, he became aware of the Armenians as a school boy through a subscription to an encyclopaedia built up in weekly issues. This has a picture of the 1894 Sassoun massacres that he vividly recalls till this day, the people “butchered for a reason I did not know”. As a teenager, he read the book on Armenia’s tragedy written by the Welsh MP W Llewellyn Williams, and discovered that the local chapel had collected £6, a princely sum, at that time. It is interesting that in Wales, the 1894-6 tragedies had a more profound impact on the Welsh: that did the genocide; they were then dominated by the First World War when fathers and sons move out of their valleys, some for the first time in their lives. Protest meetings were held in 1896 across Wales the there existed a Wales Armenia Society to provide relief.

At the age of 22, he read Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat and was struck by the comment of Sarkis that being an Armenian means an “unbearable weight of sadness on your soul”. He became more agitated with his continued research. This was not just an individual’s motivation: the Welsh have a natural empathy with the Armenians as a small nation physically and culturally oppressed by a dominant and abusive neighbour. The Welsh have a saying dating back to the late 19^th century: “he looked at me just like a Turk” whenever someone looks at another with malice or evil.

Eilian had been intrigued by the amazing similarity of the patterns on the Armenian Khatchkars and the Welsh Celtic crosses. Also linguistic similarities suggested some distant link, such as dwr in Welsh for tchour (water), hen in Welsh for hin (ancient), chwaer in Welsh for kuir (sister), carreg in Welsh for kar (stone). Also the letters c, p and t mutate in Welsh at the beginning of words into g, b and d as they change in Armenian. In 1997, he initiated the Welsh Armenian Solidarity to promote friendship between the two peoples. He organised an Armenian Church Choir to perform at the Rhondda Valley Eisteddfod. But it is the injustice of the Armenian Genocide that drives him: the obliteration of a whole people from their ancestral land. His attitude to the policy of successive British governments towards Turkey is best described in the 1923 words of Aneurin Williams MP that it is “intolerable to recognise a majority made by massacres”.

Many Armenians believe that nothing that can be done about this issue. He firmly disputes this – particularly at present when Turkey’s application to join the European Union gives unprecedented political leverage. He looks to the worldwide diaspora to fight this: the Republic of Armenia has to contend with developing the nation and be wary of the military might of its hostile neighbour (who even now at its whim threatens South Kurdistan). The diaspora are not restricted by such constraints and represent those whose roots constitute the most dispossessed and disadvantaged from violence. The immediate aim is recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the British government. This however is only a first step that must lead to recompense. Armenia in his view will not become viable in the long-term unless some of the lost land is returned and access is provided to the sea.

So what has been the outcome of Eilian’s zeal? When Wales achieved a degree of autonomy in 2000, he persuaded a Welsh Assembly MP to introduce a motion in the Assembly for Wales recognise the genocide, a task that that took two and half years of hard slog to achieve. The First Minister of the new National Assembly had also accepted an invitation to lay flowers to commemorate the victims of the genocide on the 24th April 2001. This was followed by regional resolutions by municipalities in Gwynedd and Cardiff in 2004, and recognition by the majority of Welsh Members of the UK Parliament in 2006 and 2007 With the efforts of local Armenians, Wales Armenia Solidarity lobbied hard to get the genocide acknowledged from the main podium at the national 2007 Holocaust Memorial Day, something that had been strongly resisted by the British authorities till then.

The even more impressive results are now being achieved at a national level. Eilian has helped to forge a collaborative coalition between four Armenian groups: the British Armenian All Party Parliamentary Group, Armenia Solidarity, the Armenian Genocide Trust of Great Britain and Nor Serount UK. These organised three major House of Commons conferences, staged a protests, laid wreaths at the Cenotaph and the Westminster Monuments of the Innocents, issued a 24 April publication to MPs and key libraries, supported a House of Commons Early Day Motion signed by the unprecedented number of 161 MPs and given a platform to the Armenian ambassador in the UK to give his government’s views that are not picked up by the national press. An online petition to the Prime Minister is still collecting signatures, the Armenian Genocide Trust website (http://armenian-genocide.info/) disseminates information and hundreds of letters and emails to government ministers, church leaders, have been sent.

The crown jewel of the Welsh Armenians will be on 3 November 2007 when a khatchkar on Welsh stone chosen to match tufa, carved by a Welsh stonemason to an Armenian design with dedication in three languages s will be consecrated in the Temple of Peace, Cardiff in the presence of Armenian, Welsh and English clergy. This is the first time that a piece of land has been donated for such a purpose and the first such monument commissioned by non-Armenians in the UK.

So could this have been achieved without our Welsh farmer? The real truth is not likely. Eilian possesses remarkable political instinct: he is aware of the differences between the political parties, the type of MP that will support and how to approach them. MPs recognise this quality as one was heard to say at one conference that “we need people like Eilian to remind us of our principles and our consciences”. He pays complete attention to detail: lobbying at the last Labour Party conference, he could remember the position of all MP names given to him. He has taught us to be inclusive and to reach out to others: the wreath laying was with a representative of Darfur, conferences have been addressed by British, liberal Turkish, Kurdish and Jewish speakers (including a Holocaust survivor). Thanks to such achievements, the Archbishop of Canterbury this week was able to speak of a steady (and ongoing) advance to the recognition of the genocide in the UK during his current visit to Echmiadzin.

Much of this can be traced back those dreams that Eilian conjures up while attending his sheep.