TIME's DVD on Armenian Genocide Continues to engender "Hurricane Armenia!"
Friday March 2, 2007
By Appo Jabarian Executive Publisher/Managing Editor USA Armenian Life Magazine Hye Kiank Armenian Weekly
On Feb. 16, I went to Los Angeles International Airport and boarded an Air Tahiti Nui flight to Europe. To my astonishment, the airplane, coming from Far East and heading toward Paris, France, was carrying a special gift for me.
As usual, before I sat, I scanned a nearby airplane news-rack for an interesting magazine. Before I even approached the news-rack, I knew that I had already seen something familiar: the cover of the Feb. 12 issue of TIME Europe. The upper right corner of the front cover was standing out and was fairly noticeable from among several other publications. I immediately took it and looked for the TIME DVD on the Armenian Genocide. There it was affixed on a full page announcement on the Armenian Genocide. The page number was 5. At the low right corner of the page one could read: “This DVD and ad page were provided courtesy of TIME.”
The very first person that I wanted to share this good news with was an individual who had worked so hard along with other dedicated individuals to make this happen. My cell-phone was still on. Right before the pilot turned the turbine engines on, I called that individual, Harut Sassounian, the Publisher of the California Courier, and shared the Air Tahiti Nui’s pleasant surprise.
In my mind, I was whole-heartedly applauding TIME Magazine for having corrected its terrible mistake when it was duped by Ankara Chamber of Commerce and had unwittingly inserted a Turkish DVD back in June 2005. The Turkish DVD which was supposedly intended for promoting tourism in Turkey turned out to be a Turkish propaganda tool to deny the facts of the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923 at the hands of Turkey.
Little did I know that my experience of sweet satisfaction was materializing in a sharp contrast with a bitter political taste that was experienced a few days earlier, by the Foreign Minister of Turkey Abdullah Gul. Also, little did I suspect that the TIME Europe Feb. 12 issue was going to become the object of a debate in the Turkish National Assembly.
According to several Turkish newspaper reports of Feb. 26, “Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul was shocked when he saw an Armenian Genocide DVD in an issue of the TIME magazine European edition on his plane.”
On Feb. 26, Sassounian reported: “Gul and members of his delegation were returning to Turkey on February 11, after spending several days in Washington, D.C., lobbying against the pending Congressional Resolution on the Armenian Genocide. On their Lufthansa Airline flight, they discovered that the TIME magazine issue handed to them included a DVD as well as a full-page announcement on the Armenian Genocide. Gul was reportedly very upset that Armenians were carrying out propaganda activities even on his plane. He said he would conduct an investigation.”
Reportedly, a Turkish official filed a complaint with Lufthansa Airline condemning the appearance of the TIME issue and the DVD on board of its airplanes. But Lufthansa executives brushed aside the complaint.
Now, in response to TIME Feb. 12 issue’s appearance on board Air Tahiti Nui, Lufthansa, and several other major airlines, wouldn’t it be interesting if Turkey boycotts these airlines? An “effective” Turkish boycott would effectively keep denialist Turks out of the air space of several nations that have already officially recognized the Armenian genocide.
Or, Turkey can take a good lesson from TIME Europe by correcting its misguided denialism sooner rather than later. The TIME lesson is that, more than anything else, TIME has done itself a great service by re-establishing its journalistic credibility and integrity among several hundreds of thousands readers in Europe and around the world.
Whereas Turkey, continues its auto-destructive denialism only to one day find out that it has more to gain than to lose by filling its history gap with a genuine acknowledgement of the facts of a Turkish-masterminded and executed genocide that cost the Armenian Nation over one and a half million innocent lives and the loss of an entire homeland in Western Armenia.
Otherwise, Gul and his denialist masters in Ankara can do well to remember what Mehmet Ali Birand, a Turkish journalist, predicted a while ago about “Armenian Tsunami” in 2006. Apparently the “Armenian Tsunami” will continue to engender “Hurricane Armenia” in this and many years – or decades to come.