Month: June 2005

WORKING MEETING BETWEEN CO-CHAIRMEN OF ARMENIAN-RUSSIAN
INTERGOVERNMENTAL COMMISSION ON ECONOMIC COOPERATION TO TAKE PLACE
ON JUNE 21
YEREVAN, JUNE 17, NOYAN TAPAN. A working meeting between the RA
and RF Co-Chairmen of the Intergovernmental Commission on Economic
Cooperation, the RA Minister of Defence, the Secretary of RA National
Security Council Serge Sargsian and the RF Minister of Transport
Igor Levitin will take place on June 21 in Moscow. According to
the press secretary of RA Ministery of Defence Seyran Shahsuvarian,
issues of operating the RA enterprises transferred as property to the
Russian Federation, as well as other issues of mututal interest will
be discussed at the meeting.

UNPRECEDENTED HARVEST OF APRICOT EXPECTED THIS YEAR
YEREVAN, JUNE 17, NOYAN TAPAN. An unprecedented harvest of apricot
is expected this year. As Garnik Petrosian, the Chief of the
Planting Department the Ministry of Agriculture informed the Noyan
Tapan correspondent, according to prelimenary accounting, 60-70
thousand tons of apricot are expected to get from about 5 hectares
of gardens. It was mentioned that unprecedented harvest of fruit:
particularly it is expected to get 40-50 thousand tons of fruit
from 3 126 hectares of peach gardens. 70-80 thousand tons of apple
and about 5 thousand tons of cherry are also expected to gather this
year. Garnik Petrosian stated that 9 tons of apricot had already been
exported. It was mentioned that the exported apricot was procured at
an average price of 600 drams (about 1.4 US dollars) for one kilogram.

TURKS NEED RECOGNITION OF GENOCIDE MORE FOR GETTING RID OF THE COMPLEX
OF PEOPLE WHO COMMITED GENOCIDE: HRANT MARGARIAN
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, NOYAN TAPAN – ARMENIANS TODAY. The Armenian-Turkish
relations stopped when Turkey adopted a decision on closing
the border bringing unacceptable conditions. Hrant Margarian,
the representative of the ARFD Beauru stated this at the June 16
meeting with journalists. According to him, the reason of stopping
any relations between Armenia and Turkey is the agressive position of
the latter. Hrant Margarian pointed out the necessity of establishing
normal relations between the two countries, emphasizing that these
relations must be based on respecting dignity of both peoples. “Turks
need the recognition of the Genocide more for getting rid of the
complex of a people having commited a genocide,” the representative
of the ARFD Beauru stated.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

19 TONS OF GOAT CHEESE TO BE EXPORTED TO US THIS AUTUMN
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, NOYAN TAPAN. Four Armenian companies will export
this autumn 19 tons of goat cheese to Los Angeles (the US). According
to the information provided by the Center for Agribusiness and Rural
Developing (CARD) Foundation, the first stock of 7 tons of goat cheese
sent to the US in March has been sold.

HENCEFORTH REGISTRATION OF BIRTHS AND INFANT MORTALITY IN ARMENIA TO BE DONE IN ACCORDANCE WITH WHO ICD
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, NOYAN TAPAN. At the June 16 meeting, the Armenian
government made a decision on improving the situation regarding
the problems of the registration and classification of births and
infant mortality. According to the RA Government Information and
PR Department, the decision in particular was taken in accordance
with the requirements and norms of the World Health Organization’s
International Classification of Diseases (WHO ICD). The decision also
approved the main medical and demographic definitions used in the child
and mother health care, as well as a new order of the registration
and calculation of births and infant mortality. Chief Specialist of
the Medical Aid Organization Department of the RA Ministry of Health
Anahit Hovhannisian told reporters after the meeting that the adoption
of the new order will make the registration of births and infant
deaths more precise. Based on the decision, new ICD standards will
be put in practice, as well as new forms of registering births and
infant mortality will be developed. According to Anahit Hovhannisian,
infant mortality has shown a downward tendency in Armenia in recent
years – 11.8 thousand deaths were registered in 2003, whereas the
number declined to 11.6 thousand in 2004.

Saturday Review: Travel: Back to Baku: Veronica Horwell on an
extraordinary tale of reinvention: The Orientalist by Tom Reiss
432pp, Chatto & Windus, pounds 16.99:
VERONICA HORWELL
The Guardian – United Kingdom; Jun 18, 2005
Baku, on the Azerbaijan shore of the Caspian sea, was the most
modern city on earth at the beginning of the 20th century. East was
outrageously east there, and west was wild, and the twain met often,
their fusion fuelled by the city’s power source: oil. Baku was the
first petroleum metropolis. Crude, brokered by barons, financed a
unique civilisation. Like everybody in the Caucasus, the barons had
arrived from elsewhere to take advantage of frontier forgetfulness.
Among them was Abraham Nussimbaum, one generation away from the Russian
pale of Jewish settlement, and his shtetl-raised wife, whose youthful
suicide was a chosen exit from the clash of her revolutionary fervour
with Nussimbaum’s prosperity.
She had produced a son, Lev, born aboard a strikebound train to
Baku in October 1905, when riot and ruckus, provoked by Russia’s
massive failure in its war with Japan, were raised in the region. The
Orientalist is a biography of Lev.
His childhood was a short course in reality – mother soon gone,
Armenians massacred, Cossacks charging, terrorists of all and no
allegiances assassinating. It was also a long dream season. When
he could get out, albeit guarded against kidnap, Lev haunted the
Muslim quarter and the palace of its khans, or sat on the family roof
rhapsodising on fantastic desert and mountain dwellers.
Magic realism was a pragmatic response to Baku between 1905 and
the 1917 revolution, and Lev was grounded in it; his belief that he
could instigate marvels was confirmed, during post-Soviet exile in
central Asia and Persia, by his escapes – connived yet miraculous –
from Bolsheviks, bandits, buggery and bullets. Abraham and Lev were
sundered and reunited, sometimes destitute, sometimes flush. Once
they were housed in a cinema, because it was clean and had a loo.
Such an unsentimental education should have shaped Lev into a
novelist and very eventually it did. Ali and Nino , published 1937,
was the love story of a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, or, rather,
the romance of Lev and vanished Baku. But the novel, which spellbound
Tom Reiss in 1990s oil boomtown Baku, was credited to “Kurban Said”.
As Reiss slowly discovered through his original research for The
Orientalist , Kurban Said was more of a fiction than Ali and Nino .
Said was Lev’s second self-invented persona.
He had created his first alternative identity, Essad Bey, as a
pfennigless exile in Berlin in the early 1920s. (Lev and Abraham
had by then scarce unpacked their suitcases in Constantinople, Rome
and Paris in turn, flotsam on a first wave of asylum-seekers.) Lev
attended Russian high school in the afternoon and enrolled for
oriental studies at Berlin university the rest of the day. Any teen
geek fantasist might have done that, but few would then have learned
the languages, read the tomes, converted to Islam, with name-change,
and promoted themselves as an expert Orientalist at the age of 22.
Lev-Essad played a dual game from then to the end: acquaintances knew
he was Lev, shabby son of Abraham, racked about rent, but they didn’t
contradict the mensch when he asserted he was Essad, heir of a noble
Arab father and Russian aristo mother. As Essad Bey, he made a Weimar
name for himself: journalist, biographer and cultural analyst, starting
with Blood and Oil in the Orient. He was challenged all along as a
fraud, by anti-semites and born, as opposed to born-again, Muslims.
Reiss attributes Lev’s refusal to abandon the imposture to
his determination not to be classified by the era’s fatal racial
taxonomy, and to his belief that he could imagine his way out of a
locked room, even when the closed space was Nazi-dominated Europe.
Perhaps Lev-Essad was even more complicated that that; he decided to
return from America, where he could have stayed with his scalp-hunting
wife and wealthy inlaws for long enough to have claimed permanent
sanctuary from the Third Reich, screenwriting for an income as did
his closest friend. (Reiss mentions Casablanca in connection with
the refugee artist circuit; how much richer the movie’s script would
have been if the writers had known about the former Ottoman empire
as well as the importance of money, papers and a ticket for the last
Lisbon flight.)
For a long time, Lev-Essad fled from the freedom to tell made-up
stories, other than the one about his origins. In fact, his first dozen
books, including biographies of Stalin and Muhammad, were nonfiction,
and in them he seems to have told fewer lies, especially to himself,
than did his contemporaries.
Only when Lev’s wife resented the non-Valentino aspects of Essad’s
sheikhdom (sexual reality was beyond his grasp), left with a rival
and blabbed to the tabloids, abandoning Lev on a continent where Jews
could no longer write or publish, did he formally essay fiction. And
first he had to create “Kurban Said”, meaning “joyful sacrifice”,
to write Ali and Nino , a character less a safe alias than a golem –
an artificial being animated by magic, the enchantment of Baku. The
invention didn’t save his career, and his life was soon after forfeit
to a disease that rotted him from the feet up. He languished in the
half-haven of fascist Italy, proposing, until his death in Positano
in 1942, to write a biography of Mussolini.
Reiss, through obsessed sleuthing, has retrieved a believable liar and
revealed a secret, the last notebooks of Lev-Essad-Kurban, purportedly
a novel called The Man Who Knew Nothing About Love . He decently
respects the connections inconsequence can make, from the Interpol
officer who hooked him on Ali and Nino to the chance arrival at his
Manhattan dinnertable of the last heir to the Ottoman sultanate. And
his descriptions of cities of exile resonate so in a time of transit
that I hope his next book will be a history of diaspora capitals.
To order The Orientalist for pounds 15.99 with free UK p&p call
Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. guardian.co.uk/bookshop

Iran’s gas export plans gain momentum
IranMania, Iran
June 19 2005
Sunday, June 19, 2005 – ©2005 IranMania.com
LONDON, June 19 (IranMania) – Managing Director of National Iranian
Gas Exports Company has said that several companies have completed
feasibility studies to transfer gas from Iran to Europe, Iran Daily
reported.
Roknoddin Javadi said companies from Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania,
Slovenia and Austria each had a 20% share in completing the feasibility
studies of the project to pump gas produced in Iranian refineries to
Europe’s main grid via Turkey.
He said Iran is also considering gas export to the UAE and Oman.
“The Indians are also a potential customer for 2.5 mln tons of
liquefied natural gas (LNG) from us which if finalized will begin as
of 2011,” Fars news agency further quoted him as saying.
Iran, which holds some 15% of the world’s natural gas reserves, is
trying to increase exports of gas to neighboring states in the hope
of picking up sales to Asia and Europe in the future.
“In the short term, we are looking to export gas to neighboring
countries, but we are also working on exports of liquefied natural gas
(LNG) to markets in Asia and Europe,” said Javadi.
“The issue is that the projects to export gas to neighbors, such as
those in the Persian Gulf, can be completed in two years. But an LNG
export project needs five years.”
Javadi said Iran was also in talks with Kuwait and the UAE for two
contracts, hoping to export 1.5 bln cubic meters to the two countries
each year. Contracts are also expected with Armenia and other former
Soviet republics in the Caucasus, covering the sale of three blon
cubic meters annually.
South Pars gas field, which is set to increase Iran’s gas exports,
straddles the maritime border between Qatar and Iran in the Persian
Gulf.
It is estimated to contain around 14.2 trln cubic meters of gas, equal
to seven percent of the world’s total proven reserves and roughly 50%
of the national gas deposits.
Iran’s gas reserves, estimated at 812 trln cubic feet account for 15.8%
of the world’s proven gas reserves are second only to those of Russia.
–Boundary_(ID_SNBgDIGY94wmhmUoAFGJlA)–

Orange County Register, CA
June 19 2005
A rebel with a cause
Teacher P.O. Marsubian, often at odds with authority, related to kids
who felt the same. He pioneered a night high school program that
turned him into
Sunday, June 19, 2005
AMY MARTINEZ STARKE
P. O. Marsubian, a Portland high school teacher, had two motives in
the late 1960s when he came up with the idea of an alternative high
school. For starters, he saw juniors disappearing from the halls
at the now-defunct Adams High School in Northeast Portland, and he
wanted to give dropouts, street kids, minorities, throwaway kids,
and gang members a way to earn a diploma.
But he also saw an alternative high school as a way to get away from
bureaucratic rules that chafed and an administration headquarters he
bluntly called “the nut hut.” He identified with disruptive students;
he was a rebel and outsider himself.
So when administrators said no to his idea, it didn’t slow him at
all. It took awhile, but he got his way, and eventually the night
high school began serving young people others had given up on.
“Anybody can teach the stable kids, the smart kids,” he said. The
tougher the challenge, the greater the triumph, P.O. thought.
The night school tolerated street language and unconventional
behavior. P.O.’s own classroom language was quite colorful, but
students could tell he was really angry when he used the king’s
English.
Eventually the waiting list included both teachers and students;
students recruited their friends. P.O. brought students home to feed
or house. The phone rang in the middle of the night, and more than
once he bailed a student out of jail. P.O. retired in the mid-1980s
but continued to substitute.
Students will remember the teacher they called P.O. as a stout man
who wore a suit and tie to school. But at home, he wore faded denim
bib overalls to the day he died, May 24, 2005, of congestive heart
failure. He was 79.
P.O. was born Parimaz Onan Marsubian in Chicago to Armenian immigrant
tailors who escaped the Turkish genocide. He flunked first grade
because he could only speak Armenian, but he soon mastered English.
In 1942, he joined the Navy and, though he asked for combat duty,
was stationed in Pasco, Wash., as a parachute packer. In Pasco,
he met Lee Parker at a dance, and they married in 1945.
After the war, Lee worked while P.O. went to Northwestern University
on the GI Bill. Their son was born in 1947, about the time P.O.
became friends with Martin Luther King Jr., who once held their son
on his lap. They later had a second child, a daughter.
P.O. and Lee decided to move out West, and P.O. taught at Jefferson
and Roosevelt high schools in the 1950s and 1960s. He became a union
official and a thorn in the administration’s side.
At Roosevelt, he convinced a group of students to raise money
for their own purposes by selling dill pickles for 5 cents each,
and he refused the principal’s demand that he turn over the money.
Administrators sought to defuse his energetic union organizing by
plucking him out of Roosevelt and transferring him to Grant — a move
that had the opposite effect.
In the 1960s, P.O. began to study the stock market. “You can’t buy the
company, but you can buy a piece of it,” he figured. Eventually, he
became an informal stockbroker, at one time managing the portfolios of
26 friends, including the mail carrier; he never charged a dime. His
stocks underdogs that made good — were graphed with paper and
pencil. He once gave 1,000 shares in a Canadian gold-mining company
to a student. Hold on to these, he said; gold is coming back.
At night high school, P.O. taught social studies, geography, politics,
survival skills, personal finance, the stock market and real life. He
also taught handyman repair: He could do it all himself.
Night school stayed at Adams until Adams closed as a high school in
1981. It then moved to Grant, where it remains.
P.O. saw some of his former students go on to make good. Although
wedding invitations came regularly in the mail, he refused to attend.
He despised weddings, funerals, organized religion, and gift-giving
and receiving.
In 1990, his wife suddenly died. He made himself available to baby-sit
grandchildren on a moment’s notice, and since 1992 had a girlfriend.
Before he retired, P.O. lived in a decaying North Portland neighborhood
near a notorious prostitution zone. His wife was once mugged at
their home. But when others were fleeing, P.O. refused to move. He
didn’t like the suburbs and predicted a resurgence of Portland’s
inner city. He maintained a free soda machine in the garage for
neighborhood kids.
Near retirement, P.O. and his wife moved to a house on a North
Portland bluff. Every morning , he hosted a club of friends at his
kitchen table, where World War II and political topics were cussed
and discussed. P.O. was a card-carrying member of the ACLU, and he
read The New Republic and Mother Jones, with a concession to The Wall
Street Journal. Gore Vidal was without a doubt his favorite author.
Around his home on the bluff, kids like to smoke weed, drink and drive
gangsta-looking cars booming tunes from behind darkened windows. He
was not afraid. He installed a bench, loaned them tools and invited
them to park in his driveway. “Hey, P.O.” they called when he walked
out. Those were his kind of kids.

In Caucasus enclave, Internet puts young in touch with outside world
Agence France Presse
June 19 2005
STEPANAKERT, Azerbaijan (AFP) – For 15-year-old Albert, who lives in
Nagorno Karabakh, the Internet is an exciting venue for meeting
people of his own age from any nation but one, Azerbaijan, which
remains dead against any moves to have the enclave recognised as an
independent state.
“I have never seen a single Azeri in my life, but I consider them
enemies. If it hadn’t been for the war with them, my father would
not have died and our house would not have been destroyed,” said the
teenager from Nagorno Karabakh, a mostly ethnic Armenian enclave that
lies within Azerbaijan.
As the territory holds parliamentary polls Sunday, hoping to convince
the world it should be recognised as an independent country, Albert’s
resentment of Azerbaijan, which surrounds Nagorno Karabakh, is typical
of many young people here.
Nagorno Karabakh seceded from Azerbaijan upon the Soviet Union’s
1991 collapse, leading Armenia to fight Azerbaijan for control of
the territory in 1993 and 1994, with the loss of an estimated 25,000
lives and the displacement of millions of people, most of them Azeris.
Just over a year old when the fighting erupted, Albert remembers
nothing of the bombings and underground shelters where families
sought refuge.
But the loss of his father and the family home have led him to
passionately oppose any Azeri attempt to retake his homeland.
Continued border clashes and ideological sniping make laying past
grievances to rest all the harder.
“We live very well without Azerbaijan and to be honest I can never
understand those politicians who want to see us subject to Azeri rule
again,” said another young resident, Narek, a 17-year-old economics
student.
Propped up by Armenia — itself supported by a large Armenian community
in the West — Nagorno Karabakh has in recent years taken on more of
a stable appearance.
Whereas its young people used to have to travel to the Armenian capital
Yerevan for higher education, institutes have sprung up in Nagorno
Karabakh’s main city of Stepanakert, offering their own degrees.
The political landscape has also grown more diverse.
While young people alot a healthy amount of time to the main
entertainment of evening walks and bar-hopping, the weeks prior to
Sunday’s poll found many of them vigorously discussing the programmes
of the seven parties vying for parliamentary seats, and some joining
in the campaigning.
And among the territory’s young there are some who feel the only
way forward is to reach out to Nagorno Karabakh’s large, oil-rich
neighbour, Azerbaijan — especially as rumours persist that Baku may
try to take back the territory by force.
“I am afraid of war and don’t want it to happen again,” said Sveta,
a 27-year-old lawyer, explaining that she had many Azeri friends she
chatted to over the Internet.
“We need to communicate, to know each other better, to learn to trust
each other,” Sveta said.
For others the important thing is that the vote should be fair, so
that Nagorno Karabakh can win the international community’s respect
and eventually recognition of its independence.
“We want peace and to enjoy our youth in an economically developed
and democratic country,” one teenager said.

Zaman, Turkey
June 19 2005
‘Ankara Should Show US It is not Alone’
By Suleyman Kurt
Published: Sunday 19, 2005
zaman.com
Professor Georgi Derlugiani, of Armenian-origin, of the Northwestern
University, US, claimed that US need for Turkey in possible operations
against Iran and Syria in addition to pressure policies it implements
on them after Iraq is “very clear”. Derlugiani said if Ankara wants
to resist against this, it should show it is not alone.
Attending the Istanbul Conference on Democracy and Security last week,
Professor Derlugiani answered Zaman’s questions. He described rejection
of the March 1 deployment motion, which aimed to permit US troops pass
to Iraq, as a “brave and brilliant decision that showed Turkey was an
independent country even in the most difficult situation”. The Armenian
academic suggested to Turkey that it belonged to Europe and should
form more close relations with countries such as Russia, Eurasian
countries, Armenia, China, even Brazil, Mexico, and South African
countries through a “strong balance policy”. He said this would show
that Turkey is not alone when a super power applies pressures on it.
Expressing his approach to the Armenian issue, Derlugiani drew to
the attention to difficulty of a solution. Stressing that academic
discussions should be continued, Derlugiani urged forming of close
connections between the two peoples as well.