Author: Andres-Papazian

EP’S PRESIDENT BUZEK: EURONEST CAN HELP IN ESTABLISHING DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE PARTIES TO NK CONFLICT

APA
May 3 2011
Azerbaijan

Baku. Viktoria Dementyeva – APA. EURONEST, the newly-established
parliament structure, can help in establishing dialogue between the
parties to Nagorno Karabakh conflict, said President of the European
Parliament Jerzy Buzek, APA reports.

“Nagorno Karabakh is a painful problem. You, the parliamentarians
of the two countries, will decide how and in what directions your
countries will cooperate. Our relations with Azerbaijan and Armenia
are partnership relations and we want to help you in the settlement
of this conflict. We want to bring you together, establish dialogue
and help solve the conflict. I think other parliamentarians also want
this,” he said.

From: A. Papazian

METSAMOR NUKE PLANT: FATEFUL COMBINATION OF RISKS

news.az
May 3 2011
Azerbaijan

News.Az reprints from 1news.az an article by political scientist
Fikrat Sadikhov.

Not only specialists are aware of a serious threat posed by the
Metsamor nuclear power plant in Armenia.

Armenia accounts for the only nuclear power plant in the region,
locating near Metsamor city, some 20-30km south of Yerevan. It was
launched in 1976 while now only the second unit of the Armenian
nuclear power with a capacity of 407.5 MW is functioning.

Armenian side has long been trying to persuade the world community
that this nuclear plant is almost the safest in the world but in vain.

Is it true? The National Geographic has lately published an article
entitled “Is Armenia’s Nuclear Plant the World’s Most Dangerous?”

about the activity of the station and its security issue. The first
phrase in the article wipes off the farfetched arguments of the
Armenian side making them completely senseless.

The article says “fateful combination of design and location make
Metsamor among the most dangerous nuclear plants in the world”.

According to the magazine, the Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant which
is just 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the Turkish border in a
seismically active area, attracts an even increased attention in
the wake of Japan’s quake-and-tsunami-triggered Fukushima Daiichi
crisis. Armenian officials say modifications made to the reactor over
the past 15 years have made it safer.

However, IAEA said necessary upgrades do not comply with general
standards and were done after its restart.

Additionally, the ‘VVER 440s installed at the plant share one
characteristic with Chernobyl that has been a continuing concern
to many who live nearby: They have no containment structure’, the
magazine says.

It continues that ‘instead, VVER 440s rely on an “accident localization
system,” designed to handle small ruptures. In the event of a large
rupture, the system would vent directly to the atmosphere’.

They refer to an article in NEI’s 1997 Source Book on Soviet nuclear
plants saying ‘they cannot cope with large primary circuit breaks’.

“As with most Soviet-designed plants, electricity production by the
VVER-440 Model V230s came at the expense of safety”, the magazine says.

The opinion of Antonia Wenisch of the Austrian Institute of Applied
Ecology in Vienna, who calls Metsamor “among the most dangerous
nuclear plants still in operation”, also sounds important.

She said ‘despite the upgrades to the plant the overall safety has
not improved sufficiently’.

It is also known that since it failed to persuade Armenia to close
the plant, the EU has focused on providing aid for improving the
plant safety, spending more than 59 million euros ($85 million) on
such projects as well as for renewable energy, and regional energy
cooperation efforts. However, it offers 200 million euro ($289 million)
loan to finance Metsamor’s shutdown, but the issue of its closing
has not yet been settled and the Armenian side with its peculiar
‘obstinacy’ still pretends not to be seeing what happens.

It all raises fears in Turkey.

“Armenian nuke plant is the most outdated in the world and most
organizations including IAEA are demanding its shutdown since it
represents a serious threat for Turkey”, Turkey’s Energy Minister
Taner Yildiz said.

“The station is located 16 km from the Turkish border and applies
old technology which might turn it into an epicenter of a serious
disaster”, he added saying Turkey continues campaign for its shutdown.

The location of the plant is the biggest shortcoming in terms of
security. Being located in the highlands, in case of failure, it may
face shortage of water necessary for cooling the active zone of the
reactor. Another important thing is that two serious crashes occurred
at the nuke plant throughout its operation. About 400 km of cable
burned down during one of them.

The task to attain the plant’s shutdown has already become among
priorities for Azerbaijan, as well.

Thus, the Foreign Ministry of Azerbaijan and its Ministry of Ecology
and Natural Resources draw up materials that prove the danger posed
by the Metsamor nuclear plant. These materials are to be submitted
in international organizations. Intensive talks on this issue are
also held in IAEA.

Now that the events in Japan showed that no country, either highly
technological or progressive, is secured from such man-caused
disasters, what can we say about Armenia which is on the verge of
economic bankruptcy and cannot even implement primary social programs
and is located in a highly seismic area? Can a country in such a
state ensure the safety of a nuclear plant, especially that Armenia
undertook to close it when it was joining the Council of Europe?

The Metsamor power plant is morally and technically outdated and
is on the list of most dangerous ones by the IAEA ranking list. It
represents a real threat for humanity and nations, residing in the
South Caucasus and neighboring regions. This issue must be actively
raised to the Russian side, since the disaster on the nuclear plant
would have an imminent effect on the population of Russia’s south.

This issue can be raised at the sessions of the UN General Assembly,
European and other international structures, primarily, IAEA, through
joint efforts of Azerbaijan, Turkey, Georgia and other countries. It
is necessary to show the world community that the risk of disaster
at the Metsamor nuke plant is high enough especially now when the
future of the overall nuclear power engineering is at issue.

But if the Armenian side is going to use this factor as a trading
object and for different speculations, it must be prevented from
doing so.

From: A. Papazian

ARMENIA INTRODUCES COMPLAINTS SYSTEM AGAINST POLICE OFFICERS

VestnikKavkaza.net
May 3 2011

Armenians will have a hotline for complaints against police officers,
News Armenia cites a police website as saying.

The hotline numbers are (010) 55-00-89, (010) 52-24-83. Citizens may
report illegal actions or anti-social behaviour of police officers and
any information on refusal to accept reports from citizens. Anonymity
is guaranteed.

The Armenian Ombudsman said in a report that 233 complaints out of
5221 registered in 2010 were against police officers.

From: A. Papazian

PEABODY REMEMBERS THOSE KILLED IN ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
By Robert Cook

Peabody City Hall
24 Lowell St, Peabody, MA
/listings/peabody-city-hall
775596
/locations/4173215
Government, The Neighborhood Files

Peabody Remembers Those Killed in Armenian Genocide

City officials, residents gather at City Hall to remember the 96th
anniversary of the Armenian massacre of 1915

The number of Peabody residents of Armenian heritage with ties to
those who survived the Armenian massacre inflicted by Ottoman-Turkish
soldiers on April 24, 1915 may be small, but the pain of remembrance
they feel is still great.

Several members of this community gathered with city officials at
City Hall on Wednesday morning to first raise the Armenian flag in
front of City Hall and then remember the atrocities of that day and
the genocide that followed that killed more than 1.5 million men,
women and children from 1915 to 1923.

Mayor Michael Bonfanti said yesterday’s ceremony was the 10th one
he has presided over as mayor. The city first started to remember
the Armenian genocide in 1991 when former Mayor Peter Torigian,
whose parents were Armenian immigrants who survived the genocide,
decided it was needed.

Bonfanti said that as more people who have ties to that horrific period
in Armenian history pass away, it will become even more critical
to make sure what happened is never forgotten so it doesn’t happen
anywhere again in the world.

“Millions of innocent human beings died and we must never forget,”
Bonfanti said.

The Rev. Karenkin Bedourain of St. Gregory Church in North Andover
said the Armenian people’s hope for justice to make those responsible
accountable has never diminished even as the anniversary of the 1915
nears 100 years.

“God’s anger will keep reminding us and others that there are other
nations that are thirsty for justice,” he said. “Now we are demanding
justice and all reperations from the world, and particularly murderous
Turkey which continues to deny the fact.”

Bedourain said it is important for the world to fully acknowledge
that the Armenian massacre of 1915 and the genocide that followed
did happen.

“The world can be saved when it begins to practice justice and the
truth,” he said.

The Armenian genocide began on April 24, 1915 when the Ottoman Empire
in Turkey decided it wanted to systematically wipe out the Armenian
race. The first 250 Armenians were massacred on that day and millions
of others were subsequently uprooted from their homes and forced to
march for hundreds of miles without food or water to Syria.

Armenians who survived the massacre and genocide that followed often
saw their families decimated by these atrocities. Some families
couldn’t even stay together and sent their children to live with
relatives in other countries or to orphanages.

While 20 nations recognize the Armenian massacre and genocide, the
United States does not. Gary Barrett, who serves as the district
director for Congressman John Tierney, read a statement from Tierney
where he said that each year he supports legislation on Capitol Hill
that would make the United State recognize those things did happen,
but so far such legislation has never made it out of Congress.

Deacon Avedis Garavanian, also of St. Gregory Church in North
Andover, delivered an emotional account of how children of parents
who survived the Armenian genocide struggle to explain that period
to their families and how the psychological scars carried by their
parents are transferred to their children.

He said 27 members of his family died as a result of those atrocities.

Garavanian said his father was often unable able to discuss what he had
experienced as a child during the massacre. He said that every April
his father would not leave their house. He recalled that whenever
he asked his father about what he saw and his father said nothing,
that was just as bad as what he would eventually learn.

“Sometimes silence is deadly.”

Finally, when he was driving his father to Hartford, Conn., in 1982,
Garavanian once asked his father what happened and this time his
father finally shared some of those terrible memories with his son.

Garavanian said his father told him that he came home to find Turkish
soldiers killing some of his siblings, his grandparents and one
soldier hit him in the eye with the butt of his rifle, which caused
him to lose one eye.

Even today, Garavanian said he finds it very hard to share what he
learned from his father with his own children whenever they ask him
about the massacre.

“It is a terrible way for anyone, and we are all God’s children,
to grow up without a sense of what we are all about,” Garavanian said

From: A. Papazian

ALIYEV: “WE HOPE, ARMENIA WILL DEMONSTRATE A CONSTRUCTIVE APPROACH TO OSCE MINSK GROUP PROPOSALS AND WILL LEAVE THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES OF AZERBAIJAN”

APA
May 3 2011
Azerbaijan

Baku – APA. “For many years the conflict between Armenia and
Azerbaijan has remained unresolved, APA reports quoting “AzerTAc”
news agency. OSCE Minsk Group has operated almost for 20 years, but
there are no so far any practical results.” Azerbaijani President
Ilham Aliyev made this statement in the press confreres after the
meeting with Lithuanian President Dalia GrybauskaitÄ-.

“Recently OSCE field assessment mission visited the occupied
territories and drew up report on it. That report clearly states
that all infrastructures were destroyed in the occupied territories,
and the facts of illegal settlement are obvious. There is a lot of
other evidences confirming Armenia’s aggressive policy, attempts
to change the historical names of the regions and administrative
borders. 7 districts located outside the administrative limits of the
Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan are also under occupation. We
suffer from the policy of ethnic cleansing. One million of
Azerbaijanis are refugees and IDPs in their native lands. About 20
percent of Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized territory is under
occupation. Nagorno-Karabakh is an integral part of Azerbaijan. Of
course, the conflict must be resolved on the basis of the principles
and norms of international law. We hope, by demonstrating a
constructive approach to OSCE Minsk Group proposals Armenia will
take a step forward and start leaving the occupied territories of
Azerbaijan. After that, the establishment of the peace in the region
is possible. The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan is the
main threat to the regional security and stability. All parties are
interested in the soonest resolution of this conflict on the basis
of international law”, – the president Aliyev said.

From: A. Papazian

ARMENIA DOUBLED BLOOD EXPORT

news.am
May 2 2011
Armenia

YEREVAN. – Armenia has exported 954 kg of blood in the first quarter
of 2011, says the report issued by Armenia’s State Revenue Committee.

As compared with the last year, blood export has almost doubled. Tax
duty for 1 kg of blood makes $176. Price for blood has gone up which
contributed to export growth.

The Armenian News – NEWS.am contacted Armenia’s Chief hematologist
Smbat Dagbashyan to clarify who and how exports blood from Armenia.

Dagbashyan said he has never heard about blood export from Armenia.

“This is the first time I hear such thing. Do we have so much blood
to export it?” he wondered.

He also recalled that a special permission of Armenia’s Health Ministry
was received when it was necessary to import 4-5 liters of blood to
Russian Beslan city for those affected by terrorist attack.

Dagbashyan assumed that apparently one of Armenia’s pharmaceutical
companies exports blood.

From: A. Papazian

ARMENIA CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT READING SOCIETY – PRESIDENT

news.am
May 3 2011
Armenia

Armenia cannot exist without reading society, said Armenian President
Serzh Sargsyan in the 25th International Book and Press Fair in
Switzerland.

On Monday President Sargsyan left on official visit to the Swiss
Confederation. In the framework of the visit, the President of Armenia
visited the Armenian pavilion at the International Book and Press Fair.

“The profound respect and esteem we have for a book have deep roots.

The masterpieces of Armenian literature were created almost
simultaneously with the translation of Bible that was the first book
written in Armenian [in the fifth century]. The feat of Armenian
nation in the fifth century laid foundation for overall development of
Armenian nation with all ups and downs,” stressed President Sargsyan.

Armenian president familiarized himself with the books published by
the publishing houses of Armenia and Armenian Diaspora.

From: A. Papazian

ARMENIAN PRESIDENT IN GENEVA

news.am
May 2 2011
Armenia

On May 2, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan left on official visit
to the Swiss Confederation.

In the framework of the visit, the President Sargsyan visited the
25th International Book and Press Fair, presidential press service
informed Armenian News-NEWS.am.

“The profound respect and esteem we have for a book have deep roots.

The masterpieces of Armenian literature were created almost
simultaneously with the translation of Bible that was the first book
written in Armenian [in the fifth century],” president said.

At the Armenian pavilion, Serzh Sargsyan familiarized himself with
the books published by the publishing houses of Armenia and Armenian
Diaspora and watched the Twelve Capitals of Armenia presentation.

President also met with the representatives of the Armenian-Swiss
community.

On Tuesday Serzh Sargsyan will hold meetings with the President of
Switzerland Micheline Calmy-Rey and President of the National Council
Jean-Rene Germanier.

From: A. Papazian

Festival fetes Armenian culture
By Kelly Corrigan

Glendale News Press
May 3 2011
CA

Money raised supports relief society’s social and educational
community outreach.

Thousands of people celebrated Armenian culture this week at the
Civic Auditorium through art, dance, history and food – lots of it.

The Armenian Relief Society of the Western United States ushered
thousands of people to its Armenian Festival at the Civic Auditorium,
where there were endless servings of shish kebabs, yershig sandwiches,
sarma, tabouleh and baklava.

On Saturday alone, organizers said 4,500 people attended the festival.

Dozens of singers performed, and folk dance groups entertained in
traditional clothing.

Dirouhi Kupelian, 74, of Fresno, was busy handing out walnuts with
delicate and sweet square-shaped wraps made with grape juice and
corn starch. Kupelian displayed many of her family heirlooms, some
dating as far back as 150 years, to re-create what a family living
room would have looked like at the turn of the 20th century in the
former Armenian region of Kharpert – now known as the Elazig province
in modern-day Turkey.

From: A. Papazian

ARMENIAN PARLIAMENT CALLS FOR RECOGNITION OF ARMENIAN, HELLENIC, ASSYRIAN GENOCIDES

Assyrian International News Agency (AINA)

May 3 2011

Yerevan — The Armenian National Committee of Australia (ANC Australia)
reports that the parliament of the Republic of Armenia called upon
parliaments and legislative bodies throughout the world to recognise
and condemn the genocide of the Armenians, Hellenes and Assyrians
perpetrated by Ottoman Turkey from 1915 to 1923.

In a Parliamentary Declaration on the occasion of the 96th anniversary
commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, the Republic of Armenia
National Assembly Speaker, Hovik Abrahamyan stated that recognition of
the genocides perpetrated against the Armenians, Hellenes and Assyrians
would lead to the restoration of justice and the of prevention other
genocides in the future.

He said: “For the resolution of this injustice, the prevention of
further genocides and the establishment of good neighbourly relations
between Armenia and Turkey, the National Assembly of the Republic
of Armenia calls on the parliaments of the world to recognise and
condemn the genocides perpetrated against the Armenian, Hellenic and
Assyrian peoples in Turkey at the beginning of the last century.”

Directing his message to Turkey, Abrahamyan then declared:
“The National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia calls upon the
legislative and executive authorities of Turkey to remove all the
legal, political and other obstacles, that prevent Turkish society
from freely studying and discussing the past, especially the facts
of the genocide for which Ottoman Turkey is responsible.”

ANC Australia Executive Director Varant Meguerditchian welcomed the
Parliamentary Declaration.

“The National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia’s policy regarding
Turkish responsibility for and denial of the Armenian, Hellenic and
Assyrian Genocides is clear and unequivocal,” he said. “ANC Australia
takes this opportunity to reaffirm its commitment to work with the
Australian Hellenic Council and the Assyrian Universal Alliance
Australia to advocate for the recognition of the Armenian, Hellenic
and Assyrian Genocides by the Federal government of Australia.”

——————————————————————————–

During the last days of the Ottoman Empire the Government implemented a
policy of Genocide upon its Christian Armenian, Hellenic and Assyrian
population. As a result, up to 1.5million Armenian, 1million Hellene
and 750,000 Assyrian men, women and children lost their lives between
1915 and 1923.

On July 9, 2010 ANC Australia the Australian Hellenic Council (AHC)
and the Assyrian Universal Alliance (AUA) released a joint statement
outlining their agreement to focus on genocide recognition:

Whereby, Australia is signatory to the UN Genocide Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and has demonstrated
leadership on international human rights issues; whereby, the people
of Australia provided food, clothing and shelter to victims and
survivors of the Armenian Genocide, the Hellenic Genocide and the
Assyrian Genocide as part of an international humanitarian relief
effort known as the Near East Relief; and whereby, throughout World
War One, Australian servicemen witnessed the systematic annihilation
of the Armenian, Hellenic and Assyrian peoples in the Ottoman Empire
from 1915 – 1923; ANC Australia, the AHC and the AUA commit to their
moral responsibility to seek recognition of the Armenian Genocide,
Hellenic Genocide and Assyrian Genocide by the Federal Government
of Australia as a measure aimed at preventing similar crimes against
humanity from ever occurring again.

Armenian National Committee Of Australia

From: A. Papazian