Raffi K. Hovannisian

YEREVAN, ARMENIA We are at the brink of a pair of wars, civil and regional, and it is better to speak now. Armenia, that ancient civilization deprived by the tragedies of yore of its capacity for contemporary statecraft, needs immediately to put its house in democratic order. Finally responsible for its own record, it also has legitimate expectations of the international partnership. In this global and so contracted century of ours, where resources and rights often compete for precedence, domestic demeanor and foreign affairs form part of one and the same policy agenda....

Luncheon Keynote Address Unofficial Transcript Georgetown University Washington, DC It is an honor to be back at Georgetown University, a very important university in a very important capital city, which has always played its pivotal role throughout the modern history of the Republic of Armenia and the Armenian people. And as a graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center, it is especially enjoyable for me to be back in these hallowed halls, although I would rather not recall too precisely how long I have been gone....

YEREVAN, ARMENIA A couple of sentences in a non-binding resolution, passed by the House of Representatives foreign affairs committee on March 4, softly reaffirming the genocide of the Armenian people and the forcible dispossession of their homeland has got Turkey threatening the world, the US administration complicitly trying to hush Congress by blocking a vote on the floor, and many Armenians celebrating a rare moment against the odds. The Swedish parliament’s March 11 decision to recognize and then its prime minister’s extraterrestrial apology to Turkey have only raised the stakes....

QUID PRO QUO? TURKEY BETWEEN ETHICS AND POLITICS: PUT IT ALL ON THE TABLE YEREVAN, ARMENIA In Washington, Brussels, Moscow and elsewhere, Turkish President Abdullah Gul, Prime Minister Erdogan, Foreign Minister Davutoglu and others have long advocated combining onto one political agenda their country’s normalization of relations with Armenia and the resolution of Mountainous Karabagh’s conflict with Azerbaijan. I agree. Newly-independent Armenia’s ostensibly mature policy–which I supported as the nation’s first foreign affairs minister–of seeking establishment of diplomatic relations without the positing of any preconditions can today, 18 years into the game, be pronounced dead on arrival....

YEREVAN, ARMENIA Turkey has always had its share of decent folks. One close example is the righteous family who, during the great genocide and national dispossession of 1915, risked its own to save my grandmother Khengeni from certain death in the coastal town of Ordu. The stories of thousands like them have not been told because of the Turkish state’s official dialectic of denial. Apart from the remnant 50,000 of the established Armenian community, at least two million people in today’s Turkey draw lineage from an Armenian grandparent who was orphaned, stolen or saved–but in all cases turkified–in the killing fields of Ottoman-occupied historic Armenia....

YEREVAN, ARMENIA That an Armenian repatriate, American-born into a legacy of remembrance inherited from a line of survivors of genocide nearly a century ago, feels compelled to entitle his thoughts with a focus on Turkey– and not Armenia– reveals a larger problem, a gaping wound, and an imperative for closure long overdue on both sides of history’s tragic divide. The new Armenia, independent of its longstanding statelessness since 1991, is my everyday life, as are the yearnings of my fellow citizens for their daily dignity, true democracy, the rule of law, and an empowering end to sham elections and the corruption, arrogance and unaccountability of power....