Raffi K. Hovannisian sends letter to U.S. President

PanARMENIAN.Net - Raffi K. Hovannisian, independent Armenia's first minister of foreign affairs and leader of Heritage opposition sent an open letter to U.S. President Barack Obama.



The letter reads:



"It is often easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them. In another time but at the same place, presidential contender Adlai Stevenson was setting the scene generations later for President Obama and his administration.



As unfair as it is to be held up as everyone's lighthouse of liberty and justice, Barack Obama was elected president on his self-projection as that very beacon. He and his world-power colleagues, for both principle and posterity, must not allow themselves the comfort, however transient, to play feel-good god in mockery of historical tragedy and in defiance of contemporary imperatives to right the wrongs of the past.



Earlier this month, G8 leaders Obama, Sarkozy, and Medvedev issued a joint declaration softly pre-imposing a superpower solution on Armenia and the freedom-loving people of Artsakh, otherwise known as Mountainous Karabagh. Years before recognition of Kosovo and Abkhazia became current fashion and counter-fashion, Karabagh was the first autonomous territory of the old USSR to challenge Stalin's divide-and-conquer legacy and to raise the standard of decolonization and liberation from its Soviet Azerbaijani yoke by means of a constitutional referendum on independence in December 1991.



Azerbaijan responded to this legitimate quest for self-determination with a failed war of aggression, resulting as it did in tens of thousands of casualties, more than a million refugees, countless lost birthrights, collaterally damaged cultural heritage, and a new strategic balance on both sides of the bitter divide, and so sued for ceasefire in May 1994.



Barack and company now wish for the Armenians, having suffered both an unrequited genocide and the greatest ever of national dispossessions at the hands of Ottoman Turkey nearly a century ago, to cede even more of their ancestral patrimony and their newly-achieved sovereignty by calling on them to withdraw unilaterally from «occupied» areas belonging to the Republic of Mountainous Karabagh in exchange for some foggy-bottomed diplomatic formulation about a future plebiscite.



Armenia says no, thank you.



If President Barack Obama and his distinguished new-age colleagues want to demonstrate that the conscience of humanity has survived the second millennium, that equity can still obtain in international affairs, and that an even and comprehensive application of the law, not self-serving parochial politics, rules this century, then they might wake up to a new mirror and proclaim the following.



*Should Mountainous Karabagh or any of its constituent parts be considered by anybody as occupied, then clearly the historical Armenian heartlands of Shahumian, Getashen, Gardmank, and Nakhichevan must immediately be acknowledged to be under Azerbaijani occupation. Worse yet, official Baku is demolishing, with malice aforethought, the last vestiges of Armenian Christian heritage in its jurisdiction, the most recent documented crime of dastardly proportions having taken place in December 2005 upon the no-longer-existent medieval chapels, cross-stones, and divine offerings at Jugha, Nakhichevan. Had the perpetrator been the Taliban—or the victim a sacred Semitic cemetery—America, Europe, Russia, and all of world civilization would have been rightfully outraged and demanded remedial action forthwith.



* If the rule of law is not a hoax or a decoy or an instrument of whim and duress, then the Mighty Three must together—and simultaneously—recognize Kosovo, Abkhazia, and Mountainous Karabagh as independent states fitting the definitional requirements of the Montevideo Convention. All must be recognized by all, or else none by none. The sui generis argument is distinction without difference.



* The government of republican Turkey—the successor regime bearing the rights and obligations of its genocidal predecessor—can no longer play dog-and-tail tag with the United States, the European Union, and the Russian Federation. Ankara's normally astute diplomacy has forgone the 18-year opportunity since Armenia's declaration of sovereignty to establish official relations with it without the positing by either side of any political preconditions. It has, most unfortunately, done so from the very beginning first by presenting preconditions of its own (including those turning on Karabagh and «occupied» territories), then holding Armenia in an unlawful blockade tantamount to an act of war, and finally speaking the language of blackmail and double-down intrigue with Washington, Brussels, and Moscow.



* Of course, the trinity of power all have talked the walk pursuant to their own petty interests of the day. President Obama's double-speak on genocide and its shameful denial, at Ankara in April followed by Buchenwald* in June, is a classic in point. But if Obama and friends are serious about the new global order, then they might find the fortitude to remind Turkey, as key partner and good neighbor, that it stands in occupation of the ancient Armenian homeland and owes a debt of atonement and redemption to the Armenian nation. And no crowning Bolshevik-Kemalist compact from 1921, a full generation before Molotov-Ribbentrop, can serve to rationalize the great genocide, nor purport to regulate the relations and frontiers between the modern Republics of Turkey and Armenia. That is their sovereign duty mutually to resolve, but if anyone in Washington or elsewhere requires guidance on crimes against humanity, ways and means of restitution, and definitions of occupation, «the memory hole» of expedient forgetting can be duly overcome in the US National Archives, its records on the Armenian genocide, and most poignantly the provisions of President Woodrow Wilson's arbitral award, issued under his seal in November 1920 and legally controlling to this day, to Armenia and its people.



Now, who was taking that pledge to liberty and justice for all? It was us, and Obama: "We must be ever-vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time, that we must reject the false comfort that others' suffering is not our problem, and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve their own interests."