Defending the Indefensible.

One can only guess what led Mr. Benon Sevan - former under-secretary of the United Nations - into publicly attacking critics of the current regime in Armenia (“so-called pundits, rabble-rousers, including self-serving former government officials”) for trying to “bring about a regime change not through the ballot box but through encouraging a mob culture”. One could not fail to feel a measure of puzzled, slightly nauseated discomfort at his de-crying of the excessive negativity heard about the Republic in the Armenian media. Whatever the reason - fawning servility or accidental ignorance - the sight of someone of Mr. Sevan's stature defending the indefensible was not at all appetising.

“Of all the hundreds of negative reports, is not there at least a single positive development to report on? Contrary to the ongoing politically motivated negativism, there are indeed many successes and improvements achieved in Armenia which deserve to be congratulated and encouraged”, so goes the argument. No country has become democratic overnight, it is posited, and centuries of foreign occupation and seventy years of communist rule have apparently turned poor native Armenian brains into such incoherent goo that they are not able to comprehend the complicated ins-and-outs of electoral democracy and the rule of law. Counting ballots correctly is a very difficult task, it seems.

It is fair to ask whether there has been any society in history that has achieved progress through the kind of self-congratulatory censorship Mr. Sevan proposes. Armenians could, of course, fill the pages of their newspapers with stories of Armenia’s glorious victories and successes – Pravda-style – only to see a polity without critique and introspection inevitably end in Brezhnevite stagnation. Armenians could, naturally, pretend life in Armenia is fab while hundreds of thousands vote with their feet and seek their economic prosperity and political liberty in foreign lands. And Armenians could, as a matter of fact, close their eyes to the authoritarian excesses of Armenia’s leaders, excesses that, far from being the mysterious product of some centuries-old trauma, are the conscious efforts at usurpation by a corrupt elite whose insidious politics and organised criminality are inextricably intertwined.

But when Mr. Sevan directs critics of the current authorities towards the ballot-box, he leaves out the crucial fact that it is the heavy, sweaty hand of a this elite that rests on that box and does the “counting”. In the absence of elected government, it behoves outsiders to respect those who try to resist injustice and effect change, instead of siding with those who, over the past two decades, have turned this country into one gigantic money-making racket, based on government of some people, by some people and for some people.

Those who want a clearer view of the real dangers Armenia is sleep-walking into should urgently re-read Dr. Jirair Libaridian’s recent open letter on the current situation, one that offers a depressing but harshly realistic contrast to Mr. Sevan’s advocation of self-indulgent and entirely misplaced complacency.

Ten Years On

Alongside marriage, the birth of a child, the death of a relative, 9-11 probably ranks as one of our lives’ starkest, clearest reminiscences. Emotions always help jog the memory; and no emotion does that better than raw terror, the one raw sentiment that these attacks were designed to instil with such chilling effectiveness. For some, that terror consisted of witnessing a world-changing atrocity live, on television; for others – with relatives in the towers, the Pentagon, the planes – that terror mixed with the much closer grief of personal loss.

Ten years on, the mastermind of these attacks is dead. By all accounts, Al Qaeda is a mere ghost of its former self, its most important operatives neutralised, many of its networks dismantled. But will, as Fukuyama asserted in this week’s Observer, the West’s challenge by extreme and violent Islamism be a mere blip on the radar compared to the importance of the rise of China, especially when viewed fifty years hence?

Yes, 9-11 was about the violent, extreme ideology of Jihadist Islamism. And, as Fukuyama contends, it is quite probable that particular mode of thought will fall by the wayside. That is, if our leaders have the foresight not to saw the seeds of terror in an ever-growing number of Islamic states. It was particularly chilling, in that context, to hear Tony Blair engage in an exercise of spectacular intellectual dishonesty by claiming the Iraq invasion made the world a safer place. The cherry on top was his advocating military action against Iran.

If hijacked 767s act as our terror, the driver of our fears and wars, don’t F22s, drones and hellfire missiles have the same effect on those expendable as ‘collateral damage’? This is not about good, old-fashioned Western self-flagellation, not about blaming ourselves for outrages like 9-11 and 7/7. Indeed, the vicious ideology behind these atrocities has a comprehensive totalitarian and obscurantist world-view, and the core carriers of that ideology would probably not stop before these goals are realised, no matter what. But ideologies only die once their core constituencies are isolated, once they are unable to create and maintain the decentralised networks of operatives and supporters that radiate outwards from them. Creating the conditions under which their ideological claims are validated by levelling one Islamic country after another can, to put it mildly, not be helpful, for the West at least. The terrorists, on the other hand, will be much obliged.

But 9-11 was not only about the emergence of global violent Islamism, in the narrow ideological sense. Fukuyama, it seems, is repeating the mistake he made in ‘The End of History’, by confounding the concrete manifestations of grand historical patterns with the patterns themselves. Terrorism – as has been so often pointed out – is a tactic, a specific method within a broader, ideologically driven strategy. And it is the change in tactics towards mega-terrorism that is far more important than the ideology driving that change. Various waves of terrorism have been informed by diverse ideologies – anarchism, nationalism, Islamism. But there is one thread running through all of them: their increasing violence, their wider geographic reach, and the resulting escalating body counts. It is in the nature of humans to produce extreme ideas. Al Qaeda showed a willingness and ability to kill thousands for these ideas; the extremists of the future – whatever their ideological substance - will have at their disposal means of destruction unimaginable to their predecessors as technology continues proliferating. Divorced from its substantive ideological aspect, abstracted into human history, 9-11 becomes a much scarier, much more defining event. If Al Qaeda is defeated, it will morph and reincarnate under a different banner, whose colours are entirely unknown today. You can count on it.

Millstones and Molotov Cocktails

‘Greece is at an existential crossroads’: a statement that has been repeated over and over again in the international media, at European summits, and in the Vouli. On the streets and squares of Athens and throughout the country, that existential crossroads is not something remote and impersonal, something abstract and far-away. It concerns people’s own livelihoods, their personal existence, their very ability to feed their children. And when humans feel threatened so profoundly in their everyday lives, they tend not to ‘give a damn’ about the lofty (?) motivations that underlay the Euro, the supposed attractions of the European project, or the world’s interest in wider financial stability. They disavow the system. They revolt. Some do so using petrol bombs. Others do so through their voting patterns. Greece’s tortured political history suggests resistance could tend towards the former rather than the latter if Greece’s and Europe’s political leaders don’t tread very carefully. But there is yet hope for peaceful and profound change.

The problem goes beyond mere questions of constitutionality or economics; it emerges, above all, from Greece’s broken, post-dictatorship social contract, the very basis for its failed societal model of the past three decades. It is easy to forget in 2011 in how far the period of stability in post-dictatorship Greece has been the exception rather than the rule within the broader context of recent, twentieth-century history. Spain’s civil war – a cause célèbre throughout Europe in its day – has been written of extensively, and has in many ways overshadowed that other, perhaps equally cruel European civil conflict, in post-World War Two Greece. The resulting constitutional instability and internal turbulence reached their nadir only during the cruel-but-farcical Colonels’ Regime of 1967-1974; when Greece entered the EU in 1980 as the ‘Hellenic Republic’, the scars within its society hadn’t healed. Substantial portions of its population remained disenfranchised and excluded. The subsequent flow of European grants and subsidies provided a cure of sorts, but resulted in a social contract that was entirely distorted and ultimately untenable. In fact, it would perhaps have been better had Greece joined the European Union at a far later date.

Greek elites always saw the public sector as a tool of political patronage; Europe allowed them to expand this abuse, without moreover having to raise the domestic revenue that such an exercise in patronage would normally require. Andreas Papandreou (whose father Giorgios allegedly prophesied that he would run Greece asunder) at first hired left-wing Greeks in an understandable effort to correct their exclusion from the state in the decades following the Communists’ civil-war defeat; but things soon spiralled out of control, with successive socialist and conservative governments hiring sympathisers in turn, buying off public-sector workers with an ever-expanding list of (at times preposterous) benefits and wage rises. The private sector, meanwhile, was stifled under a mountain of rules and regulations, or smothered with productivity-reducing subsidies (Greece is 109^th in the World Bank’s ease-of-doing-business index): sector after sector was turned into a ‘closed shop’, where only a few select, licensed, and usually ‘connected’ individuals were allowed to ply their trade. In return, those left outside of the relative safety of public service or monopolised private sectors were allowed to treat the payment of taxes as contributions to a charity called the ‘Hellenic Republic’.

Without these generous grants and subsidies from Brussels, Greek society would have had to confront the state’s spiralling expenses and inadequate revenues far earlier, and in a far more piecemeal fashion than is the case today. And without the entirely politically motivated admission of Greece into the Euro, Greek society would have faced the higher interest payments on its debt, soon disallowing any publicly funded ‘generosity’ on the part of its irresponsible elites. Quite apart from the issue of inadequate oversight and the fiddling of numbers, it is these subsidies and grants themselves that created an imbalance in the Greek economy that allowed for the continuation of venality in all impunity. As it happened, these subsidies crammed the countless difficult decisions that could have been taken in stages, over decades without causing much social disruption into today, overwhelming the nation’s body politic and tearing its fabric apart.

Re-establishing social cohesion on a more sustainable basis won’t be easy. The kind of economic shock Greece is going through more often than not results in a shifting of the political landscape, but this doesn’t seem to have dawned on many of the existing political actors. The established political centre is, in essence, morally and politically bankrupt; both Pasok and the ND have lost a large chunk of their electorates, even as they continue business as usual by playing petty partisan politics on Greece’s economic half-corpse. Predictably, both the populist right and unreformed radical left are screaming their lungs out hysterically in an attempt to pilfer votes from their mainstream counterparts, in a way that insults the Greek electorate’s intelligence. Greece’s trade unions are fully living up to their reputation as the unduly romanticised representatives of vested public-sector interests. And ordinary Greeks are looking on in growing disgust, confusion, fear and anger.

This existential crossroads could take the country in either of two directions: political-economic oblivion, or renaissance. The basic choice is there for Greeks to make. While still relatively disorganised and ideologically incoherent, the ‘indignados’ movement could form the basis of the latter by spawning political movements that could challenge existing elites and claim a place in the country’s parliamentary politics. And Greek politics needs new blood, badly; given Greece’s still-vibrant and articulate civil society, and the utter rot of its political elites, such new blood should not be too difficult to come by. The end result could be a ‘fourth republic’, with a renegotiated constitutional bargain, and a competitive economy where social progress is based on substantial private-sector growth rather than the pilfering of state institutions and overdependence on EU aid. Insofar as one cannot rebuild state and society with a millstone around one’s neck, default – preferably managed and gradual - should also be an option, an option a far-from-blameless Europe would have to accept and support. Failure to rebuild would mean the Molotov cocktail and the brash populism of the extreme right and the left gaining the upper hand; taking that millstone off the Greeks’ necks would thus be a wise investment, far wiser in any case than the maladministered subsidies and grants that distorted the country’s economy in the first place.

Pathetic Indeed.

The spectacle was as pathetic a replay of past scenes as one would expect. Great powers calling on two belligerent states to set aside their differences and sign a framework agreement. The belligerents themselves expressing cautious optimism going into the talks. And the talks themselves ending with a communiqué that, in essence, means absolutely nothing. The traditional blame-game concluded proceedings: Azerbaijan repeating its mantras on the injustices of occupation and rattling its sabres a little, Armenia crowing its undying adherence to the principle of national self-determination, and rattling its sabres right back. It would be comical if it weren’t so tragic.

The problem with these talks, and the Madrid principles, is a lack of political will on all sides, and not just the belligerents’. Armenia, deluding itself with the topographic advantage Karabakh affords it, is quite happy with the status quo, thank you, and would not settle for anything less than its protégé’s official recognition, minus perhaps a few occupied territories. Azerbaijan, drunk on oil and the illusion that wasteful defence spending and vocal bravado automatically equal strategic advantage, clings on to the irrational idea of subordinating a population that does not want to be subordinated, come what may.

The fact that both sides have not been able to square the black-and-white circle that is sovereignty (you cannot have a little bit of sovereignty over a territory just as you cannot be a little bit pregnant), is but part of the story. Moscow itself is playing a dishonest game: pretending to be an honest broker when the Kremlin knows that much of its leverage in the region is based on the divide-and-rule context provided by the Karabakh conflict. Both the United States and France increasingly see the South Caucasus as Russia’s back yard; Moscow made that forceful point back in 2008, in Georgia, and it seems to have been heard in Western capitals. None of the Great Powers care or agree enough, it seems, to collectively start turning the diplomatic thumbscrews that would be required at a minimum to shove Baku and Yerevan into line.

And so, you can be certain to expect more of the same in the future, crossing your fingers that it all doesn’t go pear-shaped when one of the sides decides it’s time to call in the generals: lame exhortations from Western capitals to get it over with, Russian diplomats pretending to be earnestly striving for a solution that would make them regionally superfluous, and locals pretending to be just this close to a durable peace. Meanwhile, officials and politicians on both sides will be able to tell the world with a straight face that they are striving for reconciliation while asserting at home that their peoples are ‘ethnically incompatible’, or that the others better relocate if they want their self-determination. Pathetic indeed.

Godfathers and Broomsticks

In one of “The Godfather’s” iconic scenes, Don Vito Corleone tells his hot-headed and doomed son Sonny to never let anyone outside the family know what he’s thinking. Imagine Don Corleone’s panic if he one day found out that someone could actually read his mind, and you’ll have some idea of how the diplomats at the State Department must be feeling today, when virtually every Tom, Dick and Harry is able to read an unadulterated chunk of the world’s only superpower’s (and its allies’) innermost hopes and fears.

The implication made by the above comparison is not that diplomats are criminals, or that statecraft is criminality (although one prominent scholar of International Relations is known to have compared the early modern states to war-waging rackets). It is that the anarchic world is dangerous and unpredictable, a web of interconnected causalities that go beyond the control of one single power, with mayhem, war and death an always-present possibility. You poke that web, and kick that hornets’ nest at your own risk. The problem with Assange is not his intent – it lies in the potential unintended consequences that may flow from his actions.

This goes far beyond the death of an individual informant because of specific information found within these leaks. In many of the world’s regions – East Asia, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union – stability hangs by a thin thread. Peace negotiations are often conditioned by the necessity to keep ongoing bartering secret; they would otherwise remain at the mercy of radicals opposing even the slightest compromise, leaving moderate governments unable to sell solutions even before they have been negotiated. The absence of war also often hangs on the very discretion and deceit Assange rather grandiosely aims to abolish – on elements of inducement and deterrence whose effectiveness often hangs on the poker element within the global chess game: bluff.

Wikileaks has become the world’s ordinary citizens’ mind-reading machine. To some, it is a welcome way of humbling the powerful through acute embarrassment, one heaven-sent element of the technological revolution that has made the world a better and freer place by undermining the power of not just any state, but the world’s hegemonic superpower. To others, it is one of the Internet’s dangerous excesses, one that puts the very survival of the art of statecraft in danger: steering the ship of state in a perilous, anarchic world, where Don Corleone’s advice could be of regular use, requires an element of ‘discretion’. Diplomacy, traditionally understood, cannot function without it – as the inter-war idealists learned – much to their disappointment - decades ago.

Assange has taken on a huge moral responsibility – some would say carried out an act of folly – by stirring that which is intensely unpredictable. We often complain of the bungling ineffectiveness of statespeople; the structures they are confronted with are hardly manipulable and present them with surprise after surprise, often giving them the flair of sorcerer’s apprentices. Wikileaks adding to the complexity and risk by creating an information free-for-all is not going to prevent that sorcerer’s apprentice from performing his ill-fated tricks; it’ll just multiply the number of broomsticks that spring from them, without there being a master-sorcerer to put them back in place.

But nevertheless, it is difficult to see how Wikileaks could be legally faulted for this release of information without endangering that central value of Western liberal democracy - freedom of speech. Assange is not a US citizen – he has not committed an act of treason, unlike the person directly responsible for leaking these documents. Even with a US passport, however, as the ACLU has pointed out, his first-amendment rights as a third-party editor/journalist would remain beyond question. For all the dangers outlined above, the perils inherent to limiting a cornerstone of Western liberal democracy would be far greater. Freedom of speech is always liable to create complications - think of the Danish cartoons saga, or the Salman Rushdie episode - but it is up to the diplomats of Western democratic states to adapt to that fact, rather than abuse state power to repress or curtail a fundamental civil right. This happens to be one of the curses of not working for a dictatorship.

The Endgame in Iran?

And so, the Middle East is nearing a strategic crossroads. Within the next eighteen months or so, the decisions taken by different actors will affect issues far beyond the area itself. And time is running out for such decisions. Last year’s discovery of a covert enrichment plant near Qum is probably only the tip of the iceberg; significantly, the IAEA recently openly accused Tehran of developing nuclear weapons, for the first time in its dealings with Iran. Many experts now estimate that the country is at most 1-2 years away from acquiring a functioning nuclear device. And, judging from the regime’s increasingly defiant tone, it has no intention whatsoever to depart from its stated policy of becoming a ‘nuclear nation’ – one that has mastered a sufficient share of civilian nuclear technology to put nuclear weapons well within its grasp.

As time runs out, and the Obama administration definitively gives up on its short-lived attempt at dialogue with Tehran, attention will again shift to the United Nations Security Council, starting with renewed Western attempts to impose sanctions on the Iranian regime in coming weeks and months. Proposals on the table include various restrictions on institutions and persons connected with the regime, and in particular, its core support base in the Revolutionary Guard. But significantly, recent statements have been shifting towards a whole-scale embargo on Iran’s oil industry – blocking Iranian imports of refined fuels (which it cannot produce itself) and technical supplies, and perhaps also blocking oil exports from Iran – with other producers making up for the shortfall.

A two-fold question arises, however. Firstly, whether such sanctions would be approved by all veto-wielding UNSC members – especially Russia and China. And, secondly, whether such sanctions would at all work. The historical evidence is stacked against both these aforementioned possibilities. Russia and China have a long track record of being reluctant in imposing sanctions on regimes deemed ‘rogue’ by the United States and the West. Both also have serious misgivings about the effectiveness of sanctions in general, and in Iran’s particular case – having described them as ‘counterproductive’ on numerous occasions. While no-one – including Moscow and Beijing – would be interested in the serious damage a nuclear Iran could cause to regional stability and the NPT, both these great powers do have interests in Iran that would be affected directly by a UNSC decision to that effect. Russia is a major trading partner; China has invested heavily in Iran’s oil industry in recent years.

Any imposition of sanctions would therefore involve considerable horse-trading, and, probable linkages with other issues that affect great power relations today – with Moscow and Beijing trying to extract Western concessions in matters not necessarily connected to Iran in return for cutting themselves in the flesh. This does not exclude the possibility of sanctions being ultimately pushed through at the right price. Russia’s position, in particular, has begun to shift in recent weeks, with the foreign ministry expressing ‘alarm’ at the prospect of a nuclear Iran, and Russian defence contractors delaying the delivery of the state-of-the-art S-300 anti-aircraft missile system to the Islamic Republic, ostensibly for ‘technical reasons’. Still, Moscow has made tough noises in the past, only to break with its Western counterparts – and China is maintaining its traditional line emphasising the importance of a negotiated settlement.

But even if tough sanctions came into force, their effect would be highly ambiguous: the historical track record of sanctions (be they of the smart or, if you will, ‘dumb’ variety) is highly dubious. Even in cases around the world where they have had the time to affect elites, economies and societies, they have usually not achieved their desired result in terms of changing regime behaviour. The luxury of time is certainly absent in the case of Iran, and the kind of sanctions that are currently being advocated might end up accelerating rather than stopping its nuclear programme. Past and current embargoes on dual-use technology may hamper Iran’s nuclear quest from the supply side – but, ultimately, its drivers on the demand side remain unaddressed: nuclear weapons, once acquired, are a watertight guarantee of regime security from external threat. This is, and will remain the primary driver of Iran’s nuclear ambitions in the foreseeable future, sanctions or no sanctions.

Some have clung on to the idea that an oil embargo would bring about the current regime’s downfall. Certainly, a whole-scale boycott of Iranian petroleum products would hurt Iran’s oil-dependent economy in an unprecedented way, undermining Iran’s ability to provide for its population. This line of thinking, however, makes three highly uncertain assumptions. Firstly, regime change would be dependent on the regime losing control; instead, an embargo may very well give its hardliners carte blanche for even bloodier repression than has been seen up to now in the name of ‘national security’. Secondly, the assumption is also that Iran would sit still and take such a development quietly. The odds are, however, of a response; there is certainly no lack of opportunities in that sense – Hamas and Hezbollah come to mind, but Iraq, Afghanistan and Hormuz are also definite possibilities should the regime be pressed into a corner.

The third assumption is that the regime would fall before it actually managed to obtain ‘the bomb’. But if anything, an oil embargo might increase the demand-side factor in Tehran’s nuclear quest - and North Korea has clearly shown how the dynamics of inter-state interaction change before and after nuclearisation. Before it, regime destabilisation remains an option; after it, it becomes a folly. Among the “international community’s” greatest contemporary nightmares are those of a destabilised North Korea and Pakistan. Iran probably knows a destabilised nuclear Iran would potentially strike equal fear into Western policymakers’ hearts, probably more so than a stable nuclear Iran - all the more reason to obtain the bomb quickly, for once you cross the nuclear threshold, the kinds of sanctions that actually engender regime change become irrational, providing ample opportunity for brinkmanship.

If one assumes sanctions to be either unattainable or ineffective, the choice becomes one between the two evils of nuclear deterrence and military action – and it is not a straightforward one to make. The views of nuclear deterrence as a regional stabiliser are controversial at best; they also come at the price of either abandoning the NPT to its fate as nukes proliferate freely in the region, or of the United States extending its nuclear umbrella, not to mention the incomparable consequences of potential deterrence failure. The military option, on the other hand, would carry with it the certainty of regional destabilisation, probably with global repercussions, and great uncertainty in terms of its chances for success. In the absence of good intelligence (a rare commodity indeed), military strikes would at best delay Iran’s nuclear capability.

But this is exactly what might make the military option a more rational (or less irrational) choice in combination with sanctions. If embargoes are perceived to take long time to work, a hit on Iran’s nuclear facilities might be seen as extending the possibility for sanctions to work, even if it only ends up delaying its nuclearisation. Considering the fact that Israel, as a ‘free agent’ might actually be both able and willing to carry out such strikes, it becomes clear to what extent this is a situation fraught with danger. And in view of all the certainties and potentialities involved, it seems the next few years will be undesirably interesting for all.

[This article is also due to be published in the upcoming issue of The Majalla]

On 8 March, throw away that red apple....

At its inception, the Soviet empire included some of the most patriarchal societies on the Eurasian landmass – even by the already patriarchal standards of 1917. True to their Marxist teachings – which saw the patriarchal family as a microcosm of bourgeois oppression – the early Bolsheviks set upon many of the Central Asian and Caucasian traditions that had kept women in Tbilisi, Tashkent, Baku in bondage for centuries. The veil was torn up. Women received equal rights of divorce. Legally at least, they received at the very least the same level of control over mind and body that this totalitarian system allowed their male counterparts. They could opt for higher education, indeed, they were encouraged to. And abortions were legalized.

The picture was not unequivocally rosy throughout the history of the Soviet Union. Some of Stalin’s policies were particularly retrograde, both state and party remained bastions of male dominance throughout Soviet history, and, in the later Soviet period, many of the great ambitions of the early Bolsheviks became mired in the self-congratulatory stagnation of Brezhnevism. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that, in the Caucasus and Central Asia at least, seventy years of communist rule drastically transformed the power relationships between men and women on a very fundamental level. Where an illiterate Central Asian girl born at the beginning of the century could at pin her hopes for a not-too-bright future on her parents’ choice of a not-too-old and -gruff husband, women at the end of the Soviet experiment could fully expect to become part of their republic’s workforce and live a life of their choosing (again, within the confines of ‘Really Existing Socialism’). And while local patriarchal traditions did stay alive, at least it was official policy to discourage some of their more sinister utterances.

The fall of the Soviet Union was a disaster for gender equality throughout the collapsed empire – but especially in these above-mentioned hyper-patriarchal societies in the Caucasus and Central Asia. With the economic collapse, many women lost their ability to survive independently outside of marriage if they so chose to; others had the pressure of being the sole breadwinners for their families added to their household chores, which they had always been expected to perform even in Soviet times (attesting to the limits of the Soviet gender experiment). But, perhaps more importantly, with the revival of nationalist, old, forgotten and atavistic patriarchal traditions were embraced with gusto by the new authorities throughout the FSU. With official Marxism gone, nothing could counter-balance the revival of male chauvinism – that ever-present companion of bigoted nationalism - in places like Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan.

The cult of virginity returned, with a vengeance, as confirmed by sociological surveys throughout the Caucasian republics, where a solid majority of men would not marry a woman who has already ‘done it’ with another man [the opposite does, of course, not apply, for ‘boys will be boys’.]; such attitudes were, naturally, actively promoted by the local religious establishments, with many Georgian and Armenian priests and Azeri mullahs busily pontificating on the virtues of matrimony and the weaknesses of the ‘fair sex’. Those same surveys confirm a large majority in these republics believe women to be less intelligent than men, and therefore under the obligation to be obedient to their husbands. Domestic violence, a survey by Amnesty International tells us, is rife, with a quarter of women falling victim to it in Armenia. Girls born in Yerevan, Baku and Tbilisi today are expected to a far greater extent than before to be good housewives above all – the pressures to marry –and forget about a career- are on as soon as they turn eighteen. You go to university to find a husband: the clock has been well and truly turned back by a few decades.

The reappearance of ‘traditions’ has also meant a sudden return to grace of a supposedly ancient, but probably reconstructed – and certainly despicable – Armenian usage: that of the ‘Red Apples’. In short, on the morning after her first wedding night, the groom’s family is supposed to deliver a basked of red apples to the bride’s relatives – as a confirmation of their newlywed’s virginity. While the custom is certainly not ubiquitous (some Armenians would still take such a gesture as a rather vulgar insult) it has certainly seen a revival – as have, not surprisingly, hymen-repair operations throughout the region, where a few remote villages even continue the even more demeaning practice of hanging the bloodied bed-sheets out on public display during the morning after – just in case anyone missed the point made by the apples themselves. In an atmosphere of national chauvinism, challenges to this kind of atavism are few and far between; the few Armenian women who protested against the ‘red apple’ on international women’s day, in March 2009, were ridiculed by bystanders who saw them as eccentric threats to the ‘grandfatherly traditions’ (‘papakan adatner’ in Armenian) of the country, and, for good measure, compared them to drug addicts.

What’s more, international women’s day itself, instead of being what it was intended to – a celebration of or an impetus to emancipation, depending on what side of the women’s-lib divide your country is one – is distorted in all societies of the region into an affirmation of women’s subordinate position. ‘Sois belle et tais-toi’ – be pretty and keep quiet – could just as well be the motto of the day. Instead of concentrating on the numerous problems women face, the dominant themes are those of ‘female beauty’ and ‘motherhood’ – in fact, for a while in the 1990s, the Armenian government had abolished the observance of International Women’s Day in favour of a reconstructed ‘day of beauty and motherhood’ [sic], in April. While the sight of men buying flowers for their female counterparts is certainly not a disagreeable one at first sight, in this region, it serves to camouflage the inferior position of the female sex, where ‘manhood’ (‘tghamartkutyun’) still implies the dependence of women on male protection and tutelage. Independent women who make choices that fall outside these norms – do not marry, don’t have children, or simply don’t give up their career for God, husband and family – are seen as bad mothers, hysterics, weirdos, just as in the olden days in Europe.

The point of 8 March is to put an end to these distortions, which keep half of these societies’ populations – with all their ability and talent - in a social corset. It is ultimately up to Armenian, Georgian and Azeri women to free themselves from it – and regain the rights they enjoyed before their republics decided to go back a few decades, and more. Because, in the end, international women’s day has nothing to do with either beauty or motherhood – and everything with liberty and equality.