Month: November 2006

AZERBAIJANI AND ARMENIAN DEFENSE MINISTERS EXPECTED TO MEET IN JANUARY
Today, Azerbaijan
Nov 12 2006
“Azerbaijani and Armenian Defense Ministers’ next meeting is
expected to be held in January,” Special representative of OSCE
Chairman-in-Office Anjey Kasprzyk said.
He said he appealed to the sides about it, but hasn’t received an
answer yet.
The Defense Ministers Safar Abiyev and Serge Sarkisian met on the
initiative of Anjey Kasprzyk October 20. They discussed the problem
of preservation of ceasefire regime.
Azerbaijani Defense Ministry Press Service Department told the APA
they are unaware of Anjey Kasprzyk’s statement.
URL:

A GOOD RUN, TOO BAD IT DIDN’T LAST
Daily Pilot, CA
Nov 12 2006
Comments & Curiosities:
Kind of sad, I think. The Balboa Village Market – an icon on the Balboa
Peninsula since 1938 – closed its doors last week, at least for now
if not for good. The world was a very different place in 1938, which
was, like, 68 years ago, give or take. I don’t remember a lot about
1938, but I do know there was no cable, cellphones were the size
of overnight bags, and there were maybe seven television stations,
which was ridiculous.
In later years, the Balboa market had a number of independent owners,
the latest being Bob and Scott St John, who are father and son but
no relation to Jill. The St Johns tried mightily to make it work over
the last five years, but, alas, it was not to be. They did everything
they could to revive the market’s storied past as a focal point for
the neighborhood, where locals would stop in every day for some fresh
coffee, fresh bread and fresh gossip, but the chemistry just wasn’t
there. “It just didn’t work out because the customer base has changed,”
Bob St John told the Pilot.
They even allowed kids to charge a soda or candy to their parent’s
account and offered free deliveries in a bright yellow golf cart
tricked up to look like a little panel truck. That’s the part of the
story that got my attention.
I could say I have a long history with the Balboa Village Market,
except that I don’t. But I sure have one with the corner market in
the Bronx neighborhood from whence I came.
When I was an annoying little nerd with glasses, which I still am
other than the little part, Sam’s – not Sam’s Grocery or Sam’s Market,
just Sam’s – was the glue that held our block together, and I am quite
pleased to report that it is still there, still open for business,
although it hasn’t been called Sam’s for years. I stop in whenever I
get back, just for a moment, but long enough to hear the voices and
see the faces of all the people who live in my head whether they are
still here or not.
~U THE BELL CURVE: Good news for U.S.; bad news for us
~U COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES: Election Day voting made easy
~U COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES: A good run, too bad it didn’t last
~U COMMUNITY & CLUBS: Interfaith service days coming up
Sam’s is small, considerably smaller than the Balboa Village Market,
but it’s as important to the people who live on the block as any fire
station or hospital. It has the same wood plank floors now as it did
then; at least one of the same coolers, which amazes me; and the same
two aisles that are almost impossible for two people to get through
at the same time.
What it no longer has – and I suspect there was a lawyer involved in
this somehow – are the wall shelves that were stacked to the ceiling
with boxes and canned goods.
Sam had a long pole with levers on the bottom and pincers on the top,
and he was a master at grabbing whatever a customer wanted off the
shelf and dropping it into his free hand – no small trick when you’re
catching a 1 lb. can of coffee and a 16 oz. can of tomatoes while
you’re holding a cereal box between your knees. advertisement
Sam, by the way, was Sam Arzoumanian, a pretty big name on the block
because he was the only Armenian in a sea of Italians and Irish. He
was forever talking about life back in Armenia, and not one of us had
any idea where that was. Someone decided, Tony Peccoraro I think, that
Armenia was an island off Australia. When we said how come, he said,
“Because they both start with an A and end with A.” Nobody came up with
anything better so we just went with that until we got to high school.
Like the Balboa Village Market, Sam’s had free deliveries, only it
wasn’t with golf carts, it was with us. Whenever Sam had an order
ready, he would stick his head out the door and shout “Delivery!” and
one or more of us would come running. You got a quarter from Sam,
which was not bad, and a tip on the other end, hopefully.
Most of the deliveries were to the apartment houses up and down the
block, which I wasn’t crazy about. The elevators were like phone
booths, only smaller, and the halls were long and dark and you could
smell everything everyone had cooked for the last three meals.
There was an old woman whose name I cannot remember for the life of
me who lived in a fourth-floor apartment that all of us dreaded going
to. In fact, for a long time, I was the only one who would go there,
even though I hated it. It was always dark as night, and she was always
really cranky, which is an understatement. Most customers would quickly
check their order then hand you a quarter or fifty cents, which meant
you scored 50 or 75 cents for five minutes work, which meant life was
good. Mrs. Cranketta, on the other hand, made you take everything
out of the box and line it up – cans with cans, boxes with boxes –
then carefully check everything against the hand-written receipt,
kvetching the whole time about, “This isn’t the size I wanted,” and
“Why did he send me this?”
I was always tempted to say “Because you’re a cranky old bat, that’s
why,” but I knew she’d turn me into a toad if I did.
The whole ordeal took about 10 minutes, which seemed like an hour
and a half. Why did I keep going back? Because when it was over
Mrs. De Grumpy would reach into her purse and, incredibly, toss a
dollar onto the table. That is a genuine, Federal Reserve, green,
picture-of-George Washington-on-the-front dollar we’re talking about.
It’s hard to explain what that meant in 1958. I could live for two
days on a dollar, and here I am with $1.25 in my pocket between my
base salary and Cruella’s tip.
That is when I decided that this is the greatest country on the face
of the earth.
So there you have it. Bob and Scott St John of Balboa Village Market,
we salute you for trying to make it work. We’re so bummed it didn’t.
Remember, time and tide wait for no man, any port in a storm, a watched
pot never boils, never up, never in, and, well, I guess that’s it.
I gotta go.
/columns/dpt-buffa12.txt

HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE ARABS
By Robert Satloff
Newsweek (International Edition)
Nov 12 2006
Even for the most empathetic Arabs, the Holocaust is still a faraway
event-Europeans killing their own-for which they paid a price.
Nov. 20, 2006 issue – A moroccan cartoonist recently took top honors,
worth $12,000, in a contest lampooning the Holocaust, sponsored by
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Instead of echoing the crass
anti-Semitism that nowadays issues from Tehran, Moroccans and other
Arabs might better have cited their rich history with Jews and the
Holocaust to put Ahmadinejad in his place.
In North Africa and the Middle East, discussion of the Holocaust has
tended to take one of three forms. One is outright denial, favored
by demagogues ranging from secular nationalists like Egypt’s Gamal
Abdul Nasser, who 40 years ago said that “no person takes seriously
the lie of the six million Jews that were murdered,” to religious
radicals like Hizbullah’s Hassan Nasrallah, who once proclaimed that
“Jews invented the legend of the Holocaust.” At the opposite end
of the spectrum are what I call Holocaust glorifiers. These Hitler
cheerleaders are best exemplified by the editorial writers at Egypt’s
state-owned al-Akhbar newspaper, who have praised the Final Solution
and only lamented the fact that the Nazis didn’t finish the job.
Most Arabs settle between these extremes in a sort of “Holocaust
relativism.” They admit that Jews suffered during World War II but
dispute both the numbers and the unique depravity of the Final
Solution. “In war, bad things happen,” they tend to say, citing
mass killings of Armenians, Kurds or Cambodians to suggest that the
Jewish experience was nothing special. Thus Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad told U.S. TV host Charlie Rose earlier this year that
he doesn’t have “any clue how [Jews] were killed or how many were
killed,” while moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas authored
a Soviet-era doctoral dissertation that questioned the number of Jews
killed. Even for the most empathetic Arabs, the Holocaust is still
a faraway event-Europeans killing their own-for which, they say,
the Palestinians have paid a price in the creation of Israel.
Five years ago, shortly after September 11, my family and I moved to
Rabat to begin a research project that I hoped would change the way
Arabs think about the Holocaust. My man-bites-dog idea was simple.
Not a single Arab is among the more than 20,000 non-Jews recognized by
Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the Holocaust, for rescuing
Jews from the threat of death. This didn’t make sense to me, given
that North Africa, with more than a half-million Jews, was such a
critical front of the war. If I could find even a single story of
an Arab who saved a Jew, I thought, perhaps it could serve as a tool
for transforming the Holocaust into a source of pride for the region,
rather than a target of denial.
I soon learned that the Holocaust, while overwhelmingly a European
story, was an Arab story, too. From June 1940 to May 1943, the Nazis
and their allies controlled North Africa and exported across the
Mediterranean many elements of the Final Solution, from slave labor
camps to the Yellow Star. Arabs responded remarkably like Europeans:
most were indifferent to the fate of the Jews, a sizable percentage
willingly collaborated in the persecution of Jews, and a small but
symbolically important group of Arabs helped and even saved Jews.
Perpetrators ranged from Arab guards who tortured Jews in Vichy
“punishment camps” in Algeria and Morocco to Arab interpreters in
Tunisia who went house to house with SS officers pointing out Jews.
These ordinary Arabs are best represented by a Tunisian named Hassen
Ferjani, convicted by a Free French tribunal in 1943 for a conspiracy
that led to the deportation to Germany-and subsequent execution-of
three Jewish men, a father and his two sons.
The heroes have names, too. They include men such as Si Ali Sakkat,
a former mayor of Tunis who opened his mountainside farm to 60 Jews
escaping from a labor camp, and the dashing Khaled Abdelwahhab, son
of a celebrated Tunisian author, who spirited several Jewish families
from their hostel in the middle of the night to protect one of them-a
beautiful blond, blue-eyed Jewish woman-from being raped by a German
officer. I also found tales of many Arabs whose names we don’t know:
the Arab wet nurse who took in Jewish children when milk was scarce;
the Arab baker who squirreled away extra bread for Jewish families when
Vichy rations penalized Jews most of all; the Arab shepherds who opened
their modest homes to Jewish families fleeing bombed-out villages.
These stories of villains and heroes constitute the real-life Arab
experience of the Holocaust. Arabs don’t have to take a lesson from
the president of Iran. In fact, they could teach him a few things.
Satloff, director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is
the author of ‘Among the Righteous: Lost Stories From the Holocaust’s
Long Reach Into Arab Lands’
week/
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS
by Andrew Wallis
Reviewed By Rw Johnson
The Sunday Times, UK
Nov 12 2006
SILENT ACCOMPLICE: The Untold Story of France’s Role in the Rwandan Genocide
France has recently infuriated Turkey by making it illegal to deny
the Turkish massacre of the Armenians in 1915. But if Turkey is in
denial, so is France, which bears a central responsibility for the 1994
genocide of 937,000 Tutsis in Rwanda. On occasion, as he tells this
terrible story, Andrew Wallis’s indignation gets the better of him,
causing him to lapse into heavy-handed infelicities. These do not,
however, weaken the power of what he has to say.
For those unfamiliar with French policy in Africa, it may seem
almost incredible how far it is still driven by imperial rivalry with
Britain and a sort of bitter fury at the triumph of les Anglo-Saxons,
producing a defensive rallying of Francafrique, and roping into it
Rwanda and Zaire, abandoned by the Belgians. Such attitudes are by
no means confined to Gaullists – it was Francois Mitterrand who,
as minister of justice in 1957, explained French problems with its
West African colonies: “It is British agents who have made all our
difficulties.” So while Charles de Gaulle first welcomed Rwanda into
Franc-afrique, blithely ignoring the massacre of Tutsis carried out
by President Gregoire Kayibanda in 1963, so Mitterrand as president
adopted exactly the same attitude to President Juvenal Habyarimana,
who had deposed (and killed) Kayibanda in 1973. Habyarimana became his
personal friend, and Habyarimana’s wife, Agathe, a sort of African
Imelda Marcos, became a constant visitor to his household and close
friend of the first lady, Danielle. Agathe is the founder of the
extremist Hutu society, Akazu, whose network (le clan de madame)
is credited with much of the responsibility for the genocide. Its
power is still greatly feared today.
After the earlier massacres, many Tutsis had fled into Uganda where,
under Paul Kagame, they fought alongside Yoweri Museveni against
Idi Amin and Milton Obote. When Museveni won, Kagame led the Rwandan
Patriotic Front (RPF) back into Rwanda in 1990. It was immediately
clear that the RPF was fully a match for the Rwandan army (FAR),
and French troops were promptly dispatched to prop up Habyarimana –
for Kagame was Anglophone and American-educated. The French insisted
that Kagame was a CIA agent, that the RPF was really just the Ugandan
army, and that the plan was to evict France’s client and instal an
Anglophone regime instead. Their opposition to such an outcome was such
that they were willing to encourage their Hutu proteges to do anything,
including genocide, to stop it. Two Frenchmen in succession were put
in as the effective heads of FAR and, blithely ignoring EU directives
about “ethical” arms sales, they arranged huge supplies of arms for
the Hutu regime, much of it routed through Egypt with the help of
their ally in the Cairo foreign office, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. It
was an even greater coup when, in 1991, Mitterrand was able to push
in Boutros-Ghali as UN secretary-general.
By this time, the first massacres of Tutsis had begun, and a furious
Kagame flew to Paris where Paul Dijoud, African affairs director
at the Quai d’Orsay, seems to have threatened that, if he did not
withdraw the RPF, “you will not see your brothers and your family
again, because they will all have been massacred”. In fact, Wallis
produces plentiful evidence that some French officers were training the
Hutus how to capture and tie up prisoners, how to slit their bellies
so that their bodies wouldn’t float and in general preaching that
“if you let them (Tutsis) carry on producing children . . . you’ll
never be done with them”. And it seems there are many eyewitnesses of
French troops assisting at torture sessions and catching Tutsis and
handing them over to Hutus who hacked them to death before their eyes.
These early massacres were as nothing compared to the all-out
genocide launched upon Habyarimana’s death in April 1994. The new
government, with key genocidaires, was, it appears, formed by the
French ambassador at a meeting in the French embassy. The man the
French had put in charge, Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, apparently made
no secret of his plans: “I have come back to declare the apocalypse,”
he said. The French, well aware of what was about to happen,
then got out. The calculation was that any peace deal would mean a
power-sharing agreement with Kagame – which was anathema. Better let
the Hutus continue the genocide to completion if that allowed them
to stay in power, but in that case France, having armed, trained and
encouraged its proteges towards such an outcome, had to get clear of
the carnage. As the evidence of the holocaust thus unleashed became
overwhelming Bruno Delaye, the Elysee’s Africa boss, is reputed to
have said that “that’s the way Africans are”. When asked how he could
have entertained genocidaires in his office, he seems to have replied
that he’d had 400 assassins and 2,000 drug dealers through his doors:
“You can’t deal with Africa without getting your hands dirty.”
Mitterrand shrugged off the killings with “Dans ces pays-la, un
genocide ce n’est pas trop important” and cynically concocted the
notion of a “double genocide”, ie that the Tutsis were just as guilty,
which was rather like saying the Jews and the Nazis were as bad as one
another. When the surrounding states tried to hold an emergency meeting
on the situation in Tanzania, Paris angrily torpedoed it: “We can’t
let Anglophone countries decide on the future of a Francophone one.”
And so it continued to its dreadful end. Ultimately, Kagame and the
RPF won and the French sent troops in to get their Hutu proteges into
Zaire where they could reform and rearm for a fight that has thus far
cost 4m lives. Mitterrand angrily refused to invite Kagame’s Rwanda
to his last Francafrique summit and made sure the genocide was not
even discussed. Several genocidaires still live happily in France
where a parliamentary inquiry, headed by one of Mitterrand’s former
ministers, is accused of whitewashing the whole operation. Jacques
Chirac and Dominique de Villepin have wholly backed this all up,
for the French elite are as one in wishing to continue to celebrate
France as the home of democracy and human rights.
It is only in the past few years that French responsibility for
the deportation of 100,000 Jews in the second world war has been
acknowledged, and nobody yet admits that French eagerness to damage
Anglophone Nigeria by lending surreptitious support to Biafra cost
many hundreds of thousands of lives. But all this is dwarfed by the
enormity of what happened in Rwanda – an enormity so great that neither
Britain nor any of France’s partners seem keen to broach the matter.
This book (and the news that France is to declassify some documents
relating to the genocide) are at least a start. The leading
presidential contender, Nicolas Sarkozy, is fond of talking of the
need for a frank “rupture” with the past. There is no part of the
French past that needs honesty and a clean break more than this.
Read on…
websites: Human Rights Watch on Rwanda
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

RUSSIA’S STAKE IN IRAN-ARMENIA PIPELINE YET TO BE STUDIED: ARMENIAN PM
Mehr News Agency, Iran
Nov 13 2006
TEHRAN, Nov. 13 (MNA) – Armenia has not studied offering of any
sector of the Iran-Armenia gas pipeline project to Russia yet,
Armenian Prime Minister Andranik Margaryan announced.
Construction of 40 km of Iran-Armenia gas pipeline by the Russian
side has not been discussed yet, Margaryan added.
“We are not talking about selling the pipeline to Russia. We are
only discussing the possibility of Russia’s preliminary investment
in the project,” the Persian service of ISNA quoted Margaryan as
saying on Monday. “Everything will become clear when the project
comes on stream.”
In late June 2006 Deputy Chair of Gazprom Board Alexander Ryazanov
had noted that the company was going to buy the Iran-Armenia gas
pipeline. According to him, the putting into operation of the gas
pipeline would secure gas supplies to Armenia.
Referring to the recent comments on the increase in the prices of
Russia’s gas to Armenia, the Transcaucasian nation’s prime minister
pointed out that his country had not been officially informed of the
issue yet. Therefore, it would be better for the media not to mention
it before it was approved by the relevant commissions.
The Armenian official has referred to the agreement on the pipeline
construction as a priority for the West Asian nation. Based on earlier
planning, the pumping of Iranian gas to Armenia via the pipeline is
expected to begin by the end of the year.

ARMENIAN DEFENSE MINISTER TO VISIT IRAQ AS ARMENIA TO EXTEND SMALL TROOP PRESENCE
The Associated Press
International Herald Tribune, France
Nov 13 2006
YEREVAN, Armenia: Armenia will extend the mission of its nearly
four-dozen troops serving in the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq for another
year, Defense Minister Serzh Sarkisian said Monday as he left on a
visit to the country.
Sarkisian said that the government had asked parliament to approve
an extension of the deployment.
The mission has met with criticism from opposition parties in this
former Soviet republic, many Armenians and even the 30,000-strong
Armenian community in Iraq, which fears being targeted for attacks.
Sarkisian said he would hold talks with his Iraqi counterpart during
his trip and visit the 46-member Armenian contingent, which has been
deployed in Iraq since January 2005 and was due to end its mission
at the end of this year.
President Robert Kocharian and his government have sought to portray
the deployment as a way to boost ties with Europe. The contingent
serves under Polish command.
On Saturday, Armenian officials announced that an officer was wounded
while defusing land mines and had to have his foot amputated.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

BELARUSIAN PRESIDENT DEMANDS FAIR PRICE FOR TURNING GAS TRANSPORT NETWORK OVER TO RUSSIA
Kyiv Post, Ukraine
Nov 13 2006
MINSK, Belarus (AP) – President Alexander Lukashenko on Monday
raised the stakes in Belarus’ growing spat with Russia over natural
gas prices, saying Moscow should pay market prices if it is still
interested in taking over part of Belarus’ gas transport system.
Moscow and Minsk are at loggerheads over gas prices, with Russia
seeking to hike prices fourfold to $200 per 1,000 cubic meters – a
hike that would dramatically pinch Belarus’ inefficient Socialist-style
command economy.
Moscow, which has raised prices for several former Soviet republics,
has indicated it could compromise if Belarus hands over 50 percent
of its pipeline transporting Russian gas to western Europe.
Lukashenko, who traveled to Moscow to meet with President Vladimir
Putin last week, said the Belarusian national gas transport company,
Beltransgas, could be worth $17 billion – far more than the $800
million price Russian gas monopoly OAO Gazprom said the company
was worth.
He has said Belarus should not pay more for gas than what Ukraine
and Armenia pay. Armenia currently receives gas at $100 per 1,000
cubic meters.
“We are ready to form a joint venture with Russia,” Lukashenko said.
“And since Russia is talking about supplying oil and gas to Belarus
at market prices, we will be doing this under market conditions.”
Lukashenko and Putin signed a deal in 2001 setting up the joint
venture, but completion of the deal has been tied up as Gazprom has
sought to raise gas prices.
After Friday’s meeting, the Kremlin issued a statement saying that
economic ties between Russia and Belarus must be built on “mutually
beneficial terms based on market principles.”

FRESNO STATE REAL ESTATE CENTER ENDOWED
Central Valley Business Times, CA
Nov 13 2006
~U $1.5M gift establishes center
~U Research, ethical standards highlighted
California State University, Fresno announced Monday a gift to create
a $1.5 million endowment which will be used to establish the Arnold
and Dianne Gazarian Real Estate Center in the Craig School of Business.
Arnold Gazarian, a retired dentist, is a member of the California
State University, Fresno Foundation Board of Governors. Dianne Gazarian
serves as chair of the Berberian & Gazarian Family Foundation.
“We hope that this gift will assist the university in making it a
leader in educating real estate professionals, conducting real-world
research and promoting high ethical standards,” says Mr. Gazarian,
in written comments. “We also hope that the center will bring together
members of the real estate community to discuss issues of importance
to the industry.”
The money enables Fresno State to create a center that will support
the Craig School’s Real Estate and Urban Land Economics option and
major for students as well as the expansion of research by faculty
and graduate students. The center will assess trends in commercial
retail, office, residential and investment markets; analyze land
use planning; and conduct research in such areas as single- and
multi-family residential housing, commercial real estate and real
estate financial assets.
In addition, the Gazarian Center will sponsor conferences, seminars
and workshops in real estate and land use.
The Gazarians have made previous gifts to the university including
gifts to the President’s Fund, Smittcamp Alumni House, the Haig and
Isabel Berberian endowed chair in Armenian Studies, the Craig School
of Business and the Kremen School of Education and Human Development.
“This generous gift will position the Gazarian Real Estate Center as an
academic leader in real estate market analysis and research and will
help to further the university’s goal of helping the economy grow,”
says John Welty, president of Fresno State.
The Gazarian Real Estate Center will also provide students
opportunities to learn the business side of real estate and apply
their academic knowledge to real-world projects and experiences. The
real estate business community will gain a valuable informational
resource relating to the greater Fresno metropolitan area and Central
Valley region, as well as access to student interns and potential
future employees.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

INSURANCE COMPANY STARTS SETTLEMENT OF CLAIMS BY HEIRS OF 1915 GENOCIDE
By Aram Vanetsian in Los Angeles
Radio Liberty, Czech rep.
Nov 13 2006
New York Life Insurance Co. has started to pay compensations to more
than 2,000 heirs of victims of the Armenian genocide.
The company agreed to pay compensation to Armenian heirs and legal
successors who had been insured by the company in Western Armenia
and Turkey and fell victim to the 1915 massacres of Armenians in
Ottoman Turkey.
Vartkes Yeghian, one of the lawyers who had brought a case against
New York Life, said the corresponding committee had accepted 2,515 of
the 5,692 claims and sums began to be paid on Saturday to decedents
found eligible to compensation.
Yeghian explained that people living outside Armenia will simply get
bank checks in envelops and will cash them at banks. In the case with
Armenia an agreement was reached only with one bank and the sum has
already been transferred to that bank.
All 5,692 applicants will receive a letter notifying them that their
applications was either accepted or rejected.
According to Yeghian, these letters will be received in the USA within
several days, and in Armenia it may take up to a couple of weeks.
The greatest share of the sum, around $3,600,000, has been transferred
to Armenia where 1,254 people are eligible for compensation. The
second largest destination is the United States, to where $2,700,000
have been transferred for 896 people, the third is France, and the
fourth is Canada. In total, sums will be received in 26 countries.
The total sum to be paid is $7,954,000. A little more than $3,000,000
will remain, which lawyers will distribute among charity organizations.
Vartkes Yeghian also said that money have already been received from
the French Axa Insurance company. “We are only waiting for names to
be posted on the internet, as it was done in the case with New York
Life. The French government’s consent is needed for that.”
Names of four to five thousand Armenians insured at the French company
will appear on the internet in several weeks.
(Note to readers: More information about the Axa settlement can be
found at )

DEMIRCHIAN RULES OUT ALLIANCE WITH PRO-GOVERNMENT FORCES
By Anna Saghabalian
Radio Liberty, Czech rep.
Nov 13 2006
A prominent opposition leader has rejected any possible alliance with
pro-government forces ahead of next year’s parliamentary elections.
Stepan Demirchian, leader of the People’s Party of Armenia (HZhK), told
the media on Monday that the party he leads will either participate
in the elections separately or in a bloc with other opposition forces.
“The only way is to struggle and I am convinced that the opposition
will still have its say,” Demirchian said.
Demirchian did not rule out the possibility of cooperation with Orinats
Yerkir, a former ruling coalition member party led by ex-parliament
speaker Artur Baghdasarian.
“We are ready for cooperation if Orinats Yerkir declares that it is
in opposition,” he said, adding that they already cooperate with this
party in the legislative process in parliament.
The HZhK congress originally planned for this month has been postponed
for what the party’s leader describes as technical reasons.
The congress, according to him, is likely to be held in January or
February 2007.
Demirchian also hailed the idea of all prominent opposition leaders
having their nominations in single-mandate constituencies, but added
that it is also important for opposition leaders to concentrate on
work for the benefit of their parties.
The oppositionist accused different wings of power for already using
administrative resource and channeling part of their illicit profits
at influencing political processes in the country.
“There are already pressures, including against journalists. People
in different fields are forced to become partisans, now this is being
done in the tax and customs spheres as well,” Demirchian claimed.
Demirchian also spoke about the outside influences on elections in
Armenia. “One cannot underestimate the factor of outside influence
on elections, but let’s not overestimate it either,” Demirchian said,
adding that his party will rely only on the Armenian people and will
participate in the elections to win.