Valentina Pasquali

Originally published on National Public Radio’s NPR.org

by Valentina Pasquali

On a recent afternoon, nearly 100 people gather at Istanbul’s Galatasaray Square for the weekly demonstration of a group known as the Saturday Mothers.

Kneeling on the pavement, they protest the disappearance of their relatives, mostly ethnic Kurds, caught up in a decades-long fight between the Kurdish separatist movement and the Turkish government.

The protesters hold red carnations and photos of their loved ones, most of whom disappeared in the early to mid-1990s. They hold the Turkish government responsible for the disappearances of about 1,200 Kurds.

The protests started about 15 years ago, but they were halted in 1999 and resumed only recently.

This year, a court case brought by state prosecutors against high-level military and government officials inspired the Saturday Mothers to come back. The prominent Turks are accused of plotting a military coup against the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Sebla Arcan, an economist and a leading member of Turkey’s Human Rights Association, believes that some of the military people on trial in the plot to overthrow Erdogan’s government are also responsible for the disappearances in the 1990s.

“We want the people now under custody to also be tried for the disappearances,” Arcan says.

Turkish judges are yet to be convinced of the link between the disappearances and the court case. But the uproar generated across Turkey by the trial has given the families of the disappeared renewed courage to speak out.

“We thought of this case as an opportunity. And that’s why we started the protests again — to show we haven’t forgotten the people who were made to disappear and the people who were responsible for these disappearances,” Arcan adds.

The Kurdish movement has spent decades fighting for the rights of Turkey’s largest minority: Kurds account for about 18 percent of Turkey’s population of 77 million. In the 1980s, a splinter group — the Kurdistan People’s Party, or the PKK — took to the mountains in the Southeast and started an armed struggle against Turkey’s central government, with the intent of carving out a separate state for Kurds. The PKK is regarded as a terrorist organization in the United States and Europe.

Turkey’s security apparatus responded forcefully to the PKK, raiding villages throughout the Kurdish region.

Many Kurds, such as Kasim Alpsoy, were caught in the middle of that fight. Kasim went missing in 1994 from Adana, a city in southern Turkey, where he was a worker in a leather factory. His son, Mehmet, recalls the day.

“There was a police raid at 6 a.m. on our house, and my father was taken into custody,” Mehmet says. “He was questioned and tortured. But then he was released. Only they kept his identification card and told him to come get it the next day.”

According to Mehmet, when Kasim Alpsoy went back for his ID, he disappeared inside the secret services building. His brother-in-law, who had accompanied him, waited outside for hours, to no avail.

“My uncle came back home but not my father. We never saw him again,” Mehmet adds.

Mehmet says his father was sympathetic to, but was not a member of, the Kurdish movement. He also says he believes the government took his father because of his ethnicity.

When the protests to prod the government to investigate the disappearances first started in the mid-1990s, they quickly attracted national attention. As the state took notice, however, things soon got ugly.

“We were dragged on the streets, were attacked with pepper gas,” says Arcan, whose organization co-sponsors the Saturday Mothers’ sit-ins. “It came to the point where it started to threaten the health of the relatives of the disappeared people. That’s why we had to stop [in 1999],” she adds.

Since the demonstrations have restarted, one missing person’s case is presented each week during the rally.

This day it is the turn of Seyhan Dogan, a Kurdish boy rounded up during a police raid in his home in the city of Mardin-Dargecit in southeastern Turkey.

“Seyhan was 13 years old on Oct. 29, 1995,” says an activist reading the boy’s story into a loudspeaker. “He was arrested at 3 o’clock in the morning along with his brother Hazni, who was 9 years old at the time.”

Dogan, the activist says, was never seen again.

For Mehmet Alpsoy, who lost his father in 1994, the matter is simple.

“I am here because even after 15 years, the people who are responsible for the disappearances are still free,” Mehmet says. “I want them to be found and tried.”

Washington DC – In November 2003 the USS Vandergrift docked at the port of Ho Chi Minh City completing the first port call by an American navy ship to Vietnam since the end of the war in 1975. Onboard the vessel was an old slim Vietnamese man, who had joined the parade at the invitation of both the United States ambassador to Vietnam Raymond Burghardt and United States consul general Emi Lynn Yamauchi. Nobody seemed to recognize him, other than a colonel that approached him and asked in Vietnamese, “Excuse me, are you General Pham Xuan An?”

The old smoke-consumed Vietnamese was no other than X6, the most famous Communist agent employed by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. Throughout the conflict, Mr. An also worked as Time Magazine correspondent – the only local to be assigned such role by a major American news organization. Journalism was Pham Xuan An’s cover, and as a reporter writing on American and South Vietnamese military and diplomatic events, he was granted access to off-the-record briefings by American authorities. This information made the reports Mr. An filed back to his North Vietnamese superiors invaluable.

Journalism, combined with Pham Xuan An’s personality and warmth, was also what allowed him to knit a close network of true and intimate friendships with many renown Americans and to maintain them through the end of the war and beyond. Incredibly so, nobody ever felt betrayed by him, despite Mr. An’s life of deception.

“Pham Xuan An was a great conversationalist, he loved speaking,” Larry Berman, author of Mr. An’s first western biography, told Washington Prism in an interview. “He was a man of extraordinary self-control, very discipline mentally. And he had a talent for math, it had been his favorite subject at school,” Professor Berman continued. “An said that it helped him to compartmentalize things and to live these two lives without a crack.”

Professor Larry Berman, of the University of California Davis, is a historian specialized in the history of the Cold War. He met Pham Xuan An by coincidence, at a dinner he attended while traveling through Vietnam in 2000, at a time when he was conducting research for a book on the secret Paris negotiations between Henry Kissinger and his North Vietnamese Communist counterpart, Le Duc Tho. In the interview with Washington Prism, Mr. Berman explained; “I wasn’t in the Vietnam War, I never served. But I grew up during the War and so I was always really curious to understand this threshold event in my own life.”

After their first casual encounter, Professor Berman had to face stubborn resistance by Pham Xuan An before finally succeeding in convincing him to tell his story as agent X6. Mr. An was worried that the information he might have disclosed would put the lives of other people at risk. Finally Mr. An gave in and Larry Berman became his official biographer in the West, beginning a collaboration that lasted until Mr. An’s death in September 2006 and that gave birth to “The Perfect Spy”, which comes out in paper back this month.

Born outside Saigon on the 12 of September 1927, Pham Xuan An joined the Communist national liberation movement– the Vietminh – in 1944, when he was only 16. At the time, the organization was fighting the Japanese occupation of Vietnam. Mr. An later became a spy for the Communist government in the North, right after Vietnam was partitioned following the departure of the French in 1954. He was immediately selected to infiltrate the South Vietnamese Army, which in turn assigned him to the Central Intelligence Agency, unknowingly making Mr. An a double agent.

His work with the CIA offered Mr. An an invaluable opportunity to start studying the American mind and to nurture close ties with many powerful Americans. Among them, there was Colonel Edward Landsdale, director of the CIA Saigon Military Mission and one of the leading anti-communists of that time. Mr. Landsdale grew so fond of Mr. An as to become the sponsors of his U.S. visa when, in 1956, Mr. An received a State Department scholarship to attend Fullerton College in California.

It was in California that Pham Xuan An began his career as a journalist, a profession that he always passionately loved and wished he could practice exclusively. During two years that he described to Professor Berman as “the best of his life,” Mr. An worked on the school newspaper and held an internship at The Sacramento Bee, the daily newspaper of California’s capital.

Mr. An moved back to Vietnam in 1958, working in Saigon for The Associated Press and then Reuters, until he landed the job at Time Magazine, which he held from 1965 to the fall of Saigon in 1975. Throughout the war, he became the most prominent source for all American journalists covering Vietnam, the only person who could explain to them the complexities of the country’s politics. At the same time, Mr. An was also the most valuable informer of the North Vietnamese.

The liberation of Saigon of April 30^th 1975, to which Pham Xuan An had dedicated his life, failed to fulfill many of the expectations that he had fostered during his years as a spy. Mr. An had hoped that, in a unified and independent Vietnam, he would have been able to practice journalism in that fair and objective manner that he had learned in America. The Communist regime crashed such dream and, not trusting Mr. An because of his close connections to the Americans, never even allowed him to leave the country to pay visit to his friends in the United States.

Nevertheless, Mr. An, who was named a national hero for the services rendered during the war, remained committed to the cause and accepted to live the rest of his life within the restrictions imposed on him and his family by the government. Until that November day in 2003, when gliding into the port of Ho Chi Minh City onboard a U.S. warship, Mr. An finally saw his two lives coming together; “I can die happy now. I served my country, my people, and reunification,” he later told Professor Larry Berman.

“If there was not Pham Xuan An, would the outcome of the war have been different?” Professor Berman wonders. In the interview with Washington Prism, he told us; “I think the answer is no, the outcome of the war would not have been different, the Americans would have never achieved their political objectives in Vietnam.” Nevertheless, Mr. Berman believes, Mr. An played “a major role in effecting the outcome of the war, just not a decisive one.”

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism – Persian Edition

Washington DC – On the 12 of October 2007, Professor Ole Danbolt Mjøs, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, announced the Peace Prize winners at a press conference in Oslo. Speaking in the hall of the Nobel Institute crowded with journalists, Mjøs said; “The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared in two equal parts between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold Gore Jr., for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” The prizes were awarded, as tradition prescribes, on December 10^th, on the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, founder of the Institute.

“I was really surprised by the Gore’s prize,” said Helge Pharo, Professor of International History at the University of Oslo and one of the only four advisors to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, referring to the politics behind the selection of the laureates. “There is such a strong strain of anti-Americanism in Norwegian left wing politics that I didn’t expect it to go to an American,” he continued. Professor Pharo spoke on Tuesday at an event organized by the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies of the George Washington University in Washington DC.

The Nobel Peace Prize is meant to recognize the outstanding work of an individual or organization that promotes good will among nations and the brotherhood of men, organizes peace conferences, and/or advances an agenda for the reduction of standing armies. It is the responsibility of the Norwegian Nobel Committee to interpret these criteria and to select the laureates. In any case there has to be a direct link between the activism of the awardees and world peace, although “sometimes the distance between these two points is quite considerable,” Professor Pharo noted, as it might have been in the case of Al Gore, and even in that of Mother Theresa, who won the prize in 1979 for the work she did with the poor and the sick in Calcutta, India.

The Nobel Peace Prize was first awarded in 1901 to Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, and Frédéric Passy, a leading international pacifist of the time. They shared a prize amount of 150,782 Swedish Krona (approximately $24 US). Today the sum is of 10 million Krona, or about $1.6 million US. Since the days of Dunant and Passy, 95 individuals and 20 organizations have won the prize. The Red Cross was awarded it three times, in 1917, 1944 and 1963, more than anyone else. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees won it twice, in 1954 and 1981.

The most controversial peace prize was probably the one that went to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in 1973 for having contributed to bringing to an end the War in Vietnam. “Many people think that that choice was outrageous,” Herge Pharo pointed out. The “missing Laureate” is certainly the Mahatma Gandhi, who never received the prize despite being considered possibly the most powerful advocate for peace in history. He was nominated several times, in 1937, 1938, 1939 and 1947, and also in 1948, just a few days before being assassinated. The official website of the Nobel Prizes writes that “the omission has been publicly regretted by later members of the Nobel Committee; when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was ‘in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi.’” However the members have never offered any official explanation as to why the Mahatma was not selected.

Alfred Nobel’s will, which also set up the Nobel prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and the Prize in Economics, instructed that Norway was to appoint five members to the committee for the Peace Prize. Since its inception, the selection process developed along lines of secrecy and elitism that seem surprising for an award that is meant to promote peace and the equality of all men.

The Storting (the Norwegian parliament) elects the five committeemen to a 6-year renewable term, in proportion to the political composition of the running legislature. The nominations are staggered so that this year, for example, three members will be replaced. The members have always been exclusively Norwegian and for a long time they were simultaneously standing members of the Parliament. This changed in 1977 when a rule was adopted barring members of the Storting from election to the Nobel Committee. “Today they are mostly former fairly top level politicians,” Professor Pharo explained. “The appointment has now become a recognition for services these politicians rendered in the past,” he continued.

The committee receives about 200 proposals each year, from professors, politicians and organizations around the world, advocating the viability of different candidates. Out of those hundreds of names, the members draw a short list of around 30. The advisors, and among them Helge Pharo, are then tasked with conducting extensive research on these finalists and with writing a report for the use of the committee profiling each of the contestants. The advisors are, normally, historians and political scientists and their role is that of “preventing committee members to make fools of themselves,” Professor Pharo joked as he explained that “committeemen are seasoned politicians but by no means international affairs experts.”

Contacts between the members and the advisors are kept to a minimum. Other than receiving their research assignments, the advisors don’t interact with the committee and are rarely even given any feedback on their work. This is part of the secrecy that characterizes the working of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. No minutes of the meetings are recorded and the members are not allowed to keep diaries and never have (with the two famous exceptions of Halvdan Koht, who was a member from 1919 to1937, and of chairman Gunnar Jahn in the period 1945-1966). The names of the candidates other than the winners are never published and the reports of the advisors are classified for 50 years after they are submitted.

Hence, the selection of the laureates is strictly guarded in the hands of a few, which can explain why there has never been any major leak on the names of the winners, but only many more or less successful speculations. The secrecy is also meant to shield the work of the members and of the advisors, especially when they must research and discuss openly aspects of the various candidates that might be controversial and politically incorrect. “They don’t keep minutes so that whatever one member says in a meeting can’t be held against him the night after,” Professor Pharo explained.

Supposedly, in deciding the year’s Laureate, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has to reach an agreement among its members, or the prize amount is reallocated to the Nobel Prize fund. However the last time this happened was in 1972, “although I doubt this is because the committeemen have since then always unanimously agreed,” Helge Pharo said. According to the Professor at the University of Oslo, the reasons behind the uninterrupted selection of laureates might be two others; “the committee has embraced a more activist approach and wouldn’t give that activist role up by renouncing to award the prize.” Furthermore, the Nobel Peace Prize has become such an important annual happening worldwide, with several side events and the media hype that accompanies it, that “by now, the prize simply cannot not be awarded…It’s a machine that’s impossible to stop,” Pharo noted.

The increased activism of the Nobel Committee emerges in another major change that has taken place in the last two decades. The prize used to be awarded in recognition of previous achievements on the part of the candidates, whereas more and more laureates today are engaged in ongoing efforts involving current conflicts. It is a departure that, in the opinion of Pharo, mirrors developments in Norwegian foreign policy, as the country has chosen to become a more active participant in international conflict resolution. The risk of this excessive activism is that the prize might lose its credibility as an independent recognition; “there is a real danger that they might overdo it,” admitted the University of Oslo Professor.

In any case, “if one wants to try to predict who will win the Nobel Peace Prize, one must know who sits on the committee,” Helge Pharo told the audience in Washington DC. It is important to take into consideration the members’ political views. The committee, after all, cannot depart excessively from the mainstream political landscape in Norway, which can be characterized as international liberalism, a left-of-center view of international affairs. Which is why, Professor Helge Pharo suggested, “It is not farfetched to think that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 was given to Al Gore as a way to hit someone else in the United States.”

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C. – In April 2005 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger from Germany became the new Pope of the Catholic Church with the name of Benedict XVI. Prior to his election Ratzinger had been a well-known Catholic theologian and he had often been viewed as a defender of traditional Catholic doctrine. Reaffirming these beliefs, a few decisions made recently under his papacy have some observers wondering if the Vatican has chosen to turn the clock back in time.

On July 7th official steps were taken towards re-adjusting the Church’s liturgy so as to accommodate the requests of traditionalist Catholics. Pope Benedict XVI decided to welcome the long-standing demands of the most conservative wing of devotes and eased the restrictions on the use of an older rite in Latin as the source of the Mass – restrictions which had been in place for forty years.

The prohibition to local priests to celebrate the traditional Mass in Latin unless specifically authorized to do so by their bishop came as one of the results of the Second Vatican Council, a round of reforms that was launched in 1962 under the papacy of Pope John XXIII and that marked a decade of transformations within the Catholic Church aimed at modernizing the internal hierarchies and the liturgy, but also the relationships that the Vatican entertained with other faiths.

Among the changes implemented, the Vatican II (another name for the Second Vatican Council) decided then to start promoting the incorporation of vernaculars (local languages) in the celebration of the Mass. This move was intended to encourage more participation on the part of the local communities and was aimed at reaching out to a larger number of people that did not understand Latin and might have been put off by its use.

The use of the Tridentine Rite – as the traditional Mass is known – was increasingly restricted in the following years and came to be an available option only in the case that the locals demanded it and after the bishop had granted official permission.

The changes sealed by the Vatican at the beginning of this past July reverse some of the changes implemented forty years ago and allow priests to celebrate the Mass in Latin once again without needing authorization.

The Vatican defends this decision as simply dealing with liturgical matters internal to the Catholic Church. Dr. Joseph Komonchak, Professor of Religious Studies at Catholic University of America in Washington DC, told Washington Prism; “I honestly believe that this decision only has value within the Catholic Church.” He said in a phone interview; “It is a step that was taken to reconcile with the Church those Catholics that have wondered off nostalgic of the older rite.”

“I doubt that the celebration of the Latin Liturgy will have any effect in the United States,” Mike Goggin of the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington says. “People here are not asking for it and most priests were educated after its introduction and are not really familiar with it,” the Assistant Director of the Washington DC-based organization tells Washington Prism in a phone interview. “Overall, if this decision by the Vatican brings more people back to church in places like Europe, as a Roman Catholic I think that this is all for the better,” Goggin continues.

However, this move by Pope Benedict XVI might bear significance that goes beyond the private theological workings of the Vatican. In fact, despite the efforts by the Church to reassure that no major change is underway, many constituencies are worried that the document signed by Benedict XVI on July 7th sends worrisome signals.

In particular the Jewish community was very critical of the adjustment of the liturgy.

Eric J. Greenberg, Director of Interfaith Policy at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), told Washington Prism: “ADL and the Jewish community are not concerned specifically with the Latin Mass. What concern us, instead, are the references made to the Jews that are part of the Latin liturgy.”

The most prominent problem is a verse about the conversion of the Jews that is present in the Good Friday prayer.

In a phone interview Greenberg said: “For the Jewish community this decision was eye-opening and upsetting. We had come to believe that the Vatican had finally dismissed the idea of converting the Jews, a mission that has created so much suffering and so many deaths for our people throughout the last 2000 years. To hear it again was traumatic.”

“I think the decision by the Pope was received in the worst possible light,” Dr. Komonchack replied. “The problem with the Jewish community can be easily dealt with by changing the texts of those specific prayers and I do believe that the Vatican is willing to take the right steps toward a solution.”

However many within the Jewish community do not seem convinced of the good intentions of the Vatican. Greenberg of ADL recalls in our phone conversation: “I personally was on the phone with colleagues of the Catholic Church since March and April, as the first news came out about the eventuality that this document would be released. It was no surprise to the Vatican, or to the Pope, that the prayer in question would have represented a problem. The surprise was that it was in the Pope’s power to delete the reference from the liturgy but he did not. This was a shock.”

The question that is at stake now is whether or not this decision must be interpreted as a signal that Benedict XVI is aiming at taking the Catholic Church down a new and more conservative path, disregarding the consequences that such choice could have on interfaith relations.

“I see no signs that this pope wants to go back on Vatican II. I do not believe that he is more conservative than his predecessor John Paul II,” Joseph Komonchack told us. “I simply feel that this issue has been exaggerated by all sides.”

However even among Roman Catholics there are some worries. Mike Goggin’s admits; “Personally I have some concerns. Although this is not a huge surprise since we have known the profile of this Pope for a long while before he became the Pope.”

In fact, Benedict XVI’s track record might suggest at least some caution.

In 2000, for example, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger authored a controversial document on inter-faith dialogue known as Dominus Iesus in which he made the argument that salvation can only come through the Catholic Church.

Following the July 7th decision Benedict XVI took another few controversial steps.

On July 10th he issued a statement from his vacation retreat in the Italian Alps saying that the Roman Catholic Church is the only true Church, and that the Protestant Churches are not. “Christ ‘established here on earth’ only one church,” said the document. The others “cannot be called ‘churches’ in the proper sense” because they lack apostolic succession, meaning they cannot trace their bishops back to Christ’s original apostles.

Finally this past week the Pope met with Reverend Tadeusz Rydzyk, head of the Polish Radio Maryja that has become known for using its broadcasts as a way to express feelings considered anti-Semitic. Following the meeting, the Vatican immediately released a statement trying to distance itself from the actions of Reverend Rydzyk saying that the fact should not “imply any change in the well known position of the Holy See and the relations between Catholics and Jews.”

The intervention of the Vatican apparently did not come quickly enough to prevent reactions from representatives of other faiths. “These incidents together certainly create concerns within the Jewish Community and when they happen one after the other they certainly raise questions about what is going on, about how the Pope truly feels about Jewish and about where the Catholic Church his heading under his papacy,” Greenberg told Washington Prism.

Representatives of the Muslim community in Washington DC have been less vocal during this recent turmoil. “As far as the use of Latin I would bet that no Muslim would have a problem with it,” Mohamed Nimer, of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) – a leading advocacy organization in Washington DC-, said in a phone interview. “I think that they would feel like they really have no saying in such a matter.”

Nevertheless Benedict XVI has aroused Islamic discontent not too long ago. Specifically, a heated controversy was spurred by a lecture that the Pope gave in January 2006 at the University of Regensburg in Germany. Many were offended by the use of a quote by the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus in 1391 saying; “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

“After the incident in 2006 there have been conciliatory moves on the part of the Pope and this has quieted things down,” Nimer, Director of Research at CAIR, told Washington Prism. “However some questions remain as far as where this Pope stands on Vatican II, especially as far as the recognition that was officially given then to Islam and to other faiths.”

“Has the progress, the openness of the previous Pope been lost? Quite possibly so” Mike Goggin says on the phone, “especially as far as ecumenism.”

On the topic of Catholic-Muslim relations, CAIR will host a panel next Tuesday to discuss the current status of things. Two eminent guest speakers will attend to represent the two faiths. Father Francis Tiso, Associate Director for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Muzammil Siddiqi, chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America and former President of the Islamic Society of North America, will offer their views at an event that is part of the ongoing effort “to keep improving Catholic-Muslim relations in the US,” as Nimer told us.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C.- dawnofcoldwarWashington D.C.- On March 24th 1946, at 1:30 pm, a wire from the Kremlin arrives to the commander of the Soviet troops deployed in the Northwest region of Iran known as Iranian Azerbaijan. Joseph Stalin orders his soldiers to withdraw immediately. By 8:00 pm that same evening the Red Army is on its way back north, directed to Moscow.

“Normally,” says historian Jamil Hasanli, “it takes between two to four weeks for a withdrawal order to actually take place.” The directive sent by Stalin, that spring day of 1946, must have sounded of particular urgency to the troops on the ground.
Dr. Jamil Hasanli comes from Azerbaijan. He is a member of the country’s parliament and a well respected Professor of International Relations at the University of Baku in Azerbaijan.

In his latest book, At the Dawn of the Cold War, Dr. Hasanli addresses the crisis over Iranian Azerbaijan province as one of the first theaters of Soviet-American conflict, marking the beginning of the Cold War.

“As a rule, the beginning of the Cold War has been traced to Europe,” Dr. Hasanli explained recently at a conference in Washington D.C. For a long time the frontier that separated the Soviet Union and the United States ran across Europe.  Additionally, the majority of Universities and Research Centers that study the Cold War are based in Europe and the US. These factors have greatly contributed to the prevalence of a Eurocentric approach to studying the Cold War.

Dr. Hasanli, however, is convinced that the historiography on the Cold War has been missing a point. “With a degree of certainty” the Professor at Baku University says, “I can now state the Cold War originated in the East.”

The Azerbaijan province of Iran, which the Azerbaijanis prefer to call Southern Azerbaijan, is, in Dr. Hasanli’s opinion, one of the decisive grounds in the emergence of the conflict between the two superpowers. The border between Iran and Azerbaijan, which assigned this portion of territory to Teheran (or the Azerbaijan portion to the Tsarist Russian Empire,) was established in 1828 with the Treaty of Turkmanchay that put an end to the Russian – Persian War.

In the period between 1945 and1946 the delicate equilibrium of this area became threatened once again. The Soviets saw Iranian Azerbaijan province as a target with a dual potential; on one hand gaining control of the region would have helped secure better access to oil and protect Baku’s oil fields. On the other hand, and most importantly, Iranian Azerbaijan would have represented one important step in the expansionist policies pursued by Stalin.

The United States and Britain perceived such aggressive stance of the USSR as a threat of further communist expansion. For the Azeri population the possibility of reunification was a matter of national identity and common faith.

Events started unfolding in the summer of 1945. As Dr. Hasanli explains, “The Soviets Politburo made secret decisions about the Azerbaijani separatist movements in the Iranian province of Azerbaijan,” and started funding and supporting them. Such move proved to be a success, as the Soviets found an available nucleus of indigenous movements that wanted to separate from Iran and re-unite the Azeri population under one flag.

In late 1945, as tensions mounted, the United States Secretary of State James Byrnes talked to the Ambassador of Iran, trying to convince the Iranian leadership to grant more freedom to the Azeris, so as to calm down the unrest and to try discrediting the Soviet attempt at annexing the region. However, according to Dr. Hasanli the Shah did not follow through and dismissed the pressures from the Americans.

On March 2nd 1946, the USSR was to pull out of the Azerbaijan province, but failed to do so. “This had an explosive effect,” Dr. Hasanli says. In short, the Soviets’ interests in the oil fields of Baku were so significant and the border of Iran so close to that city, that Moscow was determined to make its presence felt by keeping its troops on the ground in Southern Azerbaijan.

In his book, the author asserts that after Soviet Union’s refusal to withdraw, Iranian Prime Minister Ahmad Ghavam visited Moscow and engaged in talks with Stalin and his Foreign Minister Molotov asking the Soviets to withdraw their troops from Iran. Stalin tried to convince him to overthrow the monarch instead, and declare a republic in Iran. At first Ghavam seemed intrigued by the suggestion, but soon after started backtracking and openly asked Molotov not to speak on the issue in the presence of the interpreter. He returned to Teheran empty-handed, not being able to obtain a troop withdrawal commitment from the Soviets.

The situation in Iran was growing increasingly tense. The American ambassador to Teheran had written to Washington saying that the Shah and the Prime Minister were very worried and were getting ready to flee. The United States government reacted with great concern. “They saw the situation as a realistic attempt by the Soviets to possibly gain control of the oil fields in Southern Iran, the Kurdistan region, Northern Iraq and Eastern Turkey,” Jamil Hasanli explains.

Charles Bohlen, an expert on Soviet Union and later US ambassador to Moscow in the 1950s, was still convinced that the White House had the power to block Soviet Union’s expansion plans. He advised President Truman to threat Moscow with the use of the atomic bomb.

Although currently no evidence exists in the American archives that this ever happened, but Dr. Hasanli insists that he has come into the possession of one important document from the USSR archive that proves his chronology of events.

According to him, the truth of the matter is; Soviet supplies were still pouring into the Iranian Azerbaijan province on March 24th, up until the point when the order of withdrawal was wired from Moscow. The troops started pulling out that very same night. Something major must have happened then, the Baku University historian believes.
Dr. Hasanli’s book At the Dawn of the Cold War is a thick manuscript with detailed accounts of those years, where he reviews the history of Iranian Azerbaijan’s independence movement, the Soviet struggle for oil in Iran, and the American and British reactions to these events. Hasanli delved deeply into Soviet and Azerbaijani archives as well as what he found analyzing declassified top-secret materials from American, British and Iranian sources.

The Soviets’ rigid bureaucratic organization has been Hasanli’s fortune. Because these documents dealt with Azerbaijan, as a rule the Soviets duplicated a copy for the Azerbaijan’s Communist Party leadership. Without those duplicates, most of the Scholars’ research would have probably been impossible, since most of the archives in Russia are inaccessible to this day. “This has allowed us to take a unique journey through the instances of this crisis,” Dr. Hasanli emphasizes.

Dr. Jamil Hasanli takes the Azerbaijani perspective on the issue and makes no secret of it. With his effort to re-direct the debate on the Cold War and its beginning to the East and specifically to the crisis over Iranian Azerbaijan, he attempts to bring back issues of nationality and minorities’ rights into the discourse on the confrontation between the two blocks.

“Because the Cold War has always been seen as dealing with greater policy issues, often the problems of national interest and nationalities have been overlooked,” the historians points out. The day that the Soviets retreated, marking the defeat of Iranian Azeri separatist movement, he says, “was the beginning of tragedy in the lives of many Azeris.”

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C. – Last month, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright presented her most recent book, The Mighty and the Almighty, at a conference organized in Washington DC by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

In this latest work she analyzes the role of religion in foreign policy making. “Although I still strongly believe in the separation of church and state, we must know that it is impossible to separate the people from their faith and as such we must understand religion to understand motivation,” Albright said.

The Arab-Israeli conflict, for example, has profound religious roots; “If Jerusalem was only a real-estate issue, we would have solved it a long time ago. But the fact that both sides believe that the land was given to them by God makes things far more complicated,” former Secretary of State pointed out.

In the same way, President Bush’s decision to go to war with Iraq was inherently influenced by his religious beliefs. “There is some sense of a mission in him,” Albright said.

The problem, the book argues, is not that religious convictions are a constant presence in foreign policy decision-making. As former President Bill Clinton writes in the introduction; “Religious convictions, if they are convictions, can’t be pulled on and off like a pair of boots. We walk with them wherever we go”. The problem is instead, according to Albright, the absolute sense of certitude that sometimes comes with such convictions. When mixed with a lack of understanding for other people’s faith, this sense of certitude easily translates into conflict.

Acknowledging the important role that religion plays in foreign policy making, Madeleine Albright advocates for greater efforts on the part of the policy making community at understanding different faith and beliefs, so as to avoid what some believe to be the inevitable clash of civilizations.  “I have not turned into a religious mystic,” the former Secretary of State made clear. “I am a problem-solver and I look at ways how we can deal with the religious issue in today’s international politics.”

While presidents are surrounded by a variety of experts in all domains, from the economy to transportation to national security, there is no such a thing as an advisor for religious affairs. Albright suggests, for example, that this could be changed by incorporating religious expertise in the present structure of policy-making.

“It has to be said that Madeleine Albright is not the first one to have said that” Dr. Timothy Shah, fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life – a nonpartisan research center in Washington D.C. – pointed out in an interview with Washington Prism.
Congress must be given credit for having already taken some steps to incorporate religious understanding in foreign policy making. Because of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, the State Department is now mandated to produce a highly detailed annual report on the state of religious freedom in every country in the world.

“These reports are meant to be on religious freedom but they end up covering almost every aspect of religious life all over the world” Dr. Shah said.
As such, although the explicit intent of the report is to monitor the persecution of religious groups and to offer Congress the basis to act upon violations of freedom of religion via the imposition of sanctions, one important side effect is that understanding of religious conditions in foreign countries has become a learning necessity, much like understanding political and social structure of those nations, throughout the State Department.

“In a sense the report has forced large parts of State Department, whether they want to or not, to become experts on religion” Timothy Shah argues, “one could assert that, and I’m not stating my position here, but one could argue that the legislation does what Ms. Albright wants done even better than how she would want it done.”

Interestingly, Madeleine Albright, and the Clinton administration as a whole, was among the strongest opponents of the bill at the time when it was going through the initial legislative process.

Partially, the apparent contradiction between former Secretary of State’s position then and now can be explained simply by a change in her thinking on the importance of religion in world affairs.

However, the history of the legislation shows what a fine line there is between promoting religious freedom and mutual understanding and trying instead to export specific values abroad.

In fact, the bill (known as the Wolf-Specter Bill) as it was first put forward, was specifically designed to protect Christians around the world; it originally made no reference to the persecution of other faiths and came under attack as an effort at trying to promote Christianity in disguise.

Since then the legislation has gone through several rounds of revisions and has become far more inclusive of all faiths. As Mr. Shah told us, one of the most controversial policy decisions that the bill spurred followed the violent repression of demonstrations by Indian Muslims in the state of Gujarat, India, in 2002 and involved the revoking of the Indian State’s Governor, and very popular personality, Narendra Modi’s US visa.

However, the controversies surrounding the International Religious Freedom Act exemplify how complicated it is to strike a balance between understanding and protecting all religions, faiths and beliefs and imposing one own values on others.
Achieving such balance becomes even more complicated in times when more fundamentalist religious movements are booming across the world. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life recently released a survey titled the Rise of Pentecostalism that reports how the Christian renewalist movement has been gaining support world wide in recent years.
Pew Forum’s director Luis Lugo, recently discussed the results of the study in another gathering at the CFR with the noted scholar and author, Walter Russell Mead.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism