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The Armenian Weekly On-Line
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Armenian Weekly On-Line, Volume 73, Number 19, May 12, 2007
News:
1. Hovhannisyan Wins 'Best New Documentary Filmmaker' Award
2. Wikipedia Features Armenian General
3. Hairenik Web TV Pays Tribute to Freedom Fighters of Artsakh
Interviews:
4. In Gag We Trust?
An Interview with FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds (Part I)
By Khatchig Mouradian
5. Who Do You Serve?
Steve Kurkjian, Recently Retired Globe Correspondent, Talks About Hrant Dink
and Life After the Beat
By Andy Turpin
6. In the Zone with Coach Tom Derderian
Community:
7. Kef Time is Back at the Cape
8. Shentil Foundation Benefit Concert A Success
Poetry:
8. 'New Man'
By Varand
Translated by Tatul Sonentz
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1. Hovhannisyan Wins 'Best New Documentary Filmmaker' Award
Vardan Hovhannisyan won an award for Best New Documentary Filmmaker at the
2007 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City for his film "A Story of People
in War & Peace."
Lauren Kresner accepted the award on behalf of the director.
"A Story of People in War and Peace" is the first international documentary
about the Karabakh war. It is a co-production of BBC Storyville, ARTE, WDR
and YLE, and is sponsored by the Discovery Campus Masterschool and
co-sponsored by the British Council and UNESCO.
In "A Story of People in War and Peace," Hovhannisyan attempts to find those
he shared a trench with 12 years ago during the war. His intimate
conversations with the people he finds raise questions about the human costs
of war and how it changes one's life forever. More importantly, it seeks to
find out how they are surviving in peace.
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2. Wikipedia Features Armenian General
On May 9, the biography of Hovhannes Bagramyan, a Soviet-Armenian General
and Marshal who fought the Nazi armies in WWII, was prominently displayed on
one of the internet's most popular destinations, Wikipedia
(www.wikipedia.org).
The website's English-language home page sports a different "featured
article" every day; the featured article on that day was Hovhannes
Bagramyan.
The article was a long and detailed biography of Bagramyan, including a
section on his early life through WWI, the inter-war years, and then the
World War II campaigns during which he became the first non-Slavic Red Army
military commander to serve on the front. The article also included an
account of his involvement in the Battle of Kursk, known as the largest tank
battle in history, and in the Soviet offensive in the Baltic and in Belarus,
as well as his post-war years.
The article featured multiple pictures of Bagramyan during World War II with
noted Soviet generals, and a photo of Bagramyan's statue overlooking
Bagramyan Avenue in Yerevan.
----------------------------------------- ------------------------------
3. Hairenik Web TV Pays Tribute to Freedom Fighters of Artsakh
On May 9, the 15th anniversary of the liberation of the town of Shoushi, the
Hairenik Association Web TV paid tribute to he memory of the freedom
fighters of Artsakh by uploading video clips depicting the operation that
led to the liberation and including the biographies of freedom fighters
Vartan Pakhshian, Vartan Sdepanian, Bedo Ghevontian, Mher Choulhadjian, Aram
Boghossian, Vahe Baghdassarian, Simon Achikgozian and Garod Megerdchian.
Additional video clips about other freedom fighters are in the process of
being digitized and will be uploaded to the Hairenik Web TV in the near
future.
The videos are available on the Hairenik websites at www.hairenik.com or
www.haireniktv.com.
----------------------------- -----------------------------------------
4. In Gag We Trust?
An Interview with FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds (Part I)
By Khatchig Mouradian
FBI language specialist Sibel Edmonds was fired from her job with the FBI's
Washington Field Office in March 2002. Her crime was reporting security
breaches, cover-ups, blocking of intelligence, and the bribery of U.S.
individuals including high-ranking officials. The State Secret Privilege has
often been invoked to block court proceedings on her case, and the U.S.
Congress has even been gagged to prevent further discussion.
Edmonds uncovered, for example, a covert relationship between Turkish groups
and former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), who reportedly
received tens of thousands of dollars in bribes in return for withdrawing
the Armenian Genocide Resolution from the House floor in 2000.
Born in Iran in 1970, Edmonds received her BA in criminal justice and
psychology from George Washington University and her MA in public policy and
international commerce from George Mason University. She is the founder and
director of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC) and in
2006, received the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award. She speaks
Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani.
This interview was conducted in Washington on April 23. To follow the
development of her case, visit www.justacitizen.com.
Khatchig Mouradian-It's been more than five years since you first contacted
the Senate Judiciary Committee to reveal the story on Turkish bribery of
high-level U.S. officials. Can you tell us about how this has evolved since
then, and where it stands now?
Sibel Edmonds-Sure. It's been slightly over five years since I went to the
Senate Judiciary Committee and briefed both Senator Charles Grassley's
(R-Iowa) staff and Senator Patrick Leahy's (D-Vt.) staff in a classified
fashion, giving them the specific document numbers, document names, names of
specific targets and detailing the issues related to my case. And as you
might remember, a few months after I briefed the Senate Judiciary Committee,
both Senators started speaking out pretty loudly in the media. We had the
CBS 60 Minutes segment when Senator Grassley showed up and said this is
outrageous. Even people within the FBI have confirmed all the stories and
said we need to turn the FBI upside down on this issue. Senator Leahy was
making similar statements and both Senators were trying to put together a
hearing on this case. I was later told that the Chairman at the time
prevented a hearing and some people-including good FBI agents who would be
telling the truth under oath-from testifying and shedding light on the
issue.
Two years later, we had the unclassified version of that report issued by
the Inspector General's Office. This is the Department of Justice's own
Inspector General's Office. After two years of investigating, the report
confirmed my own reports. It found that although these allegations were
supported by documents and other witnesses, the FBI refused to conduct a
follow-up or an investigation-a real investigation-on this case. So you have
this case which for the past five years has been confirmed by Congressional
sources, and people familiar with my case, and the Department of Justice's
Inspector General's Office, and has never been contradicted or denied by the
Justice Department or the FBI, and still nothing has been done.
There has been no hearing and nobody has been held accountable. We are
basically where we started and I find that really appalling. It is a very
sad situation and not only for me or my case. Many people think this is
about one whistleblower, one language specialist who worked for the FBI and
was wrongfully terminated. But I wouldn't have been terminated if I hadn't
brought forth issues that were important to the American public, and even to
people outside the United States. This case sheds light on several important
areas, including our foreign policy, which is hypocrisy-ridden. We're not
talking only about foreign individuals; we're talking about our own, about
U.S. officials who have engaged in actions that are against the American
public's best interests and what we stand for. But the American people still
don't know about this case, and Congress has done nothing despite the fact
that they have been fully briefed and have gotten full confirmation.
K.M.-This makes one wonder, who is actually working for the people and who
is working for his own personal and private gains?
S.E.-This is important, the issue of self-interest versus the interests of
the American public, especially when you're talking about public servants.
These are the people who have been given access to our national
security-related issues and top-secret documents. And I emphasize that this
is not about one party, this is not an issue of right wing versus left wing,
this is not an issue of one administration against another. Because when you
really go deep into these cases, you find that these people-these U.S.
entities, U.S. officials-have been misusing and abusing their positions for
a while. And we have been looking the other way. And the mainstream media
has been looking the other way. These are not top-secret issues. All you
have to do is take a look at these people.
For example, look at Mr. Marc Grossman. He used to be the U.S. ambassador in
Turkey and used his position within the State Department to secure future
higher-level positions while in office-and I would like to emphasize
this-while in office and with several agencies knowing about it. Some people
in these agencies wanted to investigate these cases but they were prevented
from going forward.
In my case, with this one example that I gave you, I was told by my
bosses-and these are the "good people" bosses, these are the agents that I
work with-that the Pentagon and the State Department were pressuring the
Justice Department to silence the case. And just take a look at where Mr.
Grossman is today. Within a few months after he gave his resignation, he
obtained a position with a semi-legitimate Turkish company that is supplying
him with a very attractive monetary reward.
And then you can start going around and looking at similar cases, such as
Mr. Douglas Feith and Mr. Richard Perle. They were registered as foreign
agents for Turkey between 1988 and 1995. These were very lucrative
positions, and they were not representing the American government at that
point. So once they resumed their high-level positions within the U.S.
government in 2000, do you think anything changed in terms of which
interests they represented?
And unfortunately you also see this from the Congressional side. You saw it
in the late '80s and early '90s with Congressman Solaris, and again we saw
it with Congressman-and later Chairman-Livingston and the position he
obtained as a representative of a foreign interest. And we may see it
shortly with current Congressmen, such as former chairman Hastert. And it is
for the American public, for our mainstream media to really look hard at
these issues. This is an example of one country [Turkey] we are talking
about right now, one case. How many others are there? And why are they
looking the other way? Do our people know, are they aware, that they are
trusting and giving the authority to people who are not representing them?
K.M.-You are just one person and you're a translator working on issues that
have to do mainly with Turkey. You had some 200 colleagues. So one wonders
how many stories like this there are. This one story, your story, by itself,
is enough to show how corrupt the system is.
S.E.-My case has been known to a certain degree because of the activities
that I have been engaging in, in terms of going to courts, going to
Congress, etc. There are similar cases we are not hearing about. For
example, the Larry Franklin case, with the espionage case that they pursued
with AIPAC. And what the American public doesn't know is the fact that there
were other counter-intelligence operations within the FBI that obtained far
more information not only limited to Mr. Franklin. Other operations were
shut down in 2000 and 2001 because they ended up going to higher levels and
involving way too many people. I'm talking about individuals who are
breaking the law, misusing the trust and abusing their power, and in some
cases I would even say engaging in treason.
Again it's very easy to see what happened with my case. What kind of example
is my case presenting to those other people who may want to do the right
thing and come forward? They would say it doesn't make a difference at the
end, because I pursued every channel possible. I went as high as I could go
with the courts, including the Supreme Court, and as you know, they issued a
gag order on me several times and invoked the State Secrets Privilege. They
say that everything about my case-including where I was born, including the
languages I speak, everything-is classified. I'm prevented from discussing
whether or not I'm right. And I went all the way to Congress, I did the
right thing. I was not what they call a "leaker" who goes straight to the
media and starts divulging classified documents. I went to the appropriate
committees, the Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committee, too, by
the way, and the House and Senate... I went through the other legitimate
channels-the courts, the Inspector General's Office, which is the executive
branch. I tried the media. So I don't blame those people that get
pessimistic and say it doesn't make a difference, or think they'll lose
their job or possibly go to jail. Many of these people are the breadwinners
for their families. They're conscientious people, but they have put 15-20
years into their careers and think, "Oh, I'm 5 years away from my retirement
and I don't want to damage that." So you have many reasons why more people
aren't coming forward.
They make an example out of you. Because if one case, let's say my case,
would really bring justice and accountability, you would see so many people
doing the same thing. And how many times-let's just look at the past
decade-have you seen a legitimate whistleblower from any of these agencies
come forward and prevail? I don't think you can name one case.
You're also looking at all the other channels being culprits, sometimes
without even intending. For example, there is a lot of blame to be placed on
our mainstream media today. Willingly or not, they have become accomplices
by not reporting what they should be reporting, and not investigating what
they should be investigating. They have abdicated their responsibilities.
And where do we look at when we talk about issues such as accountability
investigations? We look at Congress. And they have been a major reason we
are not seeing more people coming forward from the FBI, agents that I worked
with-solid, patriotic, good Americans, dedicated people. They were as
outraged as I was when I was going through these cases and reporting them
internally. If one of these committees, be it the Judiciary Committee or the
Government Affairs Committee in the House, would set a hearing and call
these individuals to testify, these agents would tell the truth under oath.
K.M.-So in your opinion, what is the definition of an agent today in the
U.S.? What is his job? An important portion of his work is what we are
talking about, things that are actually not being dealt with and that are
being covered up. So it seems that agents are "good agents" as long as they're
dealing with the enemy. But this enemy is decided by people who are often
corrupt and even committing treason.
S.E.-I can't speak for other agents but I can speak for the FBI, and within
the FBI you have different types of operations. For example, if they are
looking at criminal cases, it is the agent's job to collect evidence with
court warrants, etc., to go after the criminals and bring them to justice.
To a certain degree, the same concept holds true for counter-terrorism
operations, the one division within the FBI that I consider the most
important, but unfortunately the worst run. You have agents and translators
and analysts overseeing the activities-sometimes criminal or
espionage-related-of foreign entities in our country. Now, if they come
across criminal activities and U.S. persons engaged in these what they
should be doing and what they are able to do is to take it, report it, go to
the Justice Department, go to the courts and start parallel investigations,
no longer under counter-intelligence but through criminal or espionage
cases. Now, by accident, this happened with this AIPAC case. It started in
the Washington Field Office where I worked long before I started working
with the FBI, and with the translators and the analysts and agents I spoke
with, that operation started as counter-intelligence. The targets were not
even U.S. individuals. They were, let's say hypothetically speaking, AIPAC
and Israeli Embassy entities. It is after they came across these explosive
activities and after a certain agent in charge decided to really tackle
this-and this was before 2000-that they opened a parallel investigation.
This is when we later heard about Feith's office and Larry Franklin.
Now the same thing was about to take place with Turkish counter-intelligence
in the main portion of the documented-wiretapped or paper-operations that I
translated verbatim not only for the Washington Field Office but also for
the Chicago and New Jersey offices. They were obtained before 2001. If we
were to put a date on it you're looking at end of 1996 to 2001. Now, in 1998
and 1999, there were so many pieces of evidence of U.S. individuals'
involvement. We're talking about people with official positions, whether
they were in the State Department or the Pentagon or the U.S. Congress. The
agents did the right thing again by starting a parallel investigation that
targeted individuals who were possibly committing acts of treason.
However, as I was told by first-source agents I was working with, this was
put on hold in 1999 because President Clinton was then going through the
Lewinsky scandal. After the current administration came into power and after
I was working there, the agents were told to shut down. The people who made
that decision were not the Justice Department or the FBI, and that's what I
try to emphasize all the time-they were pressured, they were forced by
higher-up forces within the Pentagon and the State Department. And what was
their reasoning behind the scenes? I don't know, I wasn't there, but they
gave similar explanations and justifications with the courts: "You're
talking about very sensitive diplomatic relations." And in fact,
then-Attorney General Ashcroft said this in his declaration when he invoked
the State Secrets Privilege in my case. He said that exposing these issues
in courts, whether or not I'm right, would damage certain sensitive
diplomatic relations and would hurt certain U.S. foreign business relations.
In this case we know one of the countries is Turkey. So you have a U.S.
citizen here who has been deprived of her First Amendment rights. Gagged. I
mean, is that an American concept, gagging a person? You're not talking
about an enemy combatant, you're not talking about a terrorist suspect. You're
looking at a tax-payer, a law-abiding American citizen. So these business
relations, these diplomatic relations have justified depriving a U.S.
citizen of her First Amendment rights, of her Fourth Amendment rights in
court. In fact, the U.S. State Department did a retroactive classification
illegally and Congress was effectively gagged in May 2004. They're not even
saying what diplomatic relations they refer to. Are they ashamed of it? Are
we talking about billions of dollars of weapons procurement? Why don't they
be more specific? Because this is top-secret, classified stuff. That's why I
have been writing these papers, relying on outside sources, getting all the
data. You're looking at $5 billion every two years of weapons procurements?
That's not top-secret. Who benefits from this? What companies? Who are the
individuals who are benefiting from this? And is there anything in the
issues that I dealt with that if exposed would harm the Americans and their
security? None. None whatsoever.
In fact, they are issues and they are cases that would help with their
national security because the same activities also involve money laundering
or certain narcotic activities. All you have to do is look at the State
Department's own reports on Turkey and opium. Ninety-two percent of the
heroin supplied in Europe is coming through Turkey, and it's being marketed
and distributed by Turkish individuals. This is not classified. This is
within the State Department's own report. The poppies are being produced in
Afghanistan and Taliban-esque people are getting benefits, and Al-Qaeda
people are getting the benefits of these poppies being sold to individuals
in Turkey who then distribute and provide 92 percent of Europe's heroin
market. Have we said "clamp down on these narcotic activities because it's
helping the terrorists, and the terrorists are threats to our national
security?" No, we haven't.
Time Magazine ran a piece about 11 pages long on how the Afghanistan opium
production has increased. They also put the value on that opium production.
And there were statements from various Congressmen including Walter Jones
who went to Afghanistan saying a lot of it goes to support Al-Qaeda and the
Taliban. The number was somewhere between $38 billion to $50 billion a year.
This same article limited the issue of poppy production to some farmers. And
you're looking at these Afghans in shalvars cultivating the poppies there,
and you think, these people aren't capable of managing a $50 billion
industry. They only get a small share. Processing the poppies into heroin
and then transporting them through the Balkan route is done by Turkish
individuals. And you're not looking at street thugs in Turkey, you're
looking at the Turkish military and the Turkish police. In 2000, a professor
in Turkey issued a documented report saying that a quarter of Turkey's
economy relies on heroin production and distribution. Of course, he had to
escape the country, go to Germany and ask for political asylum because he
committed treason by criticizing the Turkish government.
The Time Magazine article didn't talk about the main actors, the big people,
the powerful ones who are distributing, processing, marketing and laundering
the proceeds. Those people are not touched. If you look at the report you'll
see the countries involved-Turkey, Cyprus, the UAE. But they were
conveniently left out of the Time Magazine article, leaving any American to
conclude that the farmers are making $50 billion a year. Again, the culprit
is Time Magazine because that is not the case.
While the report shows Turkish, UAE and Pakistani involvement, we say they
are our allies, we don't want to touch them, we don't want to turn them off.
In fact, we have lots of good business and sensitive diplomatic relations
with them, as Don Ashcroft put it. Now if one of them were part of the axis
of evil, if one of them was Syria, if one of them was Iran, if one of them
was Korea, if it was Saddam, you would see the stink they would raise-how
Saddam's country and people are helping the Taliban with their finances and
helping Al-Qaeda with these cases. But there was this big oops! They're our
very close allies, the ones who we are giving billions of dollars of aid to,
the ones who come back and buy our weapons. We can't mess around with things
like that. We have too many powerful people, too many powerful companies
that are benefiting from this. There is this huge lobby industry that is
benefiting from this.
Who is representing the American people? Well we know former chairman Mr.
Livingston today is representing these outside interests, therefore our
Congress is representing these foreign powers. But who is really
representing the American public? And how? It's very hard to see the track
record. And these are the issues that you wish the mainstream media here in
this country would cover, and they're not.
Part II of this interview will appear in next week's issue of the Weekly.
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5. Who Do You Serve?
Steve Kurkjian, Recently Retired Globe Correspondent, Talks About Hrant Dink
and Life After the Beat
By Andy Turpin
WATERTOWN, Mass. (A.W.)-After almost 40 years as an editor and reporter at
the Boston Globe, Steve Kurkjian retired last month. He was chief of the
Globe Spotlight team from 1979 to 1986. As a member of Spotlight, he was
awarded two Pulitzer Prizes and more than 20 other regional and national
reporting awards.
>From 1986 to 1991, Kurkjian ran the Globe's Washington bureau, where he
reported on the Justice Department, White House, Iran-contra scandal and the
Gulf War.
He spoke to the Weekly about his last major story before retiring, in which
he journeyed to Istanbul to witness the massively attended funeral of Hrant
Dink. Kurkjian later made a return trip to Turkey to gauge how the
investigation to find the perpetrators was progressing with Turkish
authorities.
"I went back because I was really interested. I wanted to do what we would
call a 'reconstruction' to try and find out who was responsible and find out
the political element," he said. "This has all sorts of consequences for
Turkey itself and for its relationship with Armenia, and the ongoing
question of Armenians seeing where their future is and understanding their
identity."
Speaking about the investigation, Kurkjian explained, "More than a dozen
people have been questioned and taken into custody. The most prominent
people include the gunman, Samast, and the man who gave him the gun, who's
an older man of 27 years old. Both are from Trabzon on the Black Sea coast,
a very economically depressed town."
Thus far, one of the men in police custody has been shown to have a link
with the Turkish ultra nationalist group the Grand Union Party. "We're still
trying to figure out if he's the link into the deep state," he said, "which
is the loosely organized group that everyone in Turkey believes exists,
including Prime Minister Erdogan. But it's not as organized as, say, the
mafia was in the United States."
Kurkjian also spoke to the high profile and politically charged nature of
the Dink case due the atmosphere of prejudice towards minorities that exists
in Turkey prevalently today in Turkish media outlets.
He said, "This hatred manifests itself on the airwaves and in newspapers
where people can say the most hateful things about another group that would
be prohibited or frowned on in the United States and in most Western
countries. I think that this hateful talk, 'the banality' of this talk, as
it was phrased to me by a Jewish scholar, is so built into the culture there
that it encourages acting on it. This is particularly true in the under
classes."
He expanded on these cultural and logistical implications for Turkey,
saying, "This is a more problematic cause for the investigators to uncover.
But I think that it's the root evil that if addressed by the political
structure and the good public of Turkey-the great, great vast majority-then
more good will come of the change than just prosecuting 3, 5 or 10
individuals."
Kurkjian noted that Dink's lawyer, Erdal Dogan, supported the idea of having
the case be investigated by officials from the outside, who may be more
objective, such as what happened between Britain and Russia in the Alexander
Litvinenko case.
"Dogan says, 'Let it be done by an international group, by a European court,
then it will have credibility,'" Kurkjian said, adding, "I don't see that
that's going to happen."
Dink, Kurkjian said, was a true spokesman "for our Armenian ness," which he
defines as "always outgoing, always optimistic, at least to the outside
world, always looking for compromise, and always trying to be as relevant as
possible to the question posed to him."
Kurkjian addressed a group of Armenian business executives soon after his
retur to the United States. One of them asked him why Armenians should still
expect change or be surprised at incidents like Dink's murder after so many
years of denial and abuse by Turkey. "It struck me as unanswerable,"
Kurkjian said. "But as a father myself, I said that the American in me says
there is no role more important for us than to teach our children and
grandchildren about the world. But the Armenian in me says that to have
given your life for a noble cause is the right way to live. But that doesn't
answer the question. It doesn't give a rationale or justification why."
He continued, "By whose rules, do we as human beings, live our lives when we
come to face the question that it's either my ideals or my life? That's what
stuck in my mind."
Kurkjian stored the remark in his memory. He thought of how two or three
nights before Dink was killed, he went to his wife. "Dink's wife is more
religious than he was, but both are members of the Armenian Evangelical
Church. He asked her, 'Look in the Bible and tell me what God expects his
believers to do?' That's a very searing question coming when it does." He
added, "It's an important one because it tells me that he was looking for
guidance."
"I don't know if he got the answer from his wife as to what the Bible says,
but.In the Bible, both in the Old Testament and particularly in the New
Testament, it is said what God wants his believers to conduct themselves as
servants. Servants to God and servants to our fellow man."
Such circumstances from a theological perspective are in fact startlingly
coincidental and similar to the Biblical events of Christ in the garden in
the eve of his death.
He concluded of Dink, "So for someone who was facing this extraordinary
question, philosophic to the nth degree in those final days, I think Hrant
abided by the rule that he believed in. That to me has all sorts of
extraordinary quality."
Kurkjian is currently working on his newest post-Globe project-a nonfiction
book about the 1990 Boston Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art heist. "I got
on the story in 1997," he said. "I'd kept the Globe ahead of the competition
and wrote some pieces on the subject. I think the most authoritative article
on it was a piece that I wrote on the 15th anniversary in 2005."
The book is in tandem with his career as a reporter. "People said, 'It's
gonna be different for you in retiring,' but it just seems that I'm on to my
next story taking on an important project," Kurkjian said.
He also said he may be able to lend a new perspective to the case. "I think
all of the investigators except one have moved on to other cases. I think it
could be useful to have someone like a reporter who can talk both to the
investigative side and to the netherworld side who may know something about
it."
Items stolen in the robbery, the most successful single museum heist in
world history, included a Vermeer and three Rembrandts.
"As Anne Hawley, the director of the museum said to me, 'Having these
painting missing is like not being able to hear a Mozart or Beethoven
composition.' Just think if future generations would not be able to see
these masterpieces."
Kurkjian related, "That's very real to me being a Boston person, and having
grown up here and gone to Boston Latin School right next to the Gardner
Museum, and having had my father who was a commercial artist."
"Having spent a lifetime doing investigative reporting with the Boston
Globe, I think this is a good project for me to be working on," he said.
------------------------------------------- ----------------------------
6. In the Zone with Coach Tom Derderian
The Weekly spoke briefly with Tom Derderian, coach of the Greater Boston
Track Club (GBTC), and columnist for the New England Runner. He's an
Olympics trialist (1972, 1976), Boston Marathon runner (1975), Nike product
designer, and author of the histories The Boston Marathon, The First Century
of the World's Premier Running Event (Human Kinetics, 1996) and The Boston
Marathon: A Century of Blood, Sweat, and Cheers(Triumph Press, 2003). His
two daughters also compete in cross-country events.
Armenian Weekly-What inspires you to dedicate your life to running?
Tom Derderian-Well, life may be an overstatement. I was born in Milford,
Mass., the next town over from Hopkinton, the starting point for the Boston
Marathon. I started running as a freshman in high school. Not an unusual
thing to do. It just happens that you like a thing and want to get good at
it. It takes a certain degree of personal dedication.
Dedication to family is foremost. In life you decide there are things that
are necessary, like your family or making a living and self-expression. That's
what running is to me. Along with writing. Though I think at 58, I'm an old
guy. I think my writing is better than my running.
A.W.-Do you follow any sort of strict dietary regimen?
T.D.-No, only what my mother told me, 'Eat your vegetables.' Beyond eating
well and exercising, there's nothing more to it. Just don't get fat. Any
more than that crosses into obsession."
A.W.-Do you tend to go running with your wife, longtime GBTC member Cynthia
Hastings, or do you train separately?
T.D.-Yes, we go running together, but running is a social activity for me.
It's communities overlapping from other places like work, church, friends.
It's being part of a group that's larger than any single self-improvement
effort. We run and talk about things.
A.W.-Having worked and trained with wheelchair racers, is the training style
different than usual marathons, more akin to, say, a crew or rowing workout?
T.D.-It's more like playing a musical instrument. It's got to be very
precise. You have to be very quick and skilled at using the accelerator and
the brake. Being an upper body brute doesn't help. You have to have finesse.
Wheelchair racing is a sport for guys who like to race and go fast. If
anything, you're at a disadvantage for speed having legs and more weight to
pull.
------------------------------------------- -------------------------
7. Kef Time is Back at the Cape
After a two year hiatus, Kef Time is back, and will be held at the Four
Points Sheraton Resorts in Hyannis in Cape Cod, Mass., during the July 4
weekend this summer.
The Weekly spoke with Ned Apigian about the event. He is on the board of the
Armenian Cultural Association of America (ACAA) and is in charge of this and
all future special projects. "The association has two special projects,"
said Apigian. "The Heritage Cruise and the fall tour to Armenia, which is by
all accounts a very successful tour though not a major source of income. The
board has been searching for a summer social event comparable to the winter
cruise. Hence, the decision to revive the now defunct Kef Time on Cape Cod
event usually held on the 4th of July weekend now abandoned for more than
two seasons."
That Kef Time was held most recently in Falmouth, although its former
location was the Four Points in Hyaniss. "The main advantages of the new
location are an indoor and outdoor pool, 11,700 sq. ft. ballroom, a 3 par
18-hole golf course and a free shuttle to the ocean within five minutes of
the hotel," said Apigian.
Generations of Armenian-Americans grew up listening to kef music, he
explained, though dances and concerts "have gone from being the expected
norm to being a rare occurrence," mainly during AYF Olympics. Apigian and
the ACAA hope to satisfy the need and craving by bringing back such events.
"We need to draw the first and second generation of Armenians born in the
U.S. back to Armenian organizations and provide the Armenian music that they
desire. We hope this event will be the first in a long line of Hye Kef Times
to be located at this hotel on the 4th of July weekend," Apigian said.
-------------------------------------------- ------------------------------
8. Shentil Foundation Benefit Concert A Success
BOSTON, Mass. (A.W.)-On May 4, the Andreassian Music Fund together with
Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Boston presented a benefit concert featuring
noted pianist Karine Bagdassarian as a fundraiser for the Shentil
Foundation.
A cocktail party preceding gave benefactors and guests the opportunity to
meet Reverend Dajad Davidian, the former pastor of St. James Armenian Church
in Watertown and current activist for the Shentil Foundation, among other
causes in Armenia.
State Representative Rachel Kaprelian provided introduction to Rev.
Davidian, praising his works saying, "You are a home to me" and praising of
Armenia, "For those of you who have not been- it will change your life."
Bagdassarian played pieces by Chopin, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Khatchadourian,
Haig Boyajian, Dianne Goolkasian Rahbee and Keven Sigfried.
Painter Armen Daneghyan's artwork was also available for sale. Born in
Yerevan, Daneghyan creates miniature paintings depicting religious and other
thematic imagery in a modern style with original colors. His work has been
shown in Russia, the U.S., Germany, Canada, Greece, France and Brazil.
The event raised $2,500 for the Shentil Foundation, a 501C non-profit
humanitarian organization that provides assistance to needy individuals,
particularly in Armenia and engages in cultural, social, and religious
education for youth and young adults. Contributions to the Shentil
Foundation may be sent to Reverend Dajad Davidian, 74 Grove St., Belmont, MA
02478.
------------------------------------------ ------------------------------
9. 'New Man'
".Try to enter through the narrow door."
St. Luke the
Evangelist
Hit by the vicious blow
Of an outrageous life,
Nauseous of pricey fads,
And cheap deference,
Distant from bourgeois
Custom and mores,
Already aging
Way before my time.
I walk in distress,
I walk. lifeless,
headed towards the streets
of my childhood.
.And here each single moment
Is my very own -
Here a storefront
And window in lights,
There a bunch of flowers,
'The Yellow Boutique'
And the sweet dead-end
of 'dream' and 'recall'.
* * *
In the memory store,
Silent toys,
Flashing smiles
Of decked-up dolls,
Stand side by side
with soldier and car.
My maimed souvenirs -
Go away. get lost!
* * *
Hall of fantasy,
Dauntless champion,
Azure mountain-lake,
Daring on the wing,
Sporting items,
Ski, skate, javelin.
I was meant to be
king of the mountain!
* * *
Stay this way,
Always side by side,
Familiar windows
of memory and dream.
But.between the pair
A narrow door,
That is shut tight
As the lid of a sightless eye:
So, do they still stand as one?
Or, have memory and dream
split in two.?
* * *
Hit by the vicious blow
Of an outrageous life,
Nauseous of pricey fads,
And cheap deference,
Distant from bourgeois
Custom and mores,
Already aging
Way before my time .
I have vowed to enter
Through the locked door,
To unite memory
And dream. through life.
* * *
When you are livid
At your rotten luck,
Go through the narrow door and
step out as New Man.
---------- Varand
Translated by Tatul Sonentz
***
(c) 2007 Armenian Weekly On-Line. All Rights Reserved.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
80 Bigelow Avenue
Watertown MA 02472 USA
(617) 926-3974
[email protected]
http://www.ar menianweekly.com
***
Armenian Weekly On-Line, Volume 73, Number 19, May 12, 2007
News:
1. Hovhannisyan Wins 'Best New Documentary Filmmaker' Award
2. Wikipedia Features Armenian General
3. Hairenik Web TV Pays Tribute to Freedom Fighters of Artsakh
Interviews:
4. In Gag We Trust?
An Interview with FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds (Part I)
By Khatchig Mouradian
5. Who Do You Serve?
Steve Kurkjian, Recently Retired Globe Correspondent, Talks About Hrant Dink
and Life After the Beat
By Andy Turpin
6. In the Zone with Coach Tom Derderian
Community:
7. Kef Time is Back at the Cape
8. Shentil Foundation Benefit Concert A Success
Poetry:
8. 'New Man'
By Varand
Translated by Tatul Sonentz
------------------------------------------ -------------------------------
1. Hovhannisyan Wins 'Best New Documentary Filmmaker' Award
Vardan Hovhannisyan won an award for Best New Documentary Filmmaker at the
2007 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City for his film "A Story of People
in War & Peace."
Lauren Kresner accepted the award on behalf of the director.
"A Story of People in War and Peace" is the first international documentary
about the Karabakh war. It is a co-production of BBC Storyville, ARTE, WDR
and YLE, and is sponsored by the Discovery Campus Masterschool and
co-sponsored by the British Council and UNESCO.
In "A Story of People in War and Peace," Hovhannisyan attempts to find those
he shared a trench with 12 years ago during the war. His intimate
conversations with the people he finds raise questions about the human costs
of war and how it changes one's life forever. More importantly, it seeks to
find out how they are surviving in peace.
------------------------------------------ -------------------------
2. Wikipedia Features Armenian General
On May 9, the biography of Hovhannes Bagramyan, a Soviet-Armenian General
and Marshal who fought the Nazi armies in WWII, was prominently displayed on
one of the internet's most popular destinations, Wikipedia
(www.wikipedia.org).
The website's English-language home page sports a different "featured
article" every day; the featured article on that day was Hovhannes
Bagramyan.
The article was a long and detailed biography of Bagramyan, including a
section on his early life through WWI, the inter-war years, and then the
World War II campaigns during which he became the first non-Slavic Red Army
military commander to serve on the front. The article also included an
account of his involvement in the Battle of Kursk, known as the largest tank
battle in history, and in the Soviet offensive in the Baltic and in Belarus,
as well as his post-war years.
The article featured multiple pictures of Bagramyan during World War II with
noted Soviet generals, and a photo of Bagramyan's statue overlooking
Bagramyan Avenue in Yerevan.
----------------------------------------- ------------------------------
3. Hairenik Web TV Pays Tribute to Freedom Fighters of Artsakh
On May 9, the 15th anniversary of the liberation of the town of Shoushi, the
Hairenik Association Web TV paid tribute to he memory of the freedom
fighters of Artsakh by uploading video clips depicting the operation that
led to the liberation and including the biographies of freedom fighters
Vartan Pakhshian, Vartan Sdepanian, Bedo Ghevontian, Mher Choulhadjian, Aram
Boghossian, Vahe Baghdassarian, Simon Achikgozian and Garod Megerdchian.
Additional video clips about other freedom fighters are in the process of
being digitized and will be uploaded to the Hairenik Web TV in the near
future.
The videos are available on the Hairenik websites at www.hairenik.com or
www.haireniktv.com.
----------------------------- -----------------------------------------
4. In Gag We Trust?
An Interview with FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds (Part I)
By Khatchig Mouradian
FBI language specialist Sibel Edmonds was fired from her job with the FBI's
Washington Field Office in March 2002. Her crime was reporting security
breaches, cover-ups, blocking of intelligence, and the bribery of U.S.
individuals including high-ranking officials. The State Secret Privilege has
often been invoked to block court proceedings on her case, and the U.S.
Congress has even been gagged to prevent further discussion.
Edmonds uncovered, for example, a covert relationship between Turkish groups
and former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), who reportedly
received tens of thousands of dollars in bribes in return for withdrawing
the Armenian Genocide Resolution from the House floor in 2000.
Born in Iran in 1970, Edmonds received her BA in criminal justice and
psychology from George Washington University and her MA in public policy and
international commerce from George Mason University. She is the founder and
director of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC) and in
2006, received the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award. She speaks
Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani.
This interview was conducted in Washington on April 23. To follow the
development of her case, visit www.justacitizen.com.
Khatchig Mouradian-It's been more than five years since you first contacted
the Senate Judiciary Committee to reveal the story on Turkish bribery of
high-level U.S. officials. Can you tell us about how this has evolved since
then, and where it stands now?
Sibel Edmonds-Sure. It's been slightly over five years since I went to the
Senate Judiciary Committee and briefed both Senator Charles Grassley's
(R-Iowa) staff and Senator Patrick Leahy's (D-Vt.) staff in a classified
fashion, giving them the specific document numbers, document names, names of
specific targets and detailing the issues related to my case. And as you
might remember, a few months after I briefed the Senate Judiciary Committee,
both Senators started speaking out pretty loudly in the media. We had the
CBS 60 Minutes segment when Senator Grassley showed up and said this is
outrageous. Even people within the FBI have confirmed all the stories and
said we need to turn the FBI upside down on this issue. Senator Leahy was
making similar statements and both Senators were trying to put together a
hearing on this case. I was later told that the Chairman at the time
prevented a hearing and some people-including good FBI agents who would be
telling the truth under oath-from testifying and shedding light on the
issue.
Two years later, we had the unclassified version of that report issued by
the Inspector General's Office. This is the Department of Justice's own
Inspector General's Office. After two years of investigating, the report
confirmed my own reports. It found that although these allegations were
supported by documents and other witnesses, the FBI refused to conduct a
follow-up or an investigation-a real investigation-on this case. So you have
this case which for the past five years has been confirmed by Congressional
sources, and people familiar with my case, and the Department of Justice's
Inspector General's Office, and has never been contradicted or denied by the
Justice Department or the FBI, and still nothing has been done.
There has been no hearing and nobody has been held accountable. We are
basically where we started and I find that really appalling. It is a very
sad situation and not only for me or my case. Many people think this is
about one whistleblower, one language specialist who worked for the FBI and
was wrongfully terminated. But I wouldn't have been terminated if I hadn't
brought forth issues that were important to the American public, and even to
people outside the United States. This case sheds light on several important
areas, including our foreign policy, which is hypocrisy-ridden. We're not
talking only about foreign individuals; we're talking about our own, about
U.S. officials who have engaged in actions that are against the American
public's best interests and what we stand for. But the American people still
don't know about this case, and Congress has done nothing despite the fact
that they have been fully briefed and have gotten full confirmation.
K.M.-This makes one wonder, who is actually working for the people and who
is working for his own personal and private gains?
S.E.-This is important, the issue of self-interest versus the interests of
the American public, especially when you're talking about public servants.
These are the people who have been given access to our national
security-related issues and top-secret documents. And I emphasize that this
is not about one party, this is not an issue of right wing versus left wing,
this is not an issue of one administration against another. Because when you
really go deep into these cases, you find that these people-these U.S.
entities, U.S. officials-have been misusing and abusing their positions for
a while. And we have been looking the other way. And the mainstream media
has been looking the other way. These are not top-secret issues. All you
have to do is take a look at these people.
For example, look at Mr. Marc Grossman. He used to be the U.S. ambassador in
Turkey and used his position within the State Department to secure future
higher-level positions while in office-and I would like to emphasize
this-while in office and with several agencies knowing about it. Some people
in these agencies wanted to investigate these cases but they were prevented
from going forward.
In my case, with this one example that I gave you, I was told by my
bosses-and these are the "good people" bosses, these are the agents that I
work with-that the Pentagon and the State Department were pressuring the
Justice Department to silence the case. And just take a look at where Mr.
Grossman is today. Within a few months after he gave his resignation, he
obtained a position with a semi-legitimate Turkish company that is supplying
him with a very attractive monetary reward.
And then you can start going around and looking at similar cases, such as
Mr. Douglas Feith and Mr. Richard Perle. They were registered as foreign
agents for Turkey between 1988 and 1995. These were very lucrative
positions, and they were not representing the American government at that
point. So once they resumed their high-level positions within the U.S.
government in 2000, do you think anything changed in terms of which
interests they represented?
And unfortunately you also see this from the Congressional side. You saw it
in the late '80s and early '90s with Congressman Solaris, and again we saw
it with Congressman-and later Chairman-Livingston and the position he
obtained as a representative of a foreign interest. And we may see it
shortly with current Congressmen, such as former chairman Hastert. And it is
for the American public, for our mainstream media to really look hard at
these issues. This is an example of one country [Turkey] we are talking
about right now, one case. How many others are there? And why are they
looking the other way? Do our people know, are they aware, that they are
trusting and giving the authority to people who are not representing them?
K.M.-You are just one person and you're a translator working on issues that
have to do mainly with Turkey. You had some 200 colleagues. So one wonders
how many stories like this there are. This one story, your story, by itself,
is enough to show how corrupt the system is.
S.E.-My case has been known to a certain degree because of the activities
that I have been engaging in, in terms of going to courts, going to
Congress, etc. There are similar cases we are not hearing about. For
example, the Larry Franklin case, with the espionage case that they pursued
with AIPAC. And what the American public doesn't know is the fact that there
were other counter-intelligence operations within the FBI that obtained far
more information not only limited to Mr. Franklin. Other operations were
shut down in 2000 and 2001 because they ended up going to higher levels and
involving way too many people. I'm talking about individuals who are
breaking the law, misusing the trust and abusing their power, and in some
cases I would even say engaging in treason.
Again it's very easy to see what happened with my case. What kind of example
is my case presenting to those other people who may want to do the right
thing and come forward? They would say it doesn't make a difference at the
end, because I pursued every channel possible. I went as high as I could go
with the courts, including the Supreme Court, and as you know, they issued a
gag order on me several times and invoked the State Secrets Privilege. They
say that everything about my case-including where I was born, including the
languages I speak, everything-is classified. I'm prevented from discussing
whether or not I'm right. And I went all the way to Congress, I did the
right thing. I was not what they call a "leaker" who goes straight to the
media and starts divulging classified documents. I went to the appropriate
committees, the Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committee, too, by
the way, and the House and Senate... I went through the other legitimate
channels-the courts, the Inspector General's Office, which is the executive
branch. I tried the media. So I don't blame those people that get
pessimistic and say it doesn't make a difference, or think they'll lose
their job or possibly go to jail. Many of these people are the breadwinners
for their families. They're conscientious people, but they have put 15-20
years into their careers and think, "Oh, I'm 5 years away from my retirement
and I don't want to damage that." So you have many reasons why more people
aren't coming forward.
They make an example out of you. Because if one case, let's say my case,
would really bring justice and accountability, you would see so many people
doing the same thing. And how many times-let's just look at the past
decade-have you seen a legitimate whistleblower from any of these agencies
come forward and prevail? I don't think you can name one case.
You're also looking at all the other channels being culprits, sometimes
without even intending. For example, there is a lot of blame to be placed on
our mainstream media today. Willingly or not, they have become accomplices
by not reporting what they should be reporting, and not investigating what
they should be investigating. They have abdicated their responsibilities.
And where do we look at when we talk about issues such as accountability
investigations? We look at Congress. And they have been a major reason we
are not seeing more people coming forward from the FBI, agents that I worked
with-solid, patriotic, good Americans, dedicated people. They were as
outraged as I was when I was going through these cases and reporting them
internally. If one of these committees, be it the Judiciary Committee or the
Government Affairs Committee in the House, would set a hearing and call
these individuals to testify, these agents would tell the truth under oath.
K.M.-So in your opinion, what is the definition of an agent today in the
U.S.? What is his job? An important portion of his work is what we are
talking about, things that are actually not being dealt with and that are
being covered up. So it seems that agents are "good agents" as long as they're
dealing with the enemy. But this enemy is decided by people who are often
corrupt and even committing treason.
S.E.-I can't speak for other agents but I can speak for the FBI, and within
the FBI you have different types of operations. For example, if they are
looking at criminal cases, it is the agent's job to collect evidence with
court warrants, etc., to go after the criminals and bring them to justice.
To a certain degree, the same concept holds true for counter-terrorism
operations, the one division within the FBI that I consider the most
important, but unfortunately the worst run. You have agents and translators
and analysts overseeing the activities-sometimes criminal or
espionage-related-of foreign entities in our country. Now, if they come
across criminal activities and U.S. persons engaged in these what they
should be doing and what they are able to do is to take it, report it, go to
the Justice Department, go to the courts and start parallel investigations,
no longer under counter-intelligence but through criminal or espionage
cases. Now, by accident, this happened with this AIPAC case. It started in
the Washington Field Office where I worked long before I started working
with the FBI, and with the translators and the analysts and agents I spoke
with, that operation started as counter-intelligence. The targets were not
even U.S. individuals. They were, let's say hypothetically speaking, AIPAC
and Israeli Embassy entities. It is after they came across these explosive
activities and after a certain agent in charge decided to really tackle
this-and this was before 2000-that they opened a parallel investigation.
This is when we later heard about Feith's office and Larry Franklin.
Now the same thing was about to take place with Turkish counter-intelligence
in the main portion of the documented-wiretapped or paper-operations that I
translated verbatim not only for the Washington Field Office but also for
the Chicago and New Jersey offices. They were obtained before 2001. If we
were to put a date on it you're looking at end of 1996 to 2001. Now, in 1998
and 1999, there were so many pieces of evidence of U.S. individuals'
involvement. We're talking about people with official positions, whether
they were in the State Department or the Pentagon or the U.S. Congress. The
agents did the right thing again by starting a parallel investigation that
targeted individuals who were possibly committing acts of treason.
However, as I was told by first-source agents I was working with, this was
put on hold in 1999 because President Clinton was then going through the
Lewinsky scandal. After the current administration came into power and after
I was working there, the agents were told to shut down. The people who made
that decision were not the Justice Department or the FBI, and that's what I
try to emphasize all the time-they were pressured, they were forced by
higher-up forces within the Pentagon and the State Department. And what was
their reasoning behind the scenes? I don't know, I wasn't there, but they
gave similar explanations and justifications with the courts: "You're
talking about very sensitive diplomatic relations." And in fact,
then-Attorney General Ashcroft said this in his declaration when he invoked
the State Secrets Privilege in my case. He said that exposing these issues
in courts, whether or not I'm right, would damage certain sensitive
diplomatic relations and would hurt certain U.S. foreign business relations.
In this case we know one of the countries is Turkey. So you have a U.S.
citizen here who has been deprived of her First Amendment rights. Gagged. I
mean, is that an American concept, gagging a person? You're not talking
about an enemy combatant, you're not talking about a terrorist suspect. You're
looking at a tax-payer, a law-abiding American citizen. So these business
relations, these diplomatic relations have justified depriving a U.S.
citizen of her First Amendment rights, of her Fourth Amendment rights in
court. In fact, the U.S. State Department did a retroactive classification
illegally and Congress was effectively gagged in May 2004. They're not even
saying what diplomatic relations they refer to. Are they ashamed of it? Are
we talking about billions of dollars of weapons procurement? Why don't they
be more specific? Because this is top-secret, classified stuff. That's why I
have been writing these papers, relying on outside sources, getting all the
data. You're looking at $5 billion every two years of weapons procurements?
That's not top-secret. Who benefits from this? What companies? Who are the
individuals who are benefiting from this? And is there anything in the
issues that I dealt with that if exposed would harm the Americans and their
security? None. None whatsoever.
In fact, they are issues and they are cases that would help with their
national security because the same activities also involve money laundering
or certain narcotic activities. All you have to do is look at the State
Department's own reports on Turkey and opium. Ninety-two percent of the
heroin supplied in Europe is coming through Turkey, and it's being marketed
and distributed by Turkish individuals. This is not classified. This is
within the State Department's own report. The poppies are being produced in
Afghanistan and Taliban-esque people are getting benefits, and Al-Qaeda
people are getting the benefits of these poppies being sold to individuals
in Turkey who then distribute and provide 92 percent of Europe's heroin
market. Have we said "clamp down on these narcotic activities because it's
helping the terrorists, and the terrorists are threats to our national
security?" No, we haven't.
Time Magazine ran a piece about 11 pages long on how the Afghanistan opium
production has increased. They also put the value on that opium production.
And there were statements from various Congressmen including Walter Jones
who went to Afghanistan saying a lot of it goes to support Al-Qaeda and the
Taliban. The number was somewhere between $38 billion to $50 billion a year.
This same article limited the issue of poppy production to some farmers. And
you're looking at these Afghans in shalvars cultivating the poppies there,
and you think, these people aren't capable of managing a $50 billion
industry. They only get a small share. Processing the poppies into heroin
and then transporting them through the Balkan route is done by Turkish
individuals. And you're not looking at street thugs in Turkey, you're
looking at the Turkish military and the Turkish police. In 2000, a professor
in Turkey issued a documented report saying that a quarter of Turkey's
economy relies on heroin production and distribution. Of course, he had to
escape the country, go to Germany and ask for political asylum because he
committed treason by criticizing the Turkish government.
The Time Magazine article didn't talk about the main actors, the big people,
the powerful ones who are distributing, processing, marketing and laundering
the proceeds. Those people are not touched. If you look at the report you'll
see the countries involved-Turkey, Cyprus, the UAE. But they were
conveniently left out of the Time Magazine article, leaving any American to
conclude that the farmers are making $50 billion a year. Again, the culprit
is Time Magazine because that is not the case.
While the report shows Turkish, UAE and Pakistani involvement, we say they
are our allies, we don't want to touch them, we don't want to turn them off.
In fact, we have lots of good business and sensitive diplomatic relations
with them, as Don Ashcroft put it. Now if one of them were part of the axis
of evil, if one of them was Syria, if one of them was Iran, if one of them
was Korea, if it was Saddam, you would see the stink they would raise-how
Saddam's country and people are helping the Taliban with their finances and
helping Al-Qaeda with these cases. But there was this big oops! They're our
very close allies, the ones who we are giving billions of dollars of aid to,
the ones who come back and buy our weapons. We can't mess around with things
like that. We have too many powerful people, too many powerful companies
that are benefiting from this. There is this huge lobby industry that is
benefiting from this.
Who is representing the American people? Well we know former chairman Mr.
Livingston today is representing these outside interests, therefore our
Congress is representing these foreign powers. But who is really
representing the American public? And how? It's very hard to see the track
record. And these are the issues that you wish the mainstream media here in
this country would cover, and they're not.
Part II of this interview will appear in next week's issue of the Weekly.
------------------------------------------ --------------------------------
5. Who Do You Serve?
Steve Kurkjian, Recently Retired Globe Correspondent, Talks About Hrant Dink
and Life After the Beat
By Andy Turpin
WATERTOWN, Mass. (A.W.)-After almost 40 years as an editor and reporter at
the Boston Globe, Steve Kurkjian retired last month. He was chief of the
Globe Spotlight team from 1979 to 1986. As a member of Spotlight, he was
awarded two Pulitzer Prizes and more than 20 other regional and national
reporting awards.
>From 1986 to 1991, Kurkjian ran the Globe's Washington bureau, where he
reported on the Justice Department, White House, Iran-contra scandal and the
Gulf War.
He spoke to the Weekly about his last major story before retiring, in which
he journeyed to Istanbul to witness the massively attended funeral of Hrant
Dink. Kurkjian later made a return trip to Turkey to gauge how the
investigation to find the perpetrators was progressing with Turkish
authorities.
"I went back because I was really interested. I wanted to do what we would
call a 'reconstruction' to try and find out who was responsible and find out
the political element," he said. "This has all sorts of consequences for
Turkey itself and for its relationship with Armenia, and the ongoing
question of Armenians seeing where their future is and understanding their
identity."
Speaking about the investigation, Kurkjian explained, "More than a dozen
people have been questioned and taken into custody. The most prominent
people include the gunman, Samast, and the man who gave him the gun, who's
an older man of 27 years old. Both are from Trabzon on the Black Sea coast,
a very economically depressed town."
Thus far, one of the men in police custody has been shown to have a link
with the Turkish ultra nationalist group the Grand Union Party. "We're still
trying to figure out if he's the link into the deep state," he said, "which
is the loosely organized group that everyone in Turkey believes exists,
including Prime Minister Erdogan. But it's not as organized as, say, the
mafia was in the United States."
Kurkjian also spoke to the high profile and politically charged nature of
the Dink case due the atmosphere of prejudice towards minorities that exists
in Turkey prevalently today in Turkish media outlets.
He said, "This hatred manifests itself on the airwaves and in newspapers
where people can say the most hateful things about another group that would
be prohibited or frowned on in the United States and in most Western
countries. I think that this hateful talk, 'the banality' of this talk, as
it was phrased to me by a Jewish scholar, is so built into the culture there
that it encourages acting on it. This is particularly true in the under
classes."
He expanded on these cultural and logistical implications for Turkey,
saying, "This is a more problematic cause for the investigators to uncover.
But I think that it's the root evil that if addressed by the political
structure and the good public of Turkey-the great, great vast majority-then
more good will come of the change than just prosecuting 3, 5 or 10
individuals."
Kurkjian noted that Dink's lawyer, Erdal Dogan, supported the idea of having
the case be investigated by officials from the outside, who may be more
objective, such as what happened between Britain and Russia in the Alexander
Litvinenko case.
"Dogan says, 'Let it be done by an international group, by a European court,
then it will have credibility,'" Kurkjian said, adding, "I don't see that
that's going to happen."
Dink, Kurkjian said, was a true spokesman "for our Armenian ness," which he
defines as "always outgoing, always optimistic, at least to the outside
world, always looking for compromise, and always trying to be as relevant as
possible to the question posed to him."
Kurkjian addressed a group of Armenian business executives soon after his
retur to the United States. One of them asked him why Armenians should still
expect change or be surprised at incidents like Dink's murder after so many
years of denial and abuse by Turkey. "It struck me as unanswerable,"
Kurkjian said. "But as a father myself, I said that the American in me says
there is no role more important for us than to teach our children and
grandchildren about the world. But the Armenian in me says that to have
given your life for a noble cause is the right way to live. But that doesn't
answer the question. It doesn't give a rationale or justification why."
He continued, "By whose rules, do we as human beings, live our lives when we
come to face the question that it's either my ideals or my life? That's what
stuck in my mind."
Kurkjian stored the remark in his memory. He thought of how two or three
nights before Dink was killed, he went to his wife. "Dink's wife is more
religious than he was, but both are members of the Armenian Evangelical
Church. He asked her, 'Look in the Bible and tell me what God expects his
believers to do?' That's a very searing question coming when it does." He
added, "It's an important one because it tells me that he was looking for
guidance."
"I don't know if he got the answer from his wife as to what the Bible says,
but.In the Bible, both in the Old Testament and particularly in the New
Testament, it is said what God wants his believers to conduct themselves as
servants. Servants to God and servants to our fellow man."
Such circumstances from a theological perspective are in fact startlingly
coincidental and similar to the Biblical events of Christ in the garden in
the eve of his death.
He concluded of Dink, "So for someone who was facing this extraordinary
question, philosophic to the nth degree in those final days, I think Hrant
abided by the rule that he believed in. That to me has all sorts of
extraordinary quality."
Kurkjian is currently working on his newest post-Globe project-a nonfiction
book about the 1990 Boston Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art heist. "I got
on the story in 1997," he said. "I'd kept the Globe ahead of the competition
and wrote some pieces on the subject. I think the most authoritative article
on it was a piece that I wrote on the 15th anniversary in 2005."
The book is in tandem with his career as a reporter. "People said, 'It's
gonna be different for you in retiring,' but it just seems that I'm on to my
next story taking on an important project," Kurkjian said.
He also said he may be able to lend a new perspective to the case. "I think
all of the investigators except one have moved on to other cases. I think it
could be useful to have someone like a reporter who can talk both to the
investigative side and to the netherworld side who may know something about
it."
Items stolen in the robbery, the most successful single museum heist in
world history, included a Vermeer and three Rembrandts.
"As Anne Hawley, the director of the museum said to me, 'Having these
painting missing is like not being able to hear a Mozart or Beethoven
composition.' Just think if future generations would not be able to see
these masterpieces."
Kurkjian related, "That's very real to me being a Boston person, and having
grown up here and gone to Boston Latin School right next to the Gardner
Museum, and having had my father who was a commercial artist."
"Having spent a lifetime doing investigative reporting with the Boston
Globe, I think this is a good project for me to be working on," he said.
------------------------------------------- ----------------------------
6. In the Zone with Coach Tom Derderian
The Weekly spoke briefly with Tom Derderian, coach of the Greater Boston
Track Club (GBTC), and columnist for the New England Runner. He's an
Olympics trialist (1972, 1976), Boston Marathon runner (1975), Nike product
designer, and author of the histories The Boston Marathon, The First Century
of the World's Premier Running Event (Human Kinetics, 1996) and The Boston
Marathon: A Century of Blood, Sweat, and Cheers(Triumph Press, 2003). His
two daughters also compete in cross-country events.
Armenian Weekly-What inspires you to dedicate your life to running?
Tom Derderian-Well, life may be an overstatement. I was born in Milford,
Mass., the next town over from Hopkinton, the starting point for the Boston
Marathon. I started running as a freshman in high school. Not an unusual
thing to do. It just happens that you like a thing and want to get good at
it. It takes a certain degree of personal dedication.
Dedication to family is foremost. In life you decide there are things that
are necessary, like your family or making a living and self-expression. That's
what running is to me. Along with writing. Though I think at 58, I'm an old
guy. I think my writing is better than my running.
A.W.-Do you follow any sort of strict dietary regimen?
T.D.-No, only what my mother told me, 'Eat your vegetables.' Beyond eating
well and exercising, there's nothing more to it. Just don't get fat. Any
more than that crosses into obsession."
A.W.-Do you tend to go running with your wife, longtime GBTC member Cynthia
Hastings, or do you train separately?
T.D.-Yes, we go running together, but running is a social activity for me.
It's communities overlapping from other places like work, church, friends.
It's being part of a group that's larger than any single self-improvement
effort. We run and talk about things.
A.W.-Having worked and trained with wheelchair racers, is the training style
different than usual marathons, more akin to, say, a crew or rowing workout?
T.D.-It's more like playing a musical instrument. It's got to be very
precise. You have to be very quick and skilled at using the accelerator and
the brake. Being an upper body brute doesn't help. You have to have finesse.
Wheelchair racing is a sport for guys who like to race and go fast. If
anything, you're at a disadvantage for speed having legs and more weight to
pull.
------------------------------------------- -------------------------
7. Kef Time is Back at the Cape
After a two year hiatus, Kef Time is back, and will be held at the Four
Points Sheraton Resorts in Hyannis in Cape Cod, Mass., during the July 4
weekend this summer.
The Weekly spoke with Ned Apigian about the event. He is on the board of the
Armenian Cultural Association of America (ACAA) and is in charge of this and
all future special projects. "The association has two special projects,"
said Apigian. "The Heritage Cruise and the fall tour to Armenia, which is by
all accounts a very successful tour though not a major source of income. The
board has been searching for a summer social event comparable to the winter
cruise. Hence, the decision to revive the now defunct Kef Time on Cape Cod
event usually held on the 4th of July weekend now abandoned for more than
two seasons."
That Kef Time was held most recently in Falmouth, although its former
location was the Four Points in Hyaniss. "The main advantages of the new
location are an indoor and outdoor pool, 11,700 sq. ft. ballroom, a 3 par
18-hole golf course and a free shuttle to the ocean within five minutes of
the hotel," said Apigian.
Generations of Armenian-Americans grew up listening to kef music, he
explained, though dances and concerts "have gone from being the expected
norm to being a rare occurrence," mainly during AYF Olympics. Apigian and
the ACAA hope to satisfy the need and craving by bringing back such events.
"We need to draw the first and second generation of Armenians born in the
U.S. back to Armenian organizations and provide the Armenian music that they
desire. We hope this event will be the first in a long line of Hye Kef Times
to be located at this hotel on the 4th of July weekend," Apigian said.
-------------------------------------------- ------------------------------
8. Shentil Foundation Benefit Concert A Success
BOSTON, Mass. (A.W.)-On May 4, the Andreassian Music Fund together with
Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Boston presented a benefit concert featuring
noted pianist Karine Bagdassarian as a fundraiser for the Shentil
Foundation.
A cocktail party preceding gave benefactors and guests the opportunity to
meet Reverend Dajad Davidian, the former pastor of St. James Armenian Church
in Watertown and current activist for the Shentil Foundation, among other
causes in Armenia.
State Representative Rachel Kaprelian provided introduction to Rev.
Davidian, praising his works saying, "You are a home to me" and praising of
Armenia, "For those of you who have not been- it will change your life."
Bagdassarian played pieces by Chopin, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Khatchadourian,
Haig Boyajian, Dianne Goolkasian Rahbee and Keven Sigfried.
Painter Armen Daneghyan's artwork was also available for sale. Born in
Yerevan, Daneghyan creates miniature paintings depicting religious and other
thematic imagery in a modern style with original colors. His work has been
shown in Russia, the U.S., Germany, Canada, Greece, France and Brazil.
The event raised $2,500 for the Shentil Foundation, a 501C non-profit
humanitarian organization that provides assistance to needy individuals,
particularly in Armenia and engages in cultural, social, and religious
education for youth and young adults. Contributions to the Shentil
Foundation may be sent to Reverend Dajad Davidian, 74 Grove St., Belmont, MA
02478.
------------------------------------------ ------------------------------
9. 'New Man'
".Try to enter through the narrow door."
St. Luke the
Evangelist
Hit by the vicious blow
Of an outrageous life,
Nauseous of pricey fads,
And cheap deference,
Distant from bourgeois
Custom and mores,
Already aging
Way before my time.
I walk in distress,
I walk. lifeless,
headed towards the streets
of my childhood.
.And here each single moment
Is my very own -
Here a storefront
And window in lights,
There a bunch of flowers,
'The Yellow Boutique'
And the sweet dead-end
of 'dream' and 'recall'.
* * *
In the memory store,
Silent toys,
Flashing smiles
Of decked-up dolls,
Stand side by side
with soldier and car.
My maimed souvenirs -
Go away. get lost!
* * *
Hall of fantasy,
Dauntless champion,
Azure mountain-lake,
Daring on the wing,
Sporting items,
Ski, skate, javelin.
I was meant to be
king of the mountain!
* * *
Stay this way,
Always side by side,
Familiar windows
of memory and dream.
But.between the pair
A narrow door,
That is shut tight
As the lid of a sightless eye:
So, do they still stand as one?
Or, have memory and dream
split in two.?
* * *
Hit by the vicious blow
Of an outrageous life,
Nauseous of pricey fads,
And cheap deference,
Distant from bourgeois
Custom and mores,
Already aging
Way before my time .
I have vowed to enter
Through the locked door,
To unite memory
And dream. through life.
* * *
When you are livid
At your rotten luck,
Go through the narrow door and
step out as New Man.
---------- Varand
Translated by Tatul Sonentz
***
(c) 2007 Armenian Weekly On-Line. All Rights Reserved.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress