Month: June 2005

Russia, Ukraine and Greece among countries of concern on State Department list
The Associated Press
06/03/05 12:01 EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) – Russia, Ukraine and Greece were among seven
countries in Europe and Eurasia deemed to be of special concern in
a State Department report released Friday on trafficking in persons.
Those countries, along with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Slovak Republic and
Uzbekistan, were among 27 nations worldwide included on a “Tier 2
watch list” in the report. That is one notch below the tier in which
nations could be subjected to U.S. sanctions.
The Tier 2 countries were described as sources, transit points or
destinations for the exploitation of men, women or children for sexual
and labor exploitation.
The report said that while the Russian government “sustained its
commitment and recognition to address trafficking, more needs to
be done.”
It praised Russia for increasing investigations and prosecutions,
but said Russia should intensify its work with non-governmental
organizations and “identify and address trafficking complicity of
public officials.”
Of Ukraine, it said the new government “is expected to respond more
effectively to institutional weaknesses and corruption, which hindered
the previous government’s anti-trafficking efforts.”
Greece was cited for failing to complete an agreement with Albania on
child protection and for inadequate results in convicting traffickers.
It said Armenia was reluctant to apply a new anti-trafficking statute
or follow through on an anti-corruption program adopted in 2004. The
Armenian government “failed to take any measures beyond issuing a
rhetorical pledge to address trafficking-related complicity.”
Azerbaijan’s anti-trafficking efforts “remained in preliminary stages
of implementation,” the report said, though it said the government’s
“recognition and acknowledgment of the problem increased” and some
progress was made.
In the Slovak Republic, the report said, victim assistance and
protection efforts were inadequate. It noted the government is
developing a national plan to combat trafficking, but said it is too
early to judge its effectiveness.
It said Uzbekistan does not meet standards for eliminating trafficking,
but is taking steps to do so, such as adopting anti-trafficking
legislation and developing a national action plan.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Alliance of ex-Soviet republics plans to remove trade barriers by 2012
By MISHA DZHINDZHIKHASHVILI
The Associated Press
06/03/05 09:22 EDT
TBILISI, Georgia (AP) – A loose alliance of former Soviet republics
on Friday endorsed a plan envisaging the creation of a free trade
zone by 2012 – an ambitious goal it has long struggled to achieve.
The Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS, was created in the
1991 collapse of the Soviet Union to help foster closer ties between
the newly independent countries. But most of its initiatives have
foundered because of member states’ suspicions of Russia’s domination
and stark differences in their economic development. The CIS has long
been criticized for being little more than a talking shop.
Prime ministers of 12 CIS member states, who met Friday in the Georgian
capital, Tbilisi, discussed a protocol envisaging the gradual lifting
of restrictions in mutual trade and calling for their complete removal
by 2012. Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko called for their
faster removal and refused to sign the protocol, that was endorsed
by her counterparts.
During the meeting, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Moldova echoed Ukraine’s
call for a faster creation of a free trade zone. “All CIS member
states are interested in a quick removal of barriers to mutual trade,”
said Georgian Prime Minister Zurab Nogaideli.
Nogaideli on Friday criticized the grouping for having failed to live
up to its promise. “No visa-free regime has been observed in the CIS,
although that is the main principle of the Commonwealth,” he said.
He also said that the group had failed to ensure its members’
territorial integrity. “For Georgia, the most important interest
is conflict settlement and restoration of the country’s territorial
integrity,” Nogaideli said.
The government of President Mikhail Saakashvili is trying to bring
two breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, back into the
fold after more than a decade of their self-declared independence.
Georgian authorities have accused Russian peacekeepers in Abkhazia,
acting under the aegis of the CIS, of favoring the separatists.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

May 28, 2005. 11:35 AM
RON BULL/TORONTO STAR
Bittersweet symphony
After lacklustre seasons and lagging sales, orchestras are getting their
voices back
WILLIAM LITTLER
“Winnipeg Symphony can’t pay musicians, may collapse”
“Calgary orchestra seeks $1.5 million to survive”
“Orchestral manoeuvres in the red”
“As funds disappear, so do orchestras”
These are only a few of the newspaper headlines to have appeared in
recent seasons above stories of gloom and doom in the symphonic world.
The situation is not a new one. Chronically underfunded, our orchestras
lurch from crisis to rescue and back to crisis again, without achieving
long-term stability.
“Our orchestras are dysfunctional,” accuses a blunt Ed Wulfe, recently
re-elected president of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, traditionally
one of North America’s Top 10.
“The musicians have their own goals, management has its agenda and
so has the board. But our orchestras can only work if everybody is
playing on the same team.”
Ed Smith came to the same conclusion. When he accepted the Toronto
Symphony Orchestra’s managing directorship, the man who discovered
Simon Rattle found when he arrived in Canada an organization divided
in its goals and unable to work as a team. It took his subsequent
resignation to expose the depths of dysfunction.
That was only a few years ago. Today, according to the available
evidence, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra is a different organization
and Andrew Shaw credits the board chairmanship of former provincial
premier Bob Rae with bringing about much of the change.
“It was a matter of leadership,” Shaw recalls. “He pulled the
organization together and had people speaking to each other again. He
bought us time.”
He also helped recruit Shaw, himself a former orchestral player,
credited with turning the Royal Conservatory of Music’s publishing
arm, the Frederick Harris Music Co., into a profitable business,
as the orchestra’s new president and CEO.
“It was a real mess 3 1/2 years ago,” concedes Shaw. “Negative press,
negative attitudes inside and outside the organization. Our goal the
first year was just to be able to get to the end of the year and set
up a search committee to find a new music director.
“The second year we developed a market plan and set the stage for
the music director to make a statement. Some people thought it was
an impossible timeline, but we had to work quickly. Nobody is going
to give money to an abstraction.
“Engaging Peter Oundjian (as music director) was a bit of a risk,
but he has turned out to be a dream come true. He is so intelligent,
so aware of what needs to be done.”
The upshot? Over a three-year period, audiences have risen by 25 per
cent. There are now 25,000 subscribers and the orchestra sells 230,000
seats per season. More than 20,000 young people (aged 15 to 29) have
been recruited to the new “tsoundcheck” program alone, offering them
good seats over the Internet for only $10 a ticket. The price makes
going to the symphony competitive with a first-run movie.
Has all this put the Toronto Symphony Orchestra where it needs to be
to achieve long-term stability? Not yet.
Although its endowment, at about $20 million, stands second among
Canadian performing arts organizations to the Stratford Festival ? an
unprecedented figure for a Canadian orchestra ? this is still only a
fraction of what the major American orchestras have at their disposal.
He also wants to eliminate the accumulated deficit of $7 million. It’s
less than the Houston Symphony Orchestra’s $10 million, but Toronto’s
red ink flows from year to year. “We still have a $1-million structural
problem annually that has to be addressed,” Shaw admits.
`Our orchestras are dysfunctional.’
Ed Wulfe, president, Houston Symphony Orchestra
“So we are taking a page from the health services and universities. We
have to have an integrated approach to fundraising. And our operation
has become lean, if not mean.”
As Shaw and his colleagues have worked behind the scenes to improve
the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s bottom line, Oundjian has worked out
front to put a new face on what happens in and around Roy Thomson Hall.
Within a few weeks, he will have reached the end of his first full
season as music director, sometimes making music before full houses,
often speaking informally with his listeners to introduce the music
and soloists. The atmosphere is warmer in the hall than it has been
in many years.
“My opening season with the Toronto Symphony continues to be an
incredibly rewarding and fulfilling experience,” Oundjian says. “The
orchestra is filled with extraordinary musicians who continue to
share their love and passion for music with the audience.”
Some of those musicians are new and some have returned to the
orchestra in order to make music with him. Principal double bass Joel
Quarrington came back from Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra,
principal trumpet Andrew McCandless from the much richer Dallas
Symphony Orchestra. Winona Zelenka has made her mark as new principal
cellist and Teng Li has turned out to be a principal violist worthy
to follow in the distinguished footsteps of Steven Dann.
Orchestras sometimes fail to acknowledge the visual impact they make,
conditioning the way audiences listen. The Toronto Symphony has had
more than its share of apparent zombies over the years, particularly
in the string sections, but under Oundjian even some of the sitting
dead are beginning to look re-energized.
The strings are a symphony’s backbone and his credentials as former
first violinist of one of the world’s foremost chamber ensembles,
the Tokyo String Quartet, have given him the background and impetus
to improve the string sound.
His credentials as a conductor have been less impressive, since it is
only for the past several years that he has been waving a stick. The
performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony with which he opened the
season sounded more like a reading than an interpretation, and much
of the seasoning necessary to turn a talent into a maestro has yet
to take place.
The good news is that he and the orchestra seem mutually engaged. And
for a new music director to inaugurate a contemporary music festival
(New Creations) in his first season bodes well for his commitment to
revitalizing the repertory. All 11 of the works presented over three
programs were being heard in Toronto for the first time.
Talking conductors is a controversial issue. Even Leonard Bernstein
was raked over the critical coals for daring to converse with his
listeners. With his lightly English-accented voice (although born
in Toronto, he received most of his education in England), Oundjian
simply has a better knack than most of his colleagues for breaking
the ice verbally.
If there is starch in his collar, none of it is attitudinal. He
radiates friendliness from the stage and in these days of fierce
competition for the cultural dollar, symphony orchestras can use all
the friends they can get.
A radical? He is obviously not that. Balancing the New Creations
Festival was a Mozart Festival, just about the safest programming
imaginable. But as his quartet-playing years demonstrated, this
man knows his Mozart, and there isn’t a composer better suited to
cultivating refinement in an orchestra.
Mozart will return in 2005-06, along with New Creations. So will
some of the conductors around whose special talents the orchestra
is building a complementary support structure to balance Oundjian’s
12-week exposure. Former music directors Sir Andrew Davis and Gunther
Herbig continue to make welcome returns, along with Gianandrea Noseda
and Thomas Dausgaard.
It used to be said that the Toronto Symphony is a far better orchestra
than the world knows. That situation has not changed. Largely through
its Decca recordings and the tours flowing from them, the Montreal
Symphony has been the Canadian orchestra with an international profile.
Having lost its record contract and its truly distinguished music
director, Charles Dutoit, Montreal’s orchestra is now far more
debt-ridden and dysfunctional than its Ontario rival. Whether the
appearance of the high-profile Kent Nagano as music director in 2006
and the still-unfulfilled promise of a new concert hall will be the
catalysts for change remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, with sister orchestras in Calgary and Winnipeg in trouble,
and others across the country barely holding their deficits at bay,
the Canadian orchestral world is increasingly looking to Toronto as
a model for recovery.
“I don’t think a lot of orchestras got over the cutbacks of the early
’90s,” suggests Mike Forrester, Toronto’s vice-president for marketing
and development. “When they downsized, they lost marketing people
trained at a level to close the income gap.
“We have expanded our fundraising and we’ve targeted new audiences in
ethnic communities. We run ads in Cantonese and Mandarin newspapers
and work with the Russian and Korean communities. And we’ve lowered
the average age of our audience, with the help of our tsoundcheck
program and singles series. There is now such a thing as date night
with the Toronto Symphony. Who’d have thunk it?”
Who, indeed. Year One of the Age of Oundjian seems to be ending on
one of the highest notes the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has hit in
years. The struggle continues, but the smiles are returning to Roy
Thomson Hall.
Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

CONFERENCE ON 1600TH ANNIVERSARY OF ARMENIAN ALPHABET OPENED AT ARTSAKH STATE UNIVERSITY
STEPANAKERT, June 3. /ARKA/. A scientific-practical conference on the
occasion of the 1600th anniversary of the Armenian alphabet and of
foundation of the Amaras seminary has been opened at Artsakh State
University. Participating in the conference are scholars and public
figures from Nagorno Karabakh, Armenia, Russia, German, Holland and
the USA.
The conference participants intend to visit the Amaras monastery,
Martuni region, Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR), tomorrow.
RA Minister of Defense Serge Sargsyan attended the ceremonial opening
of the conference. P.T. -0–

2005 PERIOD OF CHALLENGES FOR ARMENIA’S BANKING SYSTEM: ARTUR JAVADYAN
YEREVAN, June 3. /ARKA/. The year 2005 will be a period of challenges,
as well as a year of introduction of new services and instruments, for
Armenia’s banking system, Vice-Chairman of the Central Bank of Armenia
(CBA) Artur Javadyan stated at an annual meeting of the Armeconombank.
He reported that banks forecast that their development in 2005 will
be marked by macroeconomic stability, low inflation, exchange rate
devaluation, high economic growth and improvement of the mortgage
sector. Javadyan stressed that the banks’ fund attraction policy
is chiefly based on the attraction of fixed deposits from resident
individuals and legal entities. The funds attracted by banks will
mostly be directed to industry, particularly to the food industry,
construction, trade, and consumer crediting – to mortgage. Javadyan
pointed out that stepped up competition in fund attraction last
year caused a rise in interest rates. “Competition will be stepped
up in 2005-2007 as well, and the same can be expected in crediting,
especially in the crediting of small and middle-sized businesses and
in consumer crediting,” he said. According to Javadyan, in 2005 banks
will be actively expanding their activities in Armenia’s regions,
and the establishment of branches will be an important factor in
competition. P.T. -0–

OSCE EXPRESSES WILLINGNESS TO ASSIST ARMENIAN PARLIAMENT NOT ONLY IN LAW ADOPTION, BUT ALSO IN THEIR APPLICATION
YEREVAN, June 3. /ARKA/. Armenian National Assembly Speaker Arthur
Baghdasaryan received Friday Christian Strohal, the Director of the
OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. According
to Armenian national Assembly’s Press Relations Department, at the
meeting, the sides discussed issues related to reformation process in
Armenia. Baghdasaryan pointed out effective cooperation with the OSCE
and its Yerevan office. As a result of this cooperation, Electoral
Code was amended and the adoption of the Law on Assemblies, Rallies,
Marches and Demonstrations is under way now, Baghdasaryan said. The
Speaker also presented the process of discussions over the Armenian
Constitution reformation. The sides stressed the necessity of close
cooperation with Venetian Commission.
Strohal emphasized the OSCE willingness to assist Armenian Parliament
not only in reforms implementation, but also in law application. M.V.
-0–

FRADKOV: RUSSIAN TROOPS TRANSFER FROM GEORGIA TO ARMENIA POSES NO THREAT TO AZERBAIJAN
YEREVAN, June 3. /ARKA/. Russian troops transfer from Georgia to
Armenia poses no threat to Azerbaijan, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail
Fradkov said. “We would not withdraw troops if there was no such a
fuss”, Fradkov said in Tbilisi. RUA Novosti reports quoting Fradkov
sa saying “we are moving troops away in accordance with schedule,
specifying details”. “I would like to say intimidation is irrelevant
in this matter”, the Russian PM said. M.V. -0–

TURKEY BANS MACEDONIAN NATIONAL FOOTBALL TEAM FROM FLYING TO ARMENIA
YEREVAN, June 3. /ARKA/. On Thursday evening, the Turkish authorities
prohibited an airplane carrying the Macedonian national football team
from flying to Armenia over Turkey. The team was going to Yerevan
to take part in a match of the 2006 World Championship scheduled for
Saturday. RIA Novostry reports that the plane, which was in Turkey’s
airspace a few dozen kilometers from Armenia’s border about half an
hour, had to fly back to Skopje. The Macedonia newspaper Utrenski
Vesnik reported that Ankara accounted for the incident by the fact
that the crew had no necessary documents for flying over Turkey.
Other Macedonian mass media suppose that the reason is the tension
between Armenia and Turkey. The Macedonian football association is
currently seeking an opportunity for transporting its national team
to Armenia in another way. P.T. -0–

Armenia to help Georgia improve living standards in ethnic region
Yerkir website
3 Jun 05
Yerevan. 3 June: Armenian Prime Minister Andranik Markaryan has met
Georgian Parliament Speaker Nino Burjanadze and Prime Minister Zurab
Noghaideli in Tbilisi.
The meeting discussed the socioeconomic situation in Javakhk [Georgia’s
Armenian-populated Javakheti region].
The Armenian prime minister said that with Georgia’s consent, Armenia
is ready to repair roads in Javakhk and improve the socioeconomic
situation in this region.
The Georgian officials accepted Armenia’s offer with pleasure.

EVENT DEDICATED TO WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY TO BE HELD IN UN OFFICE IN ARMENIA ON JUNE 6
YEREVAN, June 3. /ARKA/. An Event Dedicated To World Environment Day
Will Be Held In UN Office In Armenia On June 6. According To United
Nations Department For Public Information (UNDPI), Presentation Of
Books Published By The Association For Sustainable Human Development
And Environmental Academy NGO Will Be Held During The Event. The Books
Are On Problems Of Sustainable Development, Biological Security And
Environmental Education.
Also, Discussions Are Planned On The Pressing Environmental Problems,
In Particular, Preservation Of Shirak National Park, Rich A Unique
Biological Variety Of Which Currently Faces Extermination.
The Event Is Organized By Association For Sustainable Human Development
And The National Committee Of United Nations Environmental Program
(UNEP) With The Assistance Of UNDP And Kavkaz Regional Environmental
Centre. L.V.-0–