A Response Letter to the Editor-in-chief of Macmillan Publishing House

Dear Mrs. Brereton

We appreciate Your response to our letter and Your attempts to give explanations as to the wrong information about Armenia. Anyway, Your arguments are groundless and unacceptable.

With respect to our first request You mentioned that the majority language is often included in the encyclopedia, and it is not obligatory that You should be guided by the number of people speaking these languages. Then You quoted from our letter, where as if we mention that ‘’almost 98 per cent of the Armenian population speak Armenian, the rest speak Yezidi, Azerbaijani and Russian’’. It is worth mentioning that there was no mention about the Azeris in the letter. We could not have done that as there is no Azeri speaking community in Armenia. Here is what we wrote: 96 per cent of the Armenian population are Armenians. The other four per cent  are Yezidis, Jews, Russians, Kurds, etc. If You don’t find it necessary that you should be guided by the majority language speakers, why did You mention English as the main language in the section concerning Great Britain, when Scottish, Irish, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic and many other languages are widely spoken in your country. If You were consistent with what You  suggest, you should have mentioned all these languages as main languages of Great Britain. By the way, according to your logic, Armenian is also suchlike language as thousands of Armenians live in Great Britain. You go on writing: ‘’We can exclude Azerbaijani, but that will entail Armenia’s being a unilingual culture, which we do not think is right, that’s why we will keep this version in the UK publication.’’ If You are that concerned about Armenia’s not being a unilingual country, you could have enumerated the languages really spoken in Armenia – Russian, Kurdish, Ukrainian, etc. Why did You choose and mention the languages  not spoken in Armenia at all?

1. We claim once again that You should exclude Azerbaijani both from British and other publications. It is undeniable that there are no Azeris in Armenia.

2.As for the second point, religion, we find it necessary to note the following. You introduced the Armenian Apostolic Church in a wrong way including it in the Orthodox Church. They are quite different religious structures. Besides, You mentioned that You do not enumerate other state religions in your encyclopedia, emphasizing that other minority religions are important as well. We do not consider our religion to be dominant over minority religions, we only want to make a correction. Here are some official data: the total number of the Armenian population is 3 213 0 11, out of which 3 145 354 Armenians, 40 620 Yezidis , 14 660 Russians, 3409 Assyrians, 1633 Ukrainians, 1519 Kurds, 1176 Greeks, other minorities 4640. Among the nationalities mentioned above, it is only  the Kurds who are Muslims, and they are Sunni, not Shiah followers. If You want to mention religion branches other that Christianity, You may mention the ones most spread (Yezidi religion, Greek Orthodoxy)

3.As for the third point of our letter, the Nagorno Karabagh-Azerbaijan conflict, we will find out why the Russian publishers used information, which can’t be found in the original. Nevertheless, the main mistake is also found in Your publication, it refers to the status of Nagorno Karabagh Republic. You introduced Gharabagh as follows: ‘’It is an Azerbaijani region inhabited mostly by Armenians’’. This is a fact which does not correspond either with history or present-day reality. Nagorno Karabagh (Artsakh) is historically an Armenian territory, which has always been settled by Armenians. It was given to the Soviet Azerbaijan under the rule of Stalin in 1921, but since 1988 it has been independent  de facto.

Based on the above mentioned, we request that the wrong information about Armenia, which may be found in the encyclopedia, should be corrected. Otherwise, the article on Armenia will be regarded as illiteracy or a client service result. We find it necessary to mention that the sale of the encyclopedia has been suspended in Armenia.

Thousands of Armenians, both in Armenia and Diaspora, have raised their protest against the encyclopedia. A great number of NGOs have come together and created the Initiative Against Encyclopedic Fraud, which will operate until the mistakes are corrected.

Respectfully

‘’Ankakh’’ weekly

The Initiative Against Encyclopedic Fraud