Author: Andres-Papazian

NOR EDESIA COMMUNITY CENTER OPENS IN ARAGASTOTN REGION

news.am
Oct 15 2010
Armenia

On October 15the USAID-funded Small Scale Infrastructure Program
(SSIP), implemented by Cooperative Housing Foundation International
(CHF) and its partner Shen NGO, marked the renovation of the Nor
Edesia Community Center in the Aragastotn region.

Governor of Aragatsotn Sargis Sahakyan, USAID Armenia Mission Deputy
Director John Seong, Orange Armenia General Director Bruno Duthoit,
Mayor of Nor Edesia Vahan Abgaryan, Director of Shen NGO Hayk Minasyan,
CHF/Armenia Country Director Zoran Radic, representatives of the USAID
Mission, implementing partners and the village community participated
in the event.

The community center will host an internet center equipped by Shen
NGO in cooperation with Orange Armenia. Two rooms in the community
center will also be given out for rent to the offices of the community
Water Users Association and local HayPost, which will help generate
revenues for the municipality to cover facility maintenance costs,
U.S. Embassy reported.

The USAID/Armenia Deputy Mission director noted that apart from the
Nor Edesia community center renovation project, USAID’s efforts in
Aragatsotn also include the renovation of the Mastara kindergarten,
pre schools in Parpi and Tsakhkahovit, and computer clubs in Ashnak
and Katnaghbyur.

On a country-wide scale, by December 2010 the program expects to
complete 48 infrastructure projects that will benefit about 38,000
people and will provide 800 Armenians with short-term employment. Over
140 persons will get permanent employment at the facilitites
rehabilitated through SSIP.

From: A. Papazian

LENA AG: AZERBAIJANI AND ARMENIAN WOMEN’ ORGANIZATIONS SHOULD BE INVOLVED IN KARABAKH CONFLICT RESOLUTION

Trend
Oct 15 2010
Azerbaijan

The Azerbaijani and Armenian women’ organizations should be involved
in resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Secretary General of
the Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation Lena Ag told journalists today.

“The conflicts that occur in this or that country or region negatively
impact not only men, but also women. Thus, women should be given a
right to vote in adopting a decision on this matter,” Ag said.

“Diplomats of the OSCE Minsk Group should involve the women’
organizations from Azerbaijan and Armenia in the process of resolution
of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.”

Ag is on visit to Baku to attend the international conference on
“The tenth anniversary of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325:
Achievements and Prospects” organized by the Azerbaijani State
Committee for Family, Women and Children Affairs.

The Security Council adopted the Resolution 1325 on women and peace and
security on 31 October 2000. The resolution reaffirms the important
role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, peace
negotiations, peace-building, peacekeeping, humanitarian response
and in post-conflict reconstruction.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988
when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. Armenian
armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan since 1992,
including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and 7 surrounding districts.

Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a ceasefire agreement in 1994. The
co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group – Russia, France, and the U.S. –
are currently holding the peace negotiations.

Armenia has not yet implemented the U.N. Security Council’s four
resolutions on the liberation of the Nagorno-Karabakh and the
surrounding regions.

From: A. Papazian

14-YEAR-OLD ARMENIAN GIRL DISAPPEARED IN AUSTRIA

news.am
Oct 14 2010
Armenia

Amnesty international and three other international organizations
on human rights issued a statement, urging Austria to stop detaining
children and halt the deportations of well-integrated foreign families
which are denied asylum.

The statement also calls on Austria to better protect the rights of
non-Austrian minors and become more lenient about allowing young
asylum seekers and their parents to stay on humanitarian grounds,
Associated Press reports.

Several days ago two 8-year-old twins were taken into custody with
their father and deported back to their native Kosovo. The children’s
mother, who is in psychiatric care, stayed in Austria. The family
had lived in Austria since 2004.

A 14-year-old Armenian girl disappeared before police could pick
her up from school and deport her. Meanwhile, her mother, is under
suicide watch and has been hospitalized, RFE/RL reports.

From: A. Papazian

EXPERTS RECOMMEND LAUNCHING RUSSIA-TURKEY-EU TALKS

news.am
Oct 15 2010
Armenia

European Council on Foreign Relations recommends the EU to establish
trialog on security issues with Turkey and Russia.

Experts Mark Leonard and Ivan Krastev claim that modern system of
maintaining security in Europe fails to perform its functions. The
experts also note that the EU structures did not manage to prevent
armed conflicts in Kosovo and South Ossetia, BFM reported.

An informal European security triaolg should be established to join
representatives of three security pillars of the region, they stress.

Mark Leonard and Ivan Krastev consider Russia, Turkey and the EU
security pillars.

Triaolg’s goal is to resolve main conflicts in the region, including
conflict in Transdniestria and Armenian-Azerbaijani confrontation
over Nagorno-Karabakh.

From: A. Papazian

EU WELCOMES CONTACT BETWEEN ARMENIAN, AZERBAIJANI POLITICAL FORCES

news.am
Oct 15 2010
Armenia

“The European Union welcomes contacts between the Azerbaijani and
Armenian political forces”, EU Permanent Representative in Azerbaijan
Roland Kobia stated, commenting on the meeting of Azerbaijani and
Armenian political forces at the Socialist International conference
in Baku, APA agency reports.

According to him, it is necessary to use every opportunity for the
dialogue. “I understand that it is very difficult period for Azerbaijan
and the conflict is in its territory. We understand torments of
the people involved in this conflict. The European Union makes all
efforts for peaceful resolution to the conflict. We are working for
mutual confidence and contacts. We consider that only dialogue could
lead to the solution of the problem,” the official said.

As NEWS.am reported previously, two representatives of Armenian
Revolutionary Federation Dashnaktsutyun (ARFD) left for Baku to
participate in the meeting of the Socialist International Committee
for the CIS, the Caucasus and the Black Sea in Baku, Oct 11-12.

Earlier, the mass media disseminated information several liberal
parties in the South Caucasus signed a joint declaration on cooperation
to struggle for democracy. Armenian National Movement (ANM) and
Azerbaijani Musavat party signed the declaration.

From: A. Papazian

BAT-AND-KNIFE WIELDING THUGS ATTACK MAN, 4 INJURED
By LORENA MONGELLI, LARRY CELONA and SERGEY KADINSKY

New York Post

Oct 15 2010

Bat- and knife-wielding thugs attacked a Brooklyn man this morning
as he aparently waited for a ride to work in a bloody rumble that
injured four people and left a block-long trail of blood, authorities
and witnesses said.

The bloodshed erupted at 6:40 a.m. at Bedford Avenue and Avenue T in
Sheepshead Bay, where a young neighborhood man was being met by two
others. A longtime resident who saw the violence said the local man
was being met to be taken to work.

But suddenly, the neighbor said, about a half-dozen men emerged with
bats and knifes and attacked the three _ whom police sources said
also allegedly were armed with knives.

“I yelled ‘police!’ and it scared [the attackers] off,” said Salvatore
Tinerino, 66, a retired security guard. Hours later, a trial of blood
on Bedford from Avenues S and T could still be seen.

Police said Hayk Muradia , 21, was stabbed twice in the lower back
and was taken to Coney Island Hospital; three others were taken to
Lutheran in stable condition. All were expected to survive.

All the stabbing victims were of Armenian descent, but sources
said they had no information about any organized gang activity in
the neighborhood. Authorities said the men were giving conflicting
information on why the fight erupted; there were no immediate charges
filed in the case.

“It appears to be a fight over money,” a spokesman for police said.

From: A. Papazian

TELL US ABOUT THE DEEP STATE, BUT THE WAY WE LIKE IT!

Today’s Zaman
Oct 15 2010
Turkey

Some months ago I was giving a lecture to a group of young people in
Ankara. They were conservative and devout Muslims. They invited me
to talk about Ergenekon and the deep state.

When I speak, I like to make eye contact with the audience. At the
beginning, I made eye contact with everyone in the room and I saw many
shining eyes. I started my lecture by giving an overall assessment of
the Ergenekon investigation. I criticized the case by saying that the
prosecutors focused too much on coup plots against this government,
whereas there are so many other dimensions to the case that need to
be analyzed and understood. Ergenekon’s intensive activities against
missionaries and Protestants, for example, have never been analyzed
by the prosecutors.

I went on with my lecture by analyzing the relationship between
Ergenekon and JÄ°TEM, the illegal extension of the gendarmerie that
was responsible for the killing and abduction of so many Kurdish
dissidents in the ’90s in southeastern Turkey. I criticized the
Ergenekon case from this perspective, and I tried to explain that we
cannot understand the deep state without understanding JÄ°TEM.

I was going backwards in order to tell the story of the deep state. I
mentioned how the 1980 coup was prepared in Turkey. How Alevis were
massacred in different cities, how devout Muslims were provoked and
used against Alevis by the deep state in Turkey. At roughly this phase,
I realized that there were less shining eyes looking at me.

I went on to talk about the Sept. 6-7, 1955 pogroms against non-Muslims
in Ä°stanbul and how they were carefully prepared by the deep state
of the time.

And, finally, I came to the 1915 massacres of Armenians. I tried to
explain how the Turkish deep state was inherited from the time of
these massacres and that we have never confronted it. I also tried
to explain that unless we go outside of the narrow boundaries of our
identities and learn to truly empathize with other groups in this
country, we will never understand the deep state’s mentality, neither
can we get rid of it. When I reached this last phase of my lecture,
I realized that I had lost contact with most of the audience in the
room and that some of them were angry with me.

Here it comes, our problem in Turkey. We do not fight against
injustice, human rights violations and other things from a principled
point of view but rather we challenge them only when we see them as
constraints on our freedoms. Since we do not put ourselves in other
people’s shoes, our insights about our country remain too shallow,
preventing us from taking advantage of an opportunity to effect
substantial and irrevocable changes in Turkey.

For the sake of being just, I should also say that there were other
observations and thoughts that crossed my mind during the lecture. At
the very end, I still had very good and friendly eye contact with
some of the participants and some of them supported me openly. The
other thing is if I had been talking about the same thing before a
nationalist group, whether white Turks or grey wolves, I would have
probably met with very harsh criticism and might have even been
physically attacked.

At the end, I told my audience that during the massacre of Armenians
there were people who helped Armenians and most of them were devout
Muslims. They saved Armenians because they believed that their religion
and their consciences dictated it so. I said that I expect all devout
Muslims today to be like them, like these saviors who risked their
lives to follow their principles. If Muslims do not do that, they
will be, like in our Turkish saying, “Muslim only to themselves.”

If you really want to fight against the deep state and its mentality
in Turkey, try to understand its root causes. And when you look at
these roots, you will see injustice and denial. We should confront
them with all these facts to really understand what the deep state
is and how we can get rid of it!

From: A. Papazian

TURKEY’S DWINDLING CHRISTIANS FEAR END IS APPROACHING

Today’s Zaman

Oct 15 2010
Turkey

Andreas Zografos left Turkey in 1974 amid economic and political
turmoil to find work in Europe, but he always knew he would return
home.

“The ties of this land are strong. I was drawn back by the blue of
the sea, the color of the sky,” he says. A Greek Orthodox Christian,
Zografos, now 63, and his wife today tend to the 19th-century St.

Nicholas Church, where his grandfather painted vibrant icons, on
Heybeliada, or Halki in Greek, an island off the Ä°stanbul coast.

Heybeliada was home to a few thousand ethnic Greeks when he left,
Zografos says. About 25 remain, part of a dwindling community of 2,500
Greeks in Ä°stanbul, the capital of the Greek Orthodox Byzantine
Empire until the Ottoman conquest of 1453. Ä°stanbul, a city of 13
million Muslims, is still the seat of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew,
spiritual leader of the world’s 250 million Orthodox. “We are proud
our patriarch is still here in the land where our faith began. This
is holy land,” Zografos says.

But vast numbers of Christians have left their ancient homeland and
now make up just 0.13 percent of Turkey’s population of 73 million
people. Some 60,000 Armenians and 15,000 Syriac Orthodox also live in
Turkey, and there are much smaller communities of Jehovah’s Witnesses,
Roman Catholics, Chaldeans and others.

Religious freedom is enshrined in the secular Constitution. Turkey
spurns the outright religious rule of some Muslim states. Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has pledged to expand rights for
religious minorities to meet the standards of the European Union,
which Turkey aspires to join. But many Christians say they still
face deep-rooted discrimination. Non-Muslims are tacitly banned from
jobs in the state bureaucracy and security forces. Zografos finished
primary school and began working at a hairdresser’s at age 13. After
finishing military service at age 22, he could not earn enough to
provide for his family. “It is hard for Greeks to find work. I knew I
had to leave. There was never a chance to make a living here,” he says.

Sporadic violence The EU has said that applications to open places of
worship by non-Muslim citizens are generally refused in Turkey and
that some groups say security forces monitor their worship. Attacks
against Christians are infrequent but sensational. In 2006, a Roman
Catholic priest was murdered. Earlier this year, a Catholic bishop was
stabbed to death at his home in southern Turkey. The bishop’s driver
was arrested, and the Vatican said the murder was not politically
motivated. Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink was slain in 2007.

Three members of a Bible-publishing firm were tortured and killed
the same year. No one has been convicted in these cases.

Most of Turkey’s Christians fled in the upheaval of World War I and
the ensuing War of Independence. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians
were massacred and 1.5 million Greeks deported in a population
exchange. A treaty with Western powers in 1923 allowed Ä°stanbul’s
non-Muslim communities to retain special education and property
rights. But decades of economic discrimination and sporadic violence
reduced Christians to less than 200,000 by 1955, according to state
statistics. Since then, the decline has been precipitous. Today 60
percent of Turkey’s Greeks are over the age of 55, according to the
patriarchate.

Political tensions Zografos’s departure coincided with a peak in
tensions between Greeks and Turks in 1974, when Turkey invaded Cyprus
in response to a short-lived Greek Cypriot coup, though he says he
was spared any fallout and left solely for economic reasons.

Most Syriacs, who speak a form of Aramaic, the language of Jesus,
abandoned their homeland in southeastern Turkey more recently, fleeing
violence between separatist Kurds and the Turkish army in the 1990s.

Turkey has confiscated billions of dollars worth of property belonging
to Armenian and Greek foundations when they can no longer fill
schools or churches. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled
these seizures are illegal. Since 1971 the government has also kept
closed the Holy Theological School of Halki, perched on Heybeliada’s
highest ridge, called the Hill of Hope. Without a seminary, Bartholomew
struggles to dispatch enough clergy to celebrate mass at the churches
that do still operate.

At St. Nicholas, Zografos often fills in as a sexton, helping the
priest perform basic rituals for the dozen or so elderly worshippers
who still come to pray. He remembers Sundays in the 1960s when the
congregation would fill the basilica-style church and spill into the
narthex. “If I don’t do this, then who will?” says Zografos, who says
he is not religious but feels a duty to serve his community. “Soon
there will be just one or two of us left on the island. I don’t see
anything else but the end.” Reuters

From: A. Papazian

ABOUT 85 THOUSAND ARMENIANS JOINED FACEBOOK

news.am
Oct 15 2010
Armenia

According to Facebakers (the company conducting statistical research
on Facebook) 84,980 people from Armenian use social network Facebook.

In September 5,780 more Armenians joined Facebook. The growth of users
from the country for a month as a whole was 6.8%. It is noteworthy
that the number of women is higher – 45 900. The number of male users
equal to 37,620 people.

Total number of Facebook users in our country equal to the 2, 86%
of the population. The penetration rate among the Armenian Facebook
users, who regularly spend time on the Internet, is 40.82%.

It is noteworthy that 40% of Armenian Facebook users are 18 to 24 years
old, 31% – from 25 to 34. The number of users over 65 is less then 1%.

For similar parameters, Georgia ranks 86th place (367,480), Azerbaijan
– 96th (216,860).

From: A. Papazian

HAYOTS ASHKHARH: NEW PACE CO-RAPPORTEUR ON ARMENIA TO BE APPOINTED

news.am
Oct 15 2010
Armenia

The Hayots Ashkharh daily reports a new co-rapporteur of PACE
Monitoring Committee on Armenia will be appointed after the Swedish
parliament presents its new delegation to PACE and the present
co-rapporteur Goran Lindblad’s term of power expires.

As reported previously, on September 19, Goran Lindblad was not
elected to the Swedish Parliament. However, he will be in office
until his term of power expires.

From: A. Papazian