Author: Babajanian Karo

IRAK
L’EI décapite un combattant kurde

Le groupe djihadiste de l’État islamique (EI) a décapité un combattant
kurde en Irak, mettant en garde la région autonome du Kurdistan contre
d’autres exécutions si elle poursuivait sa coopération avec les
États-Unis, a rapporté le centre américain de surveillance des sites
islamistes SITE.

Washington mène depuis le 8 août des raids contre les positions de
l’EI dans le nord de l’Irak, après que l’avancée des djihadistes vers
le Kurdistan a jeté sur les routes des dizaines de milliers de
personnes, dont un grand nombre de chrétiens et Yazidis, une minorité
kurdophone non musulmane.

Sur la vidéo diffusée par la branche de l’EI dans la province de
Ninive dans le nord de l’Irak, on voit un groupe de combattants kurdes
retenus par le groupe, habillés en tenue orange. Trois d’entre eux
demandent au président du Kurdistan irakien Massoud Barzani > avec les
États-Unis, selon SITE.

Hurriyet Daily News, Turkey
Sept 1 2014

ErdoÄ?an ready for first international appearance as president

ANKARA

President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄ?an is set for his first international
appearances after taking office on Aug. 28, including participation at
the key NATO Summit and bilateral visits to Northern Cyprus and
Azerbaijan.

ErdoÄ?an’s itinerary this week begins with a one-day trip to Northern
Cyprus, in line with the tradition followed by Turkish statesmen who
come to office. He will meet Turkish Cypriot President DerviÅ? EroÄ?lu
and other high ranking officials today, where he will reiterate
Turkey’s support to the ongoing reunification talks between Turkish
and Greek Cypriots and will urge Greek Cypriots not to further delay
the process.

ErdoÄ?an’s second trip abroad will be to Azerbaijan. He is expected to
depart to Baku tomorrow and will meet with Azerbaijani President Ä°lham
Aliyev the following day. Turkey and Azerbaijan have recently
intensified economy and energy relations after Azerbaijan’s state
company SOCAR put billions of dollars of investments into Turkey. The
two countries are currently working on the realization of a major
pipeline project, the TANAP, to transport Azerbaijani natural gas to
Europe via Turkey.

The new president’s visit to Baku will also touch on the
Nagorno-Karabakh issue between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which also
affects Ankara-Yerevan relations. Armenian Foreign Minister Edward
Nalbandian was in Turkey last week to attend ErdoÄ?an’s inauguration as
president and used the venue as an opportunity to submit a letter of
invitation to ErdoÄ?an for the next year’s centennial anniversary of
the mass killings of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.
Turkey has not yet responded to the invitation.

ErdoÄ?an will then directly go to Wales from Baku to attend the NATO
Summit on Sept. 4 and 5. ErdoÄ?an’s team and the Foreign Ministry are
still working on his program in Wales, especially on his possible
bilateral meetings, including with U.S. President Barack Obama.

In a recent televised interview, ErdoÄ?an said he would bring Israel’s
blockade on Gaza to the attention of the NATO Summit, while the
ongoing NATO deployment of Patriot missiles in Turkish territories and
the growing threat of the extremist jihadists will also be on the
agenda of the Turkish delegation. The summit, however, is expected to
prioritize the ongoing crisis between the alliance and Russia over
Ukraine.

September/01/2014

Los Angeles Register
Aug 31 2014

Encino Armenian center gets $1-a-year lease amid controversy

BY JORDAN GRAHAM / STAFF WRITER

A decrepit former Encino fire station that in recent years has
attracted transients, drug users and copper thieves is set to become
an Armenian community center on a property that some neighbors say Los
Angeles is giving away for peanuts amid the city’s fiscal crunch.

The Glendale-based Armenian Cultural Foundation will rent the building
from the city for 30 years at $1 per year, under the terms of a
proposed lease that the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved
Tuesday. The agreement also stipulates the nonprofit organization must
open a community center at the site within two years and invest an
estimated $1.2 to $1.5 million to clean and improve the property.

The decision comes 16 months after Councilman Paul Koretz and
then-Councilman Eric Garcetti first proposed leasing the old fire
station No. 83 at 5001 N. Balboa Blvd. to the nonprofit. But the
process dragged on after their proposal was met with opposition from
several Encino neighborhood groups.

At Encino Charter Elementary School – where parking is so scarce that
parents say teachers have to leave class throughout the day to feed
street meters – the PTA tried repeatedly to convince the Los Angeles
Unified School District to acquire the land to build a parking lot and
multipurpose room, but the district balked at the idea.

The Encino and Lake Balboa neighborhood councils both submitted
community impact statements to the City Council saying they disagreed
with the terms of the lease and the process the city undertook to rent
the land. Other neighbors took issue that Los Angeles was opting to
lease property with an estimated 30-year rental value of $6.6 million
for almost nothing while the city projects it will face a $165 million
budget deficit in the 2015-16 fiscal year.

But Councilman Paul Koretz views the lease as a boon for Encino while
simultaneously relieving the city of a long-held liability, said Paul
Neuman, Koretz’s director of communications.

In 2006, a new fire station opened across the street from the old one,
leaving the 65-year-old building to sit deserted. When the city
offered the surplus property to other governmental departments and
agencies, none wanted it. At one point during the eight-year vacancy,
the city said it paid $18,000 in safety repairs after thieves removed
asbestos insulation while scouring for valuable materials to steal.

And while the city likely could have sold the site to developers with
plans to build apartments or condos, Neuman said Koretz preferred to
find a tenant who would benefit the community.

“We in the city find value in doing these nonprofit leases and do them
all over the city,” Neuman said. “As was the case with the (2009)
proposed sale of municipally-owned garages, the councilmember is
concerned that we not squander long-term benefit and permanent value
by disposing of city assets for short-term, one time gain.”

Los Angeles has routinely leased surplus property to nonprofits and
other community organizations at a rate of $1 per year, and a simple
City Clerk search revealed hundreds of similar motions dating back 30
years.

An Aug. 7 city report estimated the new community center would provide
at least $16.9 million in economic community benefits over three
decades, though the report did not indicate how that figure was
calculated.

Encino chapter member Shant Hagopian said that in addition to Armenian
dance, Boy Scouts and sporting groups, the new center would boast
youth tutoring, senior programming, community seminars and meeting
space for the entire neighborhood.

“It will be a community center for all of Encino,” Hagopian said.
“There is a large Armenian community in Encino to begin with, but
there are opportunities for everyone to participate.”

The Armenian Cultural Foundation must begin construction on the center
within nine months of when the lease is signed.

BurlingtonFreePress, VT
Aug 31 2014

A friendship that transcends language

CHRIS BOHJALIAN
August 31, 2014

Zulkuf knows perhaps a dozen words in English, which is roughly 11
more words than I can speak in Kurdish. Sipas means thank you, and
that’s the extent of my Kurdish vocabulary. He is a 41-year-old Kurd
from south-central Turkey. But, like me, he is adept at communicating
with hand signals and smiles. Or frowns. Or, occasionally, gently
bringing his fingertips to his heart. His dark hair is so thick that
Alec Baldwin would be jealous. The two times I have visited his corner
of the world with other Armenian-Americans to explore the remains of
Armenian civilization, he has been our driver. Last week when we were
there, he proved that on top of everything else, he is a great friend.

Our group this summer included my wife and my daughter. Visiting
medieval (and older) Armenian ruins in the desert in scorching August
heat probably isn’t everyone’s cup of tea when it comes to a family
vacation, but it was important to us because my daughter and I are
part-Armenian and descendants of survivors of the Armenian Genocide,
and my blond wife is seriously Armo by Choice.

By the last day of the journey, our group — at one point as large as
16 — had dwindled to five: my wife and me, our daughter, our great
friend Khatchig Mouradian who voluntarily leads these trips, and
Zulkuf. Everyone else had returned home, because they were only
planning on doing select parts of the expedition. We were now in
northeastern Turkey and had spent the day before at the haunting
medieval ruins of the Armenian city of Ani. We decided to conclude our
trip by venturing to a small town called Digor to see St. Sargis, one
of five ancient Armenian churches that Turkey blew up there in the
1950s, and the only one that partially survived the demolition.

We knew it was going to be a long walk to the ravine where the five
churches had once stood. Moreover, my family and Zulkuf were
recovering from a bout with a plague that, according to one local
official, had sickened lots of the local children that summer. But as
weak as we were, we gamely soldiered over some gently rolling hills,
conserving our water, and eventually we reached the precipice. When we
looked down we were utterly awed. Several hundred feet below us stood
the battered but proud remains of the 13th-century structure,
including the iconic dome that marks an Armenian church.

We were well aware of how privileged we were to see it; relatively few
westerners have. We also knew that fewer still had climbed down into
the ravine to walk inside it and savor its beauty up close. And so
despite the fact that we were exhausted from nine days on the road and
the hike to the edge of the cliff, we started down.

We took a circuitous path down the mountain, but it was still rocky
and steep and there were vertigo-inducing moments when we looked over
the edge and pined for a guardrail. Or the common sense to turn
around. My wife fell and cut her arm, but gamely soldiered on.

When we got there, we were even more moved than when we had stared
down at St. Sargis from the top of the cliff. It was among the
highlights of the trip.

But then, of course, we had to climb back up –which brings me back to
Zulkuf. My wife is in great physical shape. But she had been hit hard
by the plague that week, and was still weak. She had also taken that
tumble on the way down. We agreed that Zulkuf would always be in front
of her as we ascended and I would always be behind her. Just in case.
About a third of the way up the cliff, I started falling behind. Why?
Because Zulkuf was quite literally pulling my wife up the mountain,
not for one moment letting go of her hand. When we all reached the
top, he just shrugged as if what he had done was nothing.

But that’s Zulkuf. Back in 2013, after we met the last survivor of the
Armenian Genocide in Chungush, Turkey, most of our group was crying or
on the verge of crying when we returned to the van. Zulkuf put his
hand on one fellow’s shoulder and said, “In my country, we often don’t
even cry when we lose a loved one. You people are so big-hearted you
cry for people you never knew.”

Maybe. But Zulkuf, my friend? Your heart is plenty big, too. Sipas.

Write to Chris Bohjalian care of Free Press Media, 100 Bank Street,
Suite 700, Burlington, VT 05401, or visit him on or

CineVue
Aug 31 2014

Venice 2014: ‘The Cut’ review

`…`…`…`?`?

Medz Yeghern is the synonym Armenians gave to the brutal extermination
of their people by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to the end of First
World War, which also gave a new word to the English language –
‘genocide’, coined by Raphael Lemkin. Also known as the Armenian
Holocaust, the state-sponsored murders were widely seen as
foreshadowing the modern techniques of murder that would be brought to
terrible perfection by the Nazis during the Second World War.
Turkish-German director Fatih Akin has chosen this catastrophic event
for his new epic film, The Cut (2014), which screened in competition
at the 71st Venice Film Festival and tells the tale of a father’s
search for his family.

Nazaret Manoogian (a superb Tahar Rahim) is a simple blacksmith in a
small town called Mardin, where he lives with his wife Rakel (Hindi
Zahra) and twin daughters Lucinée and Arsinée (Dina and Zein
Fakhoury). All is well until the fateful day that soldiers come
knocking on the door. Nazaret finds himself part of a road gang, a
prisoner working with other Armenians. They hear tales of
extermination and witness a death march, even as their comrades drop
dead from overwork and neglect beside them. One morning, the men are
tied up and marched into a canyon where they’re all to be executed by
a posse of prisoners and bandits. This scene is played out in its full
horror, but Nazaret is spared when a thief, Mehmet (Bartu
Küçükçaglayan), makes the non-fatal incision of the the film’s title.

Aided by his saviour, Nazaret looks only to survive at first,
surrounded everywhere by potential enemies and now, because of his
partly slit throat, unable to speak. He happens across a camp of the
dead and dying, where he meets his sister-in-law who tells him that
his family are all dead. Later, he will find refuge in a soap factory.
This first half of the film is by far the most successful. Akin is
obviously influenced by David Lean, not only in the grandeur of the
spaces and the sweep of the narrative but also in his choice to make
scenes of death and murder not the documentary-style cinema vérité of
sequences in Spielberg’ Schindler’s List (1993), but pointedly and
cinematically beautiful. The death camp resembles an oil painting and
a well filled with dead bodies is a striking, Bruegel-like image.

There are some weaknesses as Akin’s unquestionably good intentions sit
too nakedly on the screen: the stilted idyll of Nazaret’s home life
for instance and the goodness of Arab soap maker Omar (Makram Khoury)
who rescues him in Aleppo. The biggest problem is the decision to have
the Armenian characters all speak English. This is just about
manageable in the first half but on learning his daughters are still
alive, Nazaret goes on what can only be described as a globe-trotting
search for them. Again, Akin’s laudable intention is certainly to have
the film seen by as wide an audience as possible, and few criticised
Schindler’s List for not being in German and Polish, but when Nazaret
arrives in America one wonders whether he can understand the English
because it’s basically Armenian or what.

Although The Cut’s second half is supposed to represent the diaspora
that succeeded the genocide, it has the effect of making the narrative
appear almost random as Nazaret is sent from pillar to post and his
emotions, now expressed only through gestures and written notes, are
narrowed down to hopes and dashed hopes. A well-behaved and
unashamedly populist film, the kind that could be shown in schools and
community centres, Akin’s The Cut remains an undeniably important film
regardless. What it does extremely well is to movingly illustrate a
terrible moment in history which has been sadly neglected in the West
and actively suppressed in other parts of the world.

The 71st Venice Film Festival takes place from 27 August to 6
September 2014. For more coverage, follow this link.

John Bleasdale

Foreign Policy Journal
Aug 29 2014

The Strategic Culture of Authoritarian Regimes: Mountainous Karabakh
Conflict in the Limelight

by Grigor Boyakhchyan

In the 21st-century security environment, both week and fairly capable
authoritarian states will constitute the major sources of instability
and conflict the world over. Their instability may stem from internal
problems triggered by a lack of legitimacy, weakness in basic
governance, and the suppression of domestic opposition movements by
force. But these states also project power in their geographic
regions, sometimes as a ploy of distracting attention away from
internal issues, often as an expansion of their revisionist motives.
Their weakness is provocative.

The strategic culture of authoritarian regimes permits drawing several
generalizations: the violence orchestrated to cause destruction and
suffering are permanent conditions and not anomalies; the threat of
military force and its limited deployment is everyday business, used
as a routine tool, not as a last resort; the issuance of warnings
propagating war and uncompromising enmity is used to aid diplomacy in
communicating power, resolve, and will.

Unlike democratic states, where peace is viewed as the norm, and
instability and violence as the anomaly, the strategic culture of
authoritarian regimes perceives conflict and war much more as an
enduring state of affairs – even as an advantageous condition to
secure the continuity and prosperity of the ruling regime. Recourse to
such means is tempting for any authoritarian regime. They may well
prolong a regime’s life, but at the same time they impede progress
toward sustainable peace and security.

These strategic cultures, along with security perceptions embedded in
them, also provide the framework through which political and military
instruments are selected, organized and employed. At base, they are
guided by strategic cultures that are willing to employ unrestrained
means for achieving their political objectives. That makes their
assaults harder to predict and prevent, while their confrontational
rhetoric renders negotiations or compromise almost impossible.

Now two decades into the cease-fire agreement, we are able to see that
these regular low-level yet intensely deadly confrontations along the
Mountainous Karabakh and Azerbaijani front line and Armenian and
Azerbaijani border are here to stay. These are not isolated incidents
or disparate attacks but rather examples of what is becoming the norm
for confrontation on the ground. Rather, events such as destruction of
cultural and historical artifacts, zealous talks about wiping Armenia
off the map, threats to civilian aviation, glorification of
axe-murderers, and a propensity not only to disregard the distinction
between military and civilian targets but often to deliberately focus
on the latter – something one would think belonged to a bygone era –
are constant conditions. This new environment poses dangerous and
evolving threats.

Understanding these trends and patterns for the OSCE Minsk Group
Co-Chairs and the European foreign and security policy architects at
large is critical, since these new challenges are likely to continue
in a low-level yet deadly warfare. Staying on the periphery and
supporting the efforts of the Co-Chairs are not sufficient to quell
the outgoing breaches of peace on its doorstep. These events are not
short-term disruptions of ordinary state of affairs and order. Rather,
they are the harbingers of a new security environment that will likely
present instability and gathering danger.

There comes a time in most mediation initiatives when the events on
the ground force the custodians of the peace process to face the
disparity between their favored strategies and techniques and the
necessity of action and change. When the assessment of the political
landscape exposes the ugly reality that strong incentives for
continued instability and conflict exist, no cherished diplomatic
dogmas of neutral pronouncements and expressions of concern can help
defuse tension.

Against the backdrop of recent intensified attacks along the
Mountainous Karabakh and Azerbaijani line of contact and at the
Armenian and Azerbaijani border, the mediators should come to a
belated acknowledgement that many of their assumptions and approaches,
often held as iron-clad tenets, are not valid. The deadly fighting,
together with heavy toll of casualties and human death, highlights the
many assumptions that the mediators have to jettison as they confront
the disparity between the standardized public statements to uphold the
peace and the increasing utility of use of force on the ground. These
diplomatic messages are not construed on the part of a spoiling side;
the audience is obscure, their home address is ill defined.

The mediation efforts under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group
Co-Chairmanship have floundered, since those who assume the custody of
conflict resolution process – or peaceful management for that matter –
must first of all seek to nurture peaceful conditions on the ground.
“Ambiguity is the diplomat’s friend,” – the oft-repeated cliché of
many mediation textbooks – no longer befriends the Karabakh context.
While international mediators may be impartial to the parties to
conflict and the solutions they craft, they should not be impartial
about bad behavior that obstructs the peace process. The shackles and
formalities of diplomatic parlance that constrain thinking and
practice should be broken.

Effective conflict resolution efforts proceed not in isolation but
amidst different interplay of interests and forces that often seek to
derail the peace process. A proposal to establish an “incident
investigation mechanism” is still on waiting list for implementation,
along with ad hoc arrangements that should be designed to manage and
control the local operating environment through a theater-wide
monitoring architecture for preventing the obstructionist forces to
thwart the peace process. More importantly, this should not be viewed
as outside the peacemaking remit; but an important part and parcel of
the overall conflict resolution effort. To provide demonstrable
legitimacy in support of a peace process, the motivations for
conducting a destabilizing activity must be recognized, confronted and
overcome.

The case of Mountainous Karabakh is indeed unique, but the quest for
viable peace is not. While the proposed Madrid principles are long
shots, practical near-term priorities should be set to establish a
predictable security environment with the potential to manage down the
violence on the ground and dislodge those who seek to obstruct the
road to a viable peace.

Institute for War and Peace Reporting, UK
IWPR Caucasus Reporting #750
Aug 30 2014

Azeri Journalist Beaten Unconscious

Police in Nakhichevan shrug shoulders as calls for accountability mount.
By Afgan Mukhtarli – Caucasus

An assault in which an Azerbaijani journalist and NGO activist was
badly beaten is being seen as the latest in a series of attempts to
silence government critics.

Ilgar Nasibov’s wife Malahat blames the local authorities in
Nakhichevan, an exclave region separated from the rest of Azerbaijan
by Armenian territory. She believes they were annoyed by his work on a
controversial case involving a death in custody.

On August 21, Nasibov was attacked by several people inside the
Resource Centre for NGO Development and Democracy which he heads.

`He was called from home to go the office in the evening,’ Malahat
Nasibova told RFE/RL radio’s Azerbaijani service. `They said some
petitioners had come. They attacked him suddenly in the office and
inflicted numerous injuries.’

Nasibov was found unconscious, with his jaw, cheekbone and nose
broken. He had suffered concussion and had been stabbed with scissors
several times, requiring stitches when he was taken to hospital.

Malahat Nasibova links the attack to her husband’s work on the case of
Turaj Zeynalov, a man who died while being held by the security
service on an allegation of spying for neighbouring Iran. Nasibov had
helped Zeynalov’s family, who believe he was murdered, bring a
complaint at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg.

`After the communications phase [between court and state] of the Turaj
Zeynalov case began at the ECHR, the authorities began being even more
aggressive towards us,’ Malahat said. `About a month-and-a-half ago,
Ilgar was knocked down by a car. He was only slightly injured so we
didn’t publicise it. In our view, the latest attack on Ilgar was
pre-planned¦ and designed to kill him.’

International watchdogs have urged the Azerbaijani government to find
and punish the perpetrators.

`I call on the authorities to conduct a swift and thorough
investigation of this brutal attack on Nasibov and bring those
responsible to justice,’ OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media
Dunja MijatoviÄ? said in a statement. `This criminal act has an
enormous chilling effect on free expression and free media and it
could inspire future crimes against members of the media.’

The secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders, Christophe
Deloire, said that if it turned out that the authorities were behind
the attack, `an unacceptable threshold will have been crossed in their
attempts to silence the last critical voices in Azerbaijan’.

For their part, the authorities are either ignoring or dismissing the issue.

Neither the regional government nor the security service in
Nakhichevan has commented on allegations of official involvement.

The regional interior ministry branch did put out a statement saying
its police had investigated the case and offering a completely
different account.

It quoted a witness statement from a man called Farid Askarov, who
told police that on the night in question, he met up for a few drinks
with Nasibov, an `old friend’ . One thing led to another, and they had
a fight.

Malahat Nasibova disputes that her husband was friendly with Askarov,
and points out that there were not one but several attackers present,
who ransacked and smashed the office as well as carrying out the
assault.

Mehman Aliev, the head of Turan, an independent news agency for which
both Ilgar and Malahat Nasibov have written, sees the attack as part
of a wider pattern of repression.

`The arrests of Emil Mammadov in Salyan, Hasan Huseynli in Ganja,
rights defenders Leyla and Arif Yunusov, Rasul Jafarov, Intiqam
Aliyev, journalist Rauf Mirqadirov and others, plus the enforced
closure of NGOs is all part of Azerbaijan government policy,’ he said
`It’s just that in Nakhichevan, the process is rougher.’ (Azerbaijan
Tidies Away Human Rights Critics is IWPR’s most recent round-up of the
wave of detentions.)

A leading media watchdog in Azerbaijan, the Institute for Reporters’
Freedom and Safety, asked why the Council of Europe (CoE) was doing
nothing about the situation.

`This attack is a wake-up call to all those who value freedom of
expression, in particular the Council of Europe,’ it said in a
statement.

Azerbaijan is a member of the council, which calls itself Europe’s
`leading human rights organisation’. At the moment, it also holds the
six-month rotating chair of the CoE’s Committee of Ministers.

The group accused the CoE of continuing to `turn a blind eye to a
brutal human rights crackdown coinciding with Azerbaijan’s
chairmanship’, and failing to condemn the government `for a series of
outrageous crimes against human rights’

Afgan Mukhtarli is a reporter for

ARMENIE
Environ 40% de la population active d’Arménie est impliquée dans l’agriculture

Environ 40% de la population active d’Arménie est impliquée dans
l’agriculture a affirmé le ministre de l’agriculture Sergo Karapetian.
Il a ajouté que dans les zones rurales, ce chiffre est d’environ 80%.

S’exprimant lors d’un atelier à Erevan intitulé > il a dit que la part de l’agriculture dans le PIB
global est supérieur à 20% ; avec des produits agro-alimentaires, il
constitue 25%.

Selon le Service national des statistiques, le PIB agricole entre
Janvier et Mars 2014 s’élevait à environ 68,5 milliards de drams en
prix courants, soit une augmentation de 5,2 pour cent par rapport à la
même période de 2013.

Le ministre a aussi dit que l’un des problèmes les plus importants de
l’agriculture d’aujourd’hui est d’assurer un niveau de vie à la
population rurale afin de garder les jeunes et de les empêcher
d’émigrer vers d’autres pays à la recherche d’un travail décent. Il a
également noté que pour le moment l’Arménie compte environ 340 000
ménages agricoles.

dimanche 31 août 2014,
Stéphane (c)armenews.com

We’re Screwed Again

Friday, August 29th, 2014

BY GAREN YEGPARIAN

You probably read that the United States Geological Survey has come
out with a report that says there might be a million barrels of oil
and 6 billion cubic feet of natural gas recoverable from the innards
of the current Republic of Armenia.

This report has been pending for a while. But let’s be clear. The USGS
found four possible sources of hydrocarbons, but didn’t even evaluate
three of them because the chances that anything might ACTUALLY be
found were very low. Even the reported oil and gas has only a 10%
chance of existing.

You might be wondering how this is possible. Realize that this report
is not based on even a single test-well being drilled. It simply
studied the geology of the area and based on what was there, projected
the possibility that oil and natural gas might exist.

And, if this rings vague bells, as though you’ve heard something like
this before, it could be because the study was based on data from a
1974 publication in Russian. Someone else might have made similar
guesses in the past.

Why, you’re probably wondering, is this news another example of being
screwed? Think of it. Given the corruption in the Republic of Armenia
(RoA), all it will take is for some connected crook to get the notion
that there’s oil/gas underground, and somehow get the money to start
looking for it. This could well destroy underground water and
above-ground agricultural resources because the area in which these
hydrocarbons are thought to lie under is… you guessed it, the Ararat
plain, Armenia’s agricultural heart!

As if this isn’t enough, news came out the same day that the U.S.
State Department had cleared a $320-million medium-range air-to-air
missile sale to Turkey. This is happening, it is explained by those in
power, in the context of increasing security risks in the region, and,
of course, the NATO alliance. We’re also told this won’t alter the
basic military balance in the region. These two points seem
contradictory. If the balance isn’t altered in Turkey’s favor, what’s
the point of selling them the equipment?

We’re also told that these will help Turkey defend its extensive
coastline and borders. I’m really curious as to what airborne threat
could possibly assail Turkey. Would it come (in alphabetical order)
from Armenia? Black Sea (maybe flight capable monsters inhabit these
waters…)? Bulgaria? Greece? Iran? Iraq? Kurdistan? Syria? Each of
these is more preposterous a proposition than the rest! It’s not at
all possible that Turkey might use these weapons against the RoA and
Artsakh should Azerbaijan’s bellicosity lead to another shooting war
on that front, right?

It turns out that this sale could have been prevented if a hold had
been put on it within two weeks by a U.S. senator. It didn’t happen.
Why? Could it be that our elected Senators have a guilty conscience,
knowing that one or more U.S. government agencies may have been
quietly supporting Turkey’s indiscriminate support of
anti-Syrian-regime rebels?

Write to your Senators and ask for an explanation about this foolhardy
sale to an ever more regionally destabilizing country, Turkey.

Levon Aronian currently second at chess tournament in Saint Louis

YEREVAN, August 29. /ARKA/. Armenian grosmeister Levon Aronian is the
second in the standings after the second round at Sinquefield Cup
tournament in Saint Louis, USA.

Aronian got a draw with American Hikaru Nakamura in the first round
and won over Bulgarian Veselin Topalov in the second round.

Italian Fabiano Karuana is leading with two points, having defeated
Topalov in the first round and French Maxim Vashier-Lagrave in the
second.

Aronian has 1.5 points. The world champion Magnus Carlsen and Nakamura
have one point each.

Carlsen is to meet with Karuana, Vashier-Lagrav with Aronian and
Topalov with Nakamura in the third round to take place Friday. -0–