Month: June 2005

Anatolian Times, Turkey
June 26 2005
“Armenian Atrocity” Exhibition Opens In Germany
BREMEN – “Armenian Atrocity Exhibition“ has opened in Bremen,
Germany on Saturday as a result of initiatives of several Turkish
non-governmental organizations.
Visitors observed a minute of silence in memory of Turkish people who
were massacred by Armenian gangs during the era of the Ottoman
Empire.
There are many documents and photographs in the exhibition: “The
Other Side of the Coin“ showing Armenian atrocity against Turkish
civilians.
Turkish Consul General in Hannover Birgen Kesoglu said, “the events
in 1915 caused bitter grief among both Turkish and Armenian peoples.
Republic of Turkey has nothing to be ashamed of in its history.
Documents and photographs in this exhibition are the proofs of that.
Unfortunately, the Armenian diaspora has been trying to deceive the
world public opinion with its baseless allegations.“
The exhibition will remain open till June 30th.
A panel discussion will be held during the exhibition on so-called
Armenian genocide.
Meanwhile, a demonstration will take place in Bremen on July 2nd to
protest allegations about so-called Armenian genocide.

Anatolian Times, Turkey
Turkish Press
June 26 2005
F.M. Gul Offers His Condolences To Wife Of Taschji

ANKARA – Turkish Foreign Minister & Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah
Gul sent a message to Mary Taschji and offered his condolences upon
demise of Edward Taschji, an Armenian friend of Turkey.
In his message, Gul said, ”the relentless efforts and extensive
contribution of Mr. Taschji in bringing about a better understanding
between the Turkish and Armenian peoples will always be remembered
and appreciated.”
”His courage and dedication to this cause was an inspiration for the
Turkish Americans. His lifetime contribution to the efforts of the
associations founded by the Turkish-Americans as well as for the
enhancement of Turkish-American relations will also be reminisced
dearly,” he added.
Taschji, who defended Turkish thesis against allegations about
so-called Armenian genocide, passed away in New York on June 22nd.
He was responsible for public affairs at the Federation of
Turkish-American Associations for the last 20 years.

Mehr News Agency, Iran
June 26 2005
World Christians to commemorate apostle at Iran’s St. Thaddeus Church
TEHRAN, June 26 (MNA) — Christians from all over the world will
gather at Iran’s Saint Thaddeus Church on July 1 for their annual
commemoration of the martyrdom anniversary of St. Thaddeus.
The St. Thaddaeus Church, also known as the Black Church (Ghara
Kelisa), is probably Iran’s most interesting and notable Christian
monument, located near the Chalderan region in Maku, West Azarbaijan.
One of the 12 disciples, St. Thaddaeus, also known as St. Jude, (not
to be confused with Judas Iscariot), was martyred while spreading the
Gospel. He is revered as an apostle of the Armenian Church. As legend
has it, a church dedicated to him was first built on the present site
in 68 CE.
Nothing appears to remain of this original church, which was
extensively rebuilt in the 13th century, but some sections around the
altar may date to the 10th century. Most of the present structure
dates to the 17th century and is of carved sandstone. The oldest
sections are made of black and white stone.
The Apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew traveled through Armenia in 45
CE to preach the word of God. Many people were converted and numerous
secret Christian communities were established there.
Around that time, Abgar died after ruling for 38 years and the
Armenian kingdom was split into two parts. His son Ananun crowned
himself in Edessa, while his nephew Sanatruk ruled in Greater
Armenia. About 66 CE, Ananun gave the order to kill St. Thaddeus in
Edessa. The king’s daughter Sandokht, who had converted to
Christianity, was martyred with Thaddeus. Her tomb is located near
the St. Thaddeus Church.
The church is surrounded by thick walls which form the outer ramparts
of some abandoned monastery buildings.
Only Christians will be allowed to visit the church during the
ceremony.

New York Daily News
June 26 2005
Sleeping with the enemy?

Movies, books & plays use love affairs to probe
the conflict between Islam and the West

BY CELIA MCGEE

Simon Abkarian and Joan Allen in ‘Yes.’

As far as conspiracy theories go, the idea that a racist Buckingham
Palace ordered a hit on Princess Diana and her Muslim lover in a
Paris traffic tunnel eight years ago was one of the wilder ones.
But if moviemakers, writers and big-budget musical teams are to be
believed, since 9/11 little is fair in love and war when it comes to
the romantic meeting of the Middle East and West.
With the opening this weekend of “Yes,” written and directed by Sally
Potter (“Orlando”), the entertainment industry is beginning to deal
with the difficult subject of love affairs between Muslims and
non-Muslims in the light of recent world events.
“To some extent love stories with obstacles like the ones in ‘Yes’
have been around at least as long as ‘Romeo and Juliet,'” Potter says
of her movie, which is about a passionate entanglement between an
Irish-American scientist (Joan Allen) and the refugee Lebanese
surgeon (Simon Abkarian) she meets in London, where he has been
forced into a hotel kitchen job.
But, Potter believes, the World Trade Center attacks intensified
feelings on both sides about crossing boundaries of faith and ethnic
background. She set out to make a movie that tackled a lot that has
gone on since then.
“There was so much hate in the air after Sept. 11, with Americans
portrayed as the big baddies and people from the Middle East as
mysterious demons,” she says. “I wanted to set a cross-cultural love
story against it.”
Potter is not alone. This weekend also sees the U.S. release of the
French movie “Lila Says,” in which the lovebirds are a North African
teenager and a French girl of Polish descent living with her devoutly
Catholic and seriously twisted “aunt.” Based on a 1996 literary hit,
the story’s been updated with searing references to post-9/11
tensions.
November will bring Ken Loach’s “Ae Fond Kiss,” which shows a Muslim
deejay and a Scottish piano teacher in Glasgow encountering prejudice
of all stripes when they fall in love.
To be published next month, “Desertion,” a semi-autobiographical
novel by the Booker Prize-shortlisted Abdulrazak Gurnah, should also
draw attention. It reveals how a tragic love story about an
Englishman and a local Muslim beauty in 19th-century Kenya sets the
stage for heartache in modern times.
And playwright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton is adapting the
best-selling “The White Mughal” as a musical extravaganza that’s
conscious, he has said, of today’s global atmosphere. The book is the
true tale of an 18th-century official with England’s East India
Company who converted to Islam to marry an Indian princess descended
from the prophet Muhammad.
Movies like Potter’s, says Richard Peña, program director of the Film
Society of Lincoln Center, are being made in a climate where “Arabs
have become the ultimate ‘other.’ So the question has become what
happens when one gets involved in a romantic relationship with that
‘other,’ and what does one really know about them. Is it a matter of
‘sleeping with the enemy’?”
Allen says she tried to reflect such questions in her “Yes”
performance.
“I learned about a culture that wasn’t very familiar to me,” she
says, “and my eyes were really opened. One of the crucial messages
for me was the depth of our climate of suspicion and intolerance and
threat.”
LOVE PIONEERS CHANGE
She says she has been especially moved by audiences’ warm responses
to the movie and how “it leaves people in tears. I’m scared about
what’s going on in our government right now – any dialogue has been
shut down, and dialogue is quintessentially American. This movie
should help start it up again.”
To play her sad and angry Lebanese lover, Abkarian, an Armenian
Christian, partly drew on childhood memories of when his family
briefly lived in Lebanon.
But he was also working with the way he has often found himself
unfavorably stereotyped in Europe and the U.S.
“We need to teach people that being one thing is not better than
another,” he says, “that we all need to coexist. I would end my days
if I didn’t believe we can meet in love and mutual respect.”
To that end, Potter says she fought against high odds to get “Yes”
made. Funding was hard to come by, the invasion of Iraq meant she
could no longer shoot scenes in Beirut, and new State Department
restrictions suddenly prevented Allen from filming in Cuba, another
important plot location.
“I do still believe that love can overcome hatred,” Potter says.
“Love – and hope – is the engine that pioneers change for the
better.”

Associated Press Worldstream
June 25, 2005 Saturday 8:01 AM Eastern Time
INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Europe; Britian; Scandinavia; Middle East; Africa; India; Asia; England
Azerbaijan’s president says higher defense spending linked to
relocation of Russian weapons
BAKU, Azerbaijan
President Ilham Aliev said Saturday that the ex-Soviet Caspian Sea
nation was increasing its defense spending in response to the
relocation of Russian weapons from Georgia to Azerbaijan’s rival,
Armenia.
Even though Moscow said weapons would remain under Russian military
control and would not be turned over to Armenia, the redeployment
“requires adequate steps,” Aliev said in a speech before military
school graduates.
“We have undertaken such steps, having increased our military
spending, which will continue to grow in the future,” Aliev said. He
said Azerbaijan’s military spending was set to increase from US$175
million in 2004 to US$300 million this year.
“Our army is the strongest in the Southern Caucasus,” Aliev said. “We
have achieved superiority and will continue to strengthen it.”
Azerbaijan is locked in a tense dispute with neighboring Armenia over
the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. The mountainous region inside
Azerbaijan has been under the control of ethnic Armenians since the
early 1990s, following fighting that killed an estimated 30,000
people.
A cease-fire was signed in 1994, but the enclave’s final political
status has not been determined and shooting breaks out frequently
between the two sides, which face off across a demilitarized buffer
zone.
Russia said it had redeploy the weaponry to Armenia under pressure to
speed up its military withdrawal from Georgia. Despite Russian
assurances that the move wouldn’t destabilize the region, Azerbaijan
has remained strongly critical of the relocation.
Aliev also said Saturday that Azerbaijan will also work to strengthen
its relations with NATO.
Azerbaijan has taken part in NATO’s Partnership for Peace program and
it has presented a plan that would further foster cooperation with
the alliance, “bringing Azerbaijan-NATO relations to a new level,”
Aliev said.

The Advertiser, Australia
June 25, 2005 Saturday
A child is torn
by Katharine England
THIS year’s winner of the Orange Prize (for fiction written in
English by a woman) is chilling, challenging and utterly compelling.
Written by London/New York journalist and novelist Lionel Shriver, We
Have to Talk About Kevin (Serpent’s Tail, $22.95) debates the ethos
behind the rash of high-school massacres that have overtaken the U.S.
in the past couple of decades.
The novel takes the form of a series of letters from Eva
Khatchadourian to her estranged husband. It is almost two years since
their son slaughtered seven of his schoolmates, a popular English
teacher and a cafeteria worker in a meticulously organised bloodbath
timed to occur a few days before his 16th birthday, with all its
adult legal implications.
While it is never in doubt who is to blame for the atrocity, his
mother feels a desperate need to work out who is to blame for the boy
who could commit it.
Her letters to Franklin Plaskett take a scalpel to their contented
marriage and to their decision to have a child.
Eva is consciously of immigrant stock, proud of her Armenian heritage
and fully briefed on a history of suffering and genocide.
Her attitude to her middle-America homeland is far more equivocal, so
that she marvels at falling for a down-home Norman Rockwell clone
with his own cosily idealised image of the country he inhabits.
Eva’s feelings about motherhood – and about tampering with what she
already has in such fullness – are deeply ambivalent, and Kevin is
conceived after a night of high anxiety as a talisman against the
loss of Franklin. Almost immediately, Eva feels invaded and nothing
improves when the baby is born.
Kevin is an angry, unresponsive infant; Eva suffers from postnatal
depression, antipathy and jealousy at what seems to be a far more
satisfying relationship between Franklin and their son.
Eva reveals in searing detail the feelings and fears she had
previously kept buried. As Kevin grows, apparently uninterested in
the world, refusing toilet-training until he is over six, getting his
few rewards from mimicking and manipulating his parents, Eva takes
refuge in education, parading numbers, letters, facts before the
resistant child who learns as he eats – secretly, so that none but he
shall garner the least satisfaction.
Eva also schools Kevin in her prejudices, which he astutely
assimilates and will use against her indefinitely.
Shriver is uncomfortably brilliant at conveying the consciously
superior anti-American/anti-homeland repudiation of mass-market
culture that she admits to sharing and which readers like myself,
proud of our acuity and interesting, well-developed tastes will
guiltily recognise.
Meanwhile, Franklin pours his hokey all-American dad-speak into
Kevin’s other ear, and propels the boy chummily around folk museums
and Civil War battlefields. The reader cringes at both, and can’t
stop reading.
Eva’s letters are long, dense, beautifully written and cunningly,
suspensefully structured. They combine family history with the
fallout from Kevin’s monstrous act and with his present life in the
juvenile detention centre where his mother faithfully, hopelessly,
questioningly visits him.
They take us in cool, gut-wrenching detail through the massacre and
on to devastating information we have failed to intuit on our way
through the book, and they make us look at ourselves and our society
from an angle we may not have occupied before. This is a shocking,
moving, wise book and one that should be read for all those other
young people who experience life, consciously or unconsciously, as a
spiritual vacuum, who, like Kevin, feel that “the glorified loitering
that passes for a fruitful existence” is simply inane.

AZERI AND ARMENIAN FMs MEET IN BRUSSELS
YEREVAN, JUNE 25. ARMINFO. The Armenian and Azeri FMs have met in
Brussels in the framework of the international conference on Iraq,
TURAN reports Azeri FM Elmar Mamedyarov as saying.
Mamedyarov says that his meeting with Vardan Oskanyan lasted for
several hours and they discussed “the elements of the agreements
reached by the Armenian and Azeri presidents in Warsaw.
Mamedyarov says that in Warsaw the presidents determined several
settlement principles and there is some closing of positions on two
oness. He does not specify which principles he means.
ARMINFO has failed to receive any comments from the Armenian Foreign
Ministry concerning the Brussels FM meeting.

AZERBAIJAN NEEDS ROAD OF COMMON USE MORE THAN ARMENIA DOES
YEREVAN, JUNE 25. ARMINFO. The Azerbaijan-proposed project to lay a
road of common use between Azerbaijan and Armenia via Karabakh and
Nakhichevan is more necessary to Baku than Yerevan, says Armenia’s
Transport and Communication Minister Andranik Manukyan.
Manukyan advocates the development of transport infrastructures by
neighbor countries for people to be able to freely move. But
Azerbaijan’s proposal is of political nature while there are no
appropriate conditions for its fulfillment yet.
To remind, while commenting on the Armenian-Azeri presidential
meeting in Paris June 17 Azeri Deputy FM Araz Azimov said that
Azerbaijan was waiting for Armenia’s response to its proposal for
opening an Azeri-Armenian road via Karabakh and Nakhichevan. Azimov
said that communications are one of the key issues in the Karabakh
peace process and is crucial for the restoration of normal life in
the region. Armenia’s FM responded that there is no such issue on the
agenda of the Karabakh peace talks for the time being.

GeorgianSoccer.com, Georgia
June 25 2005
European Cups Draws

The draws for the Champions League and UEFA Cup qualifying rounds
were made in Switzerland on Friday. Champions Dinamo Tbilisi will
face the Estonian side Levadia Tallinn. The first leg will take place
in Estonia on either the 12/13th July with the return in Tbilisi a
week later. If Dinamo sucessfully defeats Levadia they will meet
Danish Champions Brondby in the 2nd qualifying round.
“All of the possible opponents for FC Dinamo in the first qualifying
round of the UCL were practically of the same strength. Thus we knew
the level of the club we would face in the preliminary round. Title
holders of Estonian championship can not be weak. Chances for
elimination from the tournament are equal for both teams. However we
promise to take any possible efforts to overcome Baltic barrier. Time
before the first leg match is enough for thorough preparation.” –
commented Dinamo head coach Kakhaber Tskhadadze.
In the UEFA Cup Torpedo Kutaisi were paired with Belarussian side
BATE Borisov. Dinamo Tbilisi faced BATE last season in the UEFA Cup
and defeated them 4-2 over two legs. Torpedo will play at home in the
first leg on 14th July with the return two weeks later in Belarus.
Lokomotivi Tbilisi were paired with Armenian side Banants Yerevan.
Lokomotivi will be in Armenia for the first leg.
Champions League
Levadia Tallinn (Estonia) vs Dinamo Tbilisi
(1st leg 12/13 July, 2nd leg 19/20 July)
Winners will face Brondby
UEFA Cup:
Banants Yerevan (Armenia) vs Lokomotivi Tbilisi
Torpedo Kutaisi vs BATE Borisov (Belarus)
(1st leg 14th July, 2nd leg 28th July)

Agence France Presse — English
June 25, 2005 Saturday 3:02 PM GMT
Opposition protests in Azerbaijan’s capital
BAKU June 25
About 1,500 supporters of Azerbaijan’s opposition joined a
demonstration in the capital Baku on Saturday to demand that
parliamentary elections planned for November will be free and fair.
The demonstrators, who represented some of Azerbaijan’s smaller but
more radical opposition groups, chanted “resign” to the ruling
government of President Ilham Aliyev.
Protestors threatened to launch permanent street protests if a list
of demands — including halving the 11,000-dollar registration fee
required for candidates to participate — is not fulfilled within a
month.
“The authorities must carry out democratic reforms or they will force
us to stage a revolution, in accordance with the constitution,” said
Iskander Gamidov, the leader of Azerbaijan’s National Democratic
Party, and a former political prisoner.
Protesters also demanded that authorities reverse their policy of
negotiations in relation to the separatist Nagorno Karabakh region,
which Azerbaijan lost to Armenian forces in an early 1990s war.
“We must go to war to liberate our lands and return them at the cost
of blood and the loss of life,” Gamidov said through a loudspeaker.
Public gatherings such as this one had been prevented from taking
place by the regime since contested presidential elections in 2003
ended in rioting in which two people died. Azerbaijan recently lifted
the unofficial ban on protests under Western pressure.
Earlier attempts at holding opposition rallies were violently quashed
by the police, notably in May when scores of protestors were beaten
and arrested after trying to march in central Baku.
Human rights observers have accused Aliyev’s government of using mass
arrests, as well as torture, to quell opposition.