Month: November 2006

RUSSIA STEPS UP ECONOMIC PRESENCE IN ARMENIA
Emil Danielyan
EurasiaNet, NY
Nov 16 2006
Russia is boosting its economic presence in Armenia, and recent
acquisitions are raising new questions about the nature of Yerevan’s
close relationship with Moscow. Armenian President Robert Kocharian’s
administration is downplaying domestic opposition claims that Russia’s
growing economic presence poses a threat to Yerevan’s sovereignty.
“I don’t consider [these developments] dangerous,” Defense
Minister Serzh Sarkisian, who also co-chairs a Russian-Armenian
intergovernmental commission on economic cooperation, told reporters
on November 6. “Because I have still not seen the Russian side use
its economic levers in Armenia [for political aims.]”
Reports that Russia’s state-run Gazprom monopoly will raise its stake
in ArmRosGazprom (ARG), a Russian-Armenian joint venture running
Armenia’s gas infrastructure, from 45 percent to 58 percent were
confirmed by Kocharian during his latest visit to Moscow. The ARG
chief executive, Karen Karapetian, explained in late October that the
deal involves the circulation of $118 million worth of new ARG shares,
all of which will be bought by Gazprom.
The Armenian government has until now also possessed 45 percent stake
in ARG, with the remaining 10 percent controlled by the private Russian
energy firm, ITERA. The increase in the Armenian gas distributor’s
charter capital will dilute the government’s share to just over 30
percent. Karapetian confirmed that it is part of a complex April 2006
agreement that allowed Armenia to avoid a doubling of the price of
Russian gas to $110 million until January 2009. In return, authorities
in Yerevan controversially agreed to hand over more energy assets
to Gazprom. Those included the incomplete fifth unit of Armenia’s
largest thermal power plant located in the central town of Hrazdan.
Armenian officials have indicated in recent weeks that the April deal
also allows the Russian conglomerate to gain control of a gas pipeline
from neighboring Iran, currently under construction. Prime Minister
Andranik Markarian told reporters in late October that the pipeline,
whose first Armenian section is slated for completion this winter,
will likely be incorporated into ARG, arguing that “it would be
illogical to have two gas distribution networks in Armenia.”
All this will give the Russians a near total control over the Armenian
energy sector. Gazprom is currently Armenia’s sole gas supplier,
and already owns the four other operating units of the Hrazdan
plant. Another state-run Russian company, the RAO Unified Energy
Systems (UES) utility, owns a cascade of hydro-electric plants north
of Yerevan and manages the finances of the nuclear power plant at
Metsamor. As recently as September 26, UES formalized its $73 million
takeover of Armenia’s electricity distribution network. [For background
see the Eurasia Insight archive].
Receiving Kocharian in the Kremlin on October 30, Russian President
Vladimir Putin bluntly described as “shameful” the fact that his
country is only the third largest investor in the Armenian economy.
Three days later, a leading Russian mobile phone operator,
Vimpel-Communications, announced the purchase of a 90 percent share
in Armenia’s national telecommunications company, ArmenTel, from
the Greek firm OTE. Armenian state regulators gave the green light
to the deal on November 14. “Putin has no reason to be unhappy,”
commented the Yerevan newspaper 168 Zham. “His country has received
80 percent of the energy sector, the backbone of the Armenian economy,
and many other facilities as gifts from its strategic partner.”
Interestingly, the latest Russian takeovers come amid Yerevan’s
continuing efforts to forge closer political and security links with
the West. Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian was in Brussels
on November 14 to sign a detailed plan of actions stemming from the
European Union’s European Neighborhood Policy program that entitle
Armenia to a privileged relationship with the economic bloc. A day
earlier, Sarkisian flew to Iraq on a visit aimed at showing support
for a small contingent of Armenian troops stationed there. Analysts
believe the influential defense chief, widely seen as a Kocharian
successor, is thereby trying to enhance his pro-Western credentials.
Economic dealings with Russia are one of the least transparent areas of
governance in Armenia, with Kocharian and Sarkisian believed to make
all key decisions without outside input. Both men have repeatedly
stated that the controversial deals cut with Moscow are purely
commercial, infusing the Armenian economy with badly needed capital
investments. But Armenian opposition leaders and many local analysts
claim that their main motive is to ensure the Kremlin’s support
for their continued hold on power. Hmayak Hovannisian, a maverick
parliamentarian sympathetic to Russia, insisted on November 6 that
the Kocharian-Sarkisian duo has served as the catalyst for the deals.
“The Russians have a good proverb: Accept what you are given, run
when you are beaten. If the Armenian authorities are ready to easily
present strategic facilities, why should Russia refuse to accept
them?” Hovannisian told a roundtable discussion in Yerevan.
Whatever the real motives of its two top leaders, Armenia is beginning
to face the possibility of disruptions in Russian gas supplies as a
result of the festering confrontation between Russia and neighboring
Georgia. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. Adding a
new twist to the standoff are Gazprom’s threats to drastically raise
the price of its gas for Georgia from $110 to $230 per thousand cubic
meters unless the pro-Western government in Tbilisi follows Yerevan’s
example and cedes some of its own energy assets, notably the sole
gas pipeline running from Russia to Armenia.
[For details, see the Eurasia Insight archive].
“If no agreement on gas deliveries is signed with Georgia [before the
end of this year], gas will be delivered through Georgian territory
to Armenia only,” the Russian ITAR-TASS news agency quoted Gazprom
Deputy Chairman Aleksandr Medvedyev as saying November 7.
There are mounting fears in Yerevan that Georgia could retaliate
against what its leaders have denounced as “political blackmail”
by siphoning off the gas intended for Armenia and thus forcing the
Russians to stop the supplies altogether. It is also unclear what
the gas price will be for Armenia from January 2009, when nothing
will prevent Gazprom from charging Yerevan as much as it seeks from
Tbilisi. The asset handover to Russia may thus have brought only
temporary relief to Armenian consumers.
Editor’s Note: Emil Danielyan is a Yerevan-based journalist and
political analyst.

TURKEY: SHARPSHOOTERS AND SECURITY CAMERAS FOR POPE’S ISTANBUL VISIT
AKI, Italy
Nov 16 2006
Istanbul, 16 Nov. (AKI) – Authorities in Istanbul say they will deploy
police sharpshooters on rooftops and install closed circuit television
surveillance cameras during Pope Benedict XVI’s scheduled visit to the
city on 30 November, part of his historic visit to Turkey. Benedict
will celebrate the feast of Saint Andrew with the Ecumenical Patriarch
of Constantinople Bartholomew I and the Armenian patriarch, Mesrob II –
the two leaders of Turkey’s tiny Christian community.
The pope will stay at a church residence near the Cathedral of the
Holy Spirit and authorities say that police will carry out checks on
people moving in and around the vicinity of the building.
While people will be able to protest against the pope’s visit –
a possibility since Benedict angered many Muslims with comments he
made on Islam in September – such gatherings will only be allowed at
places determined by the police.
Police will also monitor groups suspected to be hostile to the pope,
such as an ultra-nationalist lawyer’s group behind a series of court
cases against intellectuals, including new Nobel Literature Prize
winner Orhan Pamuk, for saying that the Muslim Ottoman authorities
planned genocide against Christian Armenians in the early 20th century.
A total of 4,000 police will be tasked with protecting the pope and
wellwishers during the Istanbul leg of the visit, Benedict’s first
to an overwhelmingly Muslim populated country since becoming pope in
April last year.

SECULARISM IN TURKEY MEANS GOVERNMENT CONTROLS ALL RELIGIONS
By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service
Nov 16 2006
ROME (CNS) — Turkey’s unique brand of secularism is not separation
of religion and state, but rather government control of religion,
impacting both the Muslim majority and religious minorities.
The government builds and funds mosques, employs Muslim prayer
leaders, controls religious education and bans Muslim women and men
from wearing certain head coverings in public offices and universities.
The Turkish Constitution guarantees the religious freedom of all the
country’s residents, and a 1923 treaty guarantees that religious
minorities will be allowed to found and operate religious and
charitable institutions.
Secularists in Turkey see control of religion as the only way to
guarantee Islam will not overpower the secularism of the state and
its institutions.
However, the fact that the constitution and Turkish law do not
recognize minority religious communities as legal entities has severely
limited their ability to own property, and laws restricting private
religious higher education have made it almost impossible for them
to operate seminaries and schools of theology.
Pope Benedict XVI is expected to address the need for a broader
understanding of the religious freedom guarantees during his Nov.
28-Dec. 1 visit to Turkey.
Otmar Oehring, head of the human rights office of Missio, the German
Catholic aid and development agency, said that when the Republic of
Turkey was founded in 1923 the Department of Religious Affairs was
established “to crush Islam and replace it with Turkish nationalism,
which was seen as the only way to promote the modernization and
development of Turkey.”
“But it is clear that you cannot take religion away from a religious
country,” Oehring said in a Nov. 15 telephone interview from Aachen,
Germany. “Turks are not fundamentalists and radicals, but they
are pious.”
Oehring lived in Turkey until he was 16, and he wrote his doctoral
thesis on ideological tensions within the country.
Once multiparty democracy was established in Turkey in the 1950s, he
said, the Religious Affairs Department started opening more mosques
and training and hiring more imams.
Although the effort to crush Islam was set aside, a conviction that
religion had to be controlled was not, he said.
“The state controls and organizes a state brand of Islam,” he said.
Particularly as Turkey’s human rights record is examined as part of
its bid to enter the European Union, “many say religious freedom in
Turkey would be dangerous” because of a perceived threat of Islamic
fundamentalism, Oehring said.
“However, I argue that under international human rights agreements
people must be given full religious freedom, but the state can take
action against those who pose a danger for public safety or the state,”
he said.
As far as religious rights go, “in Turkey they first say ‘no,’ then
try to see how they can make it work. We say ‘yes,’ then work to
prevent abuses,” Oehring said.
While Turkish Muslims live their faith under government control,
minority religious communities operate under government restrictions,
and minorities often face discrimination in education and employment,
he said.
“If you are a Turkish citizen of Turkish origin, with a Turkish name
and you are a Sunni Muslim, you will have no problems,” Oehring said.
“But if you are Catholic — or worse, Greek Orthodox with a Greek name
— you are considered a foreigner, even if you are a Turkish citizen.”
One of the most difficult issues Christians, Jews and other religious
minorities are facing is their lack of recognition under Turkish law,
particularly as it applies to their ability to acquire and own property
for churches or synagogues, schools and hospitals, he said.
Running seminaries is evening more difficult, Oehring said.
“In 1971, the government decided there would be no more private
religious schools offering higher education,” so the Greek and
Armenian Orthodox seminaries were closed, he said. The Jewish community
already was sending its rabbinical students abroad, and the Latin-rite
Catholic seminary remained open since it was housed in the compound
of the French consulate in Istanbul.
“The Muslim schools had already been closed in 1924 and were reopened
as government-run high schools or faculties of divinity in Turkish
universities,” so the state controlled what the students learned,
he said.
While many people recognize the continued closure of the seminaries
as a problem, he said, “the Kemalists and secularists say if you give
Christians the possibility of opening schools, Islamic schools not
under state control also would have a right to open.”
In early November, under pressure from the European Union, the
Turkish Parliament passed a “religious foundations law” ordering
the state to return property it owns that had been confiscated from
religious communities. As of Nov. 15, the legislation had not been
signed into law.
“A lot of church people prefer that this not become law because then
the government can say it did what it was asked to do and nothing
will change for another 20 years,” Oehring said.
The biggest problem with the law, he said, is that it applies only to
confiscated property still owned by the state, but it does not address
the issue of compensation for confiscated property subsequently sold
by the government.
ies/cns/0606536.htm

PUTTING PAIN TO WORK
by Paul Brand and Philip Yancey
Christianity Today, IL
Nov 16 2006
Healthy bodies know how to make use of pain. A healthy church does too.
I admit, a professional career devoted to people with leprosy, whose
main defect is an absence of pain, has biased me on the subject. And
yet numbness, too, is a form of suffering. In the case of leprosy
patients it can lead to a life of acute suffering.
When I reflect on pain I prefer not to think in a detached way of
a hypothetical sum of the world’s suffering; instead I focus on one
individual with a face and body. At such moments my mind often flashes
back to the refined, upper-caste features of my friend Sadagopan,
whom we called Sadan. Readers of Fearfully and Wonderfully Made know
him as the forbearing subject of my early experiments with proper
footwear for leprosy patients.
When Sadan first came to Vellore, his feet had shrunk to half their
normal length and his fingers were shortened and paralyzed. It
took us nearly two years of unflagging effort to stop the pattern
of destruction in his feet. Meanwhile we began reconstructing
his hands, a finger at a time, attaching the most useful tendons
to the most useful digits and retraining his mind to control the
new set of connections. In all, Sadan spent four years with me in
rehabilitation. He personified the soft-spoken, gentle Indian spirit.
Together, we wept at our failures and rejoiced at the gradual
successes. I came to love Sadan as a dear friend.
At last Sadan decided he should return home to his family in Madras
for a trial weekend. He had come to us with badly ulcerated hands and
feet. Now his hands were more flexible, and with a specially designed
rocker type shoe he could walk without damage. “I want to go back to
where I was rejected before,” he said proudly, referring to the cafes
that had turned him away and the buses that had denied him service.
“Now that I am not so deformed I want to try my way in the great city
of Madras.”
Before Sadan left, we reviewed all the dangers he might encounter.
Since he had no warning system of pain, any sharp or hot object
could harm him. Having learned to care for himself in our hospital
and workshop, he felt confident. He boarded a train to Madras.
On Saturday night, after an exuberant reunion dinner with his family,
Sadan went to his old room where he had not slept for four years. He
lay down on the woven pallet on the floor and drifted off to sleep
in great peace and contentment. At last he was home, fully accepted
once again.
The next morning when Sadan awoke and examined himself, as he had
been trained to do at the hospital, he recoiled in horror. Part of
the back of his left index finger was mangled. He knew the culprit
because he had seen many such injuries on other patients. Evidence was
clear: telltale drops of blood, marks in the dust, and, of course,
the decimated clump of tendon and flesh that had been so carefully
reconstructed some months before. A rat had visited him during the
night and gnawed his finger.
Immediately he thought, What will Dr. Brand say? All that day he
agonized. He considered coming back to Vellore early, but finally
decided he must keep his promise to stay the weekend. He looked in
vain for a rat trap to protect him that last night at home-shops
were closed for a festival. He concluded he must stay awake to guard
against further injury.
(To prevent such tragedies, we later tried to maintain a rule at the
hospital: all released patients must take a cat home to protect them
from rats during the night.)
All Sunday night Sadan sat cross-legged on his pallet, his back
against the wall, studying an accounting book by the light of a
kerosene lantern. About four o’clock in the morning the subject grew
dull and his eyes felt heavy and he could no longer fight off sleep.
The book fell forward onto his knees and his hand slid over to one
side against the hot glass of the hurricane lamp.
When Sadan awoke the next morning he saw instantly that a large patch
of skin had burned off the back of his right hand. He sat trembling
in bed, despair growing like a tumor inside him, and stared at his
two hands-one gnawed by a rat, the other melted down to the tendons.
He had learned the dangers and difficulties of leprosy, in fact had
taught them to others. Now he was devastated by the sight of his two
damaged hands. Again he thought, How can I face Dr. Brand, who worked
so hard on these hands?
Sadan returned to Vellore that day with both hands swathed in
bandages. When he met me and I began to unroll the bandages, he wept.
I must confess that I wept with him. As he poured out his misery
to me, he said, “I feel as if I’ve lost all my freedom.” And then,
a question that has stayed with me, “How can I be free without pain?”
As I turn from the network of pain in biology to its analogy in the
Body of Christ, comprising all believers, again I am struck by the
importance of such a communicative system. Pain serves as vital a
role in protecting and uniting that corporate membership as it does
in guarding the cells of my own body.
Deep emotional connections link human beings as certainly as
dendrites link cells in our bodies, evident even in such relative
trivialities as sporting events. Watch the face of a wife sitting in
the stands at Wimbledon as her husband plays in the championship tennis
match. Strands of concern and affection unite them so intensely that
every on-court success or failure can be read on the wife’s face. She
winces at every missed shot and smiles at each minor triumph. What
affects him affects her. Or, visit a Jewish household in Miami,
San Francisco, or Chicago around election time in Israel.
Many Jews know more about the campaign ten thousand miles away than
about their local elections. An invisible web, a plexus of human
connections, links them with a tiny nation of strangers far away.
Or, recall the effect on a nation when a great leader dies. I
experienced the unifying effect of pain most profoundly in 1963 when
I came to the United States to address the student chapel at Stanford
University. As it happened, the chapel service occurred just two days
after the assassination of President John Kennedy. I spoke on pain that
day, for I could read nothing but pain on the faces of hundreds of
students jammed into that building. I described for them scenes from
around the world, where I knew clusters of people would be gathering
together in prayer and mourning to share the pain of a grieving
nation. I have never felt such unity of spirit in a worship service.
Something like those sympathetic connections should link us to members
of Christ’s Body all over the globe. When South Africa jails courageous
black Christians, when a government systematically destroys the church
in Cambodia, when Central American death squads murder Christians,
when Muslims drive a person from town for the crime of converting,
when more of my neighbors lose their jobs, a part of my Body suffers
and I should sense the loss. Pain also comes to our attention in
whispered signals of loneliness, despair, discrimination, physical
suffering, self-hatred.
“How can a man who is warm understand one who is cold?” asks Alexander
Solzhenitsyn as he tries to fathom the apathy toward millions of Gulag
inmates. In response, he has devoted his life to perform the work of a
“nerve cell,” alerting us to pain we may have overlooked. In a Body
composed of millions of cells, the comfortable ones must consciously
attend to the messages of pain. We must develop a lower threshold
of pain by listening, truly listening, to those who suffer. The word
compassion itself comes from Latin words cum and pati, together meaning
“to suffer with.”
Today our world has shrunk, and as a Body we live in awareness of
all cells: persecuted Russian believers, starving Africans, oppressed
South Africans and Indochinese and Central Americans … the litany
fills our newspapers. Do we fully attend? Do we hear their cries as
unmistakably as our brains hear the complaints of a strained back
or broken arm? Or do we instead turn down the volume, filtering out
annoying sounds of distress?
And closer, within the confines of our own local membership of Christ’s
Body-how do we respond? Tragically, the divorced, the alcoholics,
the introverted, the rebellious, the unemployed often report that the
church is the last body to show them compassion. Like a person who
takes aspirin at the first sign of headache, we want to silence them,
to “cure” them without addressing the underlying causes.
Someone once asked John Wesley’s mother, “Which one of your eleven
children do you love the most?” Her answer was as wise as the question
foolish: “I love the one who’s sick until he’s well, and the one who’s
away until he comes home.” That, I believe, is God’s attitude toward
our suffering planet. He feels the pain of the suffering; do we?
God gave this succinct summary of the life of King Josiah: “He
defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well.” And
then this profound postscript: “Is that not what it means to know
me?” (Jer. 22:16).
I hear many cries for unity in the church today; a watching world
sees divisiveness as our greatest failure. Calls go out exhorting one
denomination to merge with another, or for many denominations to join
hands in a national or worldwide campaign. Out of my experience with
the nervous system in the human body I would propose another kind of
unity: one based on pain.
I can read the health of a physical body by noting how well it
“listens” to pain-most of the diagnostic tools we use, after all
(fever, pulse, blood cell count), measure the body’s healing
response. Analogously, the corporate Body’s health depends on how
the stronger parts attend to the weaker.
Some cries of pain in the Body come to us loudly and persistently. We
cannot help but acknowledge them. I am more concerned with the distant
outposts of pain, the extremities of limb in His Body that we have
somehow silenced. I have performed many amputations in my life,
most of them because the hand or foot has gone silent and no longer
reports pain. There are members of Christ’s Body, too, whose pain we
never sense, for we have denervated or cut whatever link would carry
an awareness of them to us. They suffer, but silently, unnoticed by
the rest of the Body.
I think of my Lebanese friends, for example. In Beirut, children
have grown up knowing nothing but war. They carry submachine guns
as nonchalantly as American children carry water pistols. They play,
not in parks, but in crumbling skyscrapers gutted by bombs. Christians
in Lebanon, especially the Armenians, feel utterly abandoned by the
church in the West, which focuses so much attention on Israel and
assumes all non-Israelis in the Middle East to be Arab and Muslim.
Spokesmen for Christians in Lebanon eloquently plead for compassion
or some token of understanding by their brothers and sisters in the
West, but we act as though the neural connections have been cut, the
synapses blocked. Few hear their pain and respond with Christian love.
Or I think of the homosexual population scattered throughout our
churches and colleges. Some surveys show that as many as 20 percent
of males in Christian colleges struggle with homosexual tendencies.
The reality is so abhorrent to Christian leaders, though, that
the church may simply pretend they do not exist. They are left to
flounder, cut off from the balance and diversity of the larger Body
and the compassion that might help them.
Or I think of the elderly, often put away out of sight behind
institutional walls that hold in all sounds of loneliness and
mourning. Or of battered children who grow up troubled, unwelcomed
into foster homes. Or of races who feel cut off from participation
in the Body. Or of prisoners sealed off behind huge fences. Or of
foreign students who live tucked away in cheap lodging, isolated and
afraid. Even those within the church judged for some minor doctrinal
disagreement can feel cut off, severed.
In modern society we tend to isolate these problems by forming
organizations and appointing social workers to deal with them. If
we are not careful, a form of institutionalized charity will grow up
that effectively isolates hurting members from close personal contact
with healthy ones. In such an event, both groups atrophy: the charity
recipients who are cut off from human touch and compassion and the
charity donors who think of love as a kind of material transaction.
In the human body, when an area loses sensory contact with the rest of
the body, even when its nourishment system remains intact, that part
begins to wither and atrophy. In the vast majority of cases-95 of
100 insensitive hands I have examined-severe injury or deformation
results. The body poorly protects what it does not feel. In the
spiritual Body, also, loss of feeling inevitably leads to atrophy
and inner deterioration. So much of the sorrow in the world is due
to the selfishness of one living organism that simply does not care
when another suffers. In Christ’s Body we suffer because we do not
suffer enough.
I must also mention one further service that members of Christ’s
Body perform by embracing others’ suffering. I say this carefully:
we can show love when God seems not to.
The great accounts of Christians who have suffered, beginning with the
Book of Job and the Psalms and continuing through the writings of and
about the saints, speak of a “dark night of the soul” when God seems
strangely absent. When we need Him most, He is most inaccessible. At
this moment of apparent abandonment, the Body can rise to perhaps its
highest calling; we become in fact Christ’s Body, the enfleshment of
His reality in the world.
When God seems unreal, we can demonstrate His reality to others by
modeling His love and character. Some may see this as God’s failure
to respond to our deepest needs: “My God, why have You forsaken me?”
I see it as a calling for the rest of the Body to push through
loneliness and isolation and to embody physically the love of God.
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father
of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our
troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort
we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of
Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort
overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation;
if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you
patient endurance of the same suffering we suffer.
And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share
in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort (2 Cor. 1:3-7).
As I reflect on the need to develop greater sensitivity to pain,
I think of one of my favorite patients at Carville, a man named Pedro.
For fifteen years he had lived without pain sensation in his left hand,
yet somehow the hand had suffered no damage. Of all the patients
we monitored, only Pedro showed no signs of scarring or loss of
fingertip. My associate went over Pedro’s hand with great care and
came up with a surprise. One tiny spot on the edge of his palm still
had normal sensitivity so that he could feel the lightest touch of
a pin, even a stiff hair. Elsewhere on the hand he could feel nothing.
We also found on a thermograph that the sensitive spot was at least
six degrees hotter than the rest of Pedro’s hand (which supported our
theory, still being formulated, that warm areas of the body resist
nerve damage from leprosy).
Pedro’s hand became for us an object of great curiosity, and he
graciously obliged without protest as we conducted our tests and
observed his activities. We noticed that he approached things with the
edge of his hand, much as a dog approaches an object with a searching
nose. He picked up a cup of coffee only after testing its temperature
with his feeling spot.
Finally Pedro tired of our endless fascination with his hand. He said,
“You know, I was born with a birthmark on my hand. The doctors said it
was a hemangioma and froze it with dry ice. But they never fully got
rid of it, because I can still feel it pulsing.” Somewhat embarrassed
that we had not considered that option, we verified that indeed the
arteries in his hand were abnormal. A tangle of arteries brought an
extra amount of blood and short-circuited some of it straight back to
the veins without sending it through all the fine capillaries. As a
result, the blood flowed very swiftly through that part of his hand,
keeping its temperature close to that of the heart, too warm for the
leprosy bacilli to flourish.
That single warm spot, the size of a nickel, which Pedro had previously
viewed as a defect, had become a wonderful advantage to him when he
contracted leprosy. That one remaining patch of sensitivity protected
his entire hand.
In a church that has grown large and institutional, I pray for similar
small patches of sensitivity. We must look to prophets, whether in
speech, sermon, or art form, who will call attention to the needy by
eloquently voicing their pain.
“Since my people are crushed, I am crushed,” cried Jeremiah (8:21).
And elsewhere, “Oh, my anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain. Oh, the
agony of my heart! My heart pounds within me, I cannot keep silent”
(4:19). Prophets like Jeremiah and Micah stand in great contrast to
an insensitive one like Jonah, who cared more about his comfort than
about an entire city’s destruction.
The prophets of Israel tried to warn an entire nation of social and
spiritual numbness. We need to encourage modern Jeremiahs and Micahs
and to value our compassionate, pain-sensitive members as much as Pedro
valued his tiny spot of sensitivity. By shutting off sensitivity to
pain, we risk forfeiting the wonderful privileges of being part of
a Body. A living organism is only as strong as its weakest part.
churchvitalsigns/articles/061115.html

CO-CHAIRS HOPE TO AGREE ON BASE PRINCIPLES CONCERNING NAGORNO GARABAGH CONFLICT
Azeri Press Agency, Azerbaijan
Nov 16 2006
“OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs hope that Azerbaijani and Armenian
presidents will meet soon,” Russian co-chair Yuri Merzlyakov said,
APA reports quoting to RIA “Novosti”.
He said that they expect the meeting to be realized within the CIS
presidents’ summit in Minsk on November 28. He said that the co-chairs
made speech in the OSCE Standing Council. Russian diplomat said that
there are great opportunities to come to an agreement on the settlement
of Nagorno Garabagh conflict.
“The sides should at least agree on base principles of the future
peace treaty,” he said.
The Russian diplomat said the elections of 2007-2008 approach and the
election campaigns make negative influence on the negotiations. Asked
if the settlement of Kosovo conflict will influence the settlement
of Nagorno Garabagh conflict the diplomat said that the settlement
of Kosovo conflict will more or less influence the conflicts in the
OSCE space, as well as Nagorno Garabagh conflict.

ARMENIA PLANS TO OCCUPY ABKHAZIA? GEORGIAN INTELLIGENTSIA ACCUSES ARMENIANS OF GENOCIDE OF GEORGIANS
Regnum, Russia
Nov 16 2006
APA news agency (Baku) reports that 60 representatives of the
Georgian intelligentsia have demanded that Georgian President Mikhail
Saakashvili recognize the genocide committed by Armenians in Georgia.
They say that in 1993, the “Bagramyan” military unit, together with
Abkhazians, fought against the Georgian army and killed Georgians
living in Abkhazia: “Before the Czar, Russia populated Georgian
Javakheti with Armenians, there had been no single Armenian in that
region. However, today Javakheti is mentioned as part of Armenia.
Having ‘crippled’ the Georgian monuments in the territory of Javakheti,
the Armenians are not trying to convince everybody that they are
Armenian. All this is being done systematically, and so, must be
recognized as a genocide against the Georgian nation.”
Member of the Supreme Council of Abkhazia in exile Akaky Gasviani
supports this initiative and points out that the Armenians have a big
role in the “occupation” of Georgian lands and the establishment of
the separatist regime in Abkhazia.
The Golos Armenii daily publishes the abridged version of the article
“What Is Armenia Plotting Against Georgia,” published in the Aisi
daily (Georgia) (#36, Oct 3-9 2006). Golos Armenii says that the
article tells how Armenians populated Abkhazia and Ajaria and what
the atrocities the “Bagramyan” battalion committed during the war
against the Georgians. “Journalist Gogneli quotes “some expert on
Armenian problems” as saying: “If anybody thinks that the Russians
will appropriate Abkhazia, he is mistaken. Should they – God forbid –
recognize Abkhazia as an independent, the Armenians will occupy this
region in just one year. Today, they are silent and are just waiting
for a good opportunity. But as soon as it happens, they will rise and
appropriate this Georgian region. Today, they are trying to occupy
Abkhazia’s sea coast – they are actively working in this direction.
Then, they will ‘take care of’ Javakheti” and, finally, they will
get access to the sea. This is a part of their “Great Armenia”
plan. So, we, the Georgians, must be vigilant and wise. I wonder if
our leadership is thinking about it?”
The Azg daily says that, neither in the Georgian mass media nor via
its own sources in Georgia, has it managed to find anything that could
prove the information of the Georgian daily. Asked by Azg to comment
on the statement, Ambassador of Georgia to Armenia Revaz Gachechiladze
said that he knows nothing about such a statement and, even if it was
made, he, first of all, wants to know the names of its authors. “In
any case, this is not the position of the Georgian Government.”

FRANCE RESPONDS TO TURKEY PULLING MILITARY TIES
Men’s News Daily, CA
Nov 16 2006
France offered a low-key reaction to Turkey’s announcement it is
suspending military ties over a recent Armenian genocide vote in the
French parliament.
At the heart of the dispute is the recent approval by French deputies
of legislation making it a crime to deny an Armenian genocide took
place in Turkey a century ago. The bill needs to be passed by the
French Senate and approved by French President Jacques Chirac before
becoming law.
But the matter has sparked anger from Turkey, which denies an Armenian
genocide took place.
Wednesday, a Turkish general announced Ankara had suspended military
ties with France. But a French foreign ministry spokesman says France
has received no official word from Turkey.
French defense officials say they doubt Turkey’s move will
fundamentally hurt diplomatic relations.
But analyst Jean-Francois Daguzin, of the Foundation for Strategic
Research in Paris, believes the impact may be more severe than has
been suggested.
Daguzin says Turkey’s reaction to the French legislation is among
the strongest to date. He says Ankara traditionally makes countries
who fall out of favor pay a steep political price and the suspended
ties could affect military cooperation.
Turkish and French troops are stationed and work together in
Afghanistan, Lebanon, Kosovo, Bosnia and the Democratic Republic of
Congo. In addition, French and European companies supply Ankara with
a significant amount of military equipment.
Recently Turkey’s relations with the European Union have been rocky.
Ankara wants EU membership, but it has yet to fulfill a number of
European conditions for accession talks, including opening trade with
EU member Cyprus.
e-responds-to-turkey-pulling-military-ties/

OSKANIAN PRESENTS DETAILS OF HIS BRUSSELS MEETINGS
By Harry Tamrazian in Brussels
Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
Nov 16 2006
Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian spoke of ‘some little progress’ made
at the Armenian-Azeri ministerial talks in Brussels earlier this week,
but said the “moderate expectations” from the meeting with his Azeri
counterpart Elmar Mamedyarov were not fully met.
“A general outline of agreement around the proposals and thoughts
voiced during the Moscow meeting and discussed in Paris began to
emerge, though I cannot say that this is some complete agreement,”
Oskanian told RFE/RL after the meeting on Monday. The minister added
that “negotiations should be continued.”
Oskanian found it reassuring that after listening to the sides the OSCE
Minsk Group cochairmen suggested that the two countries’ presidents
should meet on the sidelines of the CIS summit due later this month.
“They are likely to have seen some positive moments in our discussions
and based on that made a decision to invite the presidents to such
a meeting,” Oskanian said.
“Of course, the presidents will decide whether to accept the invitation
or not after listening to their ministers. And for this very reason the
cochairmen will pay a visit to the region next week,” Oskanian said,
adding that the international negotiators are expected in Yerevan on
November 21.
The minister reiterated that the expression of the Karabakh people’s
will remains a key principle for Armenia at the talks.
“This is one of the key issues, and, of course, it is essential to the
Armenian side,” Oskanian said. “Whether it is done through a referendum
or in some other way, the right of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh to
self-determination must be stated in the document that should serve
as a means for resolution.”
To the question whether he felt any change in Azerbaijan’s tough
position during the meeting, the minister said: “I can say only that
the atmosphere was quite positive. It was a constructive meeting,
some serious discussion went on, some thoughts were expressed.”
“I cannot say that we made concrete arrangements, but the bottomline
of those discussions is that positions have in some way moved closer
together,” Oskanian said. “We want to consider it to be a flexible
approach, a compromise, I don’t want to give qualifications. I can
only state that some general outline of agreement appeared to have
emerged during that meeting.”
Assessing Russia’s role in the Karabakh peace process, the Armenian
minister praised this country’s constructive position. “Russia’s
approaches have always been consonant with those of the other
cochairmen,” he said.
Evaluating the Armenia Action Plan as part of the EU new neighborhood
policy, the minister emphasized that “with the adoption of this
document Armenia has raised its relations with the European Union to
a qualitatively new level.”
“It holds out serious prospects before us to move towards closer
integration in that structure and deepen our relationship,” Oskanian
said. “This program has a five-year duration, it has a solid financial
basis, it well serves its purpose, and, indeed, Armenia can benefit
from it immensely if it implements it properly.”
“I’ve said on many occasions that if we manage to take full advantage
of the opportunities offered by this program, in five years Armenia
can be a politically and economically different state,” the minister
underscored. “And we, indeed, must be consistent in its realization.”
Speaking about the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections
in Armenia, Oskanian said: “One of the key questions raised during
the meeting of the EU-Armenia Cooperation Council was our future
elections. Our future elections have been high on the agenda of any
bilateral meeting I’ve had in the past few months. It has been so
much talked about that we, indeed, have no room for mistake this
time around.”
The minister urged all political forces and the public to work
together to hold qualitatively better elections, as otherwise, he says,
‘Armenia has much to lose’.
“Armenia’s further democratic development largely depends on
the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections,” Oskanian
emphasized.
While in Brussels, Oskanian also participated in the closed meeting
of the foreign ministers of the three South Caucasus states with EU
representatives. He said the whole spectrum of issues in the region,
including the continuing standoff between Russia and Georgia, was
discussed by the parties.
According to Oskanian, Armenia has friendly relations with both Russia
and Georgia and wants to preserve its impartial attitude. At the same
time, the Armenian minister is concerned over more tensions emerging
in the relations between these two countries, which, according to him,
is against Armenia’s political and economic interests.
“We want to see good relations between Russia and Georgia in the
interest of the whole region,” Oskanian stressed. He denied that
Russia has exerted any pressure on Armenia to cooperate with it
against Georgia.
“Such thoughts may have been voiced within public circles in Russia
that expected Armenia to cooperate on that matter. But I assure you
that no such position was officially expressed to Armenia. Armenia
has not taken sides in this standoff and will continue to appear from
neutral positions,” the Armenian minister concluded.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

ARMENIAN, AZERI PRESIDENT EXPECTED TO MEET IN MINSK
Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
Nov 16 2006
A meeting between the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan will take
place on November 28, in Minsk, on the sidelines of the summit of
the Commonwealth of Independent States, Russian co-chair of the OSCE
Minsk Group Yuri Merzlyakov told ITAR-TASS in Vienna on Thursday.
According to him, such an agreement was reached between the two
countries’ foreign ministers in Brussels two days ago.
Earlier, Armenia’s Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian told RFE/RL that
the issue of the presidents’ meeting will be finally specified after
the visit of the international negotiators to the region planned for
next week.
On behalf of the OSCE Minsk Group cochairmen Yuri Merzlyakov urged the
two countries’ presidents to take the unique opportunity and agree on
principles of the Karabakh conflict settlement, since, according to
him, no such opportunity will be offered in the coming year. He said
that elections will be held in Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2007-2008,
which, according to him, will have a negative impact on the process
of negotiations.
“Besides, key political figures that have participated in the
negotiations during the last ten years from the Armenian side will
start to drop from the negotiating process next year.” Merzlyakov did
not expand on whom particularly he means. In the past several years
Armenia’s president and foreign minister have participated in the
high-level talks around the Nagorno-Karabakh issue. The presidential
election in Armenia is due in 2008.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

OFFICIAL BOASTS OF CIVIL INTEGRATION POLICY ON TOLERANCE DAY
Civil Georgia, Georgia
Nov 16 2006
Georgia is building a state where its citizens’ identities will
be based “not only on their blood and ethnic background, but on
the idea to build united strong state,” Chief of the President’s
Administration Giorgi Arveladze said on November 16, which is
celebrated as International Day for Tolerance.
Arveladze was speaking at a launching ceremony of the National
Integration and Tolerance in Georgia (NITG) – the USAID funded 4-year
program, run by UN Association of Georgia (UNAG), and implemented in
partnership with the Georgia government in an attempt to increase the
sense of tolerance and national unity among Georgian citizens. The
event was attended by the U.S. Ambassador in Georgia John Tefft.
Arveladze said that the Georgian authorities spare no efforts to put
an end “to infrastructure collapse” in some of the regions, which
is hindering process of civil integration. Arveladze was referring
to Samtskhe-Javakheti region populated with large group of ethnic
Armenians.
“The U.S. assistance is of special importance in this regard, I mean in
frames of Millennium Challenge Account [USD 295 million aid program]
large part of which will be spent on infrastructure rehabilitation
projects,” Arveladze said.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress