Month: April 2007

ITAR-TASS News Agency, Russia
April 13, 2007 Friday

Azerbaijan won’t ever grant independence to Karabakh-Aliyev

Azerbaijan will never grant independence to Karabakh, President Ilham
Aliyev told the national government on Friday.

“Karabakh will never join Armenia either,” he added.

The Armenian people already have their state – Armenia, Aliyev said.
“If anyone in Karabakh wants self-determination, they can move to
Armenia,” he said.

Aliyev disagreed with claims of the alleged plans to keep off Armenia
from regional projects. Armenia has isolated itself with claims to
neighbors and became “an economic and transport dead-end,” he said.

“If the Armenian administration offers a constructive attitude, the
Karabakh problem can be resolved,” Aliyev said.

He reaffirmed his “clear and invariable position: the territorial
integrity of Azerbaijan must be restored; the occupied lands must be
freed unconditionally; and refugees must return home.”

ITAR-TASS News Agency, Russia
April 13, 2007 Friday

Akhalkalaki base convoy carrying property to Armenia

The first convoy of this year carrying property of the Russian 62nd
base in Akhalkalaki (southern Georgia) crossed the Georgian-Armenian
border and headed for the Russian 102nd base in Gyumri on Friday,
Assistant Army Commander Col. Igor Konashenkov said.

“Ten large-size trucks are carrying property,” he said.

The second motorcade will leave Akhalkalaki for Armenia on April 19,
and another four will go there by the end of May.

Military hardware and property of the Akhalkalaki base will also be
sent to Russia by two trains on May 17 and 24. The base will be
transferred to the Georgian Defense Ministry by July 1.

All heavy machinery and armaments of the bases were withdrawn last
year.

The pullout of military hardware and property of the 12th base in
Batumi, which started two years ago, will resume in May and end next
year. The Batumi base will close down by October 1, 2008.

ITAR-TASS News Agency, Russia
April 13, 2007 Friday

Russia to send observers to Armenian parliament elections

The Russian Central Elections Commission will send observers to the
May 12 parliament elections in Armenia, Commission Chairman Vladimir
Churov said on Friday.

He said five Russian representatives will join the international
election observation mission of the CIS and the OSCEODIHR.

In the words of Churov, they have not received an official invitation
to monitor presidential elections in France.

Churov will go to the Krasnoyarsk territory tonight for watching the
April 15 elections of the legislative assembly.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

ITAR-TASS News Agency, Russia
April 13, 2007 Friday

Kocharyan calls for broader contacts among CIS border guards

Armenian President Robert Kocharyan has gone on record for still
broader cooperation among the border guards of the CIS countries.

“It is necessary to make cooperation among CIS border guards still
broader,” he stated here on Friday, while receiving the participants
of the meeting of the Council of Commanders of CIS Border Guard
Forces, which is under way in the Armenian capital.

First Deputy Director of the Russian Federal Security Service General
Vladimir Pronichev, who also heads the Russian Border Guard Service,
led the group.

According to Kocharyan, cooperation among the CIS border guards “is
especially timely today because the border guard services have to
deal now with numerous new challenges, besides the growing danger of
terrorism and illicit drugs circulation”.

The participants of the reception informed Kocharyan about the
problems that were discussed during the Council meeting and about the
approaches to their solution.

ITAR-TASS News Agency, Russia
April 13, 2007 Friday

Georgia’s ethnic Armenians demand regional language status for
Armenian

About 300 residents of the southern Georgian town of Akhalkalaki held
a meeting on the town’s main square Friday with a demand to declare
Armenian the regional language in Georgia’s province of
Samtskhe-Javakheti.

Participants in the meeting, convened by the local ethnic Armenian
organizations Javakh and Virk, said a considerable part of Armenians
living in the province either do not speak the Georgian language at
all or have a poor command of it.

The meeting passed a resolution with a proposal to Georgian
parliament and president give the Armenian communities living in the
Akhalkalaki and Ninotsminda districts the right to use Armenian as
the language for documentation formalities in local agencies of
power.

Member of parliament Van Baiburt, who is also a deputy chairman of
the public organization called the Union of Georgia’s Armenians, made
a comment on this demand.

“There’s no talking about any kind of infringement on the Armenians’
language rights in Samtskhe-Javakheti and in Georgia on the whole,”
Baiburt said. “A total of five MPs are Armenians, several Armenian
newspapers are published in Georgia, the country has 170 schools
where tuition is done in Armenian, and a hundred schools of that
number are located in Samtskhe-Javakheti.”

“It’s Armenians who mostly occupy executive posts in the areas with
big Armenian communities and no one objects to holding local meetings
in the Armenian language, but there’s nothing extraordinary in the
fact you must write documents in Georgian if you submit them to
central agencies of power or to an archive,” Baiburt said.

A census held in 2002 showed that Georgia had a population of 4.4
million, 84% of them ethnic Georgians, 6.5% Azerbaijanis, 5.7%
Armenians and 1.5% Russians.

Agence France Presse — English
April 12, 2007 Thursday 4:27 PM GMT

Bomb blasts damage offices of leading Armenian party

Powerful bomb blasts early Thursday badly damaged two Yerevan
campaign offices of one of Armenia’s leading parties in next month’s
parliamentary elections, police said.

No one was injured in the explosions which took place at about 3:00
am (2200 GMT Wednesday) when explosive devices were detonated in
separate districts of the capital, a police statement said.

"Serious damage was caused to our offices as a result of the
explosions. The buildings were almost entirely destroyed," a
spokesman for the Prosperous Armenia party, Bagdasar Mherian, told
AFP.

President Robert Kocharian ordered an investigation and decried the
bombings as an attack on democracy.

"We regard this as an attempt to destabilize the situation, to create
an atmosphere of intolerance before parliamentary elections. Radical
displays cannot interfere with Armenia’s determination to hold
democratic elections," presidential spokesman Victor Sogomonian said
in a statement.

Prosperous Armenia, a populist pro-presidential party, was formed
last year by Gatik Tsarukian, one of Armenia’s richest men. Along
with the ruling Republican Party, it is considered one of the top
contenders in the May 12 vote.

Previous elections in Armenia, an ex-Soviet state in the strategic
Caucasus region, have been marred by allegations of vote-rigging and
intimidation.

On April 2, Vardan Gukasian, the mayor of Armenia’s second-largest
city Gyumri and a prominent member of the Republican Party, survived
an assassination attempt by gunmen that left three people dead.

Agence France Presse — English
April 14, 2007 Saturday

Detained chess champ plots next move against Putin

by Sebastian Smith

MOSCOW

As chess champion Garry Kasparov was almost unbeatable, but from the
Moscow police station where he was held Saturday the great tactician
pondered a much tougher game — how to bring down Russian President
Vladimir Putin.

Kasparov, who made mincemeat of his opponents for 15 years after he
became World Chess Champion in 1985, is one of the disparate figures
leading The Other Russia coalition that held a banned protest march
Saturday in central Moscow.

Some 200 people were detained, among them the former chess king, when
they defied a police warning and attempted to march on the capital’s
Pushkin Square.

Kasparov, a famously aggressive chess player, clearly thought the
risk of arrest worthwhile — particularly given the huge
international media presence at the rally.

"I’m not surprised, I think Kasparov wanted that, so now he’s happy,"
commented another opposition leader, Irina Khakamada.

The same strategy of peaceful disobedience was used at two previous
Other Russia marches in the former imperial capital Saint Petersburg
and Nizhny Novgorod, east of Moscow, resulting in beatings and
arrests. Moscow police were furious.

Kasparov was arrested because "he came and began to provoke police
into taking harsh action, while knowing that the demonstration on
Pushkin Square was forbidden," a police spokesman was quoted as
saying by Interfax.

This intense man of 44, recognisable by his bushy eyebrows and dark
features, makes an unlikely political leader in today’s Russia.

Half-Jewish, half-Armenian and born during the Soviet Union in
Azerbaijan, he is automatically a hate figure for Russia’s
significant number of ultra-nationalists. And his fierce opposition
to Putin is out of step with the vast majority shown by polls to
admire the former KGB officer.

But Kasparov’s main talent seems to lie in coordinating Russia’s
fractured and marginalised opposition.

The Other Russia, which he helped found, includes figures as
disparate as a little-loved former premier Mikhail Kasyanov, the
enigmatic writer and radical left leader Eduard Limonov, and a series
of youth groups.

Their stated goal is to ensure that the March 2008 presidential
election, in which Putin is to be replaced, will be fair.

"Our demands are simple," Kasparov said when he announced his
retirement two years ago. "It’s about putting pressure on Putin’s
regime to restore democratic institutions."

Life on the political chessboard has been far from easy.

After the brutal murder in Moscow of investigative journalist Anna
Politikovskaya, a fierce Putin critic, in October Kasparov said he
feared for his safety.

"I try to protect myself and my family as much as possible but I am
aware that no protection is possible," he said in an interview
published in a Portuguese daily.

During a 2005 tour to meet grass roots groups in the troubled North
Caucasus region, Kasparov found his way repeatedly blocked.

Planned venues for meetings were mysteriously closed ahead of his
arrival and police stood by as youths hurled eggs and tomato sauce.

Kasparov gives the impression of being angry, but he apparently
retains a sense of humour.

After being hit by a member of the public with a chess board, he
quipped: "I’m glad that in the Soviet Union the popular sport was
chess and not baseball."

Middle East News Agency, Egypt
April 14 2007

MUBARAK-KOCHARYAN DISCUSS MIDDLE EAST SITUATION

Cairo, 14 April: President Husni Mubarak’s talks with visiting
Armenian President Robert Kocharyan on Saturday covered the latest
developments in the Middle East and Egyptian efforts to make a
breakthrough in the stymied Mideast peace process, Presidential
Spokesman Sulayman Awwad said.

He said the talks took up Armenia’s interest in arrangements
concerning East Jerusalem and in particular its Armenian quarter.

The two leaders also discussed the situation in Iraq, the Iranian
nuclear file -Armenia shares its southern borders with Iran- and
conditions in the Gulf, he said.

They also probed the situation in Central Asia with special focus on
the Armenian-Azeri conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, he said pointing
out that president Mubarak expressed his wish that the two countries
would be able to reach a peaceful settlement for their dispute in a
way that would bring about stability to Central Asia.

The spokesman said the Armenian president’s visit to Egypt
demonstrated a mutual wish to give a strong impetus to trade exchange
and joint investments and reach an agreement on the establishment of
a joint pharmaceutical company for the distribution of Egyptian
medicines in Armenia and other Central Asian countries.

He said the Armenian leader expressed keenness on the continuation of
bilateral technical cooperation in tourism, police and diplomatic
work through the Egyptian Foreign Ministry’s Fund for Technical
Cooperation with the Commonwealth of Independent States.

He also talked about his wish to reopen the Egyptian trade centre in
Armenia, Awwad said.

According to him, the Armenian president’s visit to Egypt will
witness the inking of a number of agreements and cooperation
protocols covering judicial fields, combat of organised crime,
customs and media – a cooperation agreement between the Middle East
News Agency and its Armenian counterpart will be signed. An agreement
will also be signed to set up a joint businessmen council, he added.

Awwad said president Kocharyan’s itinerary in Egypt includes meetings
with Grand Imam of al-Azhar Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi and Arab League
Secretary-General Amr Musa in addition to a visit to Luxor.

According to Awwad, the visit falls within the framework of President
Mubarak’s interest in consolidating ties with the Central Asia
republics. He underscored the trip paid by president Mubarak to
Kazakhstan last year, the one paid by the Kazakh president to Egypt
early this year, the meeting between president Mubarak and the Tajik
president in Egypt last month, the visit to be paid by the Uzbek
president to Cairo later this week and the planned meeting between
Mubarak and the Azeri president in Egypt next month.

Egypt was the first Arab and African country to establish diplomatic
ties with Armenia after it announced its independence from the
defunct Soviet Union back in 1991, Awwad said highlighting the
constant coordination and contacts between the two countries at
international forums, especially the UN.

Middle East News Agency, Egypt
April 14 2007

EGYPTIAN FOREIGN MINISTER HOLDS TALKS WITH ARMENIAN COUNTERPART

Cairo, 14 April: Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Abu-al-Ghayt met on
Saturday with his Armenian counterpart Vardan Oskanyan.

During the meeting, Abu-al-Ghayt reviewed the Egyptian vision of
developments in the Mideast, especially with regard to the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan and the Iranian
nuclear file.

Hailing ties between Egypt and Armenia, Abu-al-Ghayt said that the
two countries would ink seven agreements on cooperation in fighting
crime and in the customs field as well as signing a memorandum of
understanding between the Egyptian and Armenian businessmen councils.

For his part, the Armenian minister highlighted the importance
Armenia attached to ties with Egypt.

Egypt established diplomatic ties with Armenia in 1992.

The Armenian minister also reviewed developments of the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, ties with
the US and Russia and the impact of developments of the Iranian
nuclear file on the Caucasus region.

ITAR-TASS News Agency, Russia
April 14, 2007 Saturday 01:23 PM EST

Armenia says Russian border guards withdrawal out of question

The commander of Armenia’s border guard troops, Lieutenant-General
Sergei Bondarev said the question of how long Russian border guards
will stay in Armenia is not even considered.

In his view, Russian border guards have a “stabilising effect” on
the situation on the Armenian-Turkish border.

According to the general, the 15 years during which Russian border
guards have been protecting the 335-kilometre border with Turkey have
been “reliable and secure”.

Border guards detained about 100 border regime violators in the first
quarter of 2007 and more than 450 in 2006.

Russian border guards have established working contacts with the
Turkish colleagues. “Our cooperation has helped to reduce the number
of border incidents and violations considerably,” the general said.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress