Opinion: Ask the Armenian prime minister
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On Friday, October 19, the editorial board will host a discussion with Armenian Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan. Where do you come in, dear readers? Give us some questions!
Click on the ‘Comments’ button, or send us an e-mail with your hard-hitting queries. And to see a whole barrel of links related to the controversial congressional genocide resolution, keep on reading after the jump.
Here’s the prime minister’s itinerary while in the States. Here’s a Turkish Press writer warning about the visit. Here is a dense analysis of the new-to-me ‘problems of Javakhetia’ (having to do with ethnic Armenians living in bordering Georgia). Here is a totally unrelated story about an Armenian member of Parliament who was stabbed repeatedly in a Moscow casino; it was the second time he’d been attacked in the Metropol Hotel.
More to the point, Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt heaps scorn on the genocide resolution:
Imagine what the Armenian diaspora might have accomplished had it worked as hard for democracy in Armenia as it did for congressional recognition of the genocide Armenians suffered nearly a century ago. It’s even possible that modern Armenia would be as democratic as modern Turkey. [...] Things began well [in post-Soviet Armenia], with the honest election of a former dissident as president. But authoritarian tendencies soon emerged, the former dissident rigged his reelection in 1996, and things went downhill from there. As Freedom House noted last year, ‘all national elections held in Armenia since independence have been marred by some degree of ballot stuffing, vote rigging, and similar irregularities.’ Meanwhile, opposition politicians have been jailed, protests have been brutally suppressed, and broadcast media have been taken under government control. [...] [T]he two main Armenian American lobbying organizations in Washington have focused more on security questions -- opposing arms sales to Azerbaijan, for example, and opposing Turkey, Azerbaijan’s ally -- than on promoting democracy in Yerevan. Armenia’s rulers have known that, no matter how they trample on individual rights at home, the lobbying groups will cover for them here.
Others in the I-can’t-freaking-believe-they’re-even-talking-about-this-resolution camp include The Nation’s Nicholas Von Hoffman, The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall, Time’s Joe Klein and syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell, who calls it ‘another effort to sabotage Iraq war.’ Witnesses for the resolution include Michael Moodian in the L.A. Daily News and Salon’s Gary Kamiya, who make an interesting-to-me point about how this issue is symbolic of a largely unremarked-on flight to Realism among the foreign-policy Left:
One of the stranger reversals wrought by Bush’s neoconservative foreign policy has been the rejection by much of the left of a morality-based foreign policy. Angry at the failure of the neocons’ grand, idealistic schemes, some on the left have embraced a realism that formerly was associated with the America-first right. But by throwing out morality in foreign policy because of the neocon debacle in Iraq, these leftists are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The problem with Bush’s Middle East policy hasn’t been that it’s too moralistic -- it’s that its morality has been flawed and incoherent.