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CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
of the Democratic Liberal Party. Wholly opportunistic, Dashnag politics have been variously pro-Nazi, pro-Russia, pro-Soviet
Armenia,4 pro-Arab, pro-Jewish, as well as anti-Jewish, antiZionist, anti-Communist, and anti-Soviet—whichever was expedient. At the moment the official Dashnag position is raucously anti-Communist and pro-Arab; previously, the Englishlanguage organ of the American Dashnag, Hairenik Weekly
(Hairenik meaning "Fatherland"), had commended Zionism
editorially: "Since the fall of Palestine's independence nearly
two thousand years ago, Jewry has become a homeless element,
hunted by fortune, until it understood that its only salvation
lay in its return to the mother soil. This consciousness was
embodied in the Zionist movement whose founders rightly
perceived that a people cannot be happy until it has acquired
a homeland of its own."
During 1946-7 the Soviets urged Armenian war refugees to
return to their homeland. More than 100,000 from Europe
and the Middle East responded in a mass repatriation movement—particularly those who for thirty years had lived in
poverty-stricken shanty towns of unbelievable misery (not only
in the Arab world but in Greece and Bulgaria as well), those
who feared Moslem fanaticism, and those who were objects
of economic discrimination. Believing, then, in Soviet promises, they left for what they thought would be a happier land.
Dashnags everywhere in the world lauded the repatriation
movement and some offered to go along. Hairenik, the Armenian-language organ of the American Dashnag, on October
15, 1947, published a lengthy editorial of a typically pro-Soviet
tone:
Repatriation means the gathering-of-Armenians within the
bosom of Mother Armenia. . . . The movement is a great
and fruitful endeavor . . . and to that effort we all must bring
4
Armenia has been a Soviet Republic since 1920, following the ousting
of the Dashnags who in 1918 beaded an independent republic. Following a
two-year period of Dashnag mismanagement and wars, the populace accepted
Bolshevik rule on its promise of "bread and peace."