The corridors of British political life were once off limits to anyone who was not a graduate of certain elite schools or universities, but times have changed and a new generation of immigrants are getting involved in shaping the multi-ethnic country they call home. A decade or two ago, it would have been nearly impossible for an "outsider" to break the barriers of British tradition and move up the political ladder, and while the climb is still not easy, people like Ghassan Karian and Odette Bazil stand out as examples of the changes in British society. Karian, whose father is an Armenian and mother a Palestinian, was born in Lebanon. He moved to London at the age of eight with his parents and now, at the age of 30, is the Mayor of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. While the title is an honorary one, the struggle to get there took years of hard work and involvement in the British political process. "I was interested in politics from a very early age," Karian said in an interview in London. "I was attracted to the Labor Party and I joined at the age of 16 and got involved in our own community." At King's College in London, he studied business management, but politics was an attraction which pulled him closer to the social issues and hardships facing his adopted country. "Please don't think that I do not have a life outside politics ... I am a communications director at Imperial Chemical Industries in London—but politics runs in my veins. I guess it is something I took from my father," Karian said. Karian's father was one of Lebanon's leading political cartoonists, working for the Arabic newspaper Al Hayat and later the Al Sharq al Awsat magazine. "I guess we were another casualty of the Lebanese Civil War," Ghassan Karian says of his father's move to London in 1980. "I was a kid, did not speak a word of English and to be quite honest, we spoke Arabic at home. "Just look at my name. Ghassan is Arabic and Karian is Armenian. As for me today, well, I can say I am Armenian-Lebanese-Palestinian-British. Or maybe just European?. It is just this new outlook toward ethnicity which is driving a new generation of young Armenians to integrate into British society without losing their national identity. Karian said he was proud of every facet of his identity because each has given him something and turned him into a true international individual with a better understanding of the nature of the world we live in. "Maybe it was exactly this view I have in life that drove me into getting involved," he said. Soon after joining the Labor Party, Karian volunteered to work on a number of issues, getting elected to the Hammersmith and Fulham Council in 1994 and later helping a British Member of Parliament and then filling a position on the 1997 election campaign of British Prime Minister Anthony Blair. The electorate, of course, was neither Armenian nor Arab, but rather a mix of many other ethnic groups living in the region's middle class neighborhoods. As the youngest member of the Council, Karian was elected by his peers in 2002 to fill in the position of Mayor—an honorary title which makes Karian the First Citizen of Hammersmith and Fulham, the chairman of the local Labor Party group, the speaker of the Council Parliament and the most senior official who is often called upon to welcome visiting dignitaries, including the Queen. While spending most of his early life away from Armenian community issues and life in general, Karian said he was finding himself more and more attracted toward his roots and plans to visit his grandfather's birthplace in Diarbekir, Turkey. "I want to get involved with Armenian issues. I was too young when I left Lebanon, and I don't have that much of a desire to go back, but Diarbekir and even Armenia are different ... I do feel the attraction toward both," he said. With his tenure as Mayor expiring in a year, Karian is already evaluating his options and future. "Do I stay in politics? Do I try and run for a higher office like the British Parliament? I don't know yet, but certainly I will keep exploring. Politics is still running deep in my veins," he said. "But whatever I do, I still believe that more and more young Armenians should take this same route. My advice is: get involved in your local city and county governments, volunteer, join a political party if you want to, but do not isolate yourself from the rest of the British society," he said. While Karian is the only Armenian holding an elected position, a handful of others are gradually moving into the corridors of British political life. Ms. Odette Bazil, who settled in London in the early 1960's after leaving her native Iran, is one of the leading Armenian activists who has been highly instrumental not only in securing British aid to Armenia, but more importantly, the establishment of the British-Armenian All-Party Parliamentary Group which includes 49 legislators including Baroness Caroline Cox. Soon after the devastating 1988 earthquake in Armenia, Ms. Bazil founded the Anglo-Armenian Association under the patronage, as Honorary President, of Rosalind Lady Runcie, the wife of then Archbishop of Canterbury. But within a short period of time gears were shifted from just a humanitarian approach to a more active political role when Ms. Bazil, the Earl of Shannon, member of the House of Lords, Sir Anthony Buck MP, QC and Lord Melloy of Ealing founded the British-Armenian Parliamentary Group under the Patronage of then Armenian Ambassador Armen Sarkissian. The Group was officially registered at the House of Lords in February 1992 and has since grown into a well-respected voice on Armenian issues. Since its birth, the Group has successfully lobbied for the opening of the British Embassy in Armenia, petitioned the British Government to help lift the blockade of Armenia by Turkey and Azerbaijan, finalize the agreement on a taxation system with Armenia in the hope of promoting trade between the two countries by allowing joint-commercial ventures to pay taxes only in one of the joint-venture countries and taken at least five British Parliamentary delegations to Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh on fact-finding missions. For the first time in the history of the Armenian community in Britain, 60 Parliamentarians joined mainly British citizens - and not just ethnic Armenians - in signing a petition and presenting it to 10 Downing Street in July 2000, asking Prime Minister Blair's government to recognize the Armenian Genocide. During the past ten years the Group's members have been instrumental in initiating numerous debates in both Houses of Parliament on Armenian issues in their continuous efforts to influence the British Government to adopt more favorable policies towards Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh. Not an easy task, especially given the fact that the Group is not Armenian community-based and does not have the Armenian grass-root backing like the Armenian political action groups in the United States. But how did someone like Ms. Bazil energize such a large group of British Parliamentarians to take an active interest in Armenian issues? "It's all about personal relations and information. We cannot just sit back and wait for people, and especially non-Armenians, to get involved," she said in an interview in London. "I also believe that it is not enough to say our cause is right. We have to get the information out. We have to—yes—educate the non-Armenian public and politicians. Information is a powerful tool, and we have to use it," she said. Not an easy task, especially in a country like England which has always maintained a special relationship with Turkey even as far back as the Ottoman years. With Ms. Bazil in the "driver's seat", the core group of interested politicians launched an information blitz ten years ago meeting Parliamentarians, recruiting members who had interest in the Caucasus or foreign affairs or Eastern Europe, briefing them on the geographic, political and economic situation of Armenia and Karabakh and more important on the raging war in Karabakh. "Imagine ... as we started talking to politicians we discovered that many of them had never heard of Karabakh, and some even thought Armenia was somewhere in Russia or still part of the Soviet Union," she said. One of the first British Parliamentarians to take active interest in post-independence Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh was Caroline Cox, or the Battling Baroness as she is often referred to by many of her fellow members of the British House of Lords. Baroness Cox has shown her relentless support for Armenia and Karabakh from early 1991, and has since paid 53 visits to Yerevan and Stepanakert, and missed no opportunity to address her peers on the floor of the House in support of Armenian issues. "For me it all started as a humanitarian issue. British aid was relatively little and even that was not to Karabakh," the Baroness explained during a brief talk with this reporter before addressing the House of Lords after her last visit to Karabakh and Armenia. On that day, her speech was under the title of "Defense and Foreign Affairs," and dealt primarily with terrorism and the issues facing the world after the September 11, 2001 attack in New York. But it was also yet another opportunity for Baroness Cox to remind her fellow members of the House of Lords that the "bitter conflict in the predominantly Armenian enclave of Nagorno Karabakh in the early 1990's began with Azerbaijan's self-avowed policy of ethnic cleansing." But the House of Lords is not the only forum for Baroness Cox. Her in-depth report entitled "Ethnic Cleansing in Progress: War in Nagorno Karabakh" was first published in 1993 and has since been reprinted in 1999. Her scholarly work, which has been circulated among all members of both Houses of the British Parliament, puts the conflict in its deep historical context, and traces the often stormy history of a region and its Armenian roots which go as far back as the second century BC. Deeply committed to her humanitarian work in Karabakh, Baroness Cox has been a source of inspiration to many in the British Parliament. The same is true with the commitment of Odette Bazil who has played a pivotal role in strong relations between Britain and Armenia. As for Ghassan Karian, the young Mayor of Hammersmith and Fulham, it's the first step in a journey which may one day see the first Armenian member in the British House of Commons.
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