An Armenian Wishlist for Anonymous

As you probably know, “Anonymous” is an ultra-secretive, underground, very loosely “organized” group of hackers whose targets serve some societal utility. These targets have ranged from governments (including Turkey’s), to corporations, to religious entities with questionable functions, and even ISIS. They might disrupt websites or expose information (they supported Wikileaks). A few of their “members” were arrested a few years ago, but they still seem to be out there and active. So, I thought I’d act like a kid writing a letter to Anonymous Santa, with things that would help Armenians, the best “presents” being listed first. Some wishes overlap, but hey, I’m a kid writing to Santa…

1- The best gift of data and knowledge we could get are the names of all those whose “ancestry code” in Turkey is a 2. You’ll remember that about three years ago, we learned, quite by accident, because of a bureaucratic mix-up, that Turkey had tracked the ancestry of Greeks (1s), Armenians (2s), Jews (3s), Syriacs (4s), other non-Muslims (5s) ever since the Lausanne Treaty of 1923. Imagine the outreach and restoration that could be done with this data!

2- A full listing of all the hiding places of all the money squirreled away by all the kleptocrats ruling Armenia would provide the ammunition to return those funds to where they belong, the government of the Republic of Armenia. Better yet, it could be used to pay off the roughly $5 billion debt the country has amassed!

3- All the records of all the wealth and property stolen from Armenians by the Turkish government during the Genocide. This data was tallied at the time and some of it has been recovered by researchers. But imagine it in one massive data-dump, assuming these records have been scanned or digitized (which is unlikely and is the flaw in many of these wishes).

4- Late-Ottoman era archives, if when/digitized. And, not just governmental, but party or other quasi-governmental entities, too.

5- All secret communications between Ankara and its lobbyists, coopted/cooperative groups (ADL, defense industry, etc.), along with Turkish groups in the U.S. and elsewhere,

6- The same as #2, but for Azerbaijan, so the funds could be used to rebuild Artsakh which has still not fully recovered from Azerbaijan’s wanton destruction in the early 1990s, not to mention the more recent ruin of the four-day-war.

7- From Azerbaijan, any information relating to the mistreatment of and policy towards the country’s minorities (Lezgis, Tats, Talysh, etc.).

8- A comprehensive listing of all the bogus “privatization” that occurred in the Republic of Armenia after the breakup of the USSR.

9- Any Georgian secret documents about government policy towards Armenians.

10- Lists of where the Gulen movement entities, from schools, to non-profits and supporting businesses, along with the names of those running them.

11- Heck, while we’re at it, let’s be greedy! Imagine getting access to ALL of MIT’s (the Turkish intelligence agency) files and what could be done with that data!

Go ahead! Feel free to add more wishes! Let’s get some laughs out of this! We might even come up with ideas that can be pursued through traditional means.

Garen Yegparian

Garen Yegparian

Asbarez Columnist
Garen Yegparian is a fat, bald guy who has too much to say and do for his own good. So, you know he loves mouthing off weekly about anything he damn well pleases to write about that he can remotely tie in to things Armenian. He's got a checkered past: principal of an Armenian school, project manager on a housing development, ANC-WR Executive Director, AYF Field worker (again on the left coast), Operations Director for a telecom startup, and a City of LA employee most recently (in three different departments so far). Plus, he's got delusions of breaking into electoral politics, meanwhile participating in other aspects of it and making sure to stay in trouble. His is a weekly column that appears originally in Asbarez, but has been republished to the Armenian Weekly for many years.
Garen Yegparian

Latest posts by Garen Yegparian (see all)

2 Comments

  1. Hey, Garen, can you link to your old post on the ethnicity tracking in Turkey? That’s very interesting and I’d never heard of it before

  2. As I’ve written on the one other occasion when I broke my own rule about responding to comments posted to my articles (I do not because I find it inappropriate), I am doing so now ONLY BECAUSE of the above request for a specific piece of data.

    The title of that article is “I’m a 2- Are You, Too?”

    http://armenianweekly.com/?s=I%27m+a+2%2C+are

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.