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The Armenian Diaspora and its future | Agos
▻http://www.agos.com.tr/en/article/16574/the-armenian-diaspora-and-its-future

There is a growing pessimism towards the future of the Armenian Diaspora. “It has no future,” we often hear. “The Armenian can not survive away from his homeland,” is often repeated. “We will finally be assimilated” is the conclusion. The answer suggested is that the Diaspora “returns” to their homeland, to Armenia. Or else, they will be assimilated.

The large Armenian Diaspora is passing through radical transformation, and is facing unprecedented challenges. The demographic weight of the Diaspora is moving away from the traditional Middle East countries where Genocide survivors created new communities in the 1920s. Instability and lack of security in Egypt in the 1950s, Lebanon during the war 1975-1990, the Islamic revolution in Iran 1979, Iraq’s long wars under Saddam Hussein. The same is happening now in Syria where the Armenian districts of Aleppo and the Armenian town of Kessab turned into battlefields.

#arménie #diaspora

It is all the Fault of #Sykes and #Picot | Agos
▻http://www.agos.com.tr/en/article/15328/it-is-all-the-fault-of-sykes-and-picot

is the fault of Sykes and Picot. They destroyed the Ottoman Empire and divided the Middle East. It was them who drew the artificial borders of the region; it was them who divided the Arab World, segregated the Umma. It was the perfect colonialist conspiracy to divide and rule. It is the original sin, the source of all the current problems of the Middle East.

Have you heard this version before? On May 16 this year it will be 100 years following the Sykes-Picot agreement between two diplomats: one British and one French who during the height of the “Great War” negotiated on how to divide what was still at the time Ottoman lands at the conclusion of that war.

But is it? Do the imperialist invasions and division of the region into nation-states cause the problems of the Middle East? This theory was very popular at the height of Arab nationalism, immediately after the end of the Second World War, the withdrawal of the French and the British, and the emergence of the new states in the region. At the time, the greatest cause was that of Palestine, the central struggle in the Middle East was the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was the time when Arab unity was not considered just a project, but a political ideology that moved the masses, which considered the frontiers drawn between Syria and Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, as artificial barriers against the unity of the one Arab people.

#syrie #liban #irak #jordanie #sykes_picot