A TRIBUTE TO HRANT DINK Sacrificed on the Altar of Freedom of Speech

I am devoting this week's paper to the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul last January 19. The reason is that the act represents an affront to freedom of speech which transcends the Armenian cause. We know at our cost that the latter is of little interest to most non-Armenians. I am spurred in writing these words by the fact that the Chilean audiovisual press totally ignored the event, and the written press gave it a perfunctory mention. Far beyond the Turkish assassin and his backers, there are a number of other accomplices, by design, neglect or omission. An old Armenian curse on all of them. 

MEETING HRANT DINK

I write these words with Hrant's visiting card in front of me. It is entirely written in Turkish, describing him as Gemel Yayin Yönetmei (which roughly translates into General Executive Publisher). I was glad and honoured to meet him in Yerevan last September, when he was a much-applauded speaker at the Diaspora Conference I attended. I told him that even the Chilean press had mentioned his tribulations with the Turkish authorities, and asked him if he had any plans to visit Latin America. He said that indeed he had an invitation from the Armenian community in Buenos Aires (the largest in Latin America), which he was hoping to take up in 2007. I gave him a copy of my private-circulation study on the Geopolitics of Armenia, and insisted that he should add Chile to his itinerary. It was not to be.

THE WORLD MEDIA

I heard about the murder an hour or so after it occurred, following a call from a foreign ambassador friend in Santiago, who had seen it on CNN. For the next 24 hours, the US network ran it as its top story. I quickly updated myself of the known facts, and realising that I was most probably the only person in Chile to have ever met the victim, I got in touch with my three favourite medias: Radio Cooperativa, CHILEVISION, and El Mostrador. In each case I explained what had happened (none of them had watched CNN or looked at agency wires over the past 2 hours, it seems). In coming days, they totally ignored the event, even though several of them have been prosecuted for revealing the truth on many scandals in Chile..El Mercurio did publish a letter of mine, after cogitating about it for five days. I then started receiving articles, comments and agency reports from various sources. The ones from Anglo-Saxon countries had obviously not absorbed the enormity of what had happened. They continued to use euphemisms such as the "massacres", or put "alleged" in front of Genocide, or the word itself with quotation marks. The same medias who have no hesitation whatsoever in calling Genocide the killing of a few tribesmen here and there, still cannot bring themselves to use when it comes to the Armenians. CNN at least gave the story the importance it deserved, and interviewed people in Turkey itself who had no qualms in using the G word. Reuters had no balls, as usual. The current issue of The Economist has a leader on Dink, but not a single article, or letter, and the Obituary is dedicated to some Ugandan spiritist. The leader speaks about "horrors" against the Armenians, halves the number of victims, and declares itself against the penalization of negationism (understandably, otherwise most of The Economist staff would be in jail by now).


Hrant Dink Armen Kouyoumdjian

I have been a reader of The Economist for 36 years, and I have stoically withstood their blinkered support of Thatcherism, their lack of concern for the evils of the free market, followed by their mercenary backing of the Bush administration's foreign policy. However, when they started taking the Turko-American-Israeli silver pieces to rubbish the Armenians, I have decided to call it a day. When my subscription comes to an end next May, its Executive Editor Daniel Franklin is going to get a piece of my mind, jointly with my cancellation.

I have to single out the BBC, that paragon of international journalism whose total cost to the British taxpayer is higher than Chile's defence budget. Some months before the latest events, I was in correspondence with its European Editor, Mark Mardell, to complain about the "allegeds" and "genocide with quotation marks" notes on their website. His answer was very revealing. He said that as an "independent" organisation, they had to give all points of view, including those of the Flat Earth Society. When I asked him whether this generous pluralism applied to the Jewish Holocaust, there was a pregnant silence. After Dink's murder, when the "allegeds" and the "genocide with quotation marks" reappeared, I graphically reminded him of his sin of omission, and the fact that we were not The Flat Earth Society. He got offended at my language. Troppo Vero, as the Pope told Michelangelo. Oh how the British and the Chileans are alike in their verbal mariconeria…No wonder men in both these countries have tremendous sexual hang-ups! As they say in Turkish, tembel pezevenkler..

At least, Hrant Dink was oppressed by Turkish legislation talking its own book. The world media whose careful euphemisms encouraged his murderers, had no such excuse.

GOVERNMENTS

Though the new US Congress with its Democrat majority has another resolution before it recognising the Armenian Genocide, it has little hope of succeeding. The last one under the Clinton administration was withdrawn from the floor of the house half an hour before its assured vote, for "reasons of national security". The Bush administration has gone even further. Last year, it fired its own career ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, after the courageous diplomat said at a conference that it was high time to stop playing word games. A tribute to him will take place at a Los Angeles dinner on March 4. In his place, the president named one Richard Hoagland, who again had semantic problems during his Senate confirmation hearings. Everyone expected that a more objective person would be proposed instead, but GW has gone on and re-proposed the same Hoagland!

It was a good few months for disseminating the Armenian cause. Pamuk's Nobel prize in literature last October, and the proposed French legislation to penalize Genocide negation, aired the matter to all corners of the world. However, people should know that the said legislation did not have the support of the French government, which in fact was hostile to it. Though France is currently hosting the Year of Armenia, it is obviously doing it, as we say in Armenian about the unenthusiastic, with half its mouth.

Award-winning French-Armenian film director Robert Guediguian launched a new film last year, called "Voyage en Arménie". For all practical purposes it is an uncontroversial French film, about modern Armenians seeking their roots, and the relationship between the Diaspora and the Republic of Armenia. It won a prize at the Rome Film Festival last year. I thought it might be a good idea to screen it here, as an offshore activity related to the Year of Armenia.

Hrant Dink Armen Kouyoumdjian

Having obtained the enthusiastic backing of the chief commissar to the Year of Armenia in Paris, and the producers of the film, I approached the French embassy's cultural department, copying all my correspondence to the ambassador. They did not even answer my message, despite three reminders, and when I really got angry, they said they had decided that the film was "of no interest to the local market", and did not think it even necessary to inform me. Just in case you wonder, anybody who has anything to do with French diplomacy has been eliminated from my distribution list. It was a painful affair. Three generations of my family were French civil servants (two of them in Turkey, as it happens), but I do not accept messing around with the Armenian cause from anyone. Some years earlier, The Canadian embassy, which has a 5-strong "cultural" department, refused to have anything to do with the film Ararat, even though it had won the prize of top Canadian movie the year before.

Last but by no means least, we have to return to the shameful collaboration (in the WWII sense of the word) between the State of Israel and the Turkish authorities. The former have sought the help of the Jewish Diaspora in their evil deed, with varying degrees of success, but this may explain the hostility of some press organs to the Armenian cause. Anyway, what do you expect from a country who has a convicted multiple rapist as a president. At least in Chile we only have pederast senators.

TURKEY & THE TURKISH PEOPLE

The outpour of sympathy from ordinary and not so ordinary Turkish citizens, the strong condemnation in much of that country's press, and the massive crowd at Dink's funeral, might optimistically indicate that maybe the negationists in Turkey are a minority, held in ignorance and abeyance by nationalist forces which have dominated the country's politics for the past century. It is early to say how the wind will blow, but considering that Dink had been attempting a rapprochement and not a confrontation, even criticising Diaspora verbal extremism, maybe something good will come out of this mess.

As did Dink, I also support the negotiations for Turkey's entry into the EU, but probably because I am not as nice a person as he was, my purpose is more Machiavellian. I think the negotiations should be actively pursued, during which time Turkey will have, by law or by pressure, to change its policies and attitudes. Once that is achieved, they would still probably not get in (if only because of opposing referendums in some countries). The Armenians would have meanwhile had their Genocide recognition, the Republic's border with Turkey would have been opened, and even the Karabagh conflict may have found a solution. The rest, quite frankly, we should not care about, insomuch as few people have cared about us in the past 92 years.

Already, in the past few days, I have seen documents circulating on the web, from non-Armenian organizations, using the Dink murder as another excuse to stop Turkey entering the EU. One of the first things Nicolas Sarkozy said after being designated his party's presidential candidate, is that there was no room for Turkey in Europe. One of his chief advisers is Patrick Devedjian. To stop negotiations now would only strengthen the hand of nationalists and make things worse for the Armenian cause. Let us play the game for a while and fleece the opponent's chips one by one, rather than kicking the table.

POPULISM, POPULARITY & THE PEOPLE The Fear of Real Reforms in Latin America

The announcement of utility nationalisations by Venezuela's president Hugo

Chávez and his earlier cancellation of a broadcasting licence to a

well-established TV station, were accompanied by a row with the Chilean

Secretary-General of the OAS, José Miguel Insulza. The whole episode,

though it transcends Chilean borders, merits some observations. More than

ever, this report is going to be a counterpoint to fashionable views and

attitudes, and I can even draft myself in advance some of the comments

which I am bound to get. So let it be. I have come to the conclusion that

brains can be circumcised as well, and contrary to the other part of the

body, it does not improve their performance.

WHAT'S IN A WORD? The word "Populism" has acquired a pejorative

significance, from its original meaning of "doing things to please the

people", to which was added the sin that whatever you did "for the people"

had an ulterior motive. Playing with words is nothing new in politics and

sociology. The definitions are not even the same everywhere.

In England, being "an intellectual" is, contrary to France, an insult. When

Prince Charles got engaged to Diana, the conservative British press,

meaning it as a compliment, commented:" and above all, she is not an

intellectual". The English have another way to disparagingly describe

someone intelligent and efficient, "too clever by half". In the USA,

"Liberal" is almost an insult, on par with "Communist", whereas everywhere

else or nearly, it means having a broad mind and tolerant attitudes.

"Neo-liberal", of course, means something completely different, and should

indeed be an insult everywhere.

For centuries, the people of Latin America were successively subjugated by

their indigenous leaders, colonial governors, civilian and military

dictators, and pseudo-democratic governments dominated by the rich and

powerful. Nobody really took care of the majority of the people. Whenever

anyone tried to do something different, all hell broke loose before they

had a chance to show if they were genuine socially-minded reformers or

power-thirsty megalomeniacs. From Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala (and I could

start earlier in the XXth century), to Salvador Allende in Chile, going

through Fidel Castro, and now Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez and a number of

lesser figures, they were all demonized and satanised. Shaking the tree of

the status quo was unacceptable. Maybe they went about it the wrong way,

but from the earlier pioneers, most were not given the chance of falling

flat on their face by themselves.

No other part of the world has been subjected to as many experiences of

"vivisection economics" as Latin America over the past six or seven

decades. They have been the economic equivalent of the Nazi medical

experiments in the concentration camps. From Left-wing military regimes to

unrestricted Chicago boys appended to dictatorships or pseudo-democracies,

and from collective farms to old fashioned oligarchies, everything has been

tried by the academic Mengeles. However, apart from Black Africa, no other

part of the world has been less successful in developing minds, bodies,

livelihood, production and infrastructure as the countries of Latin

America. One of the region's weaknesses is its lack of a real identity.

Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, and the Protestant work ethic have fashioned

and consolidated other areas of the world.

Latin America is a badly-made potato salad of a miscellenea of different

indigenous beliefs and traditions, on which was implanted a Hispano-Arab

fusion to which were added, in different proportions, sauces from other

European cultures, from Basque to Italian, and from Germanic to Yugoslav.

After a brief flirtation with the British, who restricted their input to

civilian and military infrastructure, US influence started from the end of

the XIXth century, after which Soviet and other varieties of Marxism also

landed, and polarised regional politics.

The result is a total lack of indigenous diagnosis and solutions, because

it has no original spine on which to be hung. Whichever foreign wind (or

fart) is fashionable at any given moment is the order of the day. They need

Norwegian, Irish, New Zealand or Danish solutions, because they think

Western civilisation is the salvation to all ills, and cannot be bothered

to work out a national diagnosis and a national solution.

HUGO CHAVEZ Chileans (many of whom consider Insulza as the best president

they never had-yet), were incensed at his being called the "Viceroy of the

Empire", and a "pendejo", and the calls for his resignation after he

criticised a domestic decision by Chavez. For those unfamiliar with the

vernacular, "pendejo" strictly speaking means pubic hair, and is used as an

insult similar to "jerk" in the Central America and Caribbean countries.

When it comes to insulting foreigners, Chileans are hardly in a position to

throw the first stone. During the military government, admiral Merino

called Bolivians "animals", whereas when he was still commander in chief of

the army, Gal Pinochet made some very disparaging remarks about the

Germans. There is not a lot of love lost between Chile and Venezuela,

after the dilly-dallying on the UN Security Council membership vote and the

cowardly abstention, and the support of the then Chilean ambassador for the

failed anti-Chavez coup, before it fizzled out after a few days.

I would like to start quoting from a report issued earlier this week by the

Wall St. firm of Hallgarten & Co, under the pen of its analyst Mark Turner:

" Chavez has been made out to be a crackpot, a fool and a dictator by the

western news services. We believe that this picture is biased largely by

political interests and does not take into account the reality". Quite. For

an English-language portrait of Hugo Chavez, I recommend Richard Gott's

book "In the Shadow of the Liberator" published by Verso.Though sympathetic

to his subject, Gott, an eminent British expert on Latin America, does not

lose his objectivity.

The man was elected for a third term with around 63 % of the votes, in

elections that no independent observer has doubted in terms of fairness.

That is what the majority of the people want in Venezuela, and another

recent poll showed up that most of the population also feel there is more

democracy now than before. It seems that the quest for democracy is

selective among the critics (viz. what happened to Hamas in Palestine). The

Chilean press, which was classified last year as Latin America's second

most restricted after Cuba's, is hardly in a position to criticise "freedom

of expression" in Venezuela. The Caracas press is full of insulting

articles about Chavez. How many insults to president Bachelet have you read

in the Chilean papers? There are only two ongoing independent and incisive

sources of news and comment in Chile (apart from these papers, of course).

They are both online. One is El Mostrador (www.elmostrador.cl), and the

other, which I also strongly recommend, is www.granvalparaiso.cl

Ask about the US academics who lost their tenure for criticising the Bush

administration, before you pontificate on freedom of expression. In Chile,

if you are asked to speak in public, and make even a mild criticism of

anything or anybody important, the least that happens to you is that you

are never invited again. At worst, you are taken to court. If you reveal

corruption or wrongdoing, you are fired or even arrested for "breach of

privacy". If you are a journalist, your editor or programme producer will

get calls from business leaders threatening to withhold advertising. Dejen

de ser tan pendejosŠ

So Chavez flirts with Cuba. He gives them free oil, against the supply of

thousands of teachers and medical staff who provide educational and health

services in parts of towns and the countryside, which a century of oil

revenue could not be bothered to reach. Chavez also set up cheap

state-owned supermarkets in poor neighbourhood shops where previously the

monopolistic stores of the local cacique fleeced the population that did

not have access to the large supermarkets. Such shops are still to be found

in most Chilean "poblaciones". A recent article in Foreign Policy by one

Francisco Rodriguez (formerly a congressional aparachik in Caracas, and now

a lowly lecturer at Wesleyan College), points out the continuingly bad

poverty and social statistics, concluding that Chavez had done nothing for

the poor, and explaining his reelection by "high economic growth".

Can anyone seriously believe that 63 % of the population would have voted

for a guy, just because of an economic statistic, if they did no feel a

positive effect in their daily lives? Do you think that the mass of the

population in Latin America reads the financial pages and identifies

Euromoney's Finance Minister of the Year on the cover? According to the

same Rodriguez, over a million adults are still illiterate in Venezuela, so

they can't even read those statistics. What matters is the "feel good"

attitude. Abraham Lincoln was already aware of it in his Gettysburg address

when he referred to "the pursuit of happiness" as a national goal. At the

end of the day, irrespective of the political label attached to rulers or

governments, the main, neigh, the ONLY criteria of success is that the

majority of the population is, and more importantly FEELS better off than

under the previous guys.

Do you prefer the Venezuela of Carlos Andrés Pérez, who not only stole

zillions which he stashed away with the help of his mistress in New York,

but also shot several hundred poor protesters soon after the beginning of

his second term?

So Chavez is going to nationalise utilities. Well, did he say sequestration

without compensation? I have never been to Venezuela, but after living

nearly 16 years in a country where all public services (including some

formerly public urban streets) are privatised, I must say I am less than

impressed by "market forces". Anyway, when he jacked up taxes on oil

companies last year, not a single one of them left the country. JC Penney &

Carrefour left Chile, as did or are doing several utilities, and Occidental

Petroleum left Peru, without anybody nationalising anything in these

countries.

So Chavez is going to change the country's name from "Bolivarian" to

"Socialist" Republic. That is going to cause more wincing by the

"bien-pensant", for whom such words are anathema in Latin America. Only in

Latin America, mind you. How come the same people do not wince when

referring to the "People' s Republic" of China. Is it because Chavez's

Venezuela cannot supply them with U$ 60 DVD players or U$ 1 string

underwear for their daughters?

Where is the downside? With his undoubted popularity, Chavez may think that

he can get away with anything, and overstep the mark somewhere. So far, he

has been quite pragmatic, and in fact the business sector has done pretty

well under him. The Caracas stock exchange was a top performer in 2006.

Probably his weakest point is the financial situation. Paradoxically, many

people consider that as his principal strength. They are wrong. Despite the

huge increase in oil revenue, expenditure has risen much faster than

revenue. Public debt has quadrupled during his tenure, and he increasingly

has to resort to budgetary acrobatics such as raiding the Central Bank to

pay his way. Nationalisation also requires resources, both in acquiring the

assets, and then to provide the investment needs. The recent sharp drop in

the price of oil to a 20-month low obviously does not help. Any financial

squeeze may take some time to be felt by the public, and faced with such a

situation, various assistance programmes to third countries may be the

first to be curtailed rather than domestic social expenditure. More

perceptible by the public are the continuing bad situation of criminality

and corruption, for which Venezuela has been notorious much before Chavez

even joined the army.

RAFAEL CORREA & OTHERS With Ecuador's new president Rafael Correa taking

over on January 15, his rapprochement with Chavez, calls for suspending

debt service and going for a constitutional assembly, have already earned

him the ire of the mercenary commentators. Unfortunately, his oil resources

are too modest to allow profligacy of any sort. Far from being a Communist,

he is in fact a Catholic with a social conscience (something Chilean

Christian Democracy once was). His Belgian wife, Anne Malherbe, comes from

a very conservative family, and her brother Michel is a senior official at

the Foreign Ministry in Brussels. Correa himself has a Masters in Economy

from Belgium's Louvain university, and did voluntary work for the Salesian

order in his youth.

Other regional leaders have handled their situation in different ways. Lula

has reneged his metal worker militancy and background, forgetting almost

everything he stood for during several campaigns. He still managed to get

re-elected. Probably the cleverest has been Argentina's Nestor Kirchner. He

reneged on most of the debt, and obtained special powers that allow him to

do a lot without even consulting congress. He has not held a single press

conference or even cabinet meetings since he came to power. His popularity

is as high as ever at home, his economic statistics largely stupendous, and

hardly anyone even attempts to demonise him. He or his wife are almost

certain to be re-elected in October.

Mexico's PRI was once able to be all things to all men with hardly any

repression, but lost its way when some of its technocrats forgot about the

pendulum principle, ran away with the ball in a single direction and ended

up losing the game.

Nicaragua's re-elected Daniel Ortega is not really up to scratch, being the

second choice to originally lead the Sandinista movement. His rambling

inauguration speech on January 10 tried to be all things to all men, from

embracing the Church into which he miraculously became reconverted during

the campaign, to the closing singing of El Pueblo Unido and the Palestinian

flag flying behind him all the time. The recently defrocked bishop in

Paraguay is a man to watch for the 2008 polls (another "populist").

Uruguay's once militant president has hardly made waves once he assumed

power.