Month: March 2007

The Indypendent, NY
March 17 2007

Fighting Rape With Art

By Anoush Ter Taulian (Zaum)
>From the March 16, 2007 issue

Anoush Ter Taulian’s `Arising From The Circle Womb Of Life’

Women of Color Art Exhibit on Violence Against Women at the Brecht
Forum,
451 West St., between Bank and Bethune. The exhibit runs until March
31.

When I was in Kenya a man flung me into a ditch and lay on top of me
to rape me. When I started screaming, he pulled a machete out from
the back of his shirt and said, `Be quiet or I will kill you.’

I continued to scream and he ran away. I made a Stop Rape poster in
Swahili and English of a woman kicking her attacker, armed with a
knife, in the balls. A policeman who said my poster was
antigovernment arrested me. I spent a night in jail for my poster.

Most of my artistic work deals with violence. I have co-produced with
Fred Nyugen an audio CD called The Cost of Genocide – Armenia 1915.
Most of the Armenian women in the deportation caravans were raped by
the Turks but they are ashamed to talk about it. I spent nine years
as a volunteer in the Artsakh (the part of Armenia that was attacked
by Azerbaijan) liberation army and videotaped Armenian hostages and
torture victims.

I feel an important part of ending wars is ending the patriarchies
that disrespect women and are destroying Mother Earth. I believe,
during the matriarchy 5,000 years ago, when people didn’t know it
took sperm to have children, women were worshipped as life givers and
there was no private property. I feel indigenous women and all women
of color have a deep matriarchal artistic memory from which we can
get knowledge of how to overturn the patriarchy. So I decided to have
a women of color art exhibit that brought together African, Asian,
Pacific Islander, Latina, Caribbean, Native American and Near and
Middle Eastern women creating medicine art to help heal violence
against women. Most of the women in this exhibit had never created
work dealing with violence against women and produced original works
for the show.

All of our cultures have experienced imperialistic attacks so
devastating that it has been hard and often taboo to address the
violence against women in our own cultures. The Western world wants
us to believe the Third World is more barbaric toward women,
notwithstanding Christian witch hunts and the 25 percent of young
American girls who have been victims of incest. The male art world
generally ignores the problem of violence against women and the
feminist art movement is white controlled and sometimes racist,
despite some highprofile shows like `Global Feminisms’ currently at
Brooklyn Museum.

It is time for women of color to regain their matriarchal power to
end male privilege and the rape, beating, mutilation and murder of
women for merely being women.

‘4

Nouvelles d’Arménie, France
March 17 2007

Robert Fisk : The truth should be proclaimed loudly

samedi 17 mars 2007, Stéphane/armenews

When has any publisher ever tried to avoid publicity for his book ?

Published : 17 March 2007

Stand by for a quotation to take your breath away. It’s from a letter
from my Istanbul publishers, who are chickening out of publishing the
Turkish-language edition of my book The Great War for Civilisation.
The reason, of course, is a chapter entitled "The First Holocaust",
which records the genocide of one and a half million Armenians by the
Ottoman Turks in 1915, a crime against humanity that even Lord Blair
of Kut al-Amara tried to hide by initially refusing to invite
Armenian survivors to his Holocaust Day in London.

It is, I hasten to add, only one chapter in my book about the Middle
East, but the fears of my Turkish friends were being expressed even
before the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was so cruelly
murdered outside his Istanbul office in January. And when you read
the following, from their message to my London publishers
HarperCollins, remember it is written by the citizen of a country
that seriously wishes to enter the European Community. Since I do not
speak Turkish, I am in no position to criticise the occasional lapses
in Mr Osman’s otherwise excellent English.

"We would like to denote that the political situation in Turkey
concerning several issues such as Armenian and Kurdish Problems,
Cyprus issue, European Union etc do not improve, conversely getting
worser and worser due to the escalating nationalist upheaval that has
reached its apex with the Nobel Prize of Orhan Pamuk and the
political disagreements with the EU. Most probably, this political
atmosphere will be effective until the coming presidency elections of
April 2007… Therefore we would like to undertake the publication
quietly, which means there will be no press campaign for Mr Fisk’s
book. Thus, our request from [for] Mr Fisk is to show his support to
us if any trial [is] … held against his book. We hope that Mr Fisk
and HarperCollins can understand our reservations."

Well indeedydoody, I can. Here is a publisher in a country
negotiating for EU membership for whom Armenian history, the Kurds,
Cyprus (unmentioned in my book) – even Turkey’s bid to join the EU,
for heaven’s sake – is reason enough to try to sneak my book out in
silence. When in the history of bookselling, I ask myself, has any
publisher tried to avoid publicity for his book ? Well, I can give
you an example. When Taner Akcam’s magnificent A Shameful Act : The
Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility was
first published in Turkish – it uses Ottoman Turkish state documents
and contemporary Turkish statements to prove that the genocide was a
terrifying historical fact – the Turkish historian experienced an
almost identical reaction. His work was published "quietly" in Turkey
– and without a single book review.

Now I’m not entirely unsympathetic with my Turkish publishers. It is
one thing for me to rage and roar about their pusillanimity. But I
live in Beirut, not in Istanbul. And after Hrant Dink’s foul murder,
I’m in no position to lecture my colleagues in Turkey to stand up to
the racism that killed Dink. While I’m sipping my morning coffee on
the Beirut Corniche, Mr Osman could be assaulted in the former
capital of the Ottoman empire. But there’s a problem nonetheless.

Some months earlier, my Turkish publishers said that their lawyers
thought that the notorious Law 301 would be brought against them – it
is used to punish writers for being "unTurkish" – in which case they
wanted to know if I, as a foreigner (who cannot be charged under
301), would apply to the court to stand trial with them. I wrote that
I would be honoured to stand in a Turkish court and talk about the
genocide. Now, it seems, my Turkish publishers want to bring my book
out like illicit pornography – but still have me standing with them
in the dock if right-wing lawyers bring charges under 301 !

I understand, as they write in their own letter, that they do not
want to have to take political sides in the "nonsensical collision
between nationalists and neo-liberals", but I fear that the roots of
this problem go deeper than this. The sinister photograph of the
Turkish police guards standing proudly next to Dink’s alleged
murderer after his arrest shows just what we are up against here. Yet
still our own Western reporters won’t come clean about the Ottoman
empire’s foul actions in 1915. When, for example, Reuters sent a
reporter, Gareth Jones, off to the Turkish city of Trabzon – where
Dink’s supposed killer lived – he quoted the city’s governor as
saying that Dink’s murder was related to "social problems linked to
fast urbanisation". A "strong gun culture and the fiery character of
the people" might be to blame.

Ho hum. I wonder why Reuters didn’t mention a much more direct and
terrible link between Trabzon and the Armenians. For in 1915, the
Turkish authorities of the city herded thousands of Armenian women
and children on to boats, set off into the Black Sea – the details
are contained in an original Ottoman document unearthed by Akcam –
"and thrown off to drown". Historians may like to know that the man
in charge of these murder boats was called Niyazi Effendi. No doubt
he had a "fiery character".

Yet still this denial goes on. The Associated Press this week ran a
story from Ankara in which its reporter, Selcan Hacaoglu, repeated
the same old mantra about there being a "bitter dispute" between
Armenia and Turkey over the 1915 slaughter, in which Turkey
"vehemently denies that the killings were genocide". When will the
Associated Press wake up and cut this cowardly nonsense from its
reports ? Would the AP insert in all its references to the equally
real and horrific murder of six million European Jews that right-wing
Holocaust negationists "vehemently deny" that there was a genocide ?
No, they would not.

But real history will win. Last October, according to local newspaper
reports, villagers of Kuru in eastern Turkey were digging a grave for
one of their relatives when they came across a cave containing the
skulls and bones of around 40 people – almost certainly the remains
of 150 Armenians from the town of Oguz who were murdered in Kuru on
14 June 1915. The local Turkish gendarmerie turned up to examine the
cave last year, sealed its entrance and ordered villagers not to
speak of what they found. But there are hundreds of other Kurus in
Turkey and their bones, too, will return to haunt us all. Publishing
books "quietly" will not save us.

le=30416

AlJazeera.com, UK
March 17 2007

The Iranian dilemma
3/17/2007 6:00:00 PM GMT

By: Brian Appleton

When I read articles like the one in the Wall Street Journal
interviewing Reza Pahlavi by Nancy Dewolf Smith, I find it
bewildering how a man of his experience could naively suggest that if
the people of Iran voted for him to be King that he would accept and
that only during his father’s rule was there stability in the Middle
East.

I was not away at school in the U.S. during the revolution of ’79
like him but rather I was in Tehran listening to the chorus of a
million voices shouting from their roof tops night after night:’
Death to the king!’ I was there to witness a six-mile long protest
march on what was then Shah Reza Street. I was there to see thousands
of people dancing in the streets the day Shah Reza left. I was there
watching the political prisoners being liberated, I was there
watching houses of torture being taken down brick by brick. I was
there to witness Chinese, Korean, Indian and other foreign
restaurants being taken over to serve Persian food instead.

Iranians wanted their identity back.

There may have been a stability of sorts based on repression, based
on Savak, based on fear, based on no freedoms of speech or the right
to assemble or to have diverse political parties. If there was so
much stability why was there a revolution? Was it not because the top
2% had all the wealth and were flamboyant in their decadent
lifestyle, was it not because the Pahlavi regime was a U.S. puppet
regime in which the US had the upper hand which even the Shah
bitterly attested to in his book: Answer to History.

What I witnessed after the revolution was a brief moment called the
`Iranian Spring’ in which political parties were recreated,
newspapers and other long suppressed media flourished and people were
hopeful for the first time that they could control their own destiny
in a democratic fashion. Had any major foreign power endorsed the
revolutionaries at that time perhaps a secular pluralistic democracy
would have emerged in which an Islamic party might have been only one
of many parties instead of in charge.

What happened next we all know, a largely uneducated and illiterate
populous long kept in a state of feudalism saw Khomeini’s face in the
moon. They turned to a religious messianic movement destroying the
window of opportunity that Iran had for democracy at that time.

The monarchists who were beneficiaries of that system blame Carter
for destabilizing the Shah. It is also a fair assumption, which I
have heard from many Iranians that the CIA backed Khomeini. At the
time they were also creating El Qaeda and the Taliban to fight the
spread of communisms and the expansion of the USSR in Afghanistan and
so it was indeed a policy to use Islamic fundamentalism to fight the
USSR during the Cold War.

No wonder the Iranians have xenophobia, they have been invaded and
conquered for centuries: by the Macedonians, by the Arabs, by the
Mongols, and by Timur and their modern history shows them always
under the sphere of influence of a foreign power whether the British
or the Americans. Ironically even Khomeini from what I have read was
not of Iranian origin but rather of half British, half Kashmiri roots
and not Iranian until Senator Moussavi gave him and his sons
citizenship in what was to become a fatal error for Moussavi himself
and for the rest of Iran.

I would never be an apologist for the IRI with its totalitarian self
serving `religious’ regime of repression and torture and imprisonment
and state sanctioned rapes and assassinations which maintains itself
in power by the use of the Basij and make a mockery of Islam.

Reza Pahlavi wonders why no foreign powers have given any serious
support to democrats and dissidents within Iran for the past 27 years
when so many people within Iran are not content. I think that the
answer lies in the fact that too many trading partners like Japan,
Italy, other EU countries, Russia and China are benefiting from the
status quo and have too much at stake to want a regime change. That
is also why I think, that as admirable and correct a notion, as Reza
Pahlavi’s position is that Iranians must change their own regime and
by non-violent means; I do not believe they will ever be left alone
to do so… not until the day they have no more oil or the world
economy becomes fueled by hydrogen.

The U.S. is not the great bastion of democracy it reports itself to
be. It is bedfellow with any regime with oil like Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait and the UAE, which are not democracies. Women for example in
Saudi Arabia are not allowed to work or drive and how is that
different from the repression of woman by the IRI? And for many
decades Saddam was their boy in Iraq and a CIA appointee to start
with.

Why should any Iranian trust America, which backed Saddam in his
`Silent War’ on Iran in which a million youths died and then they
turned on him just like they put in Shah Reza and kept him in for
nearly 50 years and then turned on him too. Why should anyone trust
the USA? They despise communism and socialism and yet their biggest
trading partner is China, the China of political imprisonment and
Tienamin Square.

The U.S. is not interested in democracy for Iranians either but
having been kicked out of Iran and losing all its economic benefits
and assets in Iran, it is out for blood. I think that Mr. Bush has
bullied the EU3 and the IAEA into reporting Iran to the UN Security
Council for consideration for sanctioning because he is mad that a
program started by the Ford administration is serving the benefit of
Russia now, which is building the reactor in Bushehr. It also is an
economic blow to the U.S. that the IRI switched their bourse to
Euros. When the U.S. gets kicked out of a country by nationalists, it
never gets over it. Look at Cuba. Nationalism is a dangerous
precedent for Capitalism.

I had lunch with Prof. Abbas Edelat, the director of CASMII (Campaign
Against Sanctions and Military Invasion of Iran) a few months back
and he also wants Iranian regime change to come from within. He
clarified for me several points about this nuclear issue. Iran is a
member of the NPT and as such has the right to enrich uranium for use
in generating electricity. By what authority does the USA have the
right to demand that Iran cease enrichment of uranium? Iran has
participated for three years in a voluntary additional protocol
required of no other member of the NPT to allow anytime anywhere snap
inspections by IAEA agents of Iranian nuclear sites and to this date
no proof has ever been found that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.

The USA on the other hand has the largest nuclear arsenal in the
world and rather than dismantling it as required by the NPT, it is
augmenting it. Mr. Bush has shown a consistent pattern of contempt
for treaties and international laws. He ended the U.S. participation
in the Intercontinental ballistic Missile Treaty; he ended U.S.
participation in the Kyoto Protocol. Mr. Bush has gone all around
Iran’s neighbors who are not members of the NPT offering them nuclear
concessions as in Azerbaijan, Armenia and India, which in fact is a
violation of the non-proliferation aspect of the NPT.

How can the U.S. government demand that Iran cease uranium enrichment
because it has stopped participating in a voluntary protocol when the
US government is in violation of the NPT itself?

One thing I would like to share which I gleaned from a recent issue
of the National Geographic is that despite the Bush administration
scoffing at the theory of global warming, the north pole is indeed
melting to the point that commercial shipping lanes are taking
shorter routes through areas which were once ice year round which now
have none.

In 50 years at the present rate of warming there will be no ice cap.
There are an estimated 375 billion barrels of oil reserves below the
North Pole, which could be accessed once the ice is gone which the 9
nations bordering the pole would be only too happy to drill. Even so
Mr. Bush is not content to wait for the ice to melt and his
administration has tried to ram oil drilling in the Alaska ANWAR
through Congress about 60 times so far.

This brings me to another point and that is about the quality of life
in industrial consumer society, which it seems with the global
economy everyone is hell bent on rushing into. It is getting to the
point where air quality and traffic congestion are so bad in every
major urban area around the planet that the automobile is almost
becoming non-functional.

I think that the rise of religious fundamentalism not only in Islam
but in Christendom, is a leap of blind faith by ignorant masses who
are facing future shock. They want to impose a simpler order based on
strict religious rules because they cannot face the complexity of
technology and modern life. The trouble with orthodox religions is
that they are bureaucracies based on dogma with the aim of keeping a
few old white haired men in charge.

But I saw something else going on during and after the revolution of
1979, which was a desire to resist foreign cultural invasion, a
desire to maintain Iranian culture and traditions and a desire to
have self determination and nationalism. It was the same desire that
Mossadegh had for Iran to be the main beneficiary of its own
petroleum. I saw a similar trend in the USA during the `70’s when the
2nd and 3rd generations of immigrants tried to rediscover their
ethnic and cultural roots and identities.

Why? Because the quality of life in the post-industrial age is highly
dissatisfying to the individual. People are asked to give up their
customs, their traditions, their home towns and villages, their
clans, extended families and communities and life long friendships in
return for what? `A higher standard of living.’ The corporations who
own everything and produce everything, want humanity to be reduced to
a vast undiscriminating consumer that shops till it drops and goes
into debt and works non stop for all the stuff that our media tells
us we must have to be cool.

Meanwhile the family is so broken that single parenthood is becoming
the norm and everyone who can afford it is in therapy or failing that
on drugs and alcohol. Afghanistan has been returned to an opium
economy by design and popular demand. You see Karl Marx was wrong. It
is not religion that is the opiate of the people but opium. As long
as people are drugged out or busy killing each other in violent
crimes they cannot focus or organize a revolution. It is a strategy
that works in Iran and it works in the USA.

Unfortunately the moral decadence of the consumer society in which
cultural icons are those who have become so wealthy either by
legitimate or illegitimate means as to be able to act free of or
above the law, give plenty of ammunition to the religious zealots.

And this `War on Terrorism’ is a war on dissidents. One person’s
terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Americans have forgotten
their revolution of 1776 in which they threw off the mercantile yoke
of the British Crown. I think that Americans have to get back in
touch with their own ideals and their own constitution and bill of
rights and stop supporting a President and an administration that
refers to the constitution as `just a damn piece of paper.’

This administration has made spying on its own civilians and wire
tapping without a warrant an accepted norm. It is time to stop the
incursions against our civil liberties by an administration, which
has used the fear factor of 911 to reinstate the military industrial
complex. Americans need to believe in the rights of other nations to
have democracy and the US needs to develop foreign policies that
treat all nations equally and measure them by the same yard-stick.

No more real politique.

Middle East Newsline, Canada
March 17 2007

U.S. WARNS OF TURKISH BACKLASH

WASHINGTON [MENL] — The Bush administration has warned of a backlash
by Turkey should Congress pass a resolution that blames the NATO ally
for killing more than 1 million Armenians during World War I.

Administration officials have been meeting senior members of Congress
in an effort to block a resolution that deems the Turkish killing of
Armenians in 1915 as genocide. Turkey has warned that such a
resolution would harm relations with Washington.

"Turkey provides extensive logistic support to our troops in Iraq,"
Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried said. "This critical
lifeline includes the cargo hub at Incirlik air base through which we
ship 74 percent of our air cargo to Iraq."

In testimony to the House International Relations subcommittee on
Europe on March 15, Fried warned of Turkish retaliation for the
Armenian genocide resolution. He said one prospect was that Ankara
would expel the U.S. military from Incirlik, located in southern
Turkey.

19_1.html

Business Standard, India
March 17 2007

V V: Pamuk & after

BOOKMARK

V V / New Delhi March 17, 2007

Who can confront the lies and silences that lie at the heart of
everyone’s lives?

Turkish writers and intellectuals have been incarcerated ever since
Orhan Pamuk made his comments about Armenian-Turkish history to a
Swiss reporter last November, and although he was `let off’ (because
of his Nobel) others have been hounded by a resurgence of xenophobic
nationalism. Under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which makes
`insulting Turkishness’ a criminal offence, a slew of cases have been
launched against them. Maybe nothing may come from them (because of
EU pressure) but with the threat of retaliation always present,
writers have been gagged or at least taken to self-censorship. (A
Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor was shot in broad daylight in
January in Istanbul for `insulting Turkishness’.) Some writers have
stood up, like Elif Shafak, whose novel The Bastard of Istanbul
(Viking, $25) talks about `genocidal survivors who lost their
relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915′. Like Pamuk,
Shafak was eventually acquitted after the court agreed that she could
not be convicted on the basis of comments made by a fictional
character.

The Bastard of Istanbul is a political novel. It is spun around a
tale of two families – one Armenian-American (part of the Armenian
diaspora in San Francisco) and the other Turkish, living in Istanbul.
Both are burdened by dark secrets and historical tragedies rooted in
a common Istanbul past. The heroine is Asya, a rebel born out of
wedlock (hence the title) and an anarchist and a rebel. She shares an
old Ottoman mansion with an extended family: her mother, three aunts,
a grandmother, a step-great-grandmother and a cat, each more
eccentric than the other.

Asya’s counterpart is Armanousch, whose interest in her history is
woken up by a series of late-night exchanges with fellow diasporans.
Fired by her desire to explore her past, she travels secretly to
Istanbul and lives with Asya’s family. There she discovers that
despite historical differences Armenians and Turks have more in
common than not.

But there is one difference that separates them: the interpretation
of what happened in history. Specifically, what happened between the
two peoples since the massacres and deportations suffered by the
Armenians at the hands of the Turks in 1915. This was perhaps the
first example of what can be called ethnic cleansing or genocide – two
out of three Armenians were done to death under the Ottoman rule. How
did they react?

Asya explains that Armenians clung to history because `your crusade
for remembrance makes you part of a group where there is a great
feeling of solidarity’. But `Turks, like me, cannot be
past-orientated, not because I don’t care but because I don’t know
anything about it’. In other words, the past has been wiped out or
whitewashed. Instead of telling Turkish children that their Ottoman
forebears had killed one million Armenians, the facts were turned
upside down: it was the Armenians who had slaughtered the Turks in
far greater numbers.

Shafak tries to set the record straight. Armanousch’s
great-grandfather was a poet who was among the hundreds of Armenian
intellectuals rounded up by the Ottoman army on April 24, 1915, in
order `to get rid of the brains’. The recurring theme throughout the
novel is the need for the present to come to terms with the past
trauma, the longing for a firm identity amidst the rage and silences
that constantly hover in the background.

Who, among us, can confront the lies and silences that lie at the
heart of everyone’s lives, including our own? We need to do that if
only to come to terms with ourselves. We are all made up of different
selves like a broomstick that needs to be tethered to be of any use.

On a different plane the novel raises a much larger question: the
role of nationalist historians who see all history in terms of
victories, defeats, triumphs, humiliations, their own side on the
upgrade and some hated rival on the downgrade. And they do this
without batting an eye-lid, without being conscious of dishonesty.
Sadly, political commentators can survive almost any mistake, like
astrologers, because their devoted followers don’t look for an
appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalist
loyalties. This is what has happened in Turkey as it would elsewhere
where nationalists take over. To paraphrase Joyce, `history is a
nightmare from which we are trying to awake’.

rypage.php?leftnm=5&subLeft=6&chklogin=N&a mp;autono=277969&tab=r

The Ottawa Sun, Canada
March 18, 2007 Sunday
FINAL EDITION

Swiping at identity theft;
Ontario’s privacy czar has her hands full

BY CHRISTINA BLIZZARD

For the past 20 years, she has been a quiet warrior fighting a
neverending battle against an unseen enemy.

The war is on your privacy — which is increasingly under attack from
dumpster divers, hackers, Eastern bloc con artists, organized crime,
intrusive government agencies and even sloppy computer practices by
big hospitals and big businesses.

The province’s privacy commissioner is a tiny, elegant woman. But
don’t be fooled. She’s one gritty fighter.

Dr. Ann Cavoukian has a passion. And it’s your privacy. And the right
to privacy, she believes, is intrinsically linked to your freedom.

"The linkage between privacy and freedom is one of the strongest
associations, because the first thing that goes when society changes
from a democracy to a totaliatrain state, the first thread to
unravel, is privacy," she said in an interview.

DEFENDING OUR RIGHTS

In the Internet era, it seems rarely a day passes that Cavoukian
isn’t front and centre defending our right to keep our personal
information just that — personal. Most recently, she issued an order
requiring hospitals to take measures to ensure the safe storage of
patients’ records after a doctor at the Hospital for Sick Children
had a laptop computer — along with thousands of patients’ medical
records — stolen.

Identity theft and debit and credit card fraud using stolen personal
information have exploded in the two decades Cavoukian’s been in her
job.

"Organized crime is now into the area of identity theft big time, so
they are looking for access to personal information," she said.

Most worrying is individuals can take all the protective measures
they can to keep their personal data safe — and they are still
vulnerable to attack.

As long as businesses don’t encrypt their databases of personal
information, rogue employees and hackers have a steady stream of
identifiable data they can sell to the highest bidder. Ditto for
businesses where employees take unencrypted information home with
them on laptop computers or BlackBerries. All it takes is for the
device to be lost or stolen and your most vital information has been
compromised.

"The major two sources of identity theft have nothing to do with
consumers’ best practices," she said. "Consumers can do everything
and their information could still be subject to this enormous risk.

"If all the major companies started tomorrow encrypting the personal
identifiers associated with information they have in their databases,
you could significantly minimize the incidence of identity theft,"
she said.

Cavoukian would like the province to bring in "breach notification,"
legislation that would require businesses, hospitals and other
organizations to inform customers, clients and patients when their
personal information has been compromised. Companies that encrypt
data would not be exempt.

If the public is made aware of security breaches, they can defend
against it, Cavoukian says. They can contact credit bureaus, for
example, and ask for a fraud alert that would stop any organization
from automatically extending credit unless the victim is notified.

There are now web sites that instruct people on how to mine personal
information such as dates of birth, social insurance numbers and
driver’s licence information. That information is then sold to
organized crime.

"And that is the fear," she said. "Once it becomes big business you
are going to have more and more people entering the field — more and
more rogue employees."

But identity theft isn’t Cavoukian’s only concern.

Red flags went up on privacy recently about a plan by convenience
store owners to swipe driver’s licences as proof of age for purchases
of cigarettes, lottery tickets and other age-restricted products.
Cavoukian’s office was consulted about the program and they are
satisfied it not only doesn’t retain information from the licence, it
actually restricts the amount of information the store clerk gets —
since he or she doesn’t need to read the licence, just swipe it. They
see only the year of birth.

FACEBOOK AND MYSPACE

One alarm bell Cavoukian has been ringing has to do with on-line
"social network," web sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Her office
has produced a brochure in partnership with Facebook which, she says,
unlike other web sites, has strong privacy protection measures.

Schools now ask her to speak to students to warn them of on-line
risks.

"Parents and teachers are getting very concerned with the naivete,
especially of high school students," she says.

She reminds students, "this can come back to haunt you.

"You are going to be applying for jobs in a couple of years," she
tells youngsters, and tells the cautionary tale of a girl who was a
prefect at a university — until the administration saw an on-line
picture of her smoking a joint at a party.

"This information lives for life," Cavoukian points out. "So if
you’ve got pictures of yourself at drunken parties doing things that
you think is funny now, do you want this in the hands of a
prospective employer? What about a professor? This is going to follow
you forever. What happens if it gets into the wrong hands?" she asks.

She reminds them there are pedophiles out there who prey on the
naivete of young people. Don’t let anyone access your profile. Limit
it to people you know and never, ever put an address or locator
information in your profile.

When Toronto Police wanted to install surveillance cameras on the TTC
and in Dundas Square, she gave them guidelines of acceptable ways to
do it. The first was the public had to be notified the cameras were
there. Next, there had to be assurances that the images captured by
the cameras would be only used for the purpose for which they were
collected — and destroyed as soon as possible. And she urged police
to keep strict control on who is authorized to access the information
and how it could be used.

"One of the big problems in London, England was there are millions of
surveillance cameras and they were abused," she said. Attractive
women were tracked by people who had access to the information,
Cavoukian said.

Like freedom and democracy, privacy is often something society only
values when it has been lost. And Cavoukian’s personal background is
such that she never takes those values for granted. Of Armenian
background, her family was living in Egypt when it was nationalized
from British rule. The ensuing loss of personal freedom forced her
family to flee to Canada when she was four years old.

"My parents gave up everything so they could raise their children in
freedom. So for me the message of freedom has been drilled home" she
said.

Cavoukian’s message is slowly getting through to all of us. Because,
litttle by little, most of us have felt the gnawing vulnerability of
a privacy breach. Each time our debit card is compromised, each time
a department store acknowledges they have compromised thousands of
accounts, we feel defenceless. And we all loose a little freedom.

Brantford Expositor (Ontario)
March 17, 2007 Saturday

Restoring a monument

GRAPHIC: The 1,000-year-old Akhtamar Church, one of the finest
surviving monuments of ancient Armenian culture, is covered in
scaffolding as masons replace fallen roof stones in Van province in
east Turkey, in this July 23, 2005 photo. After a century of neglect
and political wrangling, Turkey has restored the ancient church, the
lone building on the tiny Akhtamar island. Turkey may host Armenian
officials at a ceremony marking the renovation of the chuch, Turkish
media and sources close to the project said Wednesday. AP File Photo

Edmonton Journal (Alberta)
March 17, 2007 Saturday
Final Edition

‘You can get naked and get famous’: Persistence pays off, Borat
sidekick tells students

Elizabeth Withey, The Edmonton Journal

EDMONTON – It bothers actor Ken Davitian that no one cares about his
chin.

Davitian, 53, became infamous last year after he wrestled naked with
Sacha Baron Cohen in the comedy film sensation Borat: Cultural
Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
But, as Davitian told a crowd of NAIT students and staff at a
motivational talk Friday, all people want to know is whether those
were "studio testicles" resting on Baron Cohen’s chin in the movie.

They weren’t.

"I took a lot of showers," Davitian said in a mock incensed tone.
"And no one really cares where my chin was."

"Where was your chin?" the moderator, radio DJ Fearless Fred Kennedy,
asked.

"In his belly button," Davitian told the chuckling audience.

No surprise. At five feet, five inches and 285 pounds, the
California-born Davitian is a stumpy, lumpy fellow compared with
beanpole Baron Cohen. But Davitian’s comic waddle, self-deprecating
charm and on-demand Armenian accent all helped him land the part of
Azamat Bagatov, the make-believe Kazakhstani producer who accompanies
reporter Borat Sagdiyev (Baron Cohen) to America.

Davitian said it was inspiring and educational to work alongside the
creator of Da Ali G Show, a satirical TV program in which Baron Cohen
conducts interviews with unsuspecting people as one of three
characters (among them Borat). But Davitian said there was some
obvious discomfort in the naked fight sequence, in which he and Borat
tussle on a hotel bed, then chase around the hotel in the buck,
shocking people in an elevator and a ballroom.

"There was a lot of tension there," Davitian said, adding he has lost
20 pounds since he saw his body jiggle on the big screen.

Davitian’s off-colour anecdotes and inside stories tickled a gym full
of Borat fans.

"He’s such a phenomenal actor," Revae Osinchuk, 20, said. "I thought
he was from Kazakhstan. How was I supposed to know?"

NAIT instructor Doug Holliday said Davitian’s bare buttocks in the
movie brought him to tears. "It was hilarious and disgusting," the
41-year-old said.

Joanne James, 48, applauded Davitian for being so daring. "I wish I
had a set like that," she said, cupping her hands in front of her
chest.

Relatively unknown before his Azamat role, Davitian is now busy with
acting gigs including one in Get Smart with Steve Carell, to be
released in 2008.

His message? Stardom is possible at any age. "Persistence,
persistence, persistence," he said. "Don’t stop until you drop. It
can happen when you’re old and grey. You can get naked, and get
famous."

Anatolia News Agency, Turkey
March 16 2007

USA TURKISH MPS PRESENT VIEWS ABOUT "ARMENIAN GENOCIDE" BILL

Washington, 15 March: Turkish parliamentary delegation, which is
currently in Washington to hold talks regarding the draft law on
so-called Armenian genocide (presented to US Congress), continued its
meetings with members of House of Representatives at the Congress on
Thursday [15 March].

The delegation held talks with 10 members of the House of
Representatives today.

On the other hand, Justice and Development Party (AKP) Istanbul
Deputy Egemen Bagis (who also took part in the delegation) delivered
a speech to an expert group in think-tank organization Council of
Foreign Relations.

Bagis conveyed the views of Turkish government to the group regarding
the draft law on so-called Armenian genocide, as well as recent
developments about Iraq and other regional issues.

Turkish parliamentary delegation is comprised of AKP parliamentarians
Vahit Erdem and Reha Denemec, as well as main opposition Republican
People’s Party (CHP) parliamentarians Bihlun Tamayligil and Ersin
Arioglu.

ITAR-TASS News Agency, Russia
March 17, 2007 Saturday 03:08 AM EST

CIS humanitarian cooperation council focused on particular projects

ALMATY, March 16

Almaty has hosted the first meeting of the CIS Humanitarian
Cooperation Council.

Special presidential representatives from the eight member-countries
of the Commonwealth of Independents States, as well as senior
officials for culture, science, and education met here on Friday to
map out plans for 2007-2008, discuss the council’s regulations, and
other procedural issues.

Participants in the meeting focused on the Interstate Humanitarian
Cooperation Fund, which will begin implementing real projects soon.

The council also discussed the possibilities to set up national
offices of the fund. One of their key tasks will be the intensive
drawing of non-budgetary funds for the projects with due account of
peculiarities of each CIS country.

“We have already discussed certain programs, which will be launched
in the near future,” Russia’s special presidential envoy for
humanitarian cooperation with the CIS countries Dzhakhan Pollyyeva,
who was elected as the Council’s chairperson, told Itar-Tass.

“All the necessary legal documents were signed. The financing
support of the projects is being coordinated,” she said.

“The keen interest voiced by CIS representatives and their proposals
showed that they view the fund as a source of new and broader
possibilities and expressed the readiness to work jointly for the
common benefit,” Pollyyeva said.

Chief of the Russian Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography
Mikhail Shvydkoy, who attended the meeting, believes that the main
task of the fund is “to provide young talents with broader
possibilities for further growth.”

“It is necessary to start common projects in the spheres of museums,
theatres, and music,” he said.

“We are setting up a symphony orchestra jointly with the SIC Slavic
countries. This will be the biggest project of 2007,” he stressed,
adding, “We would like to draw in our Kazakh counterparts.
Therefore, the orchestra may turn into the Eurasian Youth Symphony
Orchestra.”

“We are going to establish a broad range of institutions and
agencies, which will select talented young people from former Soviet
republics and promote them on the markets of Eastern and Central
Europe,” Shvydkoy said, adding, “We should do our utmost to give
broader possibilities for young artists and scientists. We will find
the starting capital, and then they can make money themselves.”

“We are lacking performers from Kazakhstan and Georgia. This is a
good project, which is in demand on the market,” he said.

“It is of huge importance to keep up a certain cultural balance, a
balance of languages and humanitarian relations,” Shvydkoy stressed.

The second forum of CIS intellectuals due in Kazakhstan in autumn
will be one of the most important events of this year.

Participants in the Almaty meeting proposed to hold a forum of book
publishers in Armenia and to focus on translators and interpreters
activity in the CIS countries.

They also offered to establish a databank of ideas for the joint
production of films and to develop a program for preserving the CIS
cultural variety and heritage.

“The top priority of the CIS Humanitarian Cooperation Council is to
sustain and develop the cultural community of peoples that has formed
over decades,” famous Azerbaijani artist, the country’s Ambassador
to Russia Polad Bul-Bul ogly said at the meeting.