Armenian News...8 editorials

Exhibition of Irish High Crosses and Khachkars in Dublin

click on:

https://www.catholicireland.net/exhibition-irish-high-crosses-armenian-khachkars/

Although a propaganda video, this 3-minute clip is a very beautiful presentation of the Akhtamar Island in the pristine waters of Lake Van and its 1100-year old jewel, the Holy Cross Church.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=134&v=Xv2eKKWbUO0 

Eurasianet.org

May 7 2019

One year on, how do Armenians see their “revolution”?

The euphoria is gone, but not the hope. 

Joshua Kucera 

On May 8, 2018, Nikol Pashinyan was elected prime minister of Armenia, capping off his meteoric rise from backbencher MP to protest leader to the highest office in the country. Armenia had had a difficult 27 years since gaining independence from the Soviet Union and the “Velvet Revolution,” as Pashinyan calls it, gave Armenians a rare occasion for optimism. 

One year on, we surveyed Armenians to hear how their lives had changed since then, their assessments of Pashinyan and the new government, and their hopes and fears for the “new Armenia.” The euphoria of one year ago is gone, and doubts about the pace of change are widespread. But even those who have seen little change in their own lives or in Armenia as a whole still see reason for hope. 

“He was an activist, now he’s a guy in a suit and a tie.”

When protests erupted in Yerevan last year, Rudolf Kalousdian, a French-born diaspora Armenian, didn’t take part. “I’m not into politics myself, I’m a very neutral person,” he said. “I don’t really believe in a good politician.” As the protests gained steam, though, he changed his mind. “When I saw how the people were really all together for all that stuff, I decided to join too.”

Kalousdian, 36, is a tattooed rocker who operates a chain of popular bars in Yerevan, and he sees the new government through the eyes of a small businessman. The taxes and license fees he pays have gone up in the last year, and while the government has proposed a new plan that would eliminate taxes on small businesses, Kalousdian worries that his revenues may be too high to qualify for the break. “I pay in tax what I pay in rent. It doesn’t make sense – taxes are very, very high,” he said. 

But the corruption that used to plague small businesses is gone, he says: “It’s good that we’re working more like Western countries now, everything is in order. Nothing is hidden. Back in the day it used to be a lot of bribery to get things faster. Now it’s not like that, you can’t bribe.” And he’s seen his fellow business owners change their mentalities along with it. “The people who were willing to do a lot of under-the-table stuff, they’re willing to change, they’re willing to integrate into the new Armenia,” he said. 

Still, he’s worried about whether things are changing fast enough. He applied for a license to keep one of his bars open past midnight, and still hasn’t gotten it. Under the old government, police raided him and shut him down for operating past midnight, and he worries that could still happen. “But does Pashinyan know about this stuff? I don’t think so.”

Like most other Armenians, he resented the former regime for its corruption. “It wasn’t a real political party, it was a mob, they just wanted to steal a lot of money. Pashinyan won because people were fed up with this stuff.” Now the new government has “a lot of young people, people with open minds,” he said. “It’s not going to be the same 55-year-old guys with the big stomachs, who drink and eat kebabs all day and don’t even know how to write a letter.”

He's seen a change in the mood of his friends and customers toward Pashinyan over the past year. “It’s not like it was before; before he was a hero, he was a god in this city,” he said. Now, “you see a lot of memes making fun of him online. It’s not bad stuff, but people are making fun of the guy,” he said. “He was an activist, now he’s a guy in a suit and a tie. That’s the difference.” 

“I mean, he’s still better than anyone else,” he added. “If I had to choose, I’d choose this guy.” 

“They need to act now, and they’re very slow.”

Last year, Gevorg Kaas was 21 and in drama school in Yerevan. His dreams of becoming a film director were dying and he was getting ready to drop out and move abroad. “There was no hope for a new life, to change the country, for justice,” he says. “The education system and everything else in Armenia was corrupted, and for someone like me, who wanted to do art, there was no hope that any sort of door would open.”

Then came the protests against Sargsyan, and he decided to go back to his hometown, Gyumri, and help organize the protests there. When they succeeded and the new government came to power, he changed his plans. “The revolution created hope, so I decided to stay here,” he says. He moved back permanently to Gyumri, changed schools (he’s now studying psychology) and started an NGO called Restart. “I felt a responsibility to do what I can to change the whole system in Armenia because the government can’t do everything.”

He says he had no illusions about change coming quickly: “I knew it would take five years, minimum, for the sick, rotten system that had developed since the fall of the Soviet Union, to be destroyed and to create a new one that would make a new Armenia.”

But over the past year, he’s become more pessimistic. He’s seen Pashinyan delay an aggressive prosecution of corrupt former officials – “a year has passed, and almost no one is in prison” – and take on a team of largely inexperienced young people. “I know that with time they’re gaining experience, but people can’t wait,” he says. “That inexperience is pushing the new Armenia even further away. Now I think it will be 10 years, 15 years.”

As a result, he worries that many Armenians, especially older ones, are falling prey to negative narratives about the revolution: “They say nothing has changed. I say it’s changing, but very slowly.” 

“I’m worried that in a year, in two years, Pashinyan and his team won’t be as popular as they are now,” he adds. “And if something can be changed, it needs to happen now, because in one or two years it’s going to be too difficult. New political forces are going to appear, people’s opinions will change, Pashinyan will lose his popularity. They need to act now and they’re very slow.”

“You can dig and dig and dig and find another problem and another problem.”

A year ago, Arevik Anapiosyan was doing a six-week fellowship in Washington, D.C. The head of an education policy think tank, she wasn’t directly involved in politics but was friends and colleagues with many of the people who organized the protests. She returned to Yerevan on May 13, and two hours after she landed, she was offered a job as deputy minister of education. “I wasn’t even given any time to think, there was an urgency, ‘we need you here,’” she says.

She took the job, becoming one of many young, Western-educated liberals who now occupy senior positions in the government, trying to implement the broad vision of a new Armenia in their particular fields. Under the previous government, Anapiosyan says, “it was about having a good quality education for a few. What we want, and it will require a systemic change, is to have quality education for all.”

Having worked in education in Armenia for 10 years, including regular close work with the ministry, “I thought I pretty much knew what the problems were and how they should be solved,” she says. “And then I came to the ministry and I found that it is endless. You can dig and dig and dig and find another problem and another problem, and you never get to the root of the problems. I think I never knew that the state bureaucracy could be this slow, and that to solve the systemic problem, it’s going to take me longer than I anticipated.”

She says she sees that, from the euphoric days immediately after the new government came to power, many Armenians’ sky-high expectations haven’t been met. “The level of enthusiasm has decreased in the public, and I understand,” Anapiosyan says. “Especially in the field of education, to have any changes it takes years, decades. And we need to have those fundamental, strategic changes along with some small, quick gains that the public can see.”

Some of those quick fixes will be popular: The government has already allocated money to boost preschool enrollment, with a target for 70 percent of children attending preschool within three years. The government also is working on improving vocational education to better meet the needs of employers, and working toward an American-style higher education system that combines research with teaching. 

But other reforms won’t go over as well: There are about 35,000 teachers employed in the country, and only 25,000 are needed. The ministry is now working out a testing program to measure teachers’ competencies, and will get rid of the ones who don’t meet the benchmarks. That process will start in September, and “we’ll start letting people go in 2021,” she says. “We’re going to be very unpopular among these families.” 

She believes it will bear fruit, though, and eventually “we can change the system itself to serve the vision of the country that we want to have in 10, 15, 20 years.”

“The most important thing is that he thinks only about citizens, our people.”

In the Soviet days, Albert Madatyan was the head of the collective farm in Berkaber, a village in northeastern Armenia famous for its fruit. “Under the Soviet Union this was a beautiful village,” he said. “Everyone knew us for our orchards – apricots, peaches, pomegranates, watermelons. Everyone had work, we were always busy.”

Now 72, he socializes with other retired men on a bench on the village’s dusty central square. He laments the decline that the village, along with the rest of Armenia, sunk into after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the war with neighboring Azerbaijan. But with the new government, he finally has hope again. 

“We were tired of the old leadership, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s been almost 25, 30 years. They just took, cheated, got rich,” he says. So when the protests began last year in Yerevan, then spread to other towns – including Ijevan, the regional capital here and Pashinyan’s home town – people in Berkaber joined in. “We have a small village, but people went to Ijevan and Yerevan to take part in protests,” he says. “All the young people, all of them, went.” 

Madatyan, like many others in this village distant from Yerevan and its politics, has trouble recalling Pashinyan’s name at first – “our new, what’s his name…” – before being reminded by a younger local. But the new prime minister is nevertheless a hero. “The first person to really do something [since the fall of the Soviet Union] was our local guy, Pashinyan,” he says.

Berkaber has seen some concrete benefits already: Farmers are buying livestock using a new government-subsidized loan program. The new authorities “pay a lot of attention to agriculture,” Madatyan says. 

More generally, the spirit in the village has lifted. “The mood has gotten better,” he says. “People started to trust the government … People now believe that our future will be good, that things will get better.”

“The most important thing is that [Pashinyan] thinks only about citizens, our people. He understands that corruption is a dangerous thing, he wants to eliminate it. Whether he will succeed, we’ll see. I think he will,” Madatyan says. “He’s a fair, principled man, and the most important thing – he’s smart. He’ll figure it out.”

“People don’t have work, there’s nothing for them to do.”

Ara Khazaryan, 49, is a construction worker by trade, but hasn’t held a proper job since 2003. Instead, he works as an informal taxi driver in his beat-up white Volga. With a smattering of English he offers “mini-tours” around Gyumri, Armenia’s second city, but can’t go further afield. “I have an old car, so I have to stay in the city.” Business is slow, and a sign in the back window of the Volga offers it for sale for $1,000.

When his home was destroyed in the massive earthquake that hit the area in 1988, he says corrupt officials demanded bribes for permits to rebuild it and then stole the land out from under him. “We had lived there for half a century!” But he’s seen a decrease in corruption over the last year. “There are a lot of changes,” he says. “The police already behave better toward people. Officials are afraid to take bribes.”

But the biggest problem in Gyumri – that there is no work – remains. “We need to restore industry here. The worst thing here is that there are no factories, industry doesn’t work. And people don’t have work, there’s nothing for them to do. That’s what they need to do. We’re hoping.”

He also worries about Armenia’s precarious international situation, in particular its difficult relations with Russia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey. The border with Turkey runs just next to Gyumri, but it has been closed since 1993 as a result of the war with Azerbaijan. “We’re surrounded by neighbors who don’t share our religion; there is animosity. And all the roads are closed. And we can’t resolve that issue, that has to be resolved in the international arena. Pashinyan can’t do anything about that.”

“The main thing is that people have become a little freer, they trust the government and that’s already good,” he says. “Give Armenians the possibility and they can do anything.”

“If you talk about something all the time, and now you have the opportunity to do something, you have to do it.”

A year ago, Arsen Karapetyan was an architect and urban development activist with a popular, opinionated Facebook page. But he wasn’t in politics himself. “I think people in arts or architecture have to be in opposition to any kind of government,” he says. 

“Before, it wasn’t so terrible to be in Armenia – it wasn’t North Korea,” he says. “But I like change, and for a long time I didn’t feel like anything was changing.” 

And then the changes in Armenia spread to the municipal government in Yerevan, and he was invited to join the city council. “It’s more that I have to do it, than want to,” he says. “If you talk about something all the time, and now you have the opportunity to do something, you have to do it.”

He is especially active in urban planning, and trying to eradicate the corruption that plagued Yerevan. “Corruption is a system, and it was working. It’s a way to solve problems, to manage the city. It was clear to investors – you come, you pay, you get your papers. Now we’re trying to do it more transparently and without corruption,” he says. “It was like a pyramid, but now it’s more horizontal and that makes it more difficult. But it’s the way it has to be done.”

He sees himself in government only for a short time. “I want to do something, and then leave. But I want to have some results first,” he says. In the new Armenia, “it’s not that I have found everything I wanted, absolutely not. But now I don’t see any problem to change it again. Now in a more organic way – without protests, without crowds, just to go to the election and elect another prime minister.” 

Joshua Kucera is the Turkey/Caucasus editor at Eurasianet, and author of The Bug Pit. 

https://eurasianet.org/one-year-on-how-do-armenians-see-their-revolution

Armenpress.am

6 May, 2019

Japan donates new batch of fire engines to Armenia – PM expresses gratitude for donation

Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan attended the presentation of the fire engines by Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) at the Emergency Situations Ministry of Armenia. Japan donated 14 fire engines together with some other equipment. Ambassador of Japan to Armenia Jun Yamada and JICA representative Yukiko Ejiri were present at the ceremony.

“I want to express gratitude to the Government of Japan for the assistance to Armenia and technical and financial support provided to Armenia for years”, ARMENPRESS reports the PM as saying. He added that JICA’s support to Armenia has always been useful for the development of Armenia, particularly for the modernization of the energy system of the country and protection from natural disasters.

“Armenia is always interested in strengthening friendly relations and cooperation with Japan”, Pashinyan said, expressing confidence that the two peoples have a lot in common.  

Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan

Asbarez.com

7 May 2019

Armenian-American General to Lead NATO’s Allied Air Command

U.S. Air Force General Jeffrey L. Harrigian assumed command of NATO’s Allied Air Command, U.S. Air Forces in Europe, and U.S. Air Forces Africa. The proceedings transpired during a ceremony at Ramstein Air Force Base on Wednesday, May 1.

General Harrigian assumed command from U.S. Air Force General Tod D. Wolters, who has been at the helm of Allied Air Command since August 2016. In a ceremony attended by senior military and civilian personnel representing NATO, the United States, Host Nation Germany and local communities, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Curtis M. Scaparrotti, conducted the handover of command.

Harrigian will be succeeding General Tod D. Wolters, who earlier this month was nominated to be the next NATO Supreme Allied Commander and commander of U.S. European Command, replacing U.S. Army General Curtis Scaparrotti.

Having graduated from the Colorado Springs, Colorado service academy in 1985, Harrigian is a fighter pilot and U.S. Air Force Academy alumnus. He is the descendant of a survivor of the Armenian Genocide.

Harrigian has more than 4,000 hours flying the F-22, F-15C and MQ-1 Predator. He’s flown combat missions in support of operations Just Cause—the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, Desert Storm, and Inherent Resolve.

Foreign Policy

May 8 2019

Women Can Bring Peace to Nagorno-Karabakh

 They helped propel Armenia’s Velvet Revolution. Now, they’re turning their attention to diplomacy with Azerbaijan.

 By Anna Ohanyan

After decades of strife, leaders in Armenia and Azerbaijan in January announced in a joint statement that they are ready to “prepare the populations for peace.” The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Minsk Group—the troika charged with mediating the conflict between the two over the Nagorno-Karabakh region—endures as one of the few remaining examples of U.S.-Russian cooperation. And in Armenia, a tiny, progressive opposition party recently rode a peaceful wave of popular discontent to a sweeping parliamentary victory last October.

Outside elite policy circles, though, Armenian and Azerbaijani societies remain as far apart as ever. In fact, they are diverging rapidly along ideological, cultural, and generational lines.

Women can help turn this tide.

Last month, Anna Hakobyan, Armenia’s new journalist-turned-first-spouse, touted a high-profile new public diplomacy effort, the “Women for Peace” initiative, in Washington, having launched the movement in Moscow last year. For inspiration, Hakobyan has reached back to Northern Ireland in the 1970s. There, with little formal effort to reconcile ordinary Protestants and Catholics, the shooting in Belfast of three children galvanized two women, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, to spearhead a peace movement led by local mothers and women from across the political and religious divide. Their work built the foundations for the Northern Ireland peace process and for women’s peace movements around the world. In 1976, they earned the Nobel Peace Prize for their contributions.

That kind of peer-to-peer engagement is sorely lacking in Armenia and Azerbaijan. Although women’s rights advocacy groups are active in both countries, and in Nagorno-Karabakh itself, cross-conflict initiatives are small in number an lacking in funding, visibility, and political support. Women for Peace could help change all that.

In Armenia, women have started to show their power to make or break political campaigns. Largely left out from formal politics in the previous regime, women had mobilized in the country’s civil society. A Trojan horse against the regime, they ended up driving the Velvet Revolution in 2018.

During the Velvet Revolution in April of that year, the participation of women in large numbers helped keep the movement peaceful. Because it was peaceful, Armenians were comfortable coming out in large numbers. And because the revolution was so broad-based, the democracy it installed is more likely to last.

Yet even as Armenian politics has opened up, the absence of women from diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh has persisted.

In part, that is because civilian efforts to bridge the divide have been lacking in general. Before the Velvet Revolution, the Armenian government was highly selective in its support of confidence-building measures as a way to maintain control over the peace process. And in Azerbaijan, people-to-people contacts were tightly controlled, with the space for civil society space shrinking since 2008. Azerbaijan has also viewed such initiatives with skepticism, believing that they will normalize the status quo, which tilts in Armenia’s favor. With neither country particularly interested in peace, diplomacy fell by the wayside.

But lately, with more international calls for confidence-building measures—and with a new government in Armenia—Baku and Yerevan have started to tentatively open up. As they do, women can emerge as natural leaders in peace-building initiatives. Evidence suggests that including women leads to better outcomes. The participation of civil society groups, including women’s organizations, makes peace agreements twice as likely to emerge and one-third more likely to last. Those signed by women delegates also include more provisions aimed at political reform and have higher rates of implementation for such provisions.

RFE/RL Report

Armenian Businessman Freed From Custody

May 06, 2019

Artak Khulian

The official owner of Armenia’s largest food exporting company accused of tax 

evasion has been released from custody after paying the government 1 billion 

drams ($2.1 million).

In a weekend statement, the State Revenue Committee (SRC) said a prosecutor has 

decided to set Davit Ghazarian free because there are no longer “grounds” for 

holding him in detention and because   The statement did not give further details.

One of Ghazarian’s lawyers, Arsen Sardarian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian service 

that the businessman was released on Friday, just three days after Armenia’s 

Court of Appeals refused to grant him bail.

Ghazarian’s Spayka company reposted the SRC statement on its Facebook page but 

did not officially comment on the development as of Monday evening.

Ghazarian was arrested one month ago after the SRC charged that Spayka evaded 

over 7 billion drams ($14.4 million) in taxes in 2015 and early 2016. The 

accusations stem from large quantities of foodstuffs which were imported to 

Armenia by another company, Greenproduct. The SRC says that Greenproduct is 

controlled by Spayka and that the latter rigged its customs documents to pay 

fewer taxes from those imports.

Ghazarian has strongly denied any ownership links to Greenproduct. He said on 

April 5 that the SRC moved to arrest him after he refused to pay the alleged 

back taxes.

Sardarian told the “168 Zham” newspaper on Saturday that the tax evasion 

charges against his client have not been dropped and that he might have to make 

more payments to the SRC. “Calculations still need to be done,” the lawyer 

said. “The criminal proceedings will end only when they the calculations are 

over and they reach agreement on that issue.”

Spayka is Armenia’s leading producer and exporter of agricultural products 

grown at its own greenhouses or purchased from farmers in about 80 communities 

across the country. The company employing about 2,000 people also owns hundreds 

of heavy trucks transporting those fruits and vegetables abroad and Russia in 

particular.

In a series of statements issued last month, Spayka claimed that because of 

Ghazarian’s arrest its mainly foreign creditors are withholding further funding 

for the company. It said it may therefore not be able to buy large quantities 

of agricultural produce from Armenian farmers this year.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian dismissed those warnings on April 9. He said he 

is confident that the food giant will carry on with the wholesale purchases.

As recently as on March 26, Pashinian attended the inauguration of a cheese 

factory built by Spayka in Yerevan.

Spayka was already fined about 2.5 billion drams ($5 million) for profit tax 

evasion in July last year. Ghazarian said before his arrest that he agreed to 

pay the “unfounded” fine in order to have the company’s bank accounts unfrozen.

Panorama, Armenia

May 7 2019

The number of tourists visiting Armenia increased by 5.2% in first trimester of 2019

364,489 thousand tourists arrived in Armenia in the period from January to March in 2019, the Statistical Service of Armenia (NSS) reported, adding the number has increased by 5.2% to compare with the number in the indicated the previous year.

According to the newly released data, 317 891 people left Armenia for tourism purposes which is 9 5.7% increase against the number recorded in the same period of the previous year.

Panorama, Armenia

May 7 2019

Armenia’s permanent population on the decline

As of April 1, 2019, Armenia’s permanent population stood at 2 million 962.1 thousand which is 7.8 thousand less to compare with the data of the previous year.

To remind, Armenia’s permanent population was estimated 2 million 965.3 as of January 2019 and 2 million 972.7 in January 2018. According to the statistics released by the National Statistical Service,  1 million 893.4 thousand people live in the cities of the country and 1 million 68.7 people reside in rural communities.

In particular, capital city Yerevan has 1 million 81.6 thousand population, while Armavir province comes the second with 263.8 thousand population and Ararat marz with 256.6 thousand the third.

Vayots Dzor province is the least populated region of Armenia with 48.8 thousand residents.

Armenian Mountain Tea in the USA market

In Armenian market of herbal teas, Mountain Tea has distinguished itself as a lifestyle brand with its quality and interesting range of organic herbal teas, and gained the love and trust of customers.

As the company reports in a release, all the herbal teas of the Mountain Tea have European organic certification, are being exported to Germany and Russia, and sold in specialized shops.

Now, Mounatin Tea is being sold in the USA, too. Herbal teas of wild mint, thyme, pomegranate flowers and other herbs of exceptional quality from Armenian mountains are already available in Glendale, Hollywood, and Burbank. In coming days these high-quality trending herbal teas will also be possible to obtain in John's Supermarket grocery chain.

The Spectator, London

Books

4 May 2019

Would Turkey exist as a nation if it hadn’t annihilated its Christians?

James Robins

The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924 Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi

Harvard, pp.636, £25

Terrified of their republic disintegrating, Turks have not hesitated to massacre any minorities perceived to be traitors or fifth columnists

Turkey greets you with a chilly blue eye, a flared eyebrow, a cliff-like cheekbone. The face of the republic’s founder glares imperious from almost every office wall, shopkeeper’s kiosk and airport terminal.

Turkish citizens regard Mustafa Kemal reverentially: the nation’s first president, courageous leader of the 1919–1922 war of independence, deliverer from the great powers’ imperial cleaver. An impenetrable cultish mythos envelops him. Even for Istanbul’s young cosmopolitans, any word against Kemal spurs a visceral reaction.Recep Erdogan, the current president, whose politics are anathema to Kemalist ideology, still has to invoke him for the purposes of propaganda. To an American intelligence officer who met the man in the fraught summer of 1921, however, Kemal was a  ‘clever, ugly customer,’ with the look of ‘a very superior waiter’.

It’s little wonder that an American would view Kemal in such a way. His nationalist movement was waging a quasi-guerrilla insurgency against the victors of the first world war, who sought to carve up the moribund, defeated Ottoman empire. In the process, Kemal completed what his predecessors had already begun: the definitive slaughter and removal of the empire’s remaining Christian population: Pontic and Ionian Greeks, Assyrians and, of course, Armenians.

In their expansive and detailed new volume The Thirty-Year Genocide the historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi depart from well-established accounts of the Armenian genocide which often consign earlier and later frenzies of slaying to introductions and conclusions. They roll three crimes into one. First, the Hamidian Terror (1894–96) under the sclerotic rule of Sultan Abdülhamid II. Secondly, the obliteration carried out by the formerly liberal Committee of Union and Progress (1914–18). And finally, the Kemalist ‘cleansing’ campaigns during and after the war of independence (1919–24).

Morris and Ze’evi document each period well, if often gruellingly. They include a distressing but accurate summary:

An Armenian woman from eastern Anatolia, born in the 1880s, would likely have seen her parents killed in 1895 and her husband and son massacred in 1915. If she survived, she probably would have been raped and murdered in 1919–1924. Certainly she would have been deported in that last genocidal phase.

They are right to draw a link between all three in the sense that, no matter the ideological motive, the result was the same: a complete eradication of ethnic and religious minorities, leading to a death toll that approaches two million. But it is the ideological motives that the authors encounter trouble with. To their credit, they admit that ‘the bouts of atrocity were committed under three different ideological umbrellas’. Yet for their thesis to work, there must be unity of purpose. And they’ve picked the wrong one.

They find an ‘overarching… banner’ in Islam, which, they say, ‘played a cardinal role throughout the process’. Partly, their misreading is down to relying extensively on the accounts of Allied officers or western missionaries quick to attribute bouts of savagery to ‘fanatical Mohammedanism’. This skips over the fact that ‘Christians lived in relative security under Ottoman rule for centuries’. What changed?

The only theory that could explain all three fits of carnage is this: a siege mentality. Abdülhamid II, the Committee of Union and Progress and Mustafa Kemal (also a CUP member) were all gripped by a fear of the state’s disfigurement and collapse, and they directed apocalyptic violence against those they perceived as traitors or fifth columnists.

Indeed, only this could explain something Morris and Ze’evi consign to a desultory footnote: the Turkish republic’s 94-year-long campaign against the Kurds. They are Muslim, too, by majority, but from 1925 engaged in rebellions and resistances against the state — and have suffered dearly for it. In a way, paranoia about partition is the galvanising politics of the Turkish elite to this day.

The authors also withdraw from a bitterly ironic point made by pioneering writers such as Taner Akçam, Ugur Üngör, and Hrant Dink, a very confronting and uncomfortable idea indeed: contrary to the miraculous or messianic view of Mustafa Kemal, there would not be a Turkish nation without the destruction of its Christian peoples. The very foundation of republican Turkey is an abattoir of mud and blood.