Vartan Matiossian
The Istanbul bureau chief of The New York Times, Carlotta Gall, appears to have been in her latest destination long enough to learn and internalize some of the crassest tactics of Turkish denialism.
She could not refrain from turning her dispatch from Baku, “Roots of War: When Armenia Talked Tough, Azerbaijan Took Action” (The New York Times, October 27, 2010), into the usual mix of reporting and opinion that characterizes “journalism” these days. One wonders if she used to do the same when reporting from Chechnya and Afghanistan. In any case, this article will hardly earn her a prize for journalistic fairness. She omitted the point already raised by Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalın in last May, who extended greetings to Azerbaijan on its Republic Day, wishing “more beautiful, brighter and stronger days” in the future as “one nation, two states,” to hammer on its Armenian equivalent “Artsakh is Armenia” (mentioned by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in August) as unofficial spokesperson to Azerbaijan president’s foreign policy adviser Hikmet Hajiyev’s lame justification for Azerbaijan’s aggression: “The final nail in the coffin of the negotiation process was when he said that Nagorno-Karabakh was Armenian.”
