Author: Andres-Papazian

TURKEY CANNOT BUILD DEMOCRACY OR BECOME TOLERANT THROUGH HALF-STEPS: REPUBLICAN MP

Panorama
Sept 16 2010
Armenia

“It is just a step by Turkey to mislead the world. In this way Turkey
doesn’t demonstrate tolerance and Turkey’s attempts to serve a holy
liturgy in Sourb Khach (St. Cross) Church of Akhtamar without placing a
cross atop the church are unacceptable both for the Armenian Apostolic
Church and the Armenian people, in general,” NA Republican (ARP)
MP Gagik Meliqyan told Panorama.am, commenting on the developments
over the Sourb Khach holy mass.

Note that Turkish PM Erdogan said at a joint press conference with
Azerbaijan’s President the permission to serve a holy mass in Sourb
Khach Church is demonstration of tolerance from the Turkish side.

Commenting on Panorama.am enquiry as to what Turkey seeks by permitting
the Sourb Khach holy liturgy, the MP said: “This is just one of
Turkey’s far-fetched goals to show that it is a democratic country,
what, however, it doesn’t succeed in since one cannot build democracy
or become tolerant through half-steps.”

From: A. Papazian

THE NATIONAL INTEREST REPORTS ON ‘A TALE OF TWO MONASTERIES’

New York

9/16/2010
NY

Order of St. Andrew, Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate Sept
16 2010

The National Interest magazine recently reported on ‘A Tale of Two
Monasteries’.

The National Interest is a prominent conservative American bi-monthly
international affairs magazine published by the Nixon Center. The
National Interest pays attention to broad ideas and the way in which
cultural and social differences, technological innovations, history,
and religion impact the behavior of states.

The published article can be read in its entirety below.

——————————————————————————–

The Tale of Two Monasteries 9/9/2010 by Thomas de Waal

Read this article on the website of The National Interest

On August 15 this year, a remarkable event took place at Soumela
monastery in northeastern Turkey in the beautiful wooded valleys that
the Greeks call the Pontus. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople
celebrated the first service in the ruined monastery since 1923,
the year when the Pontic Greeks were deported from their homeland.

It took many years of quiet diplomacy by church officials,
non-governmental activists, mayors and–an important group in this
rapprochement–musicians, for Greeks and Turks to bridge their
differences sufficiently to let the Soumela service take place. An
American photographer of Pontic Greek origin, Eleftherios (“Ted”)
Kostans was in the church and wrote me his impressions:

There were a couple of stand-out moments I thoroughly enjoyed. One
being the Patriarch’s speeches in Greek and Turkish. He was both
eloquent and considerate of all peoples, in a way that made reminded
us, we are all human first. The second wonderful moment was quite
thrilling for me as Greek and as a Pontian. When the Patriarch walked
through the crowed inside the Soumela walls carrying his staff I was
just a few steps away and could see him gazing the walls. The smell
of frescoes and priests singing suddenly came together for me. Silence
hit the room for a moment and suddenly the crowed yelled, “Axios!

Axios! Axios!” [the Greek word for ‘Worthy’]…..It came from all
directions as the crowed closed in around the Patriarch….Wow! For me,
that was the climactic moment. Not just for the day. But symbolically,
it represented the return to Pontus and announced officially that
yes we are Pontians and this is our homeland.

Only a year before I was with Eleftherios outside the monastery walls
on August 15, the Feast of the Virgin Day, when it all went badly
wrong and a Turkish museum curator broke up what she declared to be
an unauthorized service.

This year’s breakthrough was clearly authorized at the top, another
move in the tentative “Christian opening” made by the governing AK
Party, as it challenges some of the desiccated doctrines of the
Turkish state. Plenty of powerful nationalist forces vehemently
opposed the service as an invitation to “Christian fifth columnists”
to infiltrate a Turkish state museum. But now a precedent has been set,
hopefully the Soumela liturgy will become an annual event.

None of this can be said a parallel service planned for September 19:
the first liturgy for more than 90 years in the 10th century Armenian
church of Akhtamar on Lake Van. The Armenian patriarch of Istanbul is
due to officiate in what would again be a historic event–Armenians’
return to a place that from which they were bloodily driven out in
1915. Thousands of Armenians are due to visit, with many of them
staying in ordinary Turkish homes.

Unfortunately, unlike Soumela, the Akhtamar service is threatening to
turn into a disaster. Armenian officials and clergy are saying they
will not come because the Turkish government has not carried through on
its promise to reinstall a cross on the monastery dome. The government,
currently locked in a fight over the September 12 constitutional
referendum, is doing nothing to correct this.

I understand the concerns of some Armenians who won’t go to Akhatmar.

They want to see rapprochement with Turkey, but they believe that the
church service is a distraction from the political business that the
Turkish government flunked when it failed to press ahead with ratifying
the Protocols on normalizing relations, signed last year in Zurich.

But some Armenians are going much further, denouncing the whole
event and calling for a boycott. One commentator called the liturgy a
“scandalous show” and Armenians who are going there “tools of Turkish
propaganda.” These people, who oppose any incremental changes with
Turkey and demand nothing less than a full Turkish government apology
for committing Genocide in 1915 are in a curious way the allies
of the Turkish nationalists who oppose rapprochement for opposite
reasons. If the Akhtamar service is a failure, it will be a blow
against those liberal Turks, such as the governor of Van province
and in the presidential administration, who are still pushing for
normalization with Armenia.

I am certain of two things: There will eventually be a breakthrough
in Armenian-Turkish relations. And when it happens, both Armenians
and Turks will say things about the other and about the past that
they are not saying now. The issue is all in the timing and how to
build enough mutual trust to stiffen the resolve of the leaders who
will do the final deal.

Thomas de Waal is a senior associate for the Caucasus with the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace.

From: A. Papazian

HRANT DINK ATTORNEYS DEMAND TO RESUME INVESTIGATION

Panorama
Sept 16 2010
Armenia

Attorneys of the Armenian journalist, founder and editor of “Agos”,
Hrant Dink, who was murdered in Turkey three years ago, have demanded
from Turkey’s leadership new investigation into the police and security
service workers, Firat reported.

Prof. Turgut Tarhanlı said the comments on Turkish identity in the
Constitution of Turkey make a way for racist assassinations.

Lawyer Fethiye Cetin hailed the decision of the European Court of Human
Rights (ECHR) and demanded to openly resume the close investigation
into the police and security service workers of Istanbul, Trapizon
and Sasun.

From: A. Papazian

ARMENIAN BUSINESSMAN PLAN TO BUILD A HOTEL IN VAN

Panorama
Sept 16 2010
Armenia

Chairman of Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Van Zahir Qandashoglu
told Turkish “Dunya” paper that the number of people to visit Holy
Cross of Van on 19 September has grown. The chairman of the chamber
told the paper that after that event an Armenian businessman plans
to invest about $50 million to build five-star hotel in Van.

Qandashoglu said closed borders make it difficult and long to get
to Van, since they have a plan to found an organization which could
organize direct flights Yerevan-Van-Yerevan.

From: A. Papazian

AZERI POWS FEEL AT HOME IN ARMENIA

news.am
Sept 16 2010
Armenia

Three Azerbaijani POWs are presently kept in Armenia, the Armenian
delegation to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
told NEWS.am. The delegation member Ruzanna Vardanyan pointed out
that ICRC representatives regularly visit the POWs and supervise
their living conditions.

“If any problem arises, our representative visits the POWs without
being accompanied. If he sees any problems, he reports them to the
local authorities. This is part of the confidential dialogue our
organization is conducting,” Vardanyan said. She did not name the POWs,
as, according to international humanitarian law, they must be protected
from undue attention. “We are considered champions of international
law. Geneva conventions clearly say that POWs names must not be made
public even if they themselves want them to,” Vardanyan said.

On August 27, the Azeri serviceman, junior sergeant Roman Novruz
ogly Ghuseinov gave himself up to Armenian sentries. According to
the preliminary investigation results, the contract serviceman had
to give himself up to the Armenian side because of bullying on the
part of the military unit’s commanders.

The NKR State Commission for POWs, Hostages and Missing Persons issued
a statement recently condemning Baku’s politicizing the problem of
POWs and hostages.

From: A. Papazian

‘CHANCES FOR PEACE SOLUTION OF KARABAKH CONFLICT DECREASE SIGNIFICANTLY’

news.az
Sept 16 2010
Azerbaijan

Ilgar Mammadov ‘Azerbaijan should seek end a policy of mutual
understanding with our northern neighbor’, said Political analyst
Ilgar Mammadov.

Chances for progress in peace talks on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
have decreased several times compared with the previous year and
reached a minimum for many years, says co-founder of the civil movement
“Re: AL!”, Political analyst Ilgar Mammadov.

‘For several years we have witnessed high activity of Russian diplomacy
in the peaceful settlement of the Karabakh conflict. But now we can
say that the Russian initiatives were not serious, and served as a
cover for other purposes’, said Mammadov.

‘The main purpose of the visit of President Dmitry Medvedev to Baku was
the desire to alleviate that negative in our bilateral relationship,
which began to come out after the St. Petersburg summit.

But still, people in Azerbaijan, have strengthened in the belief
that there is no fundamental change in Russian policy in the South
Caucasus since the 19th century’, said the analyst.

‘Azerbaijan should seek end a policy of mutual understanding with our
northern neighbor, as it has not brought tangible results in resolving
the conflict with Armenia, and resume a course on Euro-Atlantic
integration, which we conducted in 1990’, Mammadov said.

‘When in country’s hard 90’s we managed to resist external pressures,
why now when the country is many times stronger, must we fear that the
return to the Euro-Atlantic course would make us vulnerable?’ he said.

From: A. Papazian

G. SAHAKYAN: NOTHING IS DISCUSSED BEHIND THE SCENES

Aysor
Sept 16 2010
Armenia

Vice President of the Republican Party of Armenia Galust Sahakyan in
his interview to aysor.am refuted the rumors that political forces
included in the ruling coalition are already preparing for the
elections of 2012.

The official also touched upon the rumors that there is a conflict
within the Republican Party connected with compilation of electoral
rolls saying that “it is an absolute falsehood, RPA has a traditional
election culture, and they do not discuss the issue even behind
the scenes.”

From: A. Papazian

ARMENIANS READY TO INVEST MILLIONS IN TURKEY?

news.am
Sept 16 2010
Armenia

The permission for a liturgy at Surb Khach church on Akhtamar Island
in Van appears to match Turkey’s expectations. Zahir Kandasoglu,
Chairman of the Van Chamber of Commerce and Industry, reported that
Armenian and Turkish businessmen plan to implement three large-scale
investment projects in Van.

Kandasoglu reported that the businessmen plan to borrow ~@100m from a
U.S. bank to found an airline. “At the initial stage, we will purchase
two planes for Yerevan-Van flights,” he said.

Kandasoglu said that a representative of Armenia’s tourist industry
asked for land to construct a 5-star hotel in Van, which requires U.S.

$50m investments. “Our only aim is to create wealth by doing business.

The liturgy is one of the occasions. A few days ago I submitted my
report on my meetings in Yerevan and opening of the Armenian-Turkish
border to Turkish Premier Recep Erdogan. Our term is trade, which is
impossible with the border with Armenia closed. Armenia has a serious
market, and we cannot leave it unnoticed,” Kandasoglu said.

From: A. Papazian

NEWLY RELEASED BOOKS

New York Times

Sept 15 2010

>From the Ottoman Empire to wartime Poland, rural Georgia to rural
Indiana, the contemporary novel thinks big this month. And the
literary world is big enough to make room for new work from the head
of a prestigious writing program and one of its recent graduates.

THE GENDARME By Mark T. Mustian 294 pages. Amy Einhorn Books. $25.95.

For most of Emmett Conn’s 92 years, his early life has been a mystery,
a casualty of memory loss caused by head injuries he sustained in World
War I. After developing a brain tumor, Conn finds fragments of this
lost past invading his dreams. He begins to remember the days before
he woke up in a London hospital and before he married an American
nurse who brought him to her home in Georgia. He recognizes himself as
Ahmet Khan, a young, brutish member of the Turkish military police –
“the gendarme” of the title – who is charged with overseeing the
deportation of thousands of Armenians in 1915, a forced trek that
contributed to wider massacres. Switching between the antiseptic
medical institutions of 20th-century America and the pitiless chaos
of the tottering Ottoman Empire, Mark Mustian reveals the unfeeling
man that Conn/Khan was and the man he became. At the center of the
transformation is a beautiful deportee. He saves her life, while she
rescues his humanity. PATRICIA COHEN

BEFORE YOU SUFFOCATE YOUR OWN FOOL SELF By Danielle Evans 232
pages. Riverhead Books. $25.95.

The most vivid characters in Danielle Evans’s story collection are
in-betweeners: between girlhood and womanhood; between the black
middle class and Ivy League privilege; between iffy boyfriends and
those even less reliable; between an extended family and living on
your own. To say they’re caught between worlds isn’t quite accurate,
though; they tend to be hard-headed, sadder but wiser and, most of all,
funny. Here’s Carla on her stripper cousin in “Wherever You Go, There
You Are”: “I love her, don’t get me wrong, but she’s got … a big head
with wide almond eyes and a long blond weave, and while I can imagine
many reasons why men might pay good money to see a real live woman,
there’s something unsettling about so many of them paying to see a
real live Bratz doll.” Now 26 and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’
Workshop, Ms. Evans first drew notice in 2007 when The Paris Review
published “Virgins,” the story that opens this collection.

SCOTT HELLER

A CURABLE ROMANTIC By Joseph Skibell 593 pages. Algonquin
Books. $26.95.

Jakob Sammelsohn is the “curable romantic” in this novel, which sweeps
from a late-19th-century Polish shtetl to the Warsaw ghetto of the
1940s. Whether Jakob has an affliction that can or should be cured is
an open question, but as the novel begins, he has been married twice
by the age of 12, thanks to one divorce and one dead wife who turns
into an insistent ghost. In a Vienna theater Jakob falls for Emma
Eckstein, a patient of Sigmund Freud’s. His encounters with Freud and
his patient, not to mention love affairs and his “traumatized dream
state” as the Germans roll across Europe, fill the pages of the novel,
Mr. Skibell’s third. At heart, the book grapples with the nature of
exile. As Jakob notes, “For two thousand years, my people had lived
in the Land of Zion as though it were real; and although this is
perhaps not the place to say it, now that it’s real, I regret that
we too often treat it as though it were imaginary.” FELICIA R. LEE

ALL IS FORGOTTEN, NOTHING IS LOST By Lan Samantha Chang 208
pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $23.95.

“Write what you know” is classic advice, and Lan Samantha Chang,
the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has taken it to heart in
her latest novel, about the charged relationship between student and
teacher at a Midwestern writing school in the mid-1980s. The talented
and narcissistic Roman Morris craves the approval of his accomplished
and aloof poetry teacher, Miranda Sturgis. After the two engage in
an intense affair that includes personalized tutoring, Roman goes on
to a successful career, with prizes, tenure and a mortgage, while
his classmate Bernard struggles along in a cold garret – make that
studio – in New York City, working for decades on a single poem. Roman
sacrifices everyone he knows for his art, while Bernard sacrifices
only himself. The book probes questions that keep graduate students
talking late into the night: What is a poem? Can poetry be taught?

What price art? PATRICIA COHEN

SALVATION CITY By Sigrid Nunez 280 pages. Riverhead Books. $25.95.

Cole Vining is one of the fortunate few. After a flu pandemic kills
tens of thousands, including his parents, he’s taken in by Pastor
Wyatt, an evangelical leader in the Indiana town that gives the novel
its title. There this seventh grader’s life is a far cry from what it
used to be; days are filled with home schooling and Bible study as the
pastor, his wife and most of the community eagerly await the rapture
they believe to be imminent. But Cole is haunted by memories of his
parents – citified, argumentative, atheist to the core. With a cool,
evenhanded tone, Ms. Nunez conjures a near future dark around the
edges; during the outbreak, people personalize their germ-protecting
surgical masks with silly drawings of lips or vampire fangs, “but
a homeless man caught spitting in the street was mobbed and beaten
to death.” And even in apocalyptic times, parents worry whether a
13-year-old should be spending so much time online. SCOTT HELLER

THE CAILIFFS OF BAGHDAD, GEORGIA By Mary Helen Stefaniak 342
pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.

August in Threestep, Ga., a town of three radios, poverty
and segregation, is hellish, according to Gladys Cailiff, the
11-year-old narrator of this Depression-era story. But some fairy
dust arrives in August 1938 with the appearance of Grace Spivey,
the new schoolteacher. Miss Spivey trades in stories – she has
been to Timbuktu, studied French in Paris and drama in London – and
she brings to life the exotic tales from her 10-volume set of “The
Thousand Nights and a Night.” She also aims to turn Threestep’s annual
town festival into a Baghdad-style bazaar. Mostly, Miss Spivey alters
how people see themselves, including Gladys’s pregnant older sister,
May, and Theo Boykin, a smart young black man who is a neighbor of
the Cailiff family. This coming-of-age tale, leavened with tragedy,
features stories embedded within stories as it moves back in time to
1775 Baghdad and 1864 Savannah. FELICIA R. LEE

From: A. Papazian

ERECTION OF CROSS ON AKDAMAR ARMENIAN CHURCH PARTIALLY SOLVED

Today’s Zaman
Sept 16 2010
Turkey

Difficulties over the erection of a 100-kilogram cross on the Cathedral
of the Holy Cross on Akdamar Island in Lake Van have been partially
solved as the cross was temporarily placed on a wooden base.

The Turkish government agreed to open the 1,100-year-old Cathedral
of the Holy Cross for a one-day religious service on Sept. 19, an
event that is to become an annual occurrence.

Many believe a religious service at the historic church, which is now
a state museum, could be a symbol of reconciliation between Turkey
and Armenia, two neighbors bitterly divided over history and the fate
of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Turkish-Armenians had welcomed the move and Karekin II, the Catholicos
of All Armenians, had agreed to send two senior clerics to the church
for the service. However, a decision to not send the clerics was made
after a controversy erupted over whether a cross would be erected on
the steeple of the church for the service.

Officials say there were difficulties in erecting the cross on the
steeple in time for the historic service. This has led to a temporary
solution. Clergymen from the Armenian Patriarchate from Ä°stanbul
are to decide where to temporarily display the cross, in or outside
the church, until it is erected on the church after the service when
preparations are complete.

From: A. Papazian