1997_03 Hye Sharzhoom Newspaper March 1997

              March 1997
Hye Sharzhoom
3
California State University, Fresno
Armenian Studies Program
Fall 1997 Schedule of Courses
Course
General Education
Division 9-Other Cultures
• Arm S 10 Intro to Arm Studies
• Arm S 10 Intro to Arm Studies
• Arm S 10 Intro to Arm Studies
Division 7- Languages
• Arm 1A Elementary Armenian
Upper Division Courses
• Arm S 108A Arm History I
• Arm S 120T Arm. Genocide
• Arm S 120T Armenian Cooking
Class meets the weekend of October 17 & 18
Materials fee of $25
• Arm S 1201 Armenian Church
Class meets the weekend of October 3 & 4
Time     Day
Instructor
1010-1100 MWF      B Der Mugrdechian
1310-1400 MWF      Staff
0945-1100 TTh I Kaprielian
1110-1200 MTWF    B Der Mugrdechian
0910-1000 MWF
1810-2100 Wed
1710-2200 Fri
0910-1700 Sat
1710-2200 Fri
0910-1700 Sat
B Der Mugrdechian
I Kaprielian
B Der Mugrdechian
B Der Mugrdechian
All courses can be used for credit toward a minor in Armenian Studies.
For more information call the Armenian Studies Program at 278-2669
or visit our offices in the Peters Business Building, Room 384.
Monte Melkonian (1957-1993)
Armenian militant and martyred hero of the war between
Karabagh and Azerbaijan, whose 1978 University of
California, Berkeley thesis on Urartian rock-cut tombs has
just been translated into Armenian and published in Erevan
in the series "Armenological Monuments of Armenia." A
new edition of Melkonian's essays, The Right to Struggle, has
also just been issued. Monte was the son of Zabelie and
Charles Melkonian of Visalia.
For more details on these volumes, see the Books and Gifts section.
Decade of Turmoil: Reflections on Armenia and the Armenians
A speech presented in Los Angeles on the second anniversary of the Consulate of the Republic of Armenia
By Dr. Dickran Kouymjian
Archbishop Vatche, Very
Reverend Mushegh, Father Raphael,
Reverend Minassian, Mr. Consul General and Mrs. Baibourtian, distinguished clergy and guests, ladies and
gentlemen. What a wonderful occasion! Many of us have mixed memories of getting a visa for Armenia,
arriving at the Soviet Consulate in San
Francisco or another city to get a visa
for Armenia, wondering if the FBI was
photographing us from the building
across the street, or if we would get in
trouble with the American government
for traveling there. Now it a simple
formality conducted between members of the same family. Surely this is
part of today's celebration.
Today's banquet should inspire us to reflect on Armenia and the
Armenians, homeland and diaspora,
citizenship, responsibility, and above
all history, the historical context of our
lives, the lives of our parents and grandparents, and of future generations of
Armenians. So much has happened to
Armenians in recent years that even
we. a people who have always respected history and interpreted our lives
in historical terms, cannot assess fully
the meaning of what has passed. It is at
moments such as this, when we come
together to commemorate and celebrate, that we offer ourselves the excuse to look at the past in larger terms.
I think back a decade ago to
those relatively tranquil days of June
1987 in Armenia when I was finishing
my term as a Fulbright professor in the
Department of Foreign Languages and
Literatures at Erevan State University.
The call by Mikhail Gorbatchov for
restructuring and transparency,
perestro'ika and glasnosl. had already
caused a stir in Armenia. A major
petition had been circulating with hundreds of thousands of signatures ask-
Consul General Armen Baibourtian, right, and Professor Dickran Kouymjian
ing for the union of Karabagh to Armenia; the ecology movement was expanding, reflecting the general concern
in the population about the nuclear plant
at Medsamour and the pollution from
the large Na'irit chemical complex in
Erevan itself: and growing nationalism
in institutions like the Matenadaran. the
Writers Union, and especially among
university students were contributing
to a major debate about Armenian leadership and the control of the country
and various unions by a small elite.
The stagnation of the
Brezhnev period, denounced in the
Soviet Union, was still felt in Armenia
through the First Secretary ofthe Communist Party. Garen Demirjian and the
crony system he supported, but open
criticism was rampant and signs that
things were changing included the resignation of Vartkes Petrossian as head
of the powerful Writers Union, caused
in part by the protest against his most
recent novel. The Bloody Shirt, by the
students of the Polytechnic University,
who were alarmed by its suggestion of
dialogue with the Turks. But I emphasize, in Armenia during the summer of
1987 things were still calm, "normal"
in the language of those days.
However, in the fall everything seemed to accelerate. The ecology and Karabagh movements got intertwined and in early 1988 engendered a series of ever larger, but peaceful, demonstrations, which confused
Moscow, astonished the world, and
even surprised Armenians by their solidarity, clarity of purpose, and determi
nation. Who could have imagined the
outcome would have been the barbarous pogroms of Sumgait and Baku
precipitating a mass exodus of populations and leading to war. Who can
forget the betrayal of Armenian hopes
by a Gorbatchov who refused to accept
the consequences of the very "transparency" and "restructuring" he so aggressively initiated, a leader who could
not or would not take the necessary
decisions to stop the killing and referee
an honest settlement between
Azerbaijan and the Armenians over
Karabagh, and who finally tricked the
Armenian people through its own intellectuals into stopping the protests,
into putting an end to the greatest popular, anti-government movement in the
history of the Soviet Union.
Martial law was declared and
Soviet tanks occupied Armenia's capital. Then at the very end of that year
1988, the earthquake struck, unexpected
and violent, merciless in its effect on
the body and spirit of a nation just as it
was collectively doing everything it
could to show that through a united
effort truth and justice could be made
to prevail. Gorbatchov himself, the
architect of the future down-sizing of
the Russian Empire, came from the UN
in New York to Erevan. But Armenians greeted him shouting "Karabaghe
mem e!" and the great Communist
leader was taken aback by a people
who, in the throes of tragedy and death,
refused to forget that Karabagh was
theirs. Working with local KGB agents,
who had things carefully planned,
Gorbatchov quickly had all the members of the Karabagh Committee,
Armenia's hope for a new future, arrested and imprisoned in Moscow in
the worst manner of Soviet totalitarianism. Catastrophe, trauma, war, death
— Armenia was devastated and occupied by Soviet tanks. There was war in
Karabagh and a total blockade of the
country. The nation's elected leadership was discredited, the people's leaders in prison. What difficult and uncertain days they were. But time never
stopped.
Soon there were renewed
proposals for a compromise on
Karabagh; due to the pressure of western governments, the members of the
Karabagh Committee were released and
allowed to return to Armenia. There
were parliamentary elections and
Karabagh Committee representatives
were swept into office. Levon Ter
Petrossian was elected president ofthe
Parliament. Finally, there was the dramatic dissolution of the Soviet Union
See Consulate, Page 8