World Press on Racial Justice, UAE and Israel, Azerbaijan and Armenia: New Age Islam's Selection, 20 November 2020
By New Age Islam Edit
Desk
20 November 2020
• Teaching Racial Justice Isn’t Racial Justice
By Benjamin Y. Fong
• To Parents Of Sons From A Parent Of A
Daughter
By Syeda Samara Mortada
• Uae And Israeli Settlers Find Common Ground
In Jerusalem
By James M Dorsey
• As A Teacher I Need To Be Able To Talk About
Racism Without Government Meddling
By Anonymous
• The Ceasefire Agreement With Azerbaijan Comes
With Great Risks For Armenia
By Dale Berning Sawa
-----
Teaching Racial Justice Isn’t Racial Justice
By Benjamin Y. Fong
Nov. 18,
2020
In the wake
of the murder of George Floyd and the season of protests for equality and
against police violence that followed, universities are seeking to affirm and
reaffirm their commitments to racial justice at all levels. Administrators are
drawing up institutional plans to address structural racism (my employer,
Arizona State University, put out its own this fall), and faculty are
reorienting their courses to greater emphasize diversity and inclusion. This
overdue reckoning is welcome, an opportunity to address longstanding inequities
and injustices perpetrated by the sprawling conglomerates of higher education.
But good
intentions do not prevent misguided practices. Just one example: Corporate
antiracism trainings are not only of questionable efficacy and dubious origin,
they also provide “an opportunity for employers to exert even more power over
employees.” If we are not to dilute the political energy of the moment, we must
be on guard against attempts to domesticate, defuse and thereby betray the
overlapping movements for racial, social and economic justice that have emerged
with such force this past year.
One danger
for academia in this regard pertains to the stubborn notion that the university
does not merely educate students about social transformation, it is also where
that transformation takes place. Many faculty and administrators believe that
by educating students in the approved manner, we will transform them,
politically and socially, one classroom of de-prejudiced minds at a time.
Undoubtedly
students are changed in the course of critical inquiry and engagement with
diverse and challenging texts. I can attest to this fact having taught liberal
arts discussion seminars for the entirety of my academic career. The problem
comes in thinking that these individual transformations are themselves
small-scale social transformations. This belief leads to a number of worrisome
consequences, the most immediate being simply an inflated sense of the university’s
importance. Yes, diverse perspectives ought to be incorporated into our
courses, but the future of American society does not hang on our collective
syllabuses being carefully weighted for race and gender.
If that
sounds cavalier, consider the following: Throughout American history, racist
attitudes and structures have been changed and dismantled because mass
political movements altered the balance of power in this country through
protest, violence, nonviolence, organizing and political strategizing — not
because people were educated in an enlightened fashion. We all know this, and
yet a grounded perspective is often absent from the marvelous displays of
self-flattery that are academic conversations about pedagogy today.
The bigger
problem with academic narcissism, however, is that it blinds us to the real
good we could do with the syllabus flexibility offered in the expendable
disciplines. At best, an overriding focus on diversity and inclusion in the
current paradigm teaches students that exclusionary attitudes and structures
exist and that we can do our part by overcoming our individual biases,
complacency and impingements on others. At worst it results in tokenism and a
cynically deployed “cultural intelligence.” Think Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the
Earth” prominently displayed on a bookshelf at a cocktail party of professional
elites.
This again
is not to say that students do not benefit from encountering diverse
perspectives and marginalized voices, but simply that such an encounter does
not in itself put them in touch with the political considerations behind
movements that advance the struggle for racial justice. If we free ourselves of
the notion that education is social change, then we can begin to think of
education about social change.
To be clear,
I am not arguing that classrooms should be political spaces — the conservative
nightmare wherein students are pushed into activist organizations — only that
the classroom can be a space where real political concerns are considered and
debated.
To get concrete,
we might consider two of the most important moments of political struggle
against racial injustice in America, about which every student getting a
liberal arts education ought to learn: the antislavery movement of the mid-19
century, and the civil rights movement of the mid-20th. In both moments,
different and oftentimes competing visions of the future of the movement
sparred for dominance, and the historical, political, economic and social
considerations behind these visions are ripe for classroom discussion.
For
instance, in the 1850s many abolitionists became quite pessimistic and called
for Black emigration out of America. But many others resisted this call,
energized by growing popular antislavery sentiment and the adoption of
aggressive abolitionist rhetoric by the Republican Party. Similarly, at the
height of the civil rights movement, prominent leaders like A. Philip Randolph
and Bayard Rustin called for a shift “from protest to politics,” as well as a
greater emphasis on economic concerns and universal social goods. A younger
generation of Black activists meanwhile spurned what they saw as these
ameliorating tendencies in favor of Black power, an orientation roundly
criticized by the old guard.
It’s in
this space of competing political orientations that the struggle for racial
justice is carried out. Listen to Rustin’s speech, “Firebombs or a Freedom
Budget,” delivered at Harvard University in 1967, and you get a sense of the
cacophony of conflicting strategies and viewpoints that infuse a movement with
real stakes. The university is not the place where these things are worked out,
but it can be a place where real-life political orientations are taken up and
grappled with.
Teaching
the considerations of political contestation bears the additional benefit of
relieving authors of color from having to represent their identities in the
minds of students. As the political scientist Cedric Johnson has noted, “at
nearly 46 million, the Black population in the United States is greater than
the population of Canada, three times the size of the population of Greece, and
slightly larger than the combined population of Oceania (i.e., Australasia,
Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia).” To think that any individual author, or
individual authors dispersed through time and space, could represent the “Black
experience” is absurd, and yet they are too often called to do just that.
Finally,
teaching in this manner about moments of radical social upheaval bears its own
important lesson: that things can change. For all their intractability, racism
and other forms of oppression are not static features of American society. The
liberal arts classroom is a unique space within which students can engage with
the strategies, conflicts, tactics and historical conjunctures of movements
that changed the United States for the better. There is a place for education
in the fight for racial justice, provided education itself is not confused for
the fight.
-----
Benjamin Y. Fong teaches at Barrett, the Honors
College at Arizona State University, and is the author of “Death and Mastery:
Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/opinion/college-antiracism-teaching.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
-----
To Parents Of Sons From A Parent Of A Daughter
By Syeda Samara Mortada
November
18, 2020
I often
wonder if I would be any different, feel any different, if I were a mother to a
son, rather than a daughter. Yes, parents ought to love all children in the
same way and treat them the same, but recently I have begun to think that the
responsibilities of being a parent to a son at this day and age far outweighs
that of a parent to a daughter. And I arrive at this conclusion based on
conversations I have had with many other parents of my generation. And what
they say (and I agree with) is that while our generation of women have stepped
out of the roles and boxes designed for them, the men of our generation have
still not evolved. So, they still expect their wives/partners to carry out the
same tasks that they saw their mothers perform, BUT also contribute to
household expenditures at the same time. There has been much said and written
by experts and activists working in the area. Today, I write and express myself
only as a mother.
And that
makes me wonder, how are we raising our sons, what is the environment we are
moulding them in, that gives rise to such perpetrators, abusers and rapists we
read of everyday? Let's face it, they are part of this very society that we
live in and helped create. They are our fathers, uncles and most importantly
our sons. And so, the onus of creating a "better" family, a
"better" community that cuts the very root of rape culture, lies now
more than ever on parents of today's children—the ones raising future
generations. And by parents I do not mean mothers. For far too long women have
been carrying the flag of equality, fighting the good fight, seeking justice.
The responsibility does not lie with her alone, just like it is not upto a
mother alone to raise her son, to give him good lessons, to teach him to
respect his wife, partner or girlfriend.
The
majority of perpetrators of sexual violence are men. And so, while survivors
are always women and children, the ones inflicting violence are almost always
men. As a woman, I have grown up watching over my shoulder, when I am walking
on the streets, even at 6 o' clock in the evening, even if the street is not
completely deserted; even if the street is where I grew up all my life.
Throughout my life, I have been extra vigilant, extra cautious, almost as if it
is MY responsibility to not get abused/harassed/raped.
But, I
don't want the same things for my daughter, and I will not accept it. I want it
to be okay and safe for her to walk the streets, use public transport, feel no
less than her male counterparts. To my daughter, like most mothers I have said
that she can be anything, do anything: a doctor, an astronaut, or an artist.
But what's most important is to be a good person, to be empathetic and kind; to
respect one and all, for who they are—not because they have a particular tone
of skin, or because of where they come from, or because what genitalia (yes, it
is a word one can utter in front of kids!) they have. I hope that's the kind of
conversations parents of young boys are also having with their sons. But this
is not the end; parents of boys also need to encourage their sons to play with
dolls or kitchen sets, not with guns; they need to stop saying that it's okay
to be naughty, and to hit others. Parents of young boys growing up need to set
forth the same house rules for their sons as they do for their daughters. It
can't be okay for the son to be out till midnight, when the daughter has to
come back home during sunset. But most importantly, parents of young boys need
to set forth good examples as parents, and act out what they are teaching their
sons. They will pick up what they see, so if they see parents sharing household
responsibility, if they see their fathers being more involved at home, with the
children, that is what they will practice.
As a mother
to a daughter, I request you, no I beg you, to hold your uncles, your fathers
your brothers accountable for their behaviour, for making sexist jokes, for
thinking it's okay to harass and abuse their power and positions of authority.
As a mother, I beg you to have open conversations with your sons so that they
can learn about their sexuality from their parents, rather than from porn or
peers. Teach them about consent, and about respect. I don't want your son to
protect my daughter, I want him to check his own behaviour. I owe it to my
daughter to end rape culture, and so do you.
-----
Syeda Samara Mortada is the Regional Movement
Builder at SheDecides, Asia and a core member of the RageAgainstRape Movement
in Bangladesh.
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/news/parents-sons-parent-daughter-1996649
-----
UAE And Israeli Settlers Find Common Ground In
Jerusalem
By James M Dorsey
November
19, 2020
Weakened by
Joe Biden's electoral defeat of US President Donald J. Trump, Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu risks being caught between a rock and a hard place
as Jordan, the Palestine Authority and the United Arab Emirates manoeuvre for
control of what is to Jews the Temple Mount and to Muslims the Haram
ash-Sharif, the third most holy site in Islam.
The rivalry
for control of Jerusalem's most sensitive, emotive, contested, and potentially
explosive place is occurring against the backdrop of a parallel and interlinked
run-up to a competition for the succession of Mahmoud Abbas, the frail
84-year-old Palestinian president.
The
Jerusalem site has been administered since Israel conquered East Jerusalem in
the 1967 Middle East war by the Jordanian and Palestinian-controlled Supreme
Muslim Council. Rivalry for the religious control of the site, which hosts the
Al-Aqsa Mosque and is where the First Jewish Temple was built by King Solomon
in 957 BC, involves multiple risks for Mr Netanyahu.
Mr
Netanyahu's inclination to back attempts by the UAE—with Saudi Arabia, home to
Mecca and Medina, Islam's holiest cities, in the background—to muscle their way
into the administration of the Haram ash-Sharif could complicate relations with
Jordan and widen differences with the Palestine Authority. The UAE enhanced its
ability to manoeuvre by establishing diplomatic relations with Israel and
rushing to forge closer ties to the country's political, security and economic
elites.
In a twist
of irony, the UAE finds common ground with the Israeli settler movement and the
Jewish far-right in wanting to weaken Jordanian-Palestinian control of the
Haram ash-Sharif and counter Turkish efforts to stoke Palestinian nationalist
and religious sentiment. The settlers and the far-right are calling for
internationalisation of the administration of the Haram ash-Sharif, which plays
into the UAE's hands.
"Ironically,
it may be the case that calls for just such an arrangement may come from Muslim
citizens of countries that have normalised their ties with Israel and find it
offensive that a small group of Palestinians are attempting to ban them from
visiting one of their holiest sites," said Josiah Rotenberg, a member of
the Board of Governors of the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based
right-wing think tank.
The UAE's
recognition of Israel and willingness to engage not only with businesses
located in Israel's pre-1967 borders but also those headquartered in Israeli
settlements on the occupied West Bank and invest in a technology park in East
Jerusalem have fuelled a war of words with the Palestinians and sparked
incidents with Emirati visitors to the Haram ash-Sharif.
"Most
of the citizens of Israel, myself included, continue to... demand that Prime
Minister Netanyahu apply full sovereignty to Judea and Samaria," said
settlement leader Yossi Dagan after heading a settlers' delegation on a visit
to Dubai to discuss business opportunities. Mr Dagan was using the biblical
name of the West Bank.
The visit
reinforced Palestinian assertions that the creation of diplomatic ties between
Israel and Arab states prior to a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict would reinforce Israeli occupation rather than open the door to the
establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
The
"Israeli-Emirati deal raises the concern and fear within the Jordanian
Awqaf and among Palestinians, because it aims to give the UAE a new role inside
Al-Aqsa," said former Palestinian minister of Jerusalem affairs Khaled Abu
Arafa, referring to the Supreme Muslim Council.
Muhammad
Hussein, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, didn't need Mr Dagan's statement to come
to that conclusion. Resigning in protest from an Emirati clerical group
established to project the UAE as a beacon of moderate Islam immediately after
the announcement of UAE-Israel relations, Mr Hussein banned Muslims from the
Emirates from visiting and praying at the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
An Emirati
business delegation visiting Israel last month was verbally assaulted and told
to go home by Palestinian worshippers when they went to pray at the mosque.
Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh scolded the Emiratis, saying that
"one ought to enter the gates of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque by way of its
owners, rather than through the gates of the occupation."
Responding
on Twitter, Laith al-Awadhi, an Emirati national, retorted: "We will visit
Al-Aqsa because it does not belong to you, it belongs to all Muslims."
Saudi lawyer and writer Abdel Rahman al-Lahim chipped in arguing that "it
is very important for the Emiratis and Bahrainis to discuss with Israel ways of
liberating Al-Aqsa Mosque from Palestinian thugs in order to protect visitors
from Palestinian thuggery."
Mr Abbas,
the Palestinian president, has slowed down a reconciliation between his Fatah
movement and Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, in anticipation
of a more empathetic policy by an incoming Biden administration. He broke off
relations with the United States after Mr Trump produced an Israeli-Palestinian
peace plan that endorsed annexation, recognised Jerusalem as the capital of
Israel, and cut off funding for the Palestinians.
Palestinian
officials suspect the UAE, backed by Israel, of positioning Mohammed Dahlan, an
Abu Dhabi-based former Palestinian security chief with close ties to Emirati
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed as well as US officials, as a potential
successor to Mr Abbas.
Mr Abbas
could be disappointed by the degree to which a Biden administration may reverse
Mr Trump's policy and find that it may not oppose broadening the administration
of the Haram ash-Sharif.
In an
interview with The Times of Israel, Antony "Tony" Blinken, Mr Biden's
top foreign policy advisor and a former senior official under President Barak
Obama, signalled that Mr Biden would, in contrast to Mr Trump, oppose Israeli
efforts to annex parts of the West Bank and could adopt a more critical
attitude towards expansion of existing Israeli settlements. It would likely be
a position endorsed by the UAE despite the Emirates' engagement with the
settlers.
Mr Blinken
insisted that a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the
"only way to ensure Israel's future as a Jewish and democratic state and
also to fulfil the Palestinian right to a state of their own." With both
Israel and the Palestinians "far from a place where they're ready to
engage on negotiations or final status talks", he said that a Biden
administration would seek to ensure that "neither side takes additional
unilateral steps that make the prospect of two states even more distant or
closing it entirely."
The Biden
administration could well see broadening of the governance of Haram ash-Sharif
as one way of achieving that goal.
-----
Dr James M. Dorsey is an award-winning
journalist and a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University's S.
Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and the National
University of Singapore's Middle East Institute.
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/news/uae-and-israeli-settlers-find-common-ground-jerusalem-1997221
-----
As A Teacher I Need To Be Able To Talk About
Racism Without Government Meddling
By Anonymous
19 Nov 2020
In October,
the women and equalities minister Kemi Badenoch made a dramatic intervention in
the House of Commons during a session commemorating Black History Month.
Schools, she said, that teach students about certain ideas from “critical race
theory” as “fact” were breaking the law: “We do not want teachers to teach
their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt.”
The
minister’s words came not too long after guidance for schools in England was
published that said schools “should not use resources produced by organisations
that … promote victim narratives that are harmful to British society”. It’s
safe to say that these two developments, which seemed designed to have a
chilling effect on discussing the uncomfortable truths of racism in Britain,
have made fellow teachers and myself worried about what we can and can’t say.
And the day after Badenoch’s speech, I was due to take a PSHE (personal,
social, health and economic) lesson about racism.
Most of the
students in my class are white, so before we even started the lesson, I knew
that the racial status of whiteness in a white-majority society was going to
come up. I felt unsure as to my role – I hadn’t had time yet to absorb
Badenoch’s statement – but the intelligence and inquisitiveness of my students
led the way. “Can you be racist towards white people, because I told my friend
that you can’t?”, asked one. Others began sharing their experiences. A black
student talked about how their family members had been stopped by the police in
town. Two non-white students explained how a teacher got them mixed up for a
year. There was no point during the lesson when any of the white students
shared experiences of racism. Isn’t that discrepancy in their experiences an
example of “white privilege” in action?
Schools are
complex ecosystems. You might be dealing with more than 1,000 students and
several hundred staff members. It became evident to me that there were many
members of staff who didn’t know or maybe even care about the issues raised
during Black History Month. I know that one member of staff said, “All lives
matter” at one point, while another drew a false equivalence between Black
Lives Matter and the BNP. This highlights both the importance of educating staff
about race, as well as the fact that schools are contested spaces for social
issues.
Now we are
faced with the dilemma of how to teach vitally important concepts without
breaking government guidance. Colleagues often have the same worrying scenario
in mind: they try to have a nuanced conversation about “whiteness” or the
legacy of white supremacy, and a student goes home and tells their parents that
they’re learning about how racism is their fault. The government says it is
against teaching certain ideas, as if they were “accepted facts”. But no
concept in the social sciences is uncontested and surely Badenoch knows this,
so the real consequences of her words is probably going to be a chilling
effect. I am also unsure specifically what constitutes “critical race theory”
or “victim narratives”, from the government’s point of view, and so feel
apprehensive about the content of some lessons in the coming weeks.
Advertisement
I don’t
want to be complicit in papering over the realities of racism by avoiding these
topics for fear of repercussions from senior staff and the wider community, but
I also don’t want to put my job at risk. As teachers, we have a responsibility
and duty to our students to provide them with comprehensive support and
guidance to give them the best chances when they leave school. Race issues and
racism are extremely prevalent in our students’ lives, and children are going
to have questions. “But why, Miss?” and “Yeah, but how do you know, Sir?” pop
up frequently in all lessons. Am I meant to discourage a conversation about
stop and search when the only teenager in the room to have experienced this is
black and their white peers want to understand why?
There needs
to be more resources and training to equip teachers to deliver good teaching on
diversity-based topics – I know I am not the only teacher who feels that. I
want to see diversity training made a compulsory part of teacher-training
programmes; it should be given a similar priority as safeguarding training.
Rather than shutting down these conversations and topics, educators should be
better equipped to explore these issues in the classroom without fear or
ignorance. Creating a climate in which teachers feel it’s safer to avoid these
topics of conversation doesn’t make these questions go away – it will force
students to go elsewhere in search of answers.
----
Anonymous author teaches in a secondary school
in England
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/19/teacher-talk-about-racism-government-meddling-white-privilege-victim-narratives
-----
The Ceasefire Agreement With Azerbaijan Comes
With Great Risks For Armenia
By Dale Berning Sawa
19 Nov 2020
The
ceasefire brokered last week between Azerbaijan and Armenia has largely been
cast as a means to end a decades-long territorial dispute. But, of course,
reality might not be as smooth. In a region every bit as geopolitically fraught
as the Balkans, the Caucasus has always been a patchwork of peoples pulled and
shoved between greater powers, suffering successive waves of conquest and “ethnic
cleansing”.
Zoom in
more closely right now, though, and while Azerbaijanis can rightly celebrate a
return to homes they were driven from 30 years ago, for the Armenian people at
large, the risks could not be greater.
In signing
the ceasefire agreement, Armenia has agreed to progressively hand back to Baku
territories around Karabakh that it has occupied – militarily – since the
1990s. Culturally, though, it’s not so simple. The people living in these parts
have, not all but in large part and since antiquity, been Armenian. It’s why
they fought for independence in the first place.
They call
the enclave Artsakh. Its deep-cut valleys and mountain ridges are dotted with
more than 3,500 monasteries, churches, distinctive Armenian khachkars (cross
stones) and gravestones. In addition to this Armenian Christian heritage, there
is a wealth of pre-Christian sites and a smaller percentage of Muslim
monuments, all of which have been meticulously listed. Teams are now scrambling
to compile an official list of what exactly is in the districts to be handed
back to Azerbaijani control.
Because,
when it comes to Armenian heritage, Baku has terrible form. A report by
political analyst Simon Maghakyan and anthropologist Sarah Pickman last year
presented extensive details of what they termed a 30-year campaign by
Azerbaijan of comprehensive “cultural cleansing” in Nakhichevan, the other
territory the two states previously disputed. Satellite imagery, extensive
documentary evidence and personal accounts showed that 89 churches, 5,840
khachkars and 22,000 tombstones were destroyed between 1997 and 2006, including
the medieval necropolis of Djulfa, the largest ancient Armenian cemetery in the
world.
The
Azerbaijani response has consistently been to simply deny that Armenians had
ever lived in the region. And that is precisely what observers fear will now
happen across Artsakh, too. Last week president Ilham Aliyev tweeted, “Karabakh
is ours! Karabakh is Azerbaijan!”, and his officials denied the historic
Armenian nature of the region’s most fabled treasures. As Armenians removed
bells, crosses and khachkars for safekeeping from the ninth-century Dadivank
monastery in the Kalbajar district, Azerbaijan’s deputy culture minister, Anar
Karimov, commented that these removals were illegal – and those items were
actually Albanian.
From the
1950s, in a bid to establish links to antiquity and bolster claims of
indigeneity, Soviet Azeri scholars embraced a revisionist cultural theory that
drew a line between the Turkic Azeri people and Caucasian Albania, a country to
the north of the Kura river. Specialists, including Danish archaeologist
Carsten Paludan-Müller (a member of the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre),
say that the theory is baseless. And the Dadivank monastery’s own walls suggest
as much. While, according to archaeologist and Yerevan State University
professor Hamlet Petrosyan, not a single Caucasian Albanian inscription has
been found in Artsakh, this monastery alone is clad in more than 100
inscriptions in Armenian script.
There have
been instances of monuments being Albanised (with the Armenian inscriptions
removed) but doing so at Dadivank simply would not be practicable – and
wouldn’t be a guarantee of the monument’s ultimate safety anyway. Experts point
to the town of Agulis in Nakhichevan, and its cathedral, all of which was
methodically laid to waste by the Azerbaijani military, starting in 1997.
Paludan-Müller is sure we will see something similar again. “It’s going to be
very difficult to avoid the destruction,” he says. “And there is a risk now
that Nagorno-Karabakh will lose its Armenian population.”
Conflict in
the region has deep roots. More than a third of the current Turkish population
descends from the muhacir, the Muslim refugees (primarily Russian, Balkan and
Caucasian) who fled persecution as the Ottoman empire collapsed. Europe and
Russia’s involvement – and converse support for the Christian Greek and
Armenian communities – is a humiliation that Turkey, as Paludan-Müller puts it,
has never forgotten, and with which the Azeris identify.
The
Armenian diaspora’s strong presence in the US, France and other western
countries after the 1915–22 genocide only exacerbates the Turkish sense of a
western or Christian bias towards Armenians. Moreover, Armenian scholarly emphasis
on the Azerbaijani identity as a 20th-century construct belies the fact that
the Azeri language, too, has ancient, pre-Turkic roots.
At the same
time, Turkey and Azerbaijan deny the Armenian genocide, which saw up to 1.5
million Armenian people killed in Anatolia. And though ancient Armenian
populations inhabited an area stretching from the Mediterranean to the Black
and Caspian seas, it was Turkish policy until the mid-20th century to destroy
Armenian heritage throughout its territory, and erase them from their maps.
In the
decades following the emergence of the Karabakh liberation movement in 1988 and
the first Armenia-Azerbaijan war in 1992, Armenian presence in Artsakh has
engendered a remarkable body of scholarship. Art historians have delved into
the wealth of illuminated manuscripts dating back to medieval Armenian
monasteries; the particular regional iconography on the carved khachkars; the
unusual, vaulted single-nave churches.
There was
also Petrosyan’s discovery, in 2005, of the first-century BC Hellenistic city
of Tigranakert and the exceptional raft of subsequent findings – agate gems,
glass amphoriskos, painted burial amphoras, fourth-century Sasanian seals, a
curious church entrance layout that connects it to ancient Jerusalem, and cave
sanctuaries that connect it to ancient Greece. Petrosyan warns that this
heritage has been targeted in the recent conflict.
His grief
and anger are palpable – but with little hope that the situation will improve.
The Djulfa cemetery, after all, was a Unesco-listed world heritage site before
it was destroyed. “We have had neither military nor political clout. There is
no difference between Azerbaijan wiping out our people or our culture. We are
our culture.”
-----
Dale Berning Sawa is a French-South-African
writer based in London
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/19/ceasefire-agreement-azerbaijan-great-risks-armenia
----
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