From San Remo To Tskhinvali… (In English & Armenian)

World War I, that unprecedented blood bath that was to mark the end of the decaying Anciens regimes ended not in peace, but in an ‘Armistice’ in 1918, followed by a frenzy of overt and covert diplomatic activity, with new imperial appetites for hegemony honed by the enticing smell of crude oil.  

Thus, Preceding the peace treaty between the Ottoman Empire and the Allied Powers, signed in Sèvres, France, the Treaty of Versailles was signed with Germany to annul the German concessions along with economic rights and enterprises.  After the February Conference of London, in April, 1920, the Great War Allied Supreme Council held a conference in San Remo, Italy, attended by the Prime Ministers of Britain, France, Italy, and the Ambassador of Japan; they determined the allocation of League of Nations mandates for administration of former Ottoman-ruled lands of the Middle East – largely based on the May 1916 Anglo-French Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. 

The present mess in that region of the world and its environs can be directly traced to the predatory appetites of the ‘Great Powers’ initiating and participating in those conferences that created the arena where the mighty would ‘legally’ dismantle, rearrange and dominate the weak — setting ‘inviolable’ ‘national’ boundaries in the process… An effective process of a recycled colonization, that, soon after, the emerging Soviet Union would apply within its own whimsical internal boundaries, setting the scene for the endemic ethnic tensions and sporadic armed clashes we are now witnessing in Russia’s ‘Near Abroad’.

With  such a lusty “Circus Maximus” atmosphere as a background, it is hardly surprising, that the August 10, 1920 Treaty of Sèvres — verbally exuding unshakeable faith in Wilsonian idealism and vision for a new world order — would soon be set aside to make room for the disgraceful Treaty of Lausanne, particularly, since on the very same date – August 10, 1920 – Great Britain, France and Italy were secretly signing a “Tripartite Agreement” confirming Britain’s oil and commercial concessions and turning the former German enterprises in the Ottoman Empire over to a Tripartite corporation.

Actually these three major powers, as early as 1915, while the Armenian Genocide had entered into full swing, had secretly started planning the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire not along ethno-national borders, but the hard line economic interests of the ‘Great’ powers. The Russian revolution and the Kemalist movement disrupted their expectations and drove them to sign the hastily assembled Lausanne Treaty – without the ratification of the United States — to keep Turkey’s Eastern borders intact, as a buffer against a possible Bolshevik incursion into Anatolia and eventually into an economically and politically unsteady Europe.

The solemn promises made to the Armenians, who had fought on the Allied side throughout the entire war were forgotten, along with promises made to the Kurds, the Pontus Greeks and the Assyrians, opening the way to a second round of the on-going Turkish genocidal ethnic cleansing process against the non-Turkic populations of Western Armenia, Kurdistan and Cilicia.  Strangely enough, Georgia, who threw her lot with Germany and the Central Powers, ended up with Armenian Javakhq and other non-Georgian territories as part of her mini-empire, and to this day, insists on masquerading as a nation state – apparently hoping to achieve that status through her own insidious programs of various forms of ethnic cleansing with the chauvinistic slogan of “Georgia for the Georgians” as her credo.

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The present debacle in South Ossetia, with its historic background and recent events cunningly distorted and misrepresented in hackneyed Cold War rhetoric by a large segment of the Western news media leads to only one conclusion, that after the stultifying decades of past brainwashing – both Western and Eastern — it is almost impossible to hope for a fair and enlightened world public opinion.  Against such a polluted background, aggravated with the present economic and political anomalies caused by a runaway globalism shirking all known criteria, certain anachronistic ‘state’ boundaries, considered sacrosanct in spite of their historically criminal origins, will continue to stand in the way of realizing true peace and harmony among nations.

It is high time for countries like Georgia and Turkey to realize that there are other national entities than just Georgians and Turks within their still imperial boundaries, set by brutal acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing – covertly conceived and made binding by predatory forces engaged in secret diplomacy.